CMRC Seminar (Semester 1 Week 7): Black Fell: a game-for-music

Event details

In this seminar, composer Martin Suckling will outline the creative process for Black Fell. He will consider ways in which online may be considered a new 'venue' for music, and explore the idea of 'thickening' as a musical analogue to narrative branching in interactive fiction.

Black Fell, released on 3 November, is an online interactive digital opera with a creative team drawn from the School of ACT (Martin Suckling, Loré Lixenberg, Marco Ng, John Gray, Alex Mackay) and beyond (Frances Leviston, Jonathan Morton), funded by DC Labs.  Set on a cloudy night at Kielder Observatory, Northumberland, it is a story in song, accessed via a website, in which the listener controls both the narrative path and the musical evolution.  A game-for-music, players are situated within a virtual ‘orchestra’ through which they can freely move, their position defining not only the spatial position and balance of the audio elements but also the type of music heard and the direction the story takes.  Audiences navigate by ear alone, or with the optional aid of a virtual ‘forest’ which provides visual feedback on their movements.

Join this seminar online via Zoom

Introduction to Black Fell

An astronomer returns to the observatory at Kielder, where as a child she accompanied her father as he tended to his beloved reflector. Tonight the forest has drawn in the clouds, thick and settled: there is no prospect of worthwhile observation.  But the darkness suits her.  Starless, she turns her gaze inward, searching among ghostly errors of measurement for the echoes of landmarks lost at the dim boundary, where knowledge fades, and fades rapidly – but still we search, and listen, and strive to understand.