Dr Louise Harris is an electronic and audiovisual composer who currently lectures on sonic and audiovisual practices at the University of Glasgow’s Music subject area.
Three of my most recent works are ‘doing the rounds’ at the moment, in a variety of different contexts. Here’s a little bit of information about the pieces and where/how you can see/hear them:
AllEco – 30-minute radio commission for Radio Arts
This piece was commissioned by Radio Arts as part of their Dreamland series and has so far been broadcast on Resonance FM, as part of the Borealis Festival. It will also be broadcast as part of the Radiophrenia series of event at Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts.
The work uses recordings of local radio broadcasting from around the UK from the late 1970s to the late1990s, particularly the jingles and sound bites used to advertise specific programming. Local radio, perhaps more so than national broadcasting, develops strong senses of association for local communities; the repeated melodies and motifs heard therein becoming something of a soundmark for listeners, representing particular times, locations or routines in their daily lives. This work explores some of these soundmarks, particularly from stations I was familiar with during my childhood. Using jingles and other musical fragments, alongside other broadcast snippets, I have attempted to create a dream-like expedition around the cultural and historical broadcast geography of the UK, in which locations, regions and periods in time are hinted at and briefly discovered, then departed from.
pletten – fixed media, dual-screen audiovisual work, c. 6mins
pletten: squash, crush, flatten. The work is an exploration of simultaneous compositional process and the development of complementary sonic and visual forms on a micro- and macro-structural level.
I’m delighted that pletten, my most recent fixed media a/v work, will feature at the launch of the Sonorities festival, hosted at Goldsmiths, London on 17th April and again on 23rd April at the festival itself in Belfast. The screening at Goldsmiths will be particularly exciting as it’s taking place in the Sonics Immersive Media Labs, meaning the work can be screened as intended on two opposite walls of the space.
IC2 – live audiovisual performance, c. 10mins
I will be performing IC2 as part of Noisefloor at Staffordshire University on 29th April 2015.
IC2 is a live, audiovisual, beat-and-noise-based performance work. The intention is to create a symbiotic system, in which live decision making by the performer impacts on both the audio and visual components of the work but also in which both the audio and visual components can interact with one another, causing behaviours that are not directly controlled by the system performer. There is also an element of chaotic behaviour built into the system, causing unpredictable audio and visual outcomes. The latest stage in the evolution of the performance is includes sonic and visual material directly generated by the activity of performer in the audiovisual outcome of the work.