UK: Convergence 2022

Music – Technology – Ideas

Convergence 2022 will be a festival/conference celebrating new work and ideas in music and technology.

Our keynote speakers for 2022 are Joanna Demers and Tim Garland.

Joanna Demers is Professor of Musicology at the Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California.  One of today’s most authoritative and interesting thinkers on music and technology she is author of Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford University Press, 2010); Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (University of Georgia Press, 2006); Drone and Apocalypse: An Exhibit Catalog for the End of the World (Zero Books, 2015) and; Anatomy of Thought-Fiction: CHS Report, 2214 (Zero Books, 2017).

Tim Garland is a world-renowned jazz musician: saxophonist, composer and arranger. A former member of Chick Corea’s bands Origin and The Vigil, and with over 40 albums and a Grammy Award to his credit, Garland is internationally respected across jazz and classical music as performer, composer, orchestrator and educator in genres spanning symphonic and small combo blends of notated and improvised music-making.  Tim Garland’s Duology, with Jason Rebello (piano) will perform in an evening concert at Convergence 2022.

Concerts will be presented in DMU PACE Studios 1 and 2 and at The Venue@DMU

Audiovisual and Installation work will be presented at two of Leicester’s central city Cultural Quarter venues: Phoenix Arts and LCB Depot.

About us

De Montfort University is located in the heart of the city of Leicester—one of the UK’s most vibrantly multicultural cities.  A city with Roman heritage, Leicester is also the recently established resting place of King Richard III, the controversial subject of one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays.

De Montfort University’s MTI² Institute for Sonic Creativity has been established as a leading international centre for electroacoustic music for over two decades and builds on Leicester’s reputation as a focal point for experimental music-making. A music department at the university was founded by the composer Gavin Bryars, focusing DMU as a hotbed of experimentalism and innovation. That imperative extends today in the Institute for Sonic Creativity—founded in 1999 with wide-ranging artistic practice embracing many forms of digital and post-digital forms of sonic art: acousmatic music, audiovisual and installation art, live coding, interactive performance, electronic instrument construction, AI, spatial audio, radiogenic art and plunderphonics.