Dear friends, 

I am delighted to congratulate Jaime Oliver La Rosa, the winner of this year’s FETA Prize in Sound Art.

Please, see the full release bellow.

Wishing you a joyful holiday season,

Juraj

FETA Prize in Sound Art

For Immediate Release

December 19, 2018 in Miami, FL

FETA Prize in Sound Art 2018 Awarded to Jaime Oliver La Rosa

With 40 blind submissions from Brazil, Canada, Chile, Peru and the US, Jaime Oliver La Rosa was selected as the 2018 winner of the FETA Prize in Sound Art for his work Caracoles IV.

The FETA Prize in Sound Art was established in 2013 to promote a broad range of contemporary American sound and installation arts. Through a two-stage blindfold evaluation process, the judges Jenny Olivia Johnson, Michael Boyd and Joo Won Park chose a small pool of finalists: Brian House’s Urban Intonation, Wendy Steiner’s Traces on the Farther Side, Stephen Lilly’s Background and Jaime Oliver La Rosa’s Caracoles IV. For the sixth edition of the prize, our honorable master judge Gustavo Matamoros selected the winning work Caracoles IV by Jaime Oliver La Rosa, who will receive a 1,000 USD monetary prize, presentation of Caracoles IV at the Emerson Dorsch Gallery in Miami, FL and a spread on the FETA web.

About Caracoles IV:

“Caracoles IV is an installation that uses interactive feedback systems to sonically explore modified conch shells known as a pututus, Andean musical instruments fashioned out of a conch shell by cutting the apex of its spire and shaping it like a cornet embouchure. This musical instrument is thus co-created by both a human maker and the non-human large snail which once inhabited it. In this installation, I place a microphone in the embouchure and a speaker at the end of the spiral canal and connect it through a software-mediated feedback system running on a micro-computer that hangs above the shell.

Instead of performing these instruments and hearing their sounds as blown, we instead hear the spectral components of each shell over time. Through a pitch tracker, the system detects resonant feedback frequencies and temporarily cancels them, thereby pushing the system to lock onto a new frequency, and so on. The result is a sequence of resonant frequencies that derive from the shape of the shell and properties of the system; the shell’s shape is sung by feedback. Each shell-system is a collaboration between humans, conch-shells, and interactive systems, but also an interaction between all the shell-systems in the room, each with its own set of resonances.” JOLR

About Jaime Oliver La Rosa

Jaime Oliver La Rosa is a computer music composer, performer, sound artist, and researcher working at the intersection between musical instruments, installations, and open works. Oliver La Rosa’s music and research explores the concept of musical instrument in electronic and computer music, designing instruments that listen, understand, remember and respond. His open source Silent Drum and MANO controllers use computer vision techniques to continuously track and classify hand gestures; his [notes] library  explores computer assisted notation and generative music in Pure Data and LilyPond.

His work has been featured in international festivals and conferences, collaborating with several composers, improvisers and artists in a field of action that spans sound performance and installation, composing and performing music, both for concerts and for theater and dance, creating sound installations and programming open source software.  He obtained a PhD in Computer Music from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Miller Puckette, and was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University & the CMC in New York. He is currently Assistant Professor of Composition at NYU and co-director of the Waverly Labs.

For additional information about Caracoles IV, please visit:

http://www.jaimeoliver.pe/caracoles-iv-2018

Read an interview with our last year’s winners Jean Piché and Patrick Saint-Denis here:

http://www.fetafoundation.org/ 

For more information about the FETA prize in Sound Art, please visit our website: http://www.fetafoundation.org  or contact Paula Matthusen at matthusen@fetafoundation.org

With the support of Foundation of Emerging Technologies and Arts, Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Harold Golen Gallery and the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.