Repressed Possibilities – An Introduction to Apotome

26th Jan 2021 26th Jan 2021 20:00 20:30

Presentation by Khyam Allami

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  • Khyam Allami

    IQ/UK

    Khyam Allami is an Iraqi-British multi-instrumentalist musician, composer, researcher and founder of Nawa Recordings. Primarily an Oud player, his artistic research focuses on the development of contemporary and experimental practice based on the fundamentals of Arabic music, with a focus on tuning and microtonality.

    • Photo: Johanne Issa

    In this talk, artist and researcher Khyam Allami will give a short introduction to Apotome – a transcultural browser-based generative music system focused on using microtonal tuning systems and their subsets (scales/modes). Alongside its sister application, Leimma, which allows intuitive and immediate browser-based exploration of tunings, it is the final part in a trilogy of music-making tools that Allami has been developing in recent years.

    Resulting from Allami's current PhD research and his in-depth collaboration with Counterpoint, the creative studio run by Tero Parviainen and Samuel Diggins, these applications are an effort to highlight the cultural asymmetries and biases inherent in modern music-making tools, alongside their interconnected web of musical, educational, cultural, social, and political ramifications. They are an attempt to present decolonised music applications that allows music-makers from any culture to have the freedom of a musical tabula rasa (blank slate) and explore their individual creative ideas with modern tools, but without a specific end-result as a goal.

    Video production: Best Films Forever