Real Music

Artist. Samson Young

Organisations. MUMA, Talbot Rice

Years: 2019, 2020

Samson Young – b. 1979, Hong Kong. Lives and works in Hong Kong.

Real Music is a solo exhibition of the work of Samson Young, it includes a major new commission created through Young’s collaboration with the Next Generation Sound Synthesis (NESS) research group within the University of Edinburgh.  Titled Possible Music #2, this new commission takes the form of a 16-channel sound garden filling Talbot Rice Gallery’s Georgian Gallery with music that could never possibly exist in the ‘real’ world.

Possible Music #2 is fuelled by the pioneering software developed by Stefan Bilbao and NESS – a world-leading laboratory in the field of synthetic sound – with Young then stretching the very parameters of this technology. This software was designed to create systems that model and synthesise how a virtual instrument would sound in a specific environment, developed to enable researchers to hear lost musical instruments within their historic settings. Young uses this hypothetical simulation model to create impossible instruments, experimenting with scale, temperature and force: what would a brass instrument sound like played at 300° Fahrenheit or played with the breath of a jet engine? Within Young’s sound garden, a field of speakers sprout
towards the cupolas overhead and 3D-printed and bronze sculptural forms allude to a colossal, oversized brass instrument emerging from the carpeted earth.

Real Music also includes an entirely new series of drawings transcribing impossible orchestrations – colourful and textured graphic scores.

Real Music shows at Talbot Rice Gallery at the University of Edinburgh from July – Oct 2019. Next it will travel to Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) in Victoria from 2 May – 4 July 2020.

The Keir Foundation is thrilled to support this project and newly commissioned work.

Real Music
Real Music
Real Music