Toronto, Ontario – Juno award winning Medicine Song Woman Brenda MacIntyre will be opening for an eclectic concert featuring solfeggio frequencies, MIDI-control of one of Toronto’s largest pipe organs, Ryerson’s Emoti-Chair and experimental music. Dr. Steve Mann, aka World’s First Cyborg, and U of T professor will demonstrate new technology in music with his Andantephone invention – a new musical instrument played simply by walking on it. (Dr. Mann is well known for his invention of the hydraulophone – a revolutionary instrument combining music and water and nominated for the Smithsonian Institution’s people’s design award.) Joining the stage will be other internationally recognized and local producers / musicians – Stéphane Vera, Davids Smits, ill.Gates, Ryan Janzen, John Farah, Aris Plampe, Heiki Sillaste, Leif Bloomquist, Paul Swoger-Ruston, Britton Vincent and Fearful Symmetry.
The concert is jointly produced by Davids Smits, Music Director at St Andrew’s Lutheran Church, and Stéphane Vera, composer / producer and Chief of Music Operations at a computational music company, WaveDNA.
Dr. Frank Russo, Director of The Science of Music, Auditory Research and Technology (SMART) lab at Ryerson University, and Dr. Deborah Fels, Director of The Centre for Learning Technologies (CLT), bring the Emoti-Chair to this event. Toronto Life magazine awarded this innovation 6th place in its “Top 25 World-Changing Ideas” (City of Ideas issue – December 2009).
The Emoti-Chair, a system developed at Ryerson University, offers people the opportunity to feel music through a series of vibrating devices that are embedded along the back and seat of a comfortable chair. Deaf or hard of hearing audience members can experience the entire range of the solfeggio frequencies through the vibrations of the chair. Mixed with the heart-pounding experience of the low bass pipes of the organ in the church, the chair offers all audience members a unique and exciting tactile experience of the music.
“Each participant will contribute some revolutionary breakthrough that on its own holds limited significance but meaningful when presented in conjunction with other disciplines and fields of study,” says Davids Smits. “The concert promises to be the first of its kind – an event that bridges historic instruments, scales and symbolic frequencies with new technology and inventions, something ancients from Pythagoras to Bach could only have imagined in their wildest dreams.”
This initiative is made possible by St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church, located at the corner of Jarvis and Carlton in downtown Toronto. With the capacity to entertain 1,000 people, and home to one of Toronto’s largest and most celebrated pipe organs, it has staged many successful and well received concerts over the years.
For additional information or media inquiries please contact Davids Smits or Stéphane Vera:
Davids Smits | Stéphane Vera
smitsdavid@sympatico.ca | march13@svera.ca
(647) 966-9758 | (416) 858-9764
Event details:
“ORGANic Evolution III”
Saturday, March 13, 2010
8:00 – 10:00p.m.
St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church
383 Jarvis St., Toronto, ON
(corner of Jarvis and Carlton)
Tickets: $10 at the door