Virginia Tech’s premier immersive music festival, Cube Fest, presents the latest innovations in sound and musical composition in one of the world’s leading spatial audio environments — the Moss Arts Center Cube.
Cube Fest 2024: Immersive Indigenous Experiences is a series of concerts featuring Indigenous artists forging new creative paths with technology and tradition. Impossible to re-create at home on a stereo system or with headphones, soundscapes delivered through the Cube’s world-leading audio system, complete with over 140 loudspeakers, are unforgettable.
The festival runs from Friday, Aug. 23, through Sunday, Aug. 25 with events taking place in the Cube and Perform Studio, both in the Moss Arts Center. Many of the events are free for the public, and all events are free for Virginia Tech students.
Cube Fest 2024 is sponsored by the Moss Arts Center; the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology; the Virginia Tech Student Engineers’ Council; and the Center for Humanities.
Cube Fest 2024 schedule:
“Listening Lounge”
Christopher Poovey, Zouning Lao, and Steve Ashby
Friday, Aug. 23; Saturday, Aug. 24; and Sunday, Aug. 25, 3 p.m.
Perform Studio
Free
Christopher Poovey is a composer, media artist, and creative coder who creates music and software that produce rich and colorful sound and encourage interactive structures. His work, “Inside a Mirage of Vertu,” uses automated processes for spatialization, like ambisonic granulation, which generate 3D gestures and soundscapes.
Born in Guangdong, China, Zouning Liao’s music draws inspiration from her fascination with nature and technology. Her recording captures the sounds of late summer, featuring a rich cricket orchestra and the songs of birds indigenous to Bloomington, Indiana.
A musician, composer, and sound artist, Steve Ashby’s work focuses on sound found in the natural and digital worlds to discover places of intersection. His “A not so distant past” captures the sonic unfolding of time represented in the visual, while simultaneously giving voice to the visual stimulus.
“Echoes of the Ancestors”
Bill Crouse
Friday, Aug. 23, 5 and 7 p.m.
Cube
$10, free for Virginia Tech students
“Echoes of the Ancestors” combines audio and live traditional dancing by Allegany River Seneca dancers, sharing oral traditions of the Seneca people through movement, sound, music, and light. The piece will move from creation through seasons and a traditional women’s dance. Bill Crouse is a self-taught painter and sculptor who specializes in Native art forms.
“Sounds in Motion”
DA Mekonnen, Shawn Greenlee, Arvcúken Noquisi, and Aline R S S de Souza
Friday, Aug. 23, 9 p.m.
Cube
$10, free for Virginia Tech students
DA Mekonnen’s new experimental jazz project, dragonchild, brings the performance of “BLACK: Constellation X” in this immersive, multimedia spatial sound performance. Conceived and transmitted by Mekonnen, four one-sided LPs will be played simultaneously to create an immersive swarm. Mekonnen was the cofounder and long-time director of Debo Band and spent nine years with Silkroad Ensemble, under the direction of both Yo-Yo Ma and Rhiannon Giddens.
Shawn Greenlee is a composer, sound artist, and professor at Rhode Island School of Design, where he leads the Studio for Research in Sound and Technology. In this work, two 20-voice, erratic synthesizers operate as a roving “chorus” under the player’s direction. As audio flows, the guiding action is like closing/opening gates in a lock on a waterway. The results are timbral and spatial churns, swells, floods and drains, motion in repetition, expansion, and contraction.
In “Enhake Konawv,” a performance of technology in tradition, Arvcúken Noquisi uses seed beads and handmade beadwork as instrumentation in combination with a granular synthesis Max patch as well as a microscope camera with Isadora to examine the beads. The work examines the relationship between a non-Indigenous audience and the artist. A citizen of the Muscogee Nation, Noquisi is currently an undergraduate student at the Ohio State University.
A student in Virginia Tech’s interdisciplinary ASPECT Ph.D. program and an instructor in the Department of Religion and Culture, Aline R S S de Souza’s work refers to the artist-scholar’s experience living in Brazil and her specific story of migration from family, which includes facing a variety of forms of violence.
“LIQUID / REAL”
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Saturday, Aug. 24, 7 p.m.
Cube
$10, free for Virginia Tech students
“LIQUID / REAL” merges the ethereal realms of sound and the essential element of water to create a meditative, immersive art experience. Together with video projections summoning images of water, the piece intricately weaves live vocals, guitar harmonies, and transformative effects to transport audiences into vivid aquatic landscapes and speculative sonic worlds. The piece is conceived and performed by Winger-Bearskin, a multifaceted artist who is also a singer, AI researcher, and opera performer, and features live accompaniment by Eamon O’Connor, electric guitar.
“Sounds in Space”
Angela McArthur, Weilu Ge, Matias Vilaplana Stark, and Eric Lyon
Saturday, Aug. 24, 9 p.m.
Cube
$10, free for Virginia Tech students
An artist and academic at University College London, Angela McArthur’s work explores the practice and theorization of aesthetics in spatial sound and ocean environments. “Pankopat” is a sound work focused on a community of elderly Nepalese women in Woolwich, southeast London.
Weilu Ge is a composer and media artist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who works with various media forms, from concert music and installation to video and innovative technology. “Tell” is a spatial soundscape composition that explores stories and music expressions of the Qiang people, an Indigenous group since ancient times living in the mountains in Central China. The original field recording part was collected during a field trip visiting a historical Qiang village in Sichuan, China.
A Chilean music technologist, composer, and improviser, Matias Vilaplana Stark is a current Ph.D. candidate in the composition and computer technologies program at the University of Virginia. “Funeral for a Whale” developed from a curiosity about the funeral practices of whales and other marine mammals, some of whom carry their deceased relative’s body for days as a manifestation of their mourning.
A composer and audio researcher, Eric Lyon is a professor of practice in the School of Performing Arts at Virginia Tech and is a faculty fellow at the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology. “A Sudden Light” was commissioned by Annie Stevens, Virginia Tech associate professor of percussion, as part of her project, “The Memory Palace,” a concert of music and dance created for the Cube in 2024. This composition pursues the idea of music as a “memory palace,” working with performed percussion sounds that reappear in transfigured forms.
“home: gokǫ̀”
Casey Koyczan and Andy Rudolph
Sunday, Aug. 25, 7 p.m.
Cube
$10, free for Virginia Tech students
“home: gokǫ̀” is an immersive audio and video performance demonstrating the artist’s culture and its continued advancement through technology and experimentation, revealing a sense of life in Canada’s Arctic. Casey Koyczan is a Dene interdisciplinary artist who uses various mediums to communicate how culture and technology can grow together to develop a better understanding of people, including where they come from and what they will be. Andy Rudolph is a freelance sound designer whose work spans nearly all facets of audio creation.
Indigenous Social: A Spatialized Mixtape
Sunday, Aug. 25, 9 p.m.
Cube
$10, free for Virginia Tech students
The Indigenous Social is an hour of cuts by popular Indigenous recording artists, hand-picked by Alicia Aldaz, Melissa Faircloth, Victoria Ferguson, and Eddie Polanco, and spatialized to a fully surround experience by Eric Lyon.
Ticketed performances are $10 for general admission and free for Virginia Tech students. Tickets can be purchased online; at the Moss Arts Center’s box office, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday; or by calling 540-231-5300 during box office hours.
The performances will be held in the Moss Arts Center, located within the Cube at 190 Alumni Mall. Convenient parking is available in the North End Parking Garage on Turner Street and in downtown Blacksburg. Find more parking details online.
Katie Gehrt for Virginia Tech
