DAVID MONACCHI

Composer, sound artist, and researcher in acoustic ecology. His primary research activity is recording natural sonic environments throughout the world with experimental field recording techniques, creating eco-acoustic compositions for multimedia concerts.

In 2002, in collaboration with Greenpeace, he travelled to the Brazilian Amazon to collect high definition sound portraits from the primary tropical rainforest. From 30 hours of extraordinary sound recordings, he composed the electroacoustic opera “Fragments of a Sonic World in Extinction” which toured theatres and contemporary music venues in Europe from 2003. He has recorded in Africa, South America, Canada and Europe, using the recordings as material for 3D sound documentaries, and multichannel installations.

His music has been performed in the Kryptonale (Berlin), Teatro Groggia (Venice), Nuova Consonanza and Tevereterno (Rome), La Via Lattea (Lugano), Community Art Council (Vancouver), Nuit Blanche (Paris), Ear to the Earth (New York) and many other international venues for as much as 180 concerts and installations, and broadcast throughout the world by many radio stations. In 2005, his eco-acoustic research project in the Foreste Casentinesi National Park became part of the Italian proposition to UNESCO for environmental projects. From 2005, he works as musical director for the project Tevereterno, a large scale multimedia spectacle on the Tiber River in Rome.

His honours include the “Erato Farnesina” Fellowship from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affaire for the World Soundscape Project – Vancouver, the “Fulbright” research fellowship to work at the CNMAT-University of California, and prizes from the “Russolo-Pratella” competition (Italy), “Locarno Film Festival” (Switzerland), and “Multiple Sound Festival” (Holland).

He is currently Professor of Electronic Music at the Conservatory of Music of Foggia, and Acting Chair at the University of Macerata and the Conservatory of Pesaro – Italy. His music is been broadcasted throughout the world by many international TV and radio stations. He is based in Italy and travels widely pursuing his research and concert activities.

Nightingale-study I [for wood traverse flute, natural soundscapes and real time spectrogram analysis] is a research on a bird’s song whose melodic virtues are described from the ancient times. Analyzing many hours of field recordings, carried out by the author during night time of May in the Urbino countryside, we came to notice how the nightingale, unlike most of the other birds, doesn’t articulate his singing through standard patterns codified in a simple language, but through evolving improvisations, with a stunning variety and richness to which it’s possible to attribute musical qualities.

On the compositional side, the pure unelaborated recordings of three different nightingales evolve through a progressive stretching that brings the singing on a more recognizable articulation of time and frequency. In this sense the “melodic” structure becomes visible, while on the other side the sound of the flute, sampled and speeded up, tends to another order of time and frequency. All the sound material, except the drones, the initial traffic and the flute, are made from the nightingales’ stretching.

The live improvisation on the medieval traverse flute, searches progressively an interaction into a non-human sound aesthetic, playing a role of melodic junction between the background-static drones and the foreground-dynamic nightingale’s modules.

This work came out as a concerned reflection about the relationship between nature and the human being: during the recordings of the nightingale in a quiet countryside night, the microphones picked up a series of imperceptible very low frequencies which in studio became surprisingly clear. Cut off in a first moment as an undesiderate noise, they became instead the emotional knot of the entire composition; only later they were discovered as being several military airplains convoys flying high, probably directed to Kosovo; it was May 25th 1998…