Artist-in-Residence at the department of Physics and Astronomy

The University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Physics and Astronomy Artists-in-Residence Program began in 2016 and provides undergraduate and graduate students in the University of Pittsburgh’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences an opportunity to submit research projects that respond to physics and astronomy research from creative visual arts, literary, film, performance, music composition, and design perspectives.

I establish main binary sounds that interact with each other to simulate supernovae. My music takes its form from the shape of their explosion, which takes 20 days to reach their peak brightness and then another couple of months to fade exponentially. I demonstrate this shape by illustrating the density and velocity of sound in a ratio in a given time. This form is not unusual in music science, and it resembles ADSR (attack, decay, sustain, release). Since music is abstract and cannot convey this type of scientific information in a scientific manner (unless another form of infor- mation such as words, visuals, statistics, etc. is used in conjunction with sounds), presenting an overall structure and shape would be more tan- gible than defining particular details. Moreover, after the explosion and its exponential decay, I progressively reduce my sounds to silence, creating a new atmosphere that corresponds to astronomical concepts such as dark energy, black holes, etc. To accomplish the section on dark energy, I also direct the audience’s attention to a visual element in which I use a violin with a very tiny speaker placed within to generate sounds. Normally, we would expect to hear a violin being played by a person, but this time, it emerges on its own terms.

Ramin Akhavijou “Dark Violin
Faculty researcher: Michael Wood-Vasey
Artistic Advisor: Eric Moe

 

New Album Release; “THE”

THE

Release date: 2.22.22

www.SoundSilenceThought.com

Composer’s note:

The multiple components of this complex of pieces are impacted by living in a multicultural environment that is surrounded and complicated by diversity. This environment has generated a compositional identity that serves to both render itself and to reconsider its place within a context of diversity that includes preceding influences. The regeneration and rethinking of various concepts demands improvisation, which Kamancheh accomplishes on this album by anchoring dialogic free-play inside the fluid flow of creative expression, much as the growing roots swarm the creator’s face in the image. Convergence of identity also prompts deviating from the traditional orchestra’s acoustic positionality, which is accomplished through the use of virtual sample instruments (except for Kamancheh, all sounds on this album are VST samples), while maintaining a practice of listening to the resultant sound on an individual basis without taking into account the sound source’s context—social, political, cultural, etc.—even though the pieces were purposefully constructed to represent societal concerns. Although various binaries such as east/west, live/virtual, singular/plural may be seen in this anthology, there is no effort to infer any specific subjectivities, and the composer considers all of them as subsets of a wider complex.

more info about this album

probable no.41- Aurélienne Brauner (Cello)- France

probable no.41 by Ramin Akhavijou

Tesselat will be hosting an online concert featuring cellist Aurélienne Brauner, premiering works by Daphné Hejebri, Sam Wu, Chatori Shimizu, Jean-Louis Agobet, Victor Baez (Tesselat Call for Scores Winner), Piyawat Louilarpprasert, Tomasz Skweres, Yukari Misawa, Jean-Patrick Besingrand, and Ramin Akhavijou!

November 21st, 2021 at 2:00 pm EST

Online concert

Argus Quartet- a miniature opera: censorship (no.1)

The Argus Quartet will perform my piece “a miniature opera: censorship” at Temple University. As a guest composer, I will also give a lecture to composition students about my censorship-related pieces.
program:
Ramin Akhavijou
Hannah Selin
Sepehr Pirasteh
Juri Seo
Temple University’s Rock Hall
Nov.10th 2021, at 5:30pm

Kamraton- Be New Too

Kamraton ensemble will play the composition “Be New Too”

Be New Too is based on the poem by Gertrude Stein

Program:
Ramin Akhavijou: Be New Too
Elizabeth Brown: Wild Apples
Ryan McMasters: Like Glue, His Dead Body Holds Me
Emily Cook: til the gossamer thread

The Irma Freeman Center for Imagination, Pittsburgh USA
Sunday, Oct. 24th, 2021
7 PM