It’s a difficult time for live music and festivals these days, but that hasn’t stopped MUTEK from kicking off this week. MUTEK is an international festival for electronic music and digital art. Founded in Montreal in 2000, the festival is held here yearly. International versions of the festivals are held at other times during the year, with events in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, San Francisco and Tokyo. This year the MUTEK is presented in a hybrid format, with a limited series of live shows at selected venues in Montreal and an expanded program of performances delivered online. The entire festival program, which includes live streams and rebroadcasts of the Montreal shows is available to experience for free at virtual.mutek.org.

Speaking of experiences, The Bionic Harpist, a research-creation project by IDMIL researcher Johnny Sullivan and collaborator Alex Tibbitts, is on the MUTEK program with a live performance at the Experience 1 concert on Wednesday, September 9th at the Satosphere, an immersive dome featuring 360° surround audio and video. Alex will perform a solo audiovisual performance on augmented concert harp. The wireless controllers that Alex uses were developed at the IDMIL and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT).

Alex Tibbitts in rehearsal with custom wireless controllers developed at the IDMIL.

Also making a return appearance at MUTEK this year is Vigliensoni, who will perform in Experience 4 on Friday. Gabriel Vigliensoni is an electronic musician and researcher who completed his master’s degree in music technology at the IDMIL. He completed his Ph.D. “Evaluating the performance improvement of a music recommendation model by using user-centric features” at McGill in 2017 and is currently a post-doctoral researcher at Goldsmith’s University in London.

Both concerts (and all MUTEK programming) can be experienced for free at virtual.mutek.org.