PRS for Music Foundation introduces…

New Music Award 2005

Finalist: Singing Ringing Buoy by Craig Vear

Craig Vear proposes to combine the wild elements of the sea with an electro-acoustic experience, a project that links ‘a sound sculpture, a navigational buoy and a surround-sound installation in the National Maritime Museum Cornwall.’

The Singing, Ringing Buoy will digitally capture spiralling wind, howling cables, lapping seas and percussive rain from its offshore location. Samples of the sounds will be used to create the composition using specially designed software. In real-time the sounds will be ‘sculpted using current weather data to generate interesting musical movements and provide a range of manipulation that expresses an impression of the affecting weather.’ The realised composition of raw and manipulated sound will be broadcast live into a museum installation using cinema surround sound technology.

From the installation space in the National Maritime Museum Cornwall the audience / listener will be able to look out to sea to where the Buoy is situated, and hence the source of the sounds will be able to viewed as well as heard.

Craig Vear is a composer and producer whose work includes the first Arts Council England International Fellowship with the British Antarctic Survey, spending three months working alongside the scientific community in Antarctica composing electro-acoustic music in response to the continent. Craig is also co-founder of pop group Cousteau and improvisation duo ev2. If he wins the New Music Award, Craig will work alongside designer and visual artist Sophia Clist, software designer Matthew Paradis together with a range of associates such as the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, Harbour Master of Falmouth Harbour Commissioners and Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory.