Vilbjørg Broch – Imaginative Sound Geometries
The spatial audio works presented at the ICST Air-Showcase join in different ways algorithmic and formalised composition with literary and mythical themes. The works explore audio forms derived from 3D projections of higher dimensional geometric and algebraic structures. There are many surprising elements and results that scientists are still trying to understand, such as physicists attempting to explain the quantum mysteries of the world. Often a specific mathematical object gives form to both the instrument and the algorithmic composition as a whole. This is for instance a geometrical polytope or an algebraic group. A certain awe-inspiring poetry arises from traversing higher dimensional geometries and making the objects acquire musical shapes. There is a search for both the abstract and the archetypal articulation in these new audio worlds. The idea of resonance plays an important role. It can define a resonating body, it can define a space as well as a spatial and temporal development.
The specific work, which has been developed during the summer residency at the ICST, is called ‘Room’. It is a work which must be fed various data on the specific room in which it is performed. Everything starts with plain measurements and a recording of the background noise. It then evolves into a geometric fantasy where the properties of the room are reflected up into a 6D hypercube. The resulting structure undergoes various transformations and becomes audio-generating as well. It is an altered and metaphysical 'voice' of the room which returns to 3D space.
BiographyVilbjørg Broch was born in Denmark in 1967. After almost 30 years in Amsterdam, she returned to Denmark in 2019. In Amsterdam, she studied dance and improvisation at the SNDO and trained her voice in classical singing with the coloratura soprano Marianne Blok.
Over the past 30 years, she has worked on multimedia projects of various types and sizes. She is largely self-taught in maths, programming and algorithmic composition. For more than 20 years she has devoted herself systematically to studying pure mathematics with a particular interest in algebra, algebraic geometry and group theory. Her work with higher-order ambisonics and Spatial Audio naturally translates these mathematical-geometric interests into the realm of sound. It has been supported as artistic research by the CCRMA at Stanford University and the IEM in Graz. In recent years she has presented many of her works in computer music at international conferences.
As an active performer of new and improvised music, Vilbjørg Broch performs mainly as a singer with an electronic setup. She has worked extensively in various forms of music theatre and has created compositional interpretations of a wide range of classical and new texts. These range from the Nag Hammadi scriptures, biblical texts and Greek philosophers to John Dee, Nietzsche, Orwell, Machiavelli, Joyce and Kafka.
Website of Vilbjørg Broch: https://frekvensverden.dk/