Making music the digital way. Art and Britishness.
Posted on 3 February 2004
The senses will be stimulated with sound and pictures in this term's public lectures at the University of York.
The well known IEE Faraday Lecture will stimulate the sense of hearing. This year it showcases Music Technology research from the University,. The Lecture, 'Sound FX: making music with technology', comes to York on 9 March. It is a multi-media extravaganza which aims to excite and stimulate students from schools, making subsequent music and science lessons more enjoyable.
The Lecture is currently touring the country performing to an audience which will total 20,000; it will also be broadcast to Hong Kong, Europe and North America.
The hour-long, interactive, lecture, which will take place in Central Hall, gives a fly-on-the-wall look at what happens in the recording studio when singers and instrumentalists are recorded. Special effects, including lasers and smoke machines, add to the lecture's appeal, and make it fun for adults as well as children.
Members of the audience will be able to participate in finding out new ways of playing electronic instruments. Even though the Lecture looks at how music is recorded, the importance of making music live is not lost, as the lecture ends with a musical grand finale.
Focusing on the sense of sight, is the Public Lectures series 'Picturing the Nation: British Art and the Body Politic 1740-1940'. Three distinguished art historians contribute to the series which starts on Thursday 5 February. The lectures examine the relationship between the visual arts and concepts of national identity in Britain.
Speakers will bring to life a wide variety of objects spanning three centuries, including the military portraits executed by Georgian Britain's most famous painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds; the flamboyant monumental sculpture erected in the late eighteenth-century; the shocking watercolours produced by a remarkable nineteenth-century watercolourist; and the avant-garde works created by a clutch of ambitious young artists in the 1930s.
All lectures are free and open to all.
Notes to editors:
2004 IEE Faraday Lecture
- Tuesday 9 Marc
Sound FX: Making Music with Technology
7pm, Central Hall
(Entry by free ticket only. Book online at www.faraday.org.uk or call 01438 767302)
- Tuesday 9 Marc
Picturing the Nation: British art and the Body Politic 1740-1940
- All lectures will take place at 8pm in room P/L001, Physics
- From out of the shadows: Sir Joshua Reynolds, war and portraiture in mid eighteenth-century Britain
Thursday 5 February
Dr Mark Hallett, University of York - Classicism naturalised: the making of a national sculpture in eighteenth-century England
Thursday 12 February
Dr Matthew Craske, University of Leicester - Thomas Heaphy's watercolour nasties
Thursday 19 February
Professor David Solkin, Courtauld Institute of Art - English renegades: John Piper, Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious in the late 1930s
Thursday 26 February
Dr Frances Spalding, University of Newcastle
- From out of the shadows: Sir Joshua Reynolds, war and portraiture in mid eighteenth-century Britain
York Biology Lectures
- The human testis - an organ in crisis
Wednesday 11 February
Professor Stewart Irvine, MRC Human Reproductive Sciences Unit
1.15pm, room P/L001, Physics - Cancer as an evolutionary disease
Wednesday 18 February
Professor Mel Greaves, Institute of Cancer Research, Chester Beatty Laboratories
1.15pm, room P/L001, Physics - Can biotechnology be used to assess and remediate contaminated environments? - sorting out the bugs in the system
Wednesday 10 March
Professor Ken Killham, University of Aberdeen
12.30pm, room P/L001, Physics
- The human testis - an organ in crisis
Merchant Adventurers' Science Discovery Lecture
- The unnatural history of the sea
Tuesday 23 March
Professor Callum Roberts, Environment Department, University of York
7pm, Merchant Adventurers' Hall, Fossgate, York
(Entry by free ticket only. Tickets are available on 01904 432029)
- The unnatural history of the sea
- The music technology research showcased in the Faraday Lecture is undertaken by the Media Engineering Group led by Professor David Howard, see www.elec.york.ac.uk/ME. The Group is part of the University's Department of Electronics. The Music Technology Lab explores ways of modelling, simulating and creating naturalness in audio, including vocal performance, acoustics and psychoacoustics.