A SIGNAL IN FRACTURE
H[t] Duo
Pierpaolo Napoli (classical guitar)
Matteo Tundo (live electronics)
ArteScienza 2026
curated by Centro Ricerche Musicali (CRM)
A Signal in Fracture is a concert program for classical guitar and live electronics that explores the unstable relationships between instrumental gesture, technological mediation, and spatial listening. Through close-miking, lo-fi amplification, and real-time processing, the guitar is transformed into a shifting sonic interface, while the electronics take on an autonomous, dialogic role, continually redefining the balance, resonance, and perception of acoustic space.
The pieces on the program approach this exploration from different angles. Fray traces the progressive dissolution of the guitar's sonic identity through mechanical gestures, friction, and processes of electronic distortion. Otiac introduces a third performing agent: an autonomous computational system that learns from material generated by the duo and intervenes in the musical dynamics through processes of feedback and prediction. In Talia, an endless descending glissando and an electronic ostinato build a constant tension between movement and stasis, turning the sonic descent into a path of metamorphosis. The reflection on the relationship between performer and technology continues in Rubber Duck Debugging, where musical fragments are continually reread and transformed by the electronics, calling into question the listener's memory and perception. Where hands fall into breath turns instead to the physical modeling of breath, making the guitar a living sonic body through which to establish an imaginative dialogue between acoustic matter and electronics. Finally, Fotografiar el Mar uses feedback as a tool for building immersive soundscapes, in a chamber-music setting that grants equal agency to both performers.
Source: https://www.crm-music.it/festival/programma/a-signal-in-fracture.html
Program
Nicoletta Andreuccetti (1968)
Where hands fall into breath
realizzazione elettronica a cura di Tommaso Rosati (2025)
Maria Vittoria Agresti (1996)
Talia
per chitarra ed elettronica (2024)
Claudio Panariello (1989)
Otiac
per chitarra ed elettronica (2026)
Stylianos Dimou (1988)
Fray
per chitarra ed elettronica (2026)
David Antunez Rodriguez (1995)
Fotografiar el Mar
realizzazione elettronica a cura di P. Dinapoli (2026)
Daniele Vulpiani (1989)
Rubber Duck debugging
per chitarra ed elettronica (2025)
Fray (2025-26)
for guitar and live electronics
Fray investigates the threshold where the classical guitar’s physical immediacy begins to disintegrate. The piece draws its raw material from mechanical gesture, percussive contact, and rhythmic friction—the grain of wood under pressure, the scrape of strings, the sharpness of attack. These tactile events form a vocabulary of recursive motion, where repeated actions gradually erode their own clarity and reveal hidden layers within the instrument’s sound. The live electronics function not as an external gloss but as an active agent of distortion, mutation, and subversion. They electrify the guitar’s acoustic reality, twisting familiar resonances into rusted timbres, stretching harmonics into hollowed echoes, and generating hybrid sonic figures that oscillate between the mechanical and the spectral. As the music unfolds, the guitar and electronics fray into each other: rhythmic impulses blur into noise, percussive cracks blossom into resonant afterimages, and fragile tones are bent into unfamiliar shapes. Fray traces this process of unraveling—where sound sheds its identity and re-emerges as a charged, electrified presence.
Fray (2025-26), for guitar and live electronics; score excerpt