Ben Vida Read Bio Collapse
Ben Vida is a composer, improviser, writer, and artist. His practice encompasses works for voice and ensemble, musique concrète, text-based compositions, and electro-acoustic improvisation. In the mid-1990s he was involved in Chicago’s multi-faceted experimental music scene, co-founding the quartet Town & Country. In the mid-2000s he relocated to New York and began producing electronic and systems-based compositions that focused on psychoacoustics and advanced synthesis techniques, releasing records on Shelter Press and PAN. He also began exhibiting artworks in various media including video, text drawing, and sound installation. Since 2013, he has been composing pieces that combine his interests in group vocalization, durational performance, and typographical scores. He teaches in the Sonic Arts MFA at Brooklyn College.
Launch of e-flux journal #144
# 144
I was influenced by how the conceptual poets had demonstrated the mutability of digitized text; through their work, language became a ready-made that could be repurposed in much the same fashion as an audio sample. Once sound was fixed to the medium of tape it took on a new life as a sample, a sound object that could be processed and transformed. Extracted from its source, the sample created an opportunity for the composer to reassign its signifiers through sonic transformation and recontextualization. Digitalization expanded the malleability of this process exponentially, creating the possibility for a wild morphology.
Miya Masaoka and Ben Vida