SPACEOUT 2026

Welcome to the 3rd Spaceout International Ambisonics Festival 2026! 

October 22-23 2026

Program

DAY 1 (October 22)

CONCERT 1: October 22 at 7:00 p.m. @ Chip Davis Technology Studio

CONCERT 2: October 23 at 12:30 p.m. @ Chip Davis Technology Studio

DAY 2 (October 23)

CONCERT 3: October 23 at 4:00 p.m. @ Chip Davis Technology Studio

Inviso session: October 23, 12:00–6:00 p.m., @ the Edit Rooms and Music Technology Lab (MTL)

Program

Spaceout showcases up to 5th-order Ambisonic compositions with a 36.2 loudspeaker array. 

--------------DAY 1--------------

CONCERT 1

October 22, 2026 | 7:00 PM

Live Performance

Performance Systems Collective 30:00

The Performance Systems Collective explores the integration of multimedia technology in collaborative music performance and interactive art. They create original works that position technology not only as a performance medium but also as a conceptual catalyst for system design as an art form. Drawing from systems theory and cybernetics, the collective aims to understand and advance the role of technology in co-creative practices. The Performance Systems Collective is Ashley Rawls, Alex Shamoun, Day Rickett, Diego Peralta Gonzales, Tannah Hessenbruch, Yilin Li, and Anıl Çamcı (faculty director).

Fixed Media

ADR - EFTA00004012 (2026) 8:09 *World Premiere

EFTA00004012 starts from an apparently innocent image from the Epstein Files: waves breaking on the sand, the wind blowing and a shadow. At the center of the photograph lies a form that should not be there. A geometric object of unknown nature. An intruder that slowly contaminates the landscape. The work is built on the principle of the glitch. The sonic material fragments, folds in on itself and corrupts from within. The tension remains unresolved as the layers engage in an impossible coexistence.

Alexander Wu - automatic buddha (2025) 13:35

Riccardo Ancona – Mothric Scherzo (2026) 8:08 *World Premiere

The listener is free to choose one or more of the following definitions: α) Mothric Scherzo is 825 lines of Supercollider code. β) It is based on extremely dense spatial counterpoints on elastic time subdivisions, reaching up to a 17-voice canon, contrasted by micropolyphonic textures. γ) It explores chromatic transpositions of Mothric moment of symmetry scales on 31 equal divisions of the octave. δ) The form is only partially related to the structural features of a romantic scherzo, but it retains its playful nature. ε) It is an extravagant, vertigo-inducing piece that has clearly inherited compositional ideas from the music of Conlon Nancarrow, György Ligeti, Klarenz Barlow, and Christophe Bertrand, but it retains none of the wit of those masters.

Elois and Renán Zelada  - ÉL-TÚ-YO (2026) 6:47 *U.S. Premiere

We have been immigrants all our life. Our connection to Venezuela, the land of our parents, is vague and ambiguous, mostly based on phone calls with our grandparents and sporadic visits. ÉL-TÚ-YO is based on interviews and field recordings where we try to unravel our family history and give some sense to our uprooted identity.

--------------DAY 2--------------

CONCERT 2

October 23, 2026 | 12:30 PM

Live Performance

Mara Mayer - Flow, State (2026) 8:00

Flow, State is a breath and texture driven spatialized  electroacoustic  excursion that sweeps the listener up like silt in a sonic river, bringing you downstream to a transformed auditory landscape.  Written for bass clarinet, flute, cello, vibraphone, and fixed media ambisonics, Flow, State was created using recorded bass clarinet extended techniques as source material for all the electronics, including the opening’s morse code-like sounds performed on the upper joint of the instrument, gradually transforming organic acoustic sounds into electronic elements. An allegory for movement towards political and systemic change, the title is a play on words inspired by the convergence of its two possible meanings: the fluvial state of consciousness gained when creating or performing art, and that state as a catalyst for political change.

The score uses graphic notation and structured improvisation interspersed with specific notated rhythmic and pitch material. There are three versions of the piece: 17 minutes for quartet and ambisonics, 8 minutes for quartet and ambisonics, and 8 minutes for solo bass clarinet and ambisonics.

Timothy Roy – dans les dents de la guivre (2024) 11:00 *Michigan Premiere

“dans les dents de la guivre” is the opening movement of "Valentina V.", a 35-minute monodrama for harp, immersive audio, and lighting commissioned by harpist Hope Cowan through a grant from the American Harp Society. "Valentina V." is inspired by my own musicological research into the medieval song “La harpe de melodie” and the provenance of the illuminated manuscript containing the song’s renowned pictographic musical score, which is preserved by the Newberry Library in Chicago.

In "Valentina V.," the harpist adopts the persona of 14th-century noblewoman and virtuoso harpist Valentina Visconti, whose life ended in tragedy and exile. Married to the brother of the King of France, Valentina was eventually forced to flee after others at the royal court accused her of witchcraft. "Valentina V." presents an imagined scene near the end of her life in which she is confined to her chamber with only her precious harp to confide in. Musical materials are partly derived from Jacob de Senleches’s “La harpe de melodie,” which he composed to showcase Valentina’s musical talents. Senleches’s song is at times referenced directly; at other times, it emerges in a fragmented or distorted form, representing Valentina’s reminiscences as they are filtered through her fractured psyche. 

Drawn from Victor Hugo’s poem “Canaris,” the opening movement’s title “dans les dents de la guivre” (“in the teeth of the viper”) refers to the Visconti family’s coat of arms: a serpentine creature devouring an infant. “dans les dents de la guivre” intersperses fragments of the “La harpe de melodie” with sounds imitative of the mythical serpent, engendering a feeling of trepidation, anxiety, and suffocation.

Aleksandra Combs - Time Machine (2025) 10:00

Time Machine is a work based on manipulating time and space. The composer performing, with their bass clarinet, is playing in an improvised trio with the world's two eternal collaborators, Space and Time.

Fixed Media

Sara Ramírez Márquez - Fragility (2024) 7:02 *U.S. Premiere of the 2021 version

Piece inspired by the scripture Corinthians 12: 1-10.

• Paul’s vision.

• A Thorn in the Flesh

(Reina, C. D. (1964). La Santa Biblia: Reina-Valera 1960.)

Przemysław Scheller – Geometry of the Paradox (2019/2024) 8:51 *U.S. Premiere

Plato says "If you make a false statement, I will throw you in the water”. Socrates responds "You will throw me in the water” 

/ J. Buridan

…

When a grain of millet falls it makes no sound, but when a thousand grains fall they do, thus

many of nothing become something. 

/ Aristotle

…

If asking oneself "Am I dreaming?" in a dream proves that one is, what does it prove in waking life?

 / E. Hutton

Jiajing Zhao – Drifting Voices (2025) 8:56 *U.S. Premiere

Drifting Voices explores the deep connection between the human body and the ocean.

Life is thought to have begun in the sea, and traces of that origin remain embedded in the human body. Human physiology depends on fluids, salts, and microscopic particles circulating within aqueous, salt-based systems whose evolutionary foundations emerged in early marine life. Drawing on this shared material scale, the piece treats sound transformation as if it were a chemical experiment. Through microsound techniques, human voices and ocean sounds are reduced to minute sonic particles, whose interactions unfold gradually at the edge of perception. Spectral textures are extracted, frozen, stretched, and blended, allowing sound to behave less like gesture and more like matter.

The voice in the piece is that of artist Portia Lee, reading a poem about the sea written by the composer. Vocal recordings were captured using both a condenser microphone and a throat-mounted hydrophone, producing a rich, intimate texture that allows for extended processing techniques. Throughout the piece, the voice—symbolising the presence of the human body—is deconstructed into intricate sonic particles and textures, moving beyond linguistic meaning. As the piece unfolds, the transformation of vocal material traces the body’s dissolution and expansion into the ocean, gradually merging with abstracted ocean field recordings. Ultimately, the distinction between voice and water blurs, as body and ocean dissolve into a single, unified sonic entity.

Rikhardur H. Fridriksson – Lidan II-3D (2002 / 2011 / 2021) 12:40 *World Premiere

Do you have a sore throat? A bad cold? Did you have too much to drink last night? Is the voice shot and the respiratory mechanism in shambles? The idea came trough in the darkest time of winter when the composer suffered from most of the above and the sound environment of broken respiratory- and speaking mechanisms surrounded and obsessed him for a good number of days.

The work was done almost entirely using Kyma system at the Kopavogur Computer Music Centre in Iceland in darkest part of the winter of 2001-2002, and finished properly in the spring of 2002.

Lidan is an Icelandic word for the state of one’s health. The original Lidan was not finished properly before the given deadline. Take two resulted in pretty drastic reorganisation of the whole thing. Hence the title; Lidan II.

Time passes and in 2011 the piece was slightly re-worked and re-mixed into more channels than the original version. Then more time passes and in 2021 it is re-mixed once more, this time around totally re-mixed from scratch, now into 3D ambisonics total surround format.

CONCERT 3

October 23, 2026 | 4:00 PM

Live Performances

Scarlett Shi – A Thousand Clocks (2026) 8:00

A Thousand Clocks is a six-minute embodied WebXR work for Meta Quest 3. Inside a clock tower filled with traces left by earlier visitors, each participant is invited to write down a moment they would return to. As eighteen spatialized clocks gradually converge on a single shared second, the tower breaks open into the Timeless Field. There, the participant encounters another possible version of what might have followed from that moment. The journey eventually leads back to the tower, where their own words have become part of the space, waiting for the next visitor.  

A Thousand Clocks turns the impossible wish to revisit time into a place the participant can briefly enter.

Kerem Ergener – Kyōkai (2026) 8:00

Kyōkai explores boundaries between composition and improvisation, structure and emergence, performer and system, sound and space. Created through live coding, the work is constructed in real time as algorithms are written, altered, interrupted, and reconfigured during performance. Kyōkai places computation itself within the act of performance. Musical form emerges through an ongoing negotiation between predetermined systems and decisions made in the moment. The spatial field is equally unstable. Using Ambisonics (5th Order), sounds move between identifiable positions and diffuse, enveloping textures, continually redrawing the perceived limits of the listening environment. Sources may circulate, fragment, converge, or dissolve into a larger field, transforming spatialization from an effect applied to sound into an active compositional parameter. 

Anthony T. Marasco, Alexis Bacon, David Biedenbender, Christopher A. Kaminski – Host Your Ghosts (2025) 8:30

Host Your Ghosts explores communal musicking through audience-provided audio recordings and a modified and repurposed Ouija board. At its core, Host Your Ghosts acknowledges preconceived notions about the purpose and significance of Ouija boards, but turns those notions on their head, giving participants the ability to collaboratively compose a soundscape built from the things that haunt them.

The piece features an option for participant interaction prior to the concert performance, asking attendees to record a short answer to the following prompt: “What Haunts You?” Once captured, these recordings are analyzed and spliced to build a series of descriptor-driven audio file corpora. During the performance, ensemble members sit around a Ouija board and a custom-made motion tracking planchette interface and think about the things in their lives that haunt them. Together, they move the planchette across the board as they feel compelled. The planchette’s movements conjure sonic material from the speakers around the space, driving a collection of concatenative synthesizers pulling from the descriptor-driven corpora and adjusting parameters on audio effects to build a sonic tapestry out of the “ghosts” of the unseen prior contributors. 

hypergrace – Improvisation 002: Hypergrace (2026) 10:15

HYPERGRACE is an improvised live electronics sound performance using custom software / hardware systems with indeterminate logics aiming to create play in the unforeseeable unpredictabilities of the aesthetic event. In this performance, I use an offbrand games controller to activate and navigate custom, real-time synthesis Max/MSP code. 

Synthesized on the fly, drone and textural ambiences aim to cultivate trance-like states of embodied thinking and feeling, punctuated by percussive, glitch, and staccato sonorities that remind of de-constructed electronic club music and game audio. 

This sonic and technical-material assemblage nods to contemporary flow states ability to contort our nervous systems, synthesizing activity and passivity, exertion and relaxation, work and play. These flow states re-route the affective movement once reserved for religious ceremony back into new secular niches. 

What potentials for embodied, aesthetic, social, and spiritual transformation emerge when these aesthetic and experiential niches are re-constellated in a performance/listening event? 

Fixed Media

Hui Kim – Molto Ordinario (2026) 7:17 *U.S. Premiere

Reading Fritz Neumeyer’s Mies van der Rohe: Das kunstlose Wort led me to realize that architecture is not merely about spatial composition, but a spiritual foundation that sustains daily life and shapes the tangible forms of human existence. This reflection sparked a profound reverence for the brain—a microcosm within the skull—whose untapped potential I sought to translate audibly through 3D ambisonics.

At the core of this work are heavily manipulated and distorted glitch sounds. These acoustic ruptures evoke the subtle vitality of micro-muscular movements and the fleeting moments of signal overload and release within complex neural processes. Spatially, I integrated micro-fluctuating sounds that continuously cycle between infinite acceleration and stillness, mirroring the evolution of neural networks. They represent the architecture of human thought—constantly deconstructed and reassembled into unique personal rhythms through an individual aesthetic lens.

While poetically defined by relentless oscillation, human life ultimately unfolds in a harmony of quietude and dynamism, guided by our own pace and order. Beneath its conceptual layers, this piece carries a deeply personal dedication: a warm wish for my uncle, who recently underwent brain surgery, to fully return to the rhythm of daily life. It stands as a proposal of optimistic possibility—a conviction that with resolute willpower, any obstacle can be transcended.

"Nihil enim est ordinatum, quod non sit pulchrum." — Augustinus

Gordon Delap - An Insect that Shuns the Light (2023) 8:00

Scuttles in pursuit of darkness. Foul-smelling, skin-shedding. A pest of book collections; page-eating, destructive. 

=Ground up with oil, a remedy for earache. Infused in tea as a cure for tetanus.

Delicious when fried in a wok.

The body flees danger even when the head is removed. The head can survive for some time, while the antennae carry on wiggling.

In An Insect that Shuns the Light, unrelated objects of conflicting scales collide across several episodes, wherein eruptions of activity and saturation scramble towards nothingness.

Tolga Yayalar - Impulse Impromptu II (2022) 8:20

Impulse Impromptu II is the second piece in my series of electroacoustic compositions titled "Impulse Impromptu." Each piece in the series takes up an instrument and explores its sonic possibilities through virtual improvisation. They explore the transformative potential of sound and challenge conventional perceptions of reality within the realm of music. Focusing specifically on the Japanese instrument Koto, Impulse Impromptu II takes the instrument out of its traditional context and reimagines it as a sound-emitting object.

In this piece, I delve into the sonic essence of the Koto, utilizing its inherent sounds and the reverberations of its soundboard. By manipulating these sonic elements, I aim to transcend the instrument's conventional boundaries. One of the key aspects of Impulse Impromptu II is the incorporation of spatial models and High Order Ambisonics. Through these technologies, I aim to immerse the audience in an expansive sonic landscape, pushing the limits of traditional stereo imaging and inviting listeners to experience a multidimensional sonic experience.

Shahrzad Talebi - Watch the Only Way Home Disappear (2026) 8:40

I used scratching sounds on various found objects as source material and explored how gestures and sound objects of different duration can shape spatialization and the perception of space.

INVISO SESSION

October 23, 2026 | 12:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Gil Dori - amb.deconstruct (2026) @MTL Computer *World Premiere

amb.deconstruct is an ambient piece deconstructed, that invites listeners to experience it in different ways. By moving within the Inviso interface, listeners can choose to hear the sounds from various spatial positions in the sonic space, to listen to the piece in its entirety or only to individual sections or individual parts, and to progress through the composition linearly or non-linearly. All the sounds for the piece were created in the spirit of analog modular synthesis with VCV Rack.

Mingjun Yang - Passing Through (2025) @MTL Computer *World Premiere

Passing Through is an interactive surround sound work that reimagines an airport as a navigable sound environment. Originally created for a ten-channel speaker system, it has been re-arranged using Inviso to accommodate binaural listening, allowing listeners to move freely within the sound field and experience the work from different locations.

The environment comprises the sounds of busy airport operations, check-in and security activities, boarding announcements, and other sounds related to waiting and transfers. These materials are distributed across five spatial zones: the entrance, the crowded passageway, the waiting area, the boarding gate, and an external landscape incorporating sounds characteristic of different cities. Some sound sources remain localized, while others move along predetermined trajectories or expand into larger areas. Distance, direction, overlap, and the listener's movement constantly alter the work's perceptual balance.

Through this structure, Passing Through explores how an airport, as a large transit hub, can create a calm and reassuring atmosphere while bringing together people traveling to different destinations in the same space.

Matias Vilaplana Stark - Losing the sense of where things are (2026) @Edit Room A *World Premiere

‘Losing the sense of where things are’ invites listeners to explore an immersive music composition through different spatial perspectives. The work combines multiple dry and reverberated sound sources in motion to create a sonic environment that drives the listeners attention in different directions. Try to follow a sound, find a listening spot, and repeat. 

Greg Dixon - Eavesdrop Courtyard (2026) @MTL Computer *World Premiere

Eavesdrop Courtyard is a navigable 3D soundscape where the listener treads their own pathway through a “Courtyard” of various sound recordings. The array of recordings function as looping 3D sound emitters. The virtual space has been created so that in the center reside materials that are more abstract and less dense. As the listener moves away from the center and in to the periphery they can explore clandestine conversations, laughter, musings, and mix the sounds together using their 3D position within the Courtyard. Eavesdrop Courtyard was created using the Inviso web-based audio tool. Inviso is also used to navigate the 3D soundscape freely according to the whim of the person controlling the listener's position.

Carlos G. Román & Alejandra Osejo-Varona - ¡Hola Hipopótamo! (2026) @MTL Computer 

¡Hola Hipopótamo! emerges from an interdisciplinary collaboration centered on the hippopotamuses inhabiting Colombia’s Magdalena River basin. Descended from animals introduced illegally into the country in the 1980s, these hippos now occupy landscapes shared with riverine communities and other species, generating complex ecological, political, and social debates. The anthropological component of the project is led by Alejandra Osejo (Rice University); through ethnographic fieldwork the research examines how communities perceive, describe, and coexist with the hippos. 

The work draws on a collection of sound ethnographies conducted primarily in Puerto Triunfo, Colombia. Previously presented as both a site-responsive soundwalk and a fixed-media composition, it is now translated into the Inviso format as an interactive, navigable sound environment. The experience situates the listener in the role of a hippopotamus moving through a series of locations identified through the ethnographic research. As participants navigate the environment, they encounter field recordings, ecological soundscapes, media clips, human voices, sub-aquatic sounds, and other sonic traces associated with the animal’s presence and its entanglement with local communities and ecosystems. The listener’s movement determines how these materials emerge, overlap, and recede. 

Artist Bios
(in alphabetical order)

Organizer

Any questions regarding the festival can be addressed to:  

ambisonics.submissions@umich.edu