Founders
COMPOSER - NOISE ARTIST
David Stenson completed an M.F.A. in Composition and Theory at Brandeis University. His first two formative years of composition study were spent with Nils Vigeland at the Manhattan School of Music, and he finished undergraduate studies at the New England Conservatory of Music (BM, with honors), taking studio lessons in composition and electronics with John Mallia. David's compositional interests include microtonality, auditory perception, digital signal processing, algorithmic music, computer-assisted composition, and noise.
Stenson says of his work:
I am interested in sound that captivates without effort. Yet, when composing I seek to cut and manipulate freely. This process inherently threatens that which initially captivates. I hope to find poetry in that threat.
In this way, I aim to explore a dichotomy of immediacy and the poetics of risk— the poetics of ruthless design.
COMPOSER
Bert Van Herck’s music has been performed in the US, and Europe among others by the Nouvel Ensemble Modern, Danish National Vokal Ensemble, Oxalys Ensemble, Garth Knox, Mario Caroli, Orchestre National de Lorraine (France), Jeremias Schwarzer, Ensemble Fa, Spectra Ensemble, White Rabbit, Talea Ensemble, Berten D’Hollander, Ian Pace, Ensemble Mosaik, Arditti String Quartet and Ensemble InterContemporain. He has been an active participant in several summer courses, such as the Acanthes summer courses in France, the Bartok Seminar in Hungary, the International Academy for Composition and Audio Art in Austria, the Wellesley Composers Conference, June in Buffalo, and Domaine Forget, all at which his music has been performed. There he has been able to meet many of today’s leading composers, such as Jonathan Harvey, Wolfgang Rihm, Pascal Dusapin, Marco Stroppa, Michaell Jarrell, Denis Smalley, Boguslaw Schaeffer, Mario Davidovsky, Martin Brody, Pablo Ortiz, Denis Bouliane, François Paris, Jean Lesage, David Felder, Charles Wuorinen and Roger Reynolds. He has also attended the Summer Course at IRCAM, the Tenso Seminar and the Darmstadt International Courses for New Music.
A native of Belgium, Bert Van Herck studied composition with Luc Van Hove and Luc Brewaeys before coming to Boston. He has written extensively for acoustic instruments, ranging from solo works to full orchestral compositions. He has been writing increasingly for electronics and instruments with live processing, and developed a great interest in microtonal music. He studied composition with Chaya Czernowin, Magnus Lindberg, Tristan Murail, Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann, and Julian Anderson; electronic music with Hans Tutschku; orchestration with Joshua Fineberg; and choral writing with Elliott Gyger.
Awards include the First Prize in the Cantabile Composition Competition, the Adelbert Sprague Composition Award, the Boott Prize for Choral Composition, the Kaske Fellowship, and the ‘Attestato di Merito’ in Torneo Internazionale di Musica, Rome. Additional recognition for his music came through the selection for performances at the ISCM World Music Days: In 2009 his ‘7 Chansons sur textes de Maurice Maeterlinck‘ were premiered in Växjö, Sweden; and ‘Spectra‘ was performed in Sidney, Australia in 2010.
Bert Van Herck presented his work in music theory on international conferences. At the Hull University MAC, he presented his work focusing on Olivers Knussen’s compositions and at the 11th Conference of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory his topic was ‘Feria‘ by Magnus Lindberg. He attended several master classes at the Orpheus Institute, and has his article on spectral music published in ‘Spectral/World Musics – Proceedings of the Istanbul Spectral Music Conference’.
Science & Technology
PERCEPTION AND COGNITION
There are two roles of a science representative on the board of Noise Salon. One is to describe the evolving artistic innovations and experiences in terms of psychoacoustics. This will be valuable for other artists and composers to participate in the exploration of noise and the creation of new esthetic experiences. The other reason is to observe the way in which Noise Salon engages audiences and new participants in its expeditionary journey. The ethnographic intent of these observations will be to appreciate the meaning and creative inspiration that audiences and participants experience in the compositions and performances. Observations also will illuminate the efficacy of Noise Salon in creating an inclusive community of creativity across genre not limited to sound while remaining centered on the elusive concept of noise.
Gary E. Riccio received his Ph.D. in Human Experimental Psychology and B.S. in Bioengineering & Neurobiology both from Cornell University. His training in both these programs specialized in multisensory perception and psychophysics from an ecological perspective that focused on relationships between an animal and its environment. His career has focused on needs for extraordinary collaboration and rigorous development of new approaches to prepare and equip both individuals and organizations for ambiguity, change, and challenging conditions outside the laboratory. Over four decades, his teaching and research experience pointedly has cut across bioengineering, biomechanics, neurophysiology, psychophysiology, sensory psychophysics, cognitive psychology, research design and data analysis to inform solutions for naturally complex challenges to perception and performance on Earth and in space. He was a tenured faculty member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he developed transdisciplinary courses, curricula, and research programs in human perception and performance.
Throughout his career, Gary has worked in multi-organizational coalitions and public-private collaboration including but not limited to traditional contractual partnerships. Over the last twenty years, he has been engaged mostly by leaders in the DoD and NASA for design and evaluation of novel scientific programs to support development of innovative technology for human perception and performance. This work has focused on the interrelationships among the auditory, visual, vestibular, and somatosensory systems in high-fidelity interactions with natural and virtual environments. An important theme in this work has been the essential role of noise as a carrier of information about the dynamics of living systems and their context with respect to which living systems must continually adapt. In essence, Gary is interested in the shared experience of noise, not as such, but as meaningful and emotionally evocative.
Over the last three years, most of his time has been devoted to pro bono work in the field with a wide variety of civic and faith-based organizations focusing on social justice and environmental justice in the context of health and well-being in elderly, poor and homeless communities. He is a member of the AAAS and their Dialog on Science, Ethics, and Religion (DoSER).
INSTRUMENT DESIGN
Michael Shonle has a broad and varied background in many areas of engineering, and over 30 years of experience in all aspects of software and hardware engineering, ranging from high-level GUI code, through embedded microcontrollers, and down to the gate level digital and analog hardware. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, where he specialized in Digital Signal Processing and computer hardware and software.
Michael has worked in such diverse areas as 2-dimensional signal processing for a high-resolution film scanner company as well as on a cutting-edge HTML/XML Custom Web Development and Server System. His experience ranges from interfacing with high-performance highly integrated media processing chips and includes working with custom sound synthesizer ASICs at the legendary Kurzweil Music Systems Research and Development Institute.
In addition, Mr. Shonle is the creator of the Paramount ME Robotic Telescope Mount, an ultra-high accuracy robotic telescope control motor driver system with 56-bit velocity precision. This is the system that has found more supernovae than anything else looking skyward.
He is currently single-handedly developing an all-electronic flute, the eCorder, which features capacitive touch sensors, an embedded physical-modeling synthesizer, analog control-voltages, and flexible MIDI routing. His work encompasses all aspects, from conception and specification, through mechanical design and realization, circuit design, layout, and routing, and embedded software for 4 different 32-bit CPU’s, as well as the graphical user interface configuration software.