AUDIO CHANDELIER is a series of multichannel works Naphtali has been creating over the past 15 years. In each piece, sounds are “pixelated” into individual grains of sound as they are dispersed to 8-16 speakers throughout a gallery and altered using granular synthesis to “illuminate and refract moments in time.” Audio Chandelier works have taken the form of performances, fixed media and interactive installations, and sound-sculpture, and ensemble pieces for laptop orchestra, smartphones, presented internationally and around the US. Audio Chandelier: Passeri was created during a residency at APO-33 in Nantes, France, June/July 2023, for 10 channels audio and 4-channel video to run as an installation summer 2023 at APO-33’s space at Platforme Intermédia, and with a COST grant (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). “Passeri” reflects on changing patterns of bird migration, climate change and bird song, inspired by open source maps and data-visualizations of changing bird flight-patterns, wind speeds, changing habitat and its effect on birdsongs. At New Ear:: Spatial, it is presented in audio-only version.

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Slow Break (2025) is a multi-channel sound work made up of shifting clusters of sounds whose spatial movements are modeled from the motions found in games of pool. The sounds used in the piece are a combination of closely recorded quiet mechanical sounds and processed reflections of those sounds. The clusters made from these sounds include only a handful of individual elements, are relatively clear, and their start and end points in both duration and spatial location are precisely articulated. The overall structure of the piece is one of repeated gradual clearings, following the arc of a pool game where the table is cleared of objects in a deliberate and varied manner. In this way, a set of carefully defined sonic spaces are moved through, each one with a precise balance and acoustic clarity that focuses the listener's attention on the development and placement of the sounds in the listening space. The title refers to a strategy in the opening move in a game of pool that keeps the balls relatively close together on the table. It requires the players to operate carefully in subsequent moves as they work through the clusters and shapes as the game unfolds.

Ed Osborn works with many forms of electronic media including installation, video, sound, and performance. He has presented his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the singuhr-hörgalerie (Berlin), the Berkeley Art Museum, Artspace (Sydney), the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), the ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe), Kiasma (Helsinki), MassMOCA (North Adams), the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast). Osborn has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Creative Work Fund, and Arts International and been awarded residencies from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Elektronmusikstudion (Stockholm), STEIM (Amsterdam), and EMPAC (Troy, NY). He is Professor of Visual Art and Music at Brown University.

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“Patch Bellows” is an octophonic re-imagining of a continuously-evolving performance project for concertina and electronics. After several performance experiments with granulation and other digital, time-domain transformations, “Patch Bellows” now focuses on fusing the concertina with the analog realm, both sonically and methodologically. The result is a vital and dynamic dialogue between the composed/improvised concertina part and the modulated but independent analog material. A small squeezebox popular among Victorian-era sailors due to its portability, and now closely associated with Irish traditional music, the concertina blends surprisingly seamlessly with the analog realm because of its rich resonance and bisonoric interface. Re-envisioning “Patch Bellows” for New Ear has entailed delving into the rich spatial potential of this material. The concertina is inherently linear, with sound emerging from either end; and its bidirectional pitch-bellows mechanism lends performances an entrancing gesturality. It has been extremely productive and intriguing to expand and re-envision this musical terrain for New Ear’s octophonic cube, with particular attention given to the vertical dimension and the suggestion (or rejection) of circularity within square forms. Mirroring the concertina’s dynamic resonance, this iteration of “Patch Bellows” includes a variety of spatial motion rates, from imperceptibly slow to nearly audio rate and beyond. This fluid interplay between audio and control signals reflects an expansive approach to time and space, with physical gesture as the hinge between these domains. Conceptually, “Patch Bellows” explores anachronistic nostalgia. The concertina has a somewhat dated sound, but its complex difference tones blend smoothly into a futuristic and evocative analog realm. Working in New Ear’s octophonic context, “Patch Bellows” builds on this constructed historicity as a bridge to the spatial dimension. Key questions include: How do distance and dimensionality affect our perception of time and space? How can the nuances of concertina tone (e.g., subtle reed degradation during note-decays) map into spatialization information? How can the concertina’s compelling gesturality inform the displacement or replacement of sound across boundaries of near and far, memory and imagination? In short, “Patch Bellows” explores New Ear’s octophonic cube configuration as a form of time travel. This piece is a form of real-time connection-making, highlighting not only the binary fact of bridging disparate sound points, but also the qualitative nature of the connection. Using the uniquely retro-futuristic concertina, “Patch Bellows” considers the resonant, mobile character of sound and gesture to patch together the spatial and the temporal.

Kristina Warren (kmwarren.org) is a versatile and imaginative sound and media artist, composer, and performer based on Narragansett land, also known as Providence, Rhode Island. Warren’s performances range from synth voyages and digital soundscapes to concertina meditations and beyond; Warren also presents installations, workshops, lectures, and more. All this work aims in various ways to highlight the ebbs and flows of individual and collective listening attention, and to transform remembering into perceiving into imagining. Praised as "beautifully organic" (Peter Bruyn, Haarlems Dagblad) and having "a finesse of timbral traces" (Frédéric Cardin, PanM360), work by Warren has been presented internationally at venues including Flux Festival [CA], TIK [DE], WORM [NL], The Bluecoat [UK], Infuse [FR], Espacios Sonoros [AR], IOIC [CH], Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago), Rhizome (DC, US), MIT Spatial Sound Lab (Cambridge, US), Waterworks Museum (Boston), Red Room (Baltimore) and Microscope Gallery (NYC). Recently a MacColl Johnson Fellow of the Rhode Island Foundation (2024) and a Fulbright US Scholar / Artist in Residence at Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier (2023), Warren previously taught electronic music and multimedia as Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University (2017-21). Warren holds a PhD in Composition and Computer Technologies from the University of Virginia (2017) and a Bachelor’s in Music Composition from Duke University (2011). See also kmwarren.bandcamp.com.