Category: CSC Sound and Music Computing Group

CIM Conference Programme

Sounding Posthuman: Reflecting on 50 Years of CIM and a New Perspective on Teresa Rampazzi

Laura ZattraAIMI CIM SMC confecence

What an inspiring week in L’Aquila!

I am so happy to have been part of CIM (Colloquio di Informatica Musicale), which 10 days ago (October 13–16, 2026) celebrated a major milestone: its 50th anniversary! This year’s inspiring theme, Sounding Posthuman, provided the perfect framework to introduce a new direction in my long-standing research on Teresa Rampazzi.

It was an honor to present my paper, “Writing Teresa Rampazzi. Between Historiography (1998–2026) and Post-Human Rereading”, as well as to chair a session and moderate the roundtable for our MEDEG (Musica Elettronica Donne e Genere) group.

Beyond the Bourgeois Instrument: The Posthuman Pioneer

My presentation brought together nearly three decades of archival research, source criticism, and oral history (from 1998 to 2026) to re-evaluate Rampazzi’s artistic trajectory through the lens of posthumanist theory (drawing on Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway).

When Rampazzi abandoned the piano at age fifty—the quintessential anthropocentric device of Western bourgeois humanism—she turned to analog generators, magnetic tape, and eventually computer systems like the Interactive Computer Music System (ICMS). By doing so, she dismantled the myth of the solitary romantic genius. Instead, she embraced a collective, distributed, and cyborg creativity within the Nuove Proposte Sonore (NPS) group and her collaborations with scientists and engineers at the University of Padua’s Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (CSC). Long before posthumanism was formally theorized in philosophy, Rampazzi’s practice anticipated the decentralization of the human subject, treating technology not as a mere tool, but as a cognitive prosthesis and a co-creative partner.

Thank You & Open Access

Thank you to everyone who made this anniversary edition possible and to such a vibrant, passionate community of researchers, artists, and musicians.

All conference papers (including mine) are available for free download on the official program page:

CIM 2026 Program & Papers

Direct link to my paper: Scrivere Teresa Rampazzi. Tra Storiografia (1998-2026) e Rilettura Post-Umana

Share

Laura Zattra talks about Teresa Rampazzi at the SoundMit event

Laura Zattrabiography

Il video dell’intervento di Laura Zattra dell’11 ottobre su Teresa Rampazzi è visibile al link seguente: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sek8tl1hmSQ

Grazie a Johann Merrich e a SoundMit per l’invito.

Play

 

 

 

Share

Teresa Rampazzi back at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse!

Laura ZattraConcert

Today, the quadraphonic piece Fluxus by Teresa Rampazzi will be performed during the final concert of the 50th Darmstadt Summer Course. After 70 years, Rampazzi is back at the Ferienkurse (she attended the course also in 1954, 1956, and until 1959, according to historical sources).

Wed, 11 August 2021, 19:30h, Sporthalle Lichtenbergschule

Final concert of the 50th Darmstadt Summer Course.

CONCERT PROGRAM

Teresa Rampazzi: Fluxus (1979) – 10’40”
Electronic Music

Rebecca Saunders: Dust III (2018-21) – 65′
World Premiere of the version for several percussion players

More details of the concert here (also in livestream): https://internationales-musikinstitut.de/en/ferienkurse/festival/programm/dust/

Teresa Rampazzi in 1976 at the Conservatory of Music in Padova in front of the ARP 2500 analog modular synthesizer. Photo by Luciano Menini
Teresa Rampazzi in 1976 at the Conservatory of Music in Padova in front of the ARP 2500 analog modular synthesizer. Photo by Luciano Menini

About Fluxus, 1979

Spatialization: 4-tracks
Published LP EDI-PAN PRC S 20-16, Roma, 1984.
Premiere: August 1979, Certaldo (Italy).

Original analogue tapes: Teresa Rampazzi Collection, University of Padua (Italy).

Digitization/restauration of the analogue tapes by MARTLab, Florence (Italy).

Fluxus was realized in 1979 with the use of the language ICMS (Interactive Computer Music System), a software created by Graziano Tisato at the CSC – Centro di Sonologia Computazionale at the University of Padova for the synthesis (connected to Music5 program, one of the early computer music programs), the editing and mixing, connected with a video, whose functions and algorithms were selected by means of a light pen. Teresa Rampazzi made the spatialization directly during the mixing of the 4-tracks. She preferred an acousmatic listening experience during concerts. Her musical works would thus be diffused without any further changes, because she disliked the human gesture in live electronic music.

From Teresa Rampazzi’s concert program [based on a citation by Heraclitus]:

«Fluxus was born from the ambitious desire to seek and find a form more adherent to the means we possess today for making music, both at the technological level and the vision of the world that together have required and caused the birth of these means. The computer suggests to us forms that cannot repeat any past, and that reflect our Heraclitean philosophy, where nothing can ever go back. The acoustic signals, therefore, flow one from the other and after the other, in an evolutionary process without interruptions. The [synthesis] technique of Frequency Modulation has been used here precisely to express, even at the level of the microstructure, this instability and incessant transformation that prevents any pause and, in a certain sense, already destroys the traditional concept of structure. Momentary shortcomings of hardware [an IBM System/7 computer system functioning in differed time] and software [the language ICMS – Interactive Computer Music System] prevented a more radical transformation of the signal and undermined the continuity of the form, which still suggests the flow of a river, sometimes slow, sometimes impetuous, sometimes dense, sometimes sparse. The parameters of density, rhythm, range of heights were therefore taken into consideration». Teresa Rampazzi, 1979.

Share
_collid=books_covers_0&isbn=9780262539302&type=

“Taras on three dimensions” in the new book Between the Tracks (2020)

Laura Zattra1971

The book Between the Tracks-Musicians on Selected Electronic Music edited by Kerry Hagan and Miller Puckette is finally published!

My chapter focuses on the analysis of “Taras su tre dimensioni” [Taras on three dimensions], a work realized by Teresa Rampazzi in 1971-72 in the course of a transitional phase (her transition from the analogue to the computer music technology).

The approximately eleven-minutes work represents an unicum among Teresa Rampazzi’s repertoire. It is made from the juxtaposition of three typologies of sounds: analogue, concrete and computer made sounds, and is also the only piece in her catalogue which incorporates concrete sounds.

To know a little more about this unique piece, read (and listen) from my prevous post): https://www.teresarampazzi.it/2019/07/02/teresa-presenting-her-unique-concreteelectroniccomputer-music-piece-taras/

_collid=books_covers_0&isbn=9780262539302&type= 117724413_10158138059855804_6304414956161648360_o

Share
btr

The Junghans Watch

Laura ZattraCSC Sound and Music Computing Group

btr

This is a picture I took last week at the CSC – Sound and Music Computing Group – UNIPD in Padova.

The Junghans Watch was the one owned by Teresa Rampazzi. She and her teammates at the N.P.S. used it to synchronize every manual operation they needed to create an analogue electronic music experiment, an ‘oggetto sonoro’ (‘sound object’).

The ‘oggetti sonori’ were reminiscent of Schaefferian “Traité des objets musicaux” (Rampazzi was at the GRM in Paris and she had a copy of the Traité autographed by the author), but they were intended to be an evolution, and in fact they were purely synthesised, not concrete.

Laura Zattra

Share