Three Ways of Meaning-Making with Sound
Abstract:
There’s a commonly held misconception that words, and words alone, can convey meaning. But our everyday experience tells us otherwise. Music, scientific data-sonification and AR/VR are all examples of non-symbolic ways humans use sound to create, explore, understand and communicate meaning. Scaletti will describe how her work on scientific data sonification and sound design has changed the way she thinks about music composition.
Bio:
Carla Scaletti is an experimental composer, designer of the Kyma sound design language and co-founder of Symbolic Sound Corporation. Her compositions always begin with a “what-if” hypothesis and involve live electronics interacting with acoustic sources and environments.
Educated at the University of Illinois (Doctor of Musical Arts, Master of Computer Science), she studied composition with Salvatore Martirano, John Melby, Herbert Brün and Scott Wyatt and computer science with Ralph Johnson, one of the Design Patterns “Gang of Four.” She received the Distinguished Alumnae Award for invaluable contributions to the field of music from Texas Tech University where she earned her master’s degree in music and graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of New Mexico.
Winner of the 2017 SEAMUS Award “for important contributions to the field of electroacoustic music,” she has been invited to present keynote addresses at the International Conference on Auditory Displays, the International Computer Music Conference, was invited participant in GVA Sessions 2015 — a workshop involving choreographers, filmmakers and particle physicists from CERN — and was a regular lecturer at Centre de Crèation Musical Iannis Xenakis when it was still in Paris. Each year, she co-organizes the Kyma International Sound Symposium.