Research Trends in Electronic Music Culture

The Digital Media and Art Research Centre (DMARC) engages in a diverse range of activities investigating technology-enabled arts practice. Focusing on the creative process in the digital arts and the aesthetic possibilities of new technologies, DMARC fosters experimentation in a wide range of disciplines, including electronic music, visual media, installation art, virtual art, and performance.

DMARC members: Jürgen Simpson, Neil O’Connor, Robin Parmar, Nicholas Ward and Giuseppe Torre will present a selection of live performances that explore current developments across electronic music performance paradigms and will examine some of the research and cultural developments underpinning contemporary practice in these areas.

This event may be recorded for future promotional use by the University of Limerick.

All venues are wheelchair accessible but should you have any specific accessibility queries, please contact us at: Research@ul.ie

Jürgen Simpson

Jürgen Simpson is a composer, curator and digital arts practitioner/researcher with a focus on interdisciplinarity, live performance and collaborative practices. Working at Computer Science and Information Systems UL since 2004, he co-founded the Digital Media and Arts Research Centre in 2011 and in 2013 established ‘Light Moves’, an interdisciplinary festival bridging between dance, digital and screen-based practices. He has co-curated the festival’s seven editions and is centrally involved in its developmental wing ‘Open Futures’ supporting innovation between dance and the digital arts. As a composer his voice is rooted in the field of music, and branches out to embrace dance, theatre, opera, sound art and the gallery. Supporters include RTÉ, The Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland, The British Council, The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, SFU Vancouver, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Recent large-scale works include a reworking of Simeon Ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato for New Music Dublin 2023 and music/sound for the ecologically focused interdisciplinary work Weathering with Mary Wycherley, Jools Gilson and Ceara Conway. His 2015 opera "Air India [redacted]” was premiered in Vancouver, in collaboration with Turning Point Ensemble and the Banff Centre and in 2003 he received the Genesis Opera Project’s principal award for his opera “Thwaite” with librettist Simon Doyle. Film music includes a decade working with artist Clare Langan with “Metamorphosis” receiving the 2007 Oberhausen Film Festival award. Colaborators include Kevin Volans, Raymond Deane and Michael Nyman. He was a member of the band The Jimmy Cake from 2000 to 2009 and recorded and produced their critically acclaimed third album, Spectre and Crown. His writing has been published by Oxford University Press and Palgrave MacMillan and he is a member of the Programme Advisory Panel for Limerick City Gallery of Art where he has curated three exhibitions as part of Light Moves.

Dr Neil O'Connor

Irish academic and composer Neil O’Connor studied music at Trinity College, Dublin (M.Litt/PhD Electroacoustic Music) and IRCAM (Paris) and has been involved in experimental & electro-acoustic music for the past two decades, performing in Ireland, Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa and the US. His work combines both spatial and fixed works which incorporates elements of musique concrète, vintage electronic hardware modular synthesisers and Max/MSP. His work has been shown/performed at MOMA, New York, Institute of Contemporary Art, London and has held residencies at the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art and EMS – Swedish Institute of Electro-Acoustic Music, Stockholm, Sweden. He has worked / collaborated with members of the Philip Glass Ensemble, the Glenn Branca Ensemble, Bang On a Can Ensemble and the RTE Symphony Orchestra. His electroacoustic works have won award and mentions at Noroit-Léonce Petitot (Arras, France), Euphonie D’Or des Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique (France) and Musica Nova Electroacoustic Music Competition, (Czech Republic). Neil has published with Bloomsbury, Routledge, Rowman & Littlefield and Cambridge University Press. He is currently part of DMARC - Digital Media Research Arts Center, Dept of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick Electronic Music Studios.

Dr Robin Parmar

Robin Parmar is a media artist and researcher exploring the phenomenology of place and our rela-tionships with nature. His cross-disciplinary practice includes electroacoustic composition, sound and video installations, and digital video. Research interests include soundscape composition, psy-choacoustics, and sonic arts theory. He has released thirteen albums, the most recent being Citalá, River of Stars (Silent Records, USA, 2023). Awards include the Invisible Places residency (2017) and an Arts Council Bursary (2017). He was selected for the national showcase Just Listening – Ireland Calling in 2011 (curated by the National Sculpture Factory) and was an invited artist at EVA Inter-national, Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2010 (curated by Elizabeth Hatz).

Robin has a doctorate in Sonic Creativity from De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) and lectures in Video, Film, and Visual Communication at the University of Limerick (Ireland) where he directs the BSc. in Music, Media and Performance Technology. He is Vice-President of the Irish Science, Sound, and Technology Association (ISSTA) and was guest editor for the last issue of Interference: Journal of Audio Culture. He regularly reviews for the journal Organised Sound. His handbook Lis-tening To Places (Void Gallery, Derry, 2022) sold out its first printing.

Dr Nicholas Ward

Nicholas holds a PhD from the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queens University Belfast. His research explores notions of physicality and effort in the context of digital musical instrument performance. Specifically he is interested in movement quality, systems for movement description, and their utility within a design context.

Dr Giuseppe Torre

Giuseppe Torre [Laurea/M.Phil., MSc, PhD] is Lecturer of digital art practices at the University of Limerick. His research interest lies at the crossings between digital art practices, open source technology/culture and philosophy. These interests respond to a questioning of the relationships between technology and art, code and aesthetics, numbers and self; a process that has so far led him to question under what forms and forces truly creative efforts may, or may not, arise. He is the author of An Ethico-Phenomenology of Digital Art Practices (Routledge, 2021). His academic writings features in journals and books by publishing houses such as MIT Press, Springer, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, Palgrave and Blackwater Publishing. As an active digital art practitioner, his works and performances have been showecased nationally and internationally. He is a advocate of FLOOS (Free and Libre Open Source Software) in the teaching and professional practice of all digital arts. In UL, Giuseppe Torre teaches in the B.Sc. in Music Media & Performance Technology, the Master in Experience Design (IUX) and the Master in AI.