Caterina Barbieri

by Ekho

“Caterina Barbieri (b.1990, Bologna, Italy) is a composer and performer of electroacoustic music. Mostly interested in modular synthesis, three-dimensional spatialisation and psychoacoustic aural sculpture, her music arises from a meditative approach to primary waveforms, microtonality and the polyrhythm of harmonics, on the boundary between drone, minimalism and techno in multichannel systems.

Her minimalistic focus is rooted in the exploration of the stratigraphic potential of voltage-controlled synthesizers, in terms of polyrhythm and polyphony.
Synthesis, texture-based forms and immersive listening are three fundamental conditions for her to enhance an advanced cognitive and auditory art, not based on extrinsic links but solely built on the experience of the spectrum, able to develop our very limited ability of perceiving the vertical domain of music, involving us in a holistic way.” www.caterinabarbieri.com

Submission to ‘Ekho:: Toward a Repetitive Sounding of Difference’

 

 

Undular is an eight-channel piece composed by Caterina Barbieri. All sounds derive from a Buchla Modular System with almost no digital processing.

‘…Immersive listening experiences with multichannel systems greatly advance our cognitive and auditory comprehension of music. After a certain exposure to the sounds, the spectral spaces underlying the fundamental tones, at first almost ‘inivisible’, come to our consciousness, enlighting an hidden perceptive dimension, that may not be specified in a score but still exists in the mind and in the body of the listener. Such a listening process may enlighten the listener to live the music as an infinitely changing experience (not only as a form), where she/he takes an active position, even a performative role. One can investigate the density of the harmonics and the secrets of their variations in time. One can move the skull horizontally and vertically to evaluate how the perception of the spectrum varies in space; cranial movement offers alternative aural perceptions due to the filtering, phasing and reflection’s phenomena depending on the angular incidence of the wavefronts on one’s ears.’ Quote from Barbieri’s supporting statment

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