EAMT master’s student Otto Iivari’s ambisonic work “Thở” was recognized as Gold Winner in Category 1: Contemporary Music, Computer Music at the 6th European Students 3D audio competition.
The award ceremony took place on Saturday, October 8 in Graz, Austria as part of the ORF musikprotokoll festival.
The competition is a cooperation of the Institut für Elektronische Musik und Akustik der Kunstuniversität Graz (IEM) and Verband Deutscher Tonmeister (VDT), and this year for the first time also with the ORF musikprotokoll. The fourth partner is the FH St. Pölten, on whose Audio Mostly the semi-finals took place.
The competition categories were Contemporary / Computer music, Audio Drama / Documentary / Soundscapes and Music Recording / Studio Production. Among the finalists were participants from Germany, Austria, England, Estonia and Finland.
Otto Iivari describes his work “Thở” as an acousmatic piece that breathes through the spectrum of vietnamese nao bat cymbals. The title translates from Vietnamese as ‘exhale’ or ‘breathing out’. Zooming in on the smallest organic details and vast harmony, it is an exploration where a combination of recorded and synthesized sounds merge. The musical gestures of the piece are inspired by the controlled chaos of accumulating, impulse-like sound Objects.
In his speech, the jury emphasized the musical line of the work, the control over the material, the sensibility of timbre and detail. The treatment of the 3D space of the work was highlighted as the spatialization being not a separate dimension of the composition, but as an organic feature of the sounds.
The work was first highlighted in September at the Audio mostly conference in St. Pölten, Austria where the audience voted the piece their favourite one.
Otto Iivari is currently a master’s student in electroacoustic composition at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre with Malle Maltis, and at the moment he is taking his Erasmus semester in Graz, Austria (University of Music and Performing Art Graz – institute of electronic music and acoustics).
Learn more here.
