SOUND SPACES 2026 - GIOVANNI VERRANDO - LECTURE

Camera Music
A Multimedia and transdisciplinary composition

Abstract

Camera Music is an eight-part multimedia cycle for voice, five performers, electronics, and stock footage, written between 2022 and 2026. At its core lies a reflection on the forms of power human beings exert over their natural and social environment.

Camera Music is conceived as a transdisciplinary composition: the different disciplines involved are integrated into a unified, reconfigured form of knowledge. Transdisciplinarity thus becomes a compositional method, with meta-descriptors serving as a means of connecting the different disciplines.

Within this framework, the notion of the meta-descriptor provides a central axis for the multimedia work. Originating in sound analysis, descriptors can be extended into broader semantic categories capable of connecting music, text, image, gesture, orchestration, and form. Meta-descriptors therefore act as relational, transdisciplinary and unifying structures, organizing heterogeneous materials around a shared conceptual field while preserving the specificity of each medium.

Camera Music inevitably develops the increasingly common role of the composer as the artistic director of their own work: the composer takes responsibility for the individual disciplines involved – orchestration, computer-assisted composition, text creation, the handling of images, and so on – while at the same time maintaining an overall perspective on the work and its effectiveness, thus giving concrete form to the transdisciplinary method.