Ellen Fishman (left) and Youngmoo Kim (right)
American Composers Forum, Philadelphia Chapter presents an online artist talk between composer Ellen Fishman and technologist Youngmoo Kim. During this free Artist to Artist Talk, the two will discuss the intersection of arts and technology and share recent work.
FREE, REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED. PLEASE RESERVE ONE SPOT PER HOUSEHOLD. A Zoom link will be sent to you the day of the event.
Composer, Ellen Fishman creates multimedia performances for audiences who crave new experiences at the intersection of art, music and technology. Her interactive works are designed to engage the audience in ways that invites choice. After awarded a 2017 Opera America Grant for Female Composers for the development of Marie Begins, a pilot of this interactive opera was produced as an online series featuring Grammy nominated soprano, Lauren Worsham. Since then, Marie Begins was selected for a workshop performance by Tri-Cities Opera for the Opera America New Works Forum in New York in January, 2018 and a full workshop was performed at Arizona State University in September 2018. After these workshops, software was completed to enable audience interaction and Marie Begins was premiered by the Opera Theater program at Westminster Choir College of Rider University in November 2020. She is currently working on an interactive work that instructs the audience how to “play along” to a performance for The Brass Project to be performed in 2022..
Ellen has worked with choreographers, artists and poets to create new performance experiences that go beyond the concert hall. Her collaborations include Remix Interactive, a work for live orchestra, playback and an interactive iOS light show in partnership with the Drexel University ExCITe Center and Mural in Motion, a soundscape and digital mural that was projected on to the side of the Fabric Workshop Building as part of collaboration with the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. She collaborated with choreographer and former Martha Graham dancer, Jeanne Ruddy, between 2007-2012. Her score for Lark was described by Merilyn Jackson for “The Philadelphia Inquirer” as “a sprightly, complex 21st-century score whose swirling arpeggios harmonized well with the choreography.” As part of her work with Ms. Ruddy, she created animations of paintings by renowned painter, Elizabeth Osborne which interacted with the choreography and served as the backdrop in performances at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Suzanne Roberts Theater in Philadelphia.
Her music is greatly influenced by the French composer, Gérard Grisey whom she studied with at UC Berkeley. Dr. Fishman is an Apple Distinguished Educator and is the Director of the Arts and New Media at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy where she founded the ViDCAST Studio for video, broadcasting and music production. She has presented nationally on technological approaches to teaching music composition and creating multimedia projects.
Youngmoo Kim is Director of the Expressive and Creative Interaction Technologies (ExCITe) Center and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Drexel University. His research group, the Music & Entertainment Technology Laboratory (MET-lab) focuses on the machine understanding of audio, particularly for music information retrieval. Other areas of active research at MET-lab include human-machine interfaces and robotics for expressive interaction, analysis-synthesis of sound, and K-12 outreach for engineering, science, and mathematics education.
Youngmoo also has extensive experience in music performance, including 8 years as a member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, the chorus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He is a former music director of the Stanford Fleet Street Singers, and has performed in productions at American Musical Theater of San Jose and SpeakEasy Stage Company (Boston). He is a member of Opera Philadelphia’s newly-formed American Repertoire Council.
Youngmoo was named "Scientist of the Year" by the 2012 Philadelphia Geek Awards and was recently honored as a member of the Apple Distinguished Educator class of 2013. He is recipient of Drexel's 2012 Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. He co-chaired the 2008 International Conference on Music Information Retrieval hosted at Drexel and was invited by the National Academy of Engineering to co-organize the "Engineering and Music" session for the 2010 Frontiers of Engineering conference. His research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.