Professor Paul Vickers

On March 5 at the TUSK North festival, John Bowers, Jorge Boehringer, Tim Shaw, and I under the collective name ‘The Heliophonic Workshop’ performed a 30-minute improvisation. I’m on the left with two synths. Jorge is in the middle with a viola, a Moog Model D clone, and some electronics. John is on the right with his humongous PureData patch running on a MacBook and his wired-up zither. Tim Shaw was streaming his contribution in from Austria and was mixed in via John’s phone.

The theme was the sun (hence the videos that accompanied the piece). Lee Fisher posted this review in Narc Magazine:

“Next up was a brilliant performance from The Heliophonic Workshop, with John Bowers, Paul Vickers and Jorge Boehringer in the room and Tim Shaw dialling in. It was an enveloping soundscape of crackle, grit and thrum, with Boehringer exposing the very guts of his violin under some cosmically microscopic/microscopically cosmic visuals.” [https://narcmagazine.com/live-review-tusk-north-the-lit-phil-newcastle-04-03-22-05-03-22/]

My contribution was a lot of the ‘thrum’ and the bits that sounded like a deranged electric motor.

I had a great time and am looking forward to doing more of this. The performance was one element of my funded three-year project to explore aesthetic experience and perception in data sonification, so there will be other outputs such as journal articles and conference papers, software, compositions, installations, and talks. The project web page is at https://projectradical.github.io/

Anyway, here’s the video of the event. Don’t worry if you don’t ‘get’ it; after all, there’s nothing in it you can whistle along to. 🙂

https://youtu.be/0s6yX1qL0-0

Tusk North 2022 - Heliophonic Project

Tomorrow I will be speaking at a debate table at the 'International Congress: Intersection art, society and technology in musical innovation' – see

International Congress Sept 3,4,5 2021 @ the IKG Virtual Campus. Over 25 international speakers devoted to artistic research and technology in music.

Project RADICAL is now up and running. Pop over to our website and see what we're doing.

A Radical New Interdisciplinary Space for Sonification Information about the Leverhulme Trust-funded RADICAL Project.

If you applied for the Research Fellow post at Northumbria University BEFORE 29 August, please contact me as a matter of urgency by email to [email protected].

Want to work on an exciting three year funded Interdisciplinary sonification project? We have two post-doc positions available. For more info on the project and links to the vacancy details see

RADICAL: A Radical New Interdisciplinary Space for Sonification The RADICAL project is funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant.