A biocomputer that can play the piano and an audio-visual representation of Motor Neurone Disease will be among the highlights of the 10th annual Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival.

The festival celebrates experimental music with the programme responding to advances in science and computer technology that are changing the way we understand, listen to, play and perform music.

Curated by directors Simon Ible and Professor Eduardo Reck Miranda, it encompasses classical and electronic music, film and installation, and experiments and discussions. And as the musicians venture into the unknown, audiences are encouraged to actively listen and engage in debate about what they hear, see and feel.

The theme for the 2015 festival is Biomusic, with composers and artists exploring new sounds, ideas, instruments and musical structures inspired, and even created, by biological processes. Highlights include:

Biocomputer Music by Eduardo Reck Miranda – an unprecedented piano duet played between the composer and a biocomputer, which harnesses the ability of slime mould to perform computational tasks;
Piano:Forest by Mike McInerney – a performance for piano and live data creating a musical ecosystem using data derived from the UK’s forested landscapes;
Orchestral Processing Unit by Alexis Kirke – will see musicians act as biological processing elements in a ‘computer’ whose calculations are made through music. People will take the place of the metallic elements that make up ‘silicon chips’ and musical melodies the place of the electrical currents which flow between elements as processing is done;
Unfolding | Clusters by Federico Visi, Giovanni Dothel and Duncan Williams – an immersive audio-visual installation which narrates the biomolecular deterioration of neurones in the devastating Motor Neurone Disease;
Corpus Callosum by Eduardo Reck Miranda – a chamber orchestra will recreate the dialogue between the right and left hemispheres of the brain in a score created from an fMRI scan of the composer’s brain listening to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony;
Fast Travel by Alexis Kirke – a musical composition modelled on the evolution of humpback whale song.

The Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival takes place at Plymouth University from 27 February to 1 March 2015. Many of the events are free and for more information visit www.peninsula-arts.co.uk.

(from a press release)