Realm of Tensors and Spruce
Live music & interactive sound installation
Composed, performed and designed by Lucy STRAUSS | Lighting design by Frans ZUNGUZE
Realm of Tensors and Spruce is a new music project created and performed by Lucy Strauss. The project explores and extends the sonic possibilities of the viola with live acoustic playing, electroacoustics, and DIY machine learning models trained on datasets of Lucy's own playing. With this palette of practices, she builds and transforms soundworlds entirely from viola audio. The resulting performance melds between improvised and composed structures.
This work will be presented at Theatre Arts first in a performance setting, then as an interactive sound installation. This affords audience members the chance to explore and influence a soundworld generated in real-time with bespoke neural audio synthesis.
Between the performance and the installation, there will be a Q&A session and a short interval
Spruce: a species of tonewood commonly used to make violas
Tensor: a data structure used in machine learning frameworks
Realm: an allusion to Lucy's compositional approach of building soundworlds; and the to latent (or hidden) space within the machine learning models used in this project. Lucy has implemented these models in such a way that they are entirely interactive and responsive to input, so that humans always remain in the loop towards a human-centred computing practice.
This event at Theatre Arts is the premiere of the interactive installation component of Realm of Tensors and Spruce. The performance component was premiered in October 2024 at Pony Books in Gothenburg, Sweden. Lucy will present the project again at Goldsmiths, University of London in early 2025. She also looks forward to sharing this music with the upcoming release of her debut album.
Lucy Strauss is a musician and researcher drawing together viola performance, interactive system design, machine learning with audio and bioelectric signals, and first-person design methodologies. With these practices, she seeks to deepen understanding of musicmaking with new and old technologies.
Lucy has performed improvised and experimental music at Pony Books (Gothenburg), the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival, Mixtophonics Festival, 8EAST Cultural Center & NOW Society (Vancouver), De Tanker (Amsterdam), Hundred Years Gallery (London), and the Theatre Arts Admin Collective (Cape Town). She also enjoys contributing to interdisciplinary collaborations with fellow artists. Notably, she was the interaction designer for Denise Onen’s sounding the body as a sight at The Oscillations Exhibition 2024 (Akademie der Künste, Berlin). Also notably, Lucy has coded, composed and played for installations by artist Mia Thom at Everard Read Gallery, Act of Brutal Curation Gallery, and Eclectica Contemporary (Cape Town), as well as the 2022 Biennale de l'Art Africain Contemporain (Dakar). Lucy has presented workshops on composition (University of British Columbia), improvisation (Canadian Viola Society) and interactive music technology (Bowed Electrons Festival & Symposium).
Lucy learnt to love improvising right here at Theatre Arts through the MusicDance021 artist residency (ZA). She further developed her improvisation practice at 8EAST & Now Society (CA). She learnt to compose music at the University of Cape Town (BMus) and perform viola at the University of British Columbia (MMus). She is currently an Artist in Residence at the University of Johannesburg (ZA), and a CHASE-funded PhD researcher in Arts & Computational Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London (UK). Lucy is based in Gothenburg (SE) and London (UK).
Photo by Mia Thom