Sound

Exhalation-Water is a sonic journey along the University of Washington campus. Participants are following at ground level the chilling pipes that connect the air conditioning system of the buildings in the campus under the floor. In this way, participants are metaphorically following their own heat. Participants carry a portable device that allows the transformation on real time of the sonic environment. The devices records and transform the live input signal and plays prerecorded sounds from the surrounding location.Along the walks, participants discover several black boxes where they are invited to exhale their breath. In return the box responds with a word that they have to select on the portable device. These boxes are constantly analyzing the sonic environment and set the "sonic situation" of the sound manipulation.

The experience finishes when participants arrive to the cooling cascade where the hot water is cool thru air. Here the participants recover the heat that they exhaled along the journey.

“Swarm Intelligence describes the high-level behavior produced by the interaction of several decentralized non-hierarchical non-complex units of low-level intelligence with short-term local interaction". The traditional examples for describing swarm systems are insect colonies, flocks, and fish schools which overall behavior is more sophisticated than each of the members isolated.

 In order to combine my various interests, I founded the NICROM Electro-acoustic Musical Improvisation Trio in 2001. This trio, consisting of two musicians and a painter, was a creative forum for sound and graphic experimentation and exploration. We were particularly interested in finding alternative means of producing coherent musical discourse based more on atonal and graphic manipulation than on the interval relations between sounds, which led us to explore the spectrum of noise and abstract painting. The trio performed in numerous concert halls throughout Mexico City. The members were Rodrigo Garibay on wind instruments, Mauricio Zárate on visuals, and Hugo Solís (myself) on computer and keyboard. Guest musicians included Uriel Alatriste, Maricia Medrano, Griselle Mac'Dowell, and Alejandro Otaola.

In The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allen Poe describes how the narrator's character kills the old man he lives with, how he hides the dismembered body in the scantlings of the chamber, and how he confesses the murder to the police after still hearing the beating of the old man’s heart coming from the underfloor where the body is hidden. While not programmatic, this work –the installation and the musical composition- is based on Poe’s story and uses an old acoustic upright piano electronically and mechanically augmented for representing the sonic imagery described in the writing.

This three-movement radio artwork has three different layers that are combined during the piece. 1- poems, 2- viola motives, which are fragments of important viola works of different periods and composers and 3- sounds of the Central Observatorio Bus Station of México City. All the poems are by Gabriela Villa except "Este es un amor" by Efraín Huerta and "Te amo ahí contra el muro destruido" by Homero Aridjis. The viola works are by Bach, Ligeti, Feldman, Schumann, Reger, and Hindemith. Reading of poems are done by Gabriela Villa, Alina Amozurrutia, Emilio Domínguez, and Hugo Solís. The viola recordings are performed by Alex Bruck. This piece won an honorable mention in the "Cuarta Bienal Internacional de Radio" of México City

EnsAmble Crumble, an electro-acoustic improvisatory ensemble was formed at the beginning of 2005 by four musicians from France, Spain, Mexico, and The Netherlands all of them with interdisciplinary studies in music and sound technology.

RadioBANDA is a radio network art piece that consists of an installation of analog radios and a web server that people access to create music in real time. The final mix is then broadcast by a radio transmitter over 88.1 FM. (IN SPANISH)

I see each of my improvisations as a snapshot of the state in the development of my acoustical/technical/creative research. The style, technologies, and expressive intentions have significantly changed over the years but the use of the acoustic piano has remained as a constant. Even when I improvise only electronics and/or visuals, I treat the material with similar strategies where the notion of “structure” –sometimes recognizable, sometimes suggested- is of extreme importance. Another element that is important in my work –therefore in today’s improvisation- is the expressive potential of the musical human computer interaction. This interest has lead me to create digital partners not trying to replace live musicians nor trying only to sonically augment the instrument, but searching for compositional paradigms where machines could emphasize the human expression.

See Concerts for specific events.

Juum Duet, (www.DuoJuum.net) integrated by Hugo Solís and Gabriela Villa, is a free electroacoustic improvisation ensemble created at the beginning of year 2006. Both musicians, native Mexicans, share interdisciplinary interests and education which include music, music technology, digital media and speech.