Dr Aki Pasoulas guests on the Creative Writing Reading series.

Dr Aki Pasoulas, electroacoustic composer and the Director of Music & Audio Arts Sound Theatre (MAAST), is welcomed to the School of English Creative Writing Open Seminar

The School of English Creative Writing Open Seminar is dedicated to the method and process happening away from the visible, behind and before a piece of art meets the world. Mostly, the series shares insights on writing text, but this week, the series invites Dr Aki Pasoulas to talk about environmental sound, time, memory, senses, and how to combine all that and translate it into aural space.

Dr Aki Pasoulas is an electroacoustic composer and the Director of Music & Audio Arts Sound Theatre (MAAST) at the Department of Music & Audio Technology at the University of Kent. His research focuses on electroacoustic music, timescale perception, spatial sound, psychoacoustics, sound perception, acoustic communication and soundscape ecology. His scholarly and music works are published through EMI/KPM, ICMA, Sonos Localia, HELMCA, Cambridge and Oxford University Press, and his commercial sound design work has been used in numerous TV programmes, documentaries and films around the world. His music is continually performed worldwide, received honorable mentions, and has been shortlisted at international composition competitions. Aki is the Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded project ‘A Sonic Palimpsest: Revisiting Chatham Historic Dockyards’, which investigates the role of sound in influencing our experience of spaces and places, and examines the sound environments in heritage contexts.

Dr Aki Pasoulas talks about the event:

‘In this presentation, I will talk about the method I followed to create my composition Irides. This method is in constant development and it is based on the interpretation of information received through all senses as gestural and textural activity in the aural domain. My method attempts to map our experiences from a number of systems (visual, gustatory, olfactory and haptic environments) to another (aural space). For the making of my piece I used information collected through my walks, including environmental recordings and sensory maps as starting points to create layers of sound material. My composition explores interrelationships between music, time perception, memory and the listening environment, based on senses acting on different timescales. Evidently, listeners do not relive the experiences I had through the walks, as the composition does not replicate them. Instead, this process allows composers to creatively use information that we receive from other senses, often neglected when thinking about sound. Perhaps this approach will inspire creators in different disciplines, and I would be delighted if this short talk initiated interesting discussions with participants’ experiences. Irides can be listened to online; programme notes are on the same page.’

View the event and join on zoom on Tuesday 23rd March at 4pm.