bio

Miguel Negrão is a sound artist, born in Lisbon and currently based in Belfast. He is interested in creating intense immersive musical experiences. He works mostly with computer controlled sound synthesis, often algorithmically, usually presenting his work in multi-channel spatial configurations. His personal aesthetic  has been characterized by an interest in sustained tones and textures as well as musical advancement through slow timbric changes. Another interest has been the creation of intense experiences, with at times overload of the senses due to high playback levels, continuous dense spectral content and the use of immersive spatialization. He is interested in the experience of time during performances, on the focusing of the attention of the listener on minute timbric changes which together with somewhat long durations without any silences tends to induce a state which can be quite removed from everyday socialization and characterized by an experience of an extended now.

His work has been presented in venues, festivals and radio programs in Europe such as STRP Festival (Eindhoven), Sonar Festival (Barcelona), OT301 (Amsterdam), Ausland (Berlin) or Deutschlandradio Kultur (DE). He has performed or presented pieces for the Wave Field System of the Game of Life foundation (192 speakers), Wave Field System of TUBerlin University (832 speakers), Acousmonium sound diffusion system of GRM (80 speakers) and Sonic Lab of SARC (32 speakers) as well as 8 and 4 channel configurations. Recently he has showcased a multi-channel sound installation at Platform Arts gallery, Belfast.

In the 2000s was active under the name ZLB with an ambient and drone based project and was part of the Friendly Virus collective, an independent record label focused on experimental electronic music releasing works from artists spread around the world. He collaborated with Wouter Snoei on the development of WFSCollider, an open source software for Wave Field Synthesis (github.com/GameOfLife/WFSCollider). He’s an active developer of the Modality toolkit, a library dedicated to modal interaction with synthesis processes for physical control in performance (modality.bek.no) and contributed several libraries for the SuperCollider audio programming environment such as FPLib and ImmLib. He gave SuperCollider workshops in different countries. He has a Bachelors in Applied Mathematics, a Masters from the Institute of Sonology in Den Haag, and a Ph.D. in Sonic Arts from the Sonic Arts Research Center, Queen’s University Belfast.