News/Research

BCNM Welcomes 2012-13 Visiting Artist, Ashley Bellouin

15 Oct, 2012

BCNM Welcomes 2012-13 Visiting Artist, Ashley Bellouin

The Berkeley Center for New Media hosts an artist in residence annually, providing them with a space in which to explore the boundaries of their work and experiment with new ideas. Last year's artists were Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine who make up the multidisciplinary group, Futurefarmers. This year's artist, Ashley Bellouin, hails from Oakland and will be staying through the 2012-2013 academic year. This year's artist in residency program is made possible with the generous support of Meyer Sound Laboratories.

Bellouin's work explores the alternating dichotomies, as well as the merging of sound art, electroacoustic composition, and instrument building. She focuses on the study of sonology, psychoacoustics, and the interaction between sound and architecture.

Her compositions emphasize and exploit the sonic potential contained within a single sound, regularly using electronics to develop latent qualities. Spatialization, beat frequencies, auditory illusions, and microtonal tunings are frequent compositional tools. Her pieces are not only concerned with how the listener receives sound on a physiological level, but also how sound is perceived in the phenomenological realm, and how this may consequently alter one's perception of time.

Ashley holds an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College, where she was awarded the Frog Peak Collective Experimental Music Award for her thesis performance Hummen. She recently completed a residency at the Paul Dresher Ensemble Artist Residency Program, where she collaborated with Ben Bracken on building an ensemble of instruments, including two monochord/tambura hybrids.