Son-Icons - Visual Music
Son-Icons are visual music. On long semi-transparent lengths of paper, structures are drawn which range from the simplicity of the solo, to something as complex as the orchestral. These drawings are free-floating and mobile, united in spatial scores and immersive art installations.
Son-Icons are hybrids of musical notation and visual art. The drawings can be experienced in galleries and museums. At the same time, they can also be played live by musicians as spatial scores, and visitors can be invited into this multidimensional framework.
Music is communication. We communicate with our whole body, especially through gestures. Thus, imagined music is recorded with both hands and sometimes several pens at the same time. Positioned between premonition and consciously perceived visual form, the Son-Icon emerges as a gestural drawing and primal impression*. (*Concept of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl)
Son-Icons are nourished by the body’s knowledge of music, which inspires the desire to visualise and create music. This in turn often surprises the mind into producing new inflections, and the music into producing new sounds. However, the gestures are not yet specific to each instrument or culturally superimposed. Son-Icons come from elsewhere and are the desire of a thinking body and dancing mind expressed in drawing.
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Son-Icon as a method of composition & creation
For the interpretation of the Son-Icons, each performer receives appropriate coaching. The different perspectives of a Son-Icon enable a formally stringent and richly varied development of the musical material.
In addition to the composition method with Son-Icons, spatial and video scores, the following coordination methods are used for larger ensembles, orchestras, and complex scenic sequences: Conduction (B. Morris & LIO London Improvisers Orchestra) or the interdisciplinary Interaction Notation (IAN) developed by Hug.
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Son-Icons digital
BADLANDS TO THE SKY Idea & concept Charlotte Hug & José López-Montes, Artist in Residence ICST 2009. For viola, voice, spatial score with Son-Icons, ambisonic 3D spatial sound diffusion & video animation with panoramic projection.
The audience experiences the way in which the Son-Icons expand into three dimensions and finally mutate into a score landscape in a panoramic projection which is visual, tonal, and can be entered physically as an immersive multidimensional space. The soloist's sounds oscillate and engage in a dialogue between live vocals, viola and the digital alter ego of reproduced and live spatialised sounds within that space. Further associations and emotional spaces are formed in the minds of the audience.
Premiered at the Fest der Künste, Zurich University of the Arts 2009.
Thanks to the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology
VIDEO
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Coordination - Interaction Notation IAN & Conduction
With the Son-Icon spatial scores, other methods of notation and coordination often come into play:
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Installations & Room Scores with Son-Icons
HARD-FLOWING TRANSPARENT
The 11-metre-long Son-Icon score of ‘Hard-Flowing-Transparent’ in the centre of the building moves in the breeze. The video score is animated: the Son-Icons breathe, change their relative positions and appear in different transparencies. Digital and analogue space intertwine and develop multiple perspectives and ever new relationships. An interactive hyperspace is created and becomes a living immersive environment for the performers involved, as well as for the audience.
For the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble & Duo Niggli -Hug with 11-metre-long Son-Icon and animated video score. MAMM Multimedia Art Museum Moscow 2018, a composition commissioned by the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble and Pro Helvetia 2018.
VIDEO Making of VIDEO Trailer.
SIYBA:found among translations
The dancers of the Company FATC dance to visual music - the music translates moving bodies into sound - rhizome-like artistic translations emerge.
Infecting the City Festival, Golden Acre and Johannesburg Atrium, a composition commissioned by Pro Helvetia and the FATC Dance Company from Johannesburg 2016.
VIDEO
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Son-Icons in the Gallery
SON-ICONS Solo Exhibition at Gallery da Mihi Bern 2016
SON-ICONS IN THE MIDDLE KINGDOM Solo exhibition at Gallery da Mihi Bern & video installation Sonotopoi shown in the gallery's cabinet 2018 VIDEO VIDEO Trailer
The Son-Icon - Hybrid art installation becomes a spatial score & creative space
The Son-Icon - Hybrid art installation becomes a spatial score & creative space
Solo exhibition China: NAVIGATING THE UNKNOWN IN BETWEEN Son-Icons from Europe and new silk Son-Icon sculptures created in the China residency produce multiple interstices and open up areas of encounter and creation within the exhibition. These were enlivened by an inter-cultural symposium, solo performances, a duo with the dancer Nunu Kong from Shanghai, and a performance masterclass. An exhibition in constant change.
Pro Helvetia China Residency, solo exhibition and various interdisciplinary intercultural performances & activities at the China Academy of Art Hangzhou 2017
VIDEO
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