Biennale Musica 2023

The 67th International Festival of Contemporary Music, Micro-Music, is dedicated to digital sound and to its production and diffusion in acoustic space through the use of the latest, most advanced technologies and experimental research.

The Festival presents a wide spectrum of the innovative stylistic trends and creative research of today’s international music scene, embracing installative, performative and online forms, with several world premieres commissioned by the Biennale Musica and co-productions with other major international festivals. The intention behind Micro-Music is to evoke music generated by means of microphone receiving devices and to explore the microscopic nature of sound. It is a Festival that aims to highlight the beauty and complexity of digital sound and of the new compositional possibilities it offers. The particular acoustic imprint of each location and the act of listening, understood as reading the surrounding space through the complex, ever-changing reverberations that the ambient creates, emerges in the electronic creations of the various different sections of the Festival, which are designed to seek out the magical sounds of the architectural context of Venice’s buildings.

The artists invited, who come from all over the world, are sculptors of new digital sonic entities, musical archaeologists in search of long-lost sounds, researchers into the mysterious, ephemeral and magical nature of sound, and creators of new acoustic incantations that will captivate audiences with their vast musical frescoes. The act of listening to digital sound, without seeing either the sound sources or the gestural context of the performance and production, invites us to a pure form of acoustic perception and to a new ontology of music made possible by the development of technologies related to the reproduction and diffusion of sound in space. Just as we can enter inside physical material with the aid of a microscope, in the same way we can broaden our ability to listen and discover the complexity of the auratic world by means of the microphone and the reproducibility of each and every acoustic event, however liminal, thanks to the digital processing of the information captured in the sphere of the inaudible, thus revealing a sound world from which our perceptive faculties had hitherto seemed precluded.

Through theoretical and performative events, Micro-Music presents the current areas of research into the phenomenon of listening, the verification of scientific data through sonification processes, and different models of biotechnology applied to the generation of sound.

Taken from Lucia Ronchetti, Introduction
Catalogue of the Biennale Musica 2023 Micro-Music