Manuella Blackburn

Formes Audibles is the first album by Manuella Blackburn, six acousmatic works composed between 2007 and 2011, most of them at the Electroacoustic Music Studios of The University of Manchester. Each piece starts from one family of everyday or instrumental sounds, and several apply the spectromorphological vocabulary of Denis Smalley as a working tool for building phrases, structures and spatial paths.

Kitchen Alchemy (2007) turns kitchen utensils and appliances into something that sounds precious, organized through combinations of onsets, continuants and terminations; it won the Grand Prize at the Digital Art Awards in Fujisawa. Switched on (2011) clusters the sounds of switches, dials and buttons with the high frequencies of an old TV powering up, and took 1st prize at the 2012 Métamorphoses competition. Vista Points (2009) uses only electric guitar sounds supplied by Carlos Lopez, and Cajón! (2008), commissioned by Miso Music in Lisbon, sets the box drum against flamenco palmas and glitch textures.

Karita oto (2009), for 8 channels, draws on instruments recorded during a trip to Tokyo in 2008, including rare specimens from the Kunitachi College of Music Museum, with five of Smalley’s spatial paths shaping the trajectories. Spectral Spaces (2008) was commissioned in part by Smalley and is made entirely from sound files of his Wind Chimes (1987).

Born in London in 1984, Blackburn studied at The University of Manchester, where she completed a PhD in electroacoustic composition with Ricardo Climent in 2010. Her music works with the careful arrangement of small sounds, transforming the ordinary into the fantastical. She is Reader in Electronic Music and Sound Design at Keele University.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 12117, 2012.