Nightports at Hull Minster

Project Description

'Nightports at Hull Minster' is a practice-research project that explores site-specific composition, production, performance and real-time audio spatialisation. Underpinning this research is the creation of a new 30-minute original musical work for live electronics and live spatialisation based on the time-keeping function of the Minster's bell tower. Adopting Nightports' self-imposed restriction of single sound sources for each project, this version of their work focussed on recordings of the bells in the bell tower and the minute sounds of the clock mechanism. Alongside this creative endeavour, the project explored a number of technical innovations relating to ambisonics and real-time spatialisation (encompassing a physical acousmonium in-situ; a hybrid acousmonium and virtualmonium; and headphone-targeted virtualisations for radio).

The creation of the music (funded by PRS for Music’s ‘The Open Fund for Music Creators’ in the UK) took place between January and June 2022, and eventually took several forms, including: 1) a live performance (with semi-improvised features) which was captured to create a film of the work (August 2022); 2) a performance for radio broadcast on BBC Radio 3 (recorded in November 2022 and broadcast in January 2023); 3) a diffusion event (without performers) of the filmed performance in Middleton Hall at the University of Hull; 4) a live performance (in Hull Minster) as part of the Awakening Festival (March 2023); and 5) a release on The Leaf Label (April 2023) based on the live video performance recording in August 2022.

In addition to these practical outputs, a series of academic papers exploring the technical and aesthetic dimensions of the spatialised qualities of this approach to composition, production and performance were shared with international audiences. These papers were then formulated into a final journal article, published in the Computer Music Journal.