Örjan Sandred and Max Sandred | Sonic Trails: Lockdown

About Sonic Trails: Lockdown

As the city enters a state of “Lockdown,” the urban environment loses its most distinctive element: the human presence. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to consider the city abandoned. As human activity withdraws, other processes and activities come into focus. Cars pass through empty streets, trees sway in deserted parks, birds roam uninhabited spaces. 

In Sonic Trails: Lockdown, visitors are immersed in various events in the lockdown city occurring regardless of their presence. Using multiple audio-visual samples of these urban phenomena, the installation creates a new place for visitors to inhabit.  

Artificial intelligence algorithms determine the composition of this environment in a constant process of deconstruction and reconfiguration. Pitches and harmonies are dissected from environmental noises, familiar objects and places are reduced to abstract visuals and spaces, rhythms and motifs are brought to focus. The AI leaves nothing to chance by structuring its actions and interactions, constantly revealing new material and juxtapositions while occasionally bringing back existing themes. In this sense, the installation is a precise musical composition, experienced beyond the realm of sound as synesthetic, audio-visual, spatial experience. 

Sonic Trails ultimately leads us somewhere beyond the samples of the alienating lockdown city. The patient visitor will discover an aesthetic world that is both abstract and palpable, static and active, infinite and intimate, rhythmic and disordered, clear and unclear. The installation generates its musicality by manipulating architectural qualities of sound, light, and space. Music and architecture are not treated as separate entities; rather, the environment of Sonic Trails becomes the musical experience. Ultimately, Sonic Trails: Lockdown attempts to unlock the reciprocity of music and architecture.

About Artists

Örjan Sandred is a Swedish-Canadian composer and is currently a Professor in Composition at the
University of Manitoba in Canada where he founded Studio FLAT – a studio for Computer Music research and
production. He studied composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, McGill University (Montreal)
and at IRCAM (Paris). Sandred taught composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm 1998-2005. In
2016 he was a DAAD visiting professor at Hochschule für Musik Detmold in Germany.
Sandred regularly receives commissions from ensembles around the world, such as the Winnipeg Symphony
Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Orchestra and the Quasar Saxophone Quartet. In recent years, Sandred has
composed a series of pieces that include live electronics. Lately he has also included live video processing in
his music.

In 2022 he was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Sandred's
music is available on the CDs "Sonic Trails" (2020) and "Cracks and Corrosion" (2009).

Örjan Sandred homepage: https://sandred.com

 

 

Max Sandred graduated from the architecture stream in the Environmental Design program at the University
of Manitoba in 2022. His interests in architecture are influenced by other creative fields of study, notably,
music and art. Max has worked in a variety of visual, audio and spatial mediums. He has performed as a jazz
musician, and in 2019 and 2020 he released his own music. His recent audio-visual installation “Beat”, first
exhibited in May 2022, explores the relationship between rhythm and space.
Max believes that architecture is an integral part of our everyday consciousness, and a medium through which
ideas and relationships can be developed.

Max Sandred homepage: https://maxsandred.wordpress.com