juliana snapper

ATLAS Summer Experimental Music Week (Aug 6, 2015) : a programme of live electronic music and live full dome projection in the Fiske Planetarium of the Colorado University Boulder — in collaboration with Miller Puckette.

Double Voiced explores the ramifications of treating the vocal signal as a living, material presence. Juliana Snapper and Miller Puckette began by designing a briefcase-sized gizmo that would let another person sing with Juliana Snapper’s voice.

While on tour in Asia, however, the project took an unexpected turn and the gizmo was rewired to allow Juliana Snapper to channel other singers. Therefore, here, Juliana Snapper engages with two iconic avant-garde opera singers : Cathy Berberian and Carol Plantamura — forming a tight reflexive synchrony with each sonic apparition.

In each performance, the unseen voices have dramatic and musical agency. Since Juliana Snapper cannot anticipate who will surface, or what that singer will do, she must be ready to respond in the moment to the expressive actions of whoever shows up.

Juliana Snapper’s agency is primarily responsive — a “listening vocality” that when successful leads to a sense of co-creation and vocal intimacy between embodied and disembodied women and reveals a circuit of composition and entrainment that is core to the post-war Modernist project.