festival di Musica Acusmatica Silence

SILENCE Ondes croisées Europe



International Acousmatic Art Festival

Cittadella Mediterranea della Scienza, Industrial Zone of Bari,
viale B.Accolti Gil 2

From Friday, September 26 to Sunday, September 28, 2025
8:30 PM

Free entry until seats are exhausted

Works from the international contemporary repertoire selected within the framework of the Crossed Waves Europe project by the associations Alcôme (France), Floating Sound Gallery (Austria), Contemporaneus (Spain), M.ar.e (Italy).

The Silence Festival

The Silence Festival is the first festival of acousmatic art born in Italy, originating in Bari in 2004 and from 2005.

Since its foundation, the Silence Festival consists of several days of concerts. Each day includes multiple concerts, each more or less an hour long, with always diverse repertoires.

It has as international partners several "brother" festivals, both as points of reference in their countries and in the world of this discipline: the Futura festival and Alcôme (France), the Audio Art Circus festival in Osaka, and the Presque Rien association which manages the memory of the great French composer Luc Ferrari.

The stable performers of the M.ar.e acousmonium are Alessandro Duma, Danilo Girardi, and Vincezno Procino.

This special edition takes place within the framework of the Crossed Waves Europe project promoted by Alcôme (France), which involves four European entities engaged in electroacoustic experimentation and includes 6 concerts with different repertoires proposed and performed by artists from France, Spain, Austria, and other nationalities.

What is Acousmatic Art

Acousmatic art is a particular type of "electronic music" that is enjoyed in a hall only through a network of speakers managed by a musician-performer in the dark, in a situation similar to that of a cinema.

The works, like films, are on a medium, only sounds on a medium: previously analog (magnetic tape) and now digital (CDs, DVDs, any kind of storage medium).

Born in the postwar period, with Schaeffer in France and Stockhausen in Germany, it has experienced quantitative growth with the development of digital technology and personal-sized recording studios, so today the repertoire consists of tens of thousands of works.

The genre belongs to the "cultured" area of sound arts (dedicated to a fundamentally meditative and sound-focused enjoyment) but also borders (or "crosses over") into some areas of popular music (dedicated more to a bodily and not necessarily focused enjoyment) such as segments of techno or more experimental rock.

What is an Acousmonium

The M.ar.e acousmonium, permanently located at the Cittadella Mediterranea della Scienza, is the device that allows the annual realization of the Silence festival but also concerts outside the Cittadella. The acousmonium currently consists of around fifty hi-fi and P.A. speakers, a control console, and other devices. For reasons of cost and as a "political" choice, materials (as much as possible) that are "poor", sometimes "recycled" or self-made, are used.

The intent is to support that the quality of sound projection is mainly related to the heterogeneity and "personality" of each pair of speakers in relation to the others. Based on a model proposed by Jonathan Prager (a French artist pioneering the development of technological and interpretative models for acousmatic music), the M.ar.e acousmonium is structured as follows:
- 2 reference speakers of good quality placed in front of the audience, centrally;
- a series of front, rear, and lateral stereophonic pairs that multiply the sound image, configuring "sound screens" of varying width, distance from the audience, and timbre quality;
- speakers specialized in reproducing limited parts of the sound spectrum (bass, very high frequencies...).

The intervention of the acousmatic interpreter determines which pair or group of pairs should operate at a given moment of the sound projection, enhancing in the hall the internal space of the work conceived by the composer in the studio and fixed on the medium. The controllable parameters are thus the distance of the sound from the audience and its three-dimensionality, intensity, overall density of the speakers in action, the speed of transformation from one space to another.


Web: www.festivalsilence.it