// about

Hello, I'm Jules Rawlinson and I design sounds, visuals and interactions and perform with live electronics. I'm Senior Lecturer in Digital Design at the University of Edinburgh

// update

Want something older? | Looking for UniSSON?| Looking for my PhD Portfolio?

Pulsar Hexerei, London Nov 2023 / Belfast April 2024

I was invited to perform Pulsar Hexerei at the excellent SOUND/IMAGE conference and festival at The University of Greenwich, and also at the equally excellent Sonorities Festival, Belfast, organised by staff at QUB's Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC)

An Island of Sound, Canada / London / Portgual, May - July 2023

JR Carpenter and I reworked our collaborative work, An Island of Sound for presentation at SpokenWeb Research Symposium on the theme of Reverb: Echo-Locations of Sound and Space", in Alberta, at Mix Conference at the British Library in London, and ELO conference at Coimbra, Portugal, where JR and I took part in a panel "Weathering Winds of Change: Writing Oceans, Islands, and AiR ", with Richard Carter

Raw Green Rust: Antagonistic Sextet, May 2023

Raw Green Rust were invited to contribute to the EFI 'Love Machine' season, and for Antagonistic Sextet the trio performed with and against our own history. An archive of high-quality video recordings of previous performances was strained through a neural network to prompt, provoke, inform and interfere with action and reaction in and?across the various networks of agency, such that the trio is (more than) doubled.

This particular work makes novel use of the FluCoMa toolset with MaxMSP for audio signal and audio corpus decomposition and recombination. The novelty is found in the application to a dataset of video material. Sound is analysed in real-time using difference measures, and from analysis descriptors across a number of sound based criteria near-neighbour matches are made from live sound to the archived video performances and slices of those performances are collaged together with the real-time sound. The system responds to the performers, the performers respond to each other and the system, the system responds to the performers, and so on!

Antagonistic Sextet: A Performance by Raw Green Rust from Edinburgh Futures Institute on Vimeo.

An Island of Sound, December 2022

In June, I was invited to collaborate with writer and artist JR Carpenter on a commissioned performance for the Edinburgh Futures Institute exploring phantom islands as weather phenomenon through an assemblage of found images, algorithmically generated texts, live performance, and sound.

JR had parts of a libretto from a browser-based work in development that utilises generative text and collaged visuals drawn the British Library's Flickr Commons. The sound-world created for the live performance of this work responds to, supports, and transforms JR's visual and textual imagery. Field recordings, wind synthesis, generative sample streams and data-driven sound processing are collaged and combined with spoken word to create ambiguous and shifting sonic narratives and spectral resonances.

An Island of Sound: J. R. Carpenter with Jules Rawlinson from Edinburgh Futures Institute on Vimeo.

Pulsar Hexerei, July 2022

Improvised buffer scratching, corpus scrubbing and waveform scuffing of material sourced from New Pulsar Generator with Make Noise Strega. These tracks are excerpts from a performance at The Waverley, Edinburgh on 30th June, 2022. Samples from nuPg improvisations have been analysed in a variety of ways using the FluCoMa toolkit for polyphonic and gestural exploration and expression using multitouch controllers. Tracks 2 and 3 take their starting point from files used to improvise the named tracks on my Pulsar Retcon release as an exercise in variation and versioning.

Interval and Instance, Sonorities Belfast, April 2022

After initially being selected for the covid-cancelled Sonorities 2020, Interval and Instance was included in the 2022 event reimagined yet again for single screen multichannel display. The work was presented as a performance document on a 9.4.1 surround rig, so I remixed the work to make the most of the multichannel opportunities and layered multiple simultaneous performances!

Raw Green Rust - BEAST Birmingham, March 2022

Raw Green Rust were invited by Annie Mahtani to perform at a BEAST takeover of Centrala Space, Birmingham. We took the opportunity to play-talk-play, too give a bit of context to our approach and performance practices to those in the audience.

w[i]nd - xCoAx, July 2021

My virtual installation was selected for inclusion in the artworks selection of the Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X, with a short paper in the proceedings, virtual presentation and online panel discussion

Raw Green Rust - Regulatory Capture, July 2021

After a forced hiatus, Raw Green Rust finally got a chance to perform in a 'hybrid' setup for Dialogues 2021. Owen had made a patch/performance tool called Regulatory Capture using the FluCoMa toolset that we all ran that grabs bits of me, him and Dave then rapidly collages them together in different ways as a new approach to recycling material. Each of us used it in slightly different ways, I was using its output as material for a FluCoMa driven two-dimensional corpus reduction rompler. I also used FluCoMa for realtime audio feature extraction of our three audio streams as a cross-platform solution to sending the analysis data for visualisation in Unity. Here's the live performance with thanks to Martin Parker

Yield Point - Studies for physically modelled brass synthesis and Serge modular synthesiser, May 2021

In engineering the yield point is the point at which some fraction of deformation of a material as a result of applied stress and strain to the material is permanent. This suite of studies explores deformation of pitch, amplitude, duration and timbral intonation in musical material by applying algorithmic and stochastic processes to physically modelled brass synthesis, with additional resonances and augmentations from similar processes applied to Serge modular synthesiser. The brass modelling uses the NESS Brass Instruments Environment

Pulsar Retcon - Superpang release, April 2021

Was very pleased to be asked to release some work on https://superpang.bandcamp.com/. Improvised buffer scratching, corpus scrubbing and waveform scuffing of material sourced from Marcin Pietruszewksi's New Pulsar Generator (nuPg) software.

w[i]nd - Virtual Sound Installation, April 2020

w[i]nd is an audiovisual composition and installation in a first-person screen-based Virtual Environment (VE) for Mac and PC. The work makes StyleGAN transformed use of a dataset of images of wind instruments held by the University of Edinburgh's musical instrument collection (MIMEd) combined with physical modelling and processed and untreated sound recordings in an interactive, participatory and dynamic work of audiovisual art. The physically modelled material was created with Edinburgh University's NESS Brass tools and Tom Mudd's Gutter Synthesis

The generated images are imperfect simulacra with amplified, abstract, smeared and distorted features and painterly qualities of colour, stroke and texture. The synthesised and processed audio follows the aesthetic properties of the images with rapid spectromorphological shifts between sustained material, sliding tones and fluttered and transient gestural articulations.

Unity and Wwise game audio technologies offer an opportunity to bring sound, images and interactions together at scale outside of that typically available in a physical space.

Visit the w[i]nd project page at https://pixelmechanics.itch.io/wind

w[i]nd walkthrough from Pixelmechanic.

Raw Green Rust - Improvisation with FluCoMa and UniSSON, September 2019

Raw Green Rust, the laptop trio I'm in with Owen Green and Dave Murray-Rust, were invited to perform at Experimenta Heilbronn Beyond Festival. Here's a video of the performance, with thanks to Ludger Pfanz.

Raw Green Rust laptop trio improvisation with machine listening and visualisations from Pixelmechanic.

UniSSON - Unity Supercollider Sound Object Notation, September 2019

My recent practice-led research output addresses action, agency, aura and spectacle in electronic music performance, with a specific focus on small improvising ensembles. The aims of this research were to develop a framework for graphical representations of multiplayer sonic/musical interactions in performance by exploring data visualization and machine listening of shared musical gestures in performance. The main output from this research is UniSSON, a suite of software tools developed with Marcin Pietruszewksi (with input from Owen Green and Dave Murray-Rust) that presents a real-time multi-temporal and multi-resolution view of sonic data across a number of sound-based parameters in accessible ways, which contributes to audience engagement and collaborative performance. There's an overview of the software below, audio starts at 45 seconds! If you'd like to try it (Mac only sorry), please get in touch via email. Raw Green Rust will perform with the software at Experimenta Heilbronn Beyond Festival

UniSSON Overview from Pixelmechanic.

Lie Still My Sleepy Fortunes(with Raymond MacDonald and Friends), Edinburgh Festival Fringe, August 2019

Following selection of his Muriel Spark suite by Made In Scotland, Raymond MacDonald brought old friends and new ones together for two dates at the intimate and atmospheric Pianodrome

As usual I was sampling and processing the band, plus adding scratching/noises, and also I revised/revisited my visuals, adding much more motion and again exploring a mid-century aesthetic in a 21st century generative way.

With 6 projectors and playing in the round, we were able to fully integrate the visuals for the first (and hopefully not the last) time, and I chose to project directly onto the pianos.

SKR1BL-ing at xCoAx, Milan, July 2019

Was delighted to be accepted for xCoAx 2019 to perform my graffiti piece SKR1BL. SKR1BL is an audio-visual composition for solo laptop performer with gestural controllers, e.g. graphics tablet. The work is part of a wider study on the use of graphic notation in live electronics to create a body of work that falls in the gaps between improvisation and repertoire. Here's an action shot courtesy of xCoAx:

The graphics tablet is used to follow the overall form of the tags as an interface to sample based DSP processes in a MaxMSP environment, and re-scribing the gestures contained in the tags. The graphics tablet and other controllers are used to trigger and scan material, which is subject to further processing and manipulation in a manner reminiscent of both early tape works and modern turntablism.

Interval and Instance, Cryptic Nights, CCA Glasgow, June 2019

I was very pleased to have another work selected for Cryptic Nights as Cathie Boyd, Claire Moran and Co. are great to work with and Cryptic continue to cultivate, curate and commission fresh, creative work in Scotland and beyond.

Image by Neil Jarvie

Building on the triptych work I'd developed for the installation, this instance of Interval and Instance was performed with three screens and multichannel audio. I added some additional material and worked on really articulating the character of both audio and video material through contrast and counterpoint.

Myles Oakey kindly wrote a very detailed review and profile of the eventand Keira Brown reviewed the event for The Fountain.

Interval and Instance - Trailer from Pixelmechanic on Vimeo.

Interval and Instance installation, Dialogues Festival Edinburgh, February 2019

My Interval and Instance work for EIFF was remixed and reimagined as a triptych video installation with multichannel audio. This re-presentation of the work explored reconfiguration, juxtapositions and layering of material and includes a 'fixed' live performance, recorded in a single take at the Reid School of Music.

Raymond MacDonald and Friends - Muriel Spark 100, Glasgow Jazz Festival, June 2018, Celtic Connections, January 2019, Glasgow Jazz Festival,June 2019

My colleague Raymond MacDonald invited me to contribute live visuals and electronics as part of a new 40-minute suite of music inspired by the writings of Muriel Spark. The motion graphics I created take inspiration from mid-20th century design, specifically jazz covers by labels such as Blue Note, Saul Bass and also Spark's book covers, and explore clipping, rotation and blended layering. My live electronics included live sampling and looping, plus my usual assortment of scratching and granular techniques.

Interval and Instance, Edinburgh International Film Festival, June 2018

Following some meetings with Rachel Hosker at Special Collections at Edinburgh University, it was suggested that I should/could make a new work out of archival material from the pioneering scientific filmmaker Eric Lucey for inclusion as part of a series of events at EIFF focusing on a review of Lucey's work. I created a 45 minute long work for 'live cinema' exploring time and focus adding a solo live electronic score and sound design.

The performance examines speed, motion and scale in film and sound. The soundtrack makes use of extensive layering, time-stretching and time-compression, extreme pitch-shifting, physical modelling and frequency carving to create unexpected points of audition which offers audiences a detailed and immersive audio-visual experience that incorporates spectralism, minimalism, modular synthesis and granular detail that support and draw attention to the visual character of the films.

Rebreather & Raw Green Rust, Sonorities, April 2018

Was delighted to be invited to perform twice at Sonorities Festival 2018 Belfast. Rebreather with Franziska Schroeder and reworked live visuals by Dara Etefaghi was selected to open the festival and Raw Green Rust, my laptop trio with Dave Murray-Rust and Owen Green played a fun and (at times) frantic set with more than a few false endings, which will hopefully appear on Radio 3's coverage of Sonorities later in the year.

Photo: Teresa H

Transmitter|Receiver, Arizona State University, April 2018

A fantastic week with Lauren Hayes, Marcin Pietruszewski and others working in residence at Arizona State University to produce two new multimedia performances including sound, visuals and dance as part of LLEAPP 2018. Mapping visuals to the floor created new opportunities for interaction and dialogue with movement. Marcin and I also got an opportunity to present our work in progress on Unity Supercollider Sound Object Notation (UNISSON) as part of ASU's Digital Culture Series

Photo: Meghan Patzem

PixiDust, Seeing Sound, March 2018

Following our performance at Siren, my ECA colleagueYati Durant and I were invited to perform PixiDust at Seeing Sound Symposium, Bath Spa. We'd developed some new approaches to working with loops of video including feedback and looping techniques. The levels were quite hot into PixiVisor leading to some dropouts and eventual failure of PixiVisor, but overall it was a rigorous and exploratory performance.

Photo: Jo Hyde

Seeing Sound 2018 - Yati Durant and Jules Rawlinson, Pixidust 2 (performance) from Joseph Hyde on Vimeo.

PixiDust, SiREN, May 2017

My ECA colleagueYati Durant and I collaborated on a new audiovisual project, PixiDust, for the SiREN Arts & Digital Practices Conference organised by PhD students from Edinburgh College of Art. PixiDust is a structured improvisation that explores opportunities for integrated audiovisual performance through hybrid analogue/digital video synthesis. Images are encoded to an audio stream using the cross platform PixiVisor software and subsequently processed in the analogue domain before summing to a final analogue to digital audio-video conversion.

Photo: Dave Murray-Rust

Rebreather at Concurrent#2, January 2017

A chance meeting with Franziska Schroeder at Belfast City after Sonorities led to a new work developed via email and Skype, and presented as an audiovisual trio with live visuals by Dara Etefaghi. "The saxophonist’s materials become the basis for the visual artist who uses these subtle sounds to inform and drive his response, tracing the gestures of the performer’s breath. Live processing of the breath sounds allows us to enhance, as well as to counter the performative materials through filtering, dispersal and accumulation."

Re-breather from CAHSS Webteam on Vimeo.

SKR1BL-ing at Sonorities, November 2016

After showing SKR1BL at ICLI2016, I was very pleased to be selected for Black Box concert at Sonorities 2016, Belfast

Photo: Andrew Harrison