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Composer Francis Dhomont died on 28 December 2023 at age 97 in Avignon, southeastern France. Born in Paris in 1926, Dhomont was originally trained as an acoustic composer, taught by Ginette Waldmeier, Charles Koechlin, and Nadia Boulanger. In an interview in Computer Music Journal 30:3 (2006), Dhomont described an early eagerness to find new musical horizons, inspiring him to experiment with wire recorders after the Second World War, initially unaware of the work Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry were doing in musique concrète at the same time. Deciding to focus exclusively on acousmatic music in 1963, Dhomont composed several dozen works, largely inspired by external narratives—Dhomont described a slow, detailed, and cinematic working process, sometimes even using storyboards to plan compositions, over months or even years.Dhomont's works like “Syntagmes” (1975), “Mais laisserons-nous mourir Arianna?” (1979), “Sous le regard d'un soleil noir” (1981), and “Points de fuite” (1982) won many awards. “Chiaroscuro” (1987) was recognized at Ars Electronica and earned the prestigious Magisterium Prize in the Bourges (France) international electroacoustic music competition, and Dhomont won the Giga-Hertz Prize for Electronic Music in 2013. Dhomont also published several writings exploring aesthetic issues of acousmatic music.Dividing his time between France and Quebec from 1987 to 2005, Dhomont produced programs for Radio-Canada and Radio France and taught at the Université de Montréal from 1980 to 1996. Dhomont was a founding member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community in 1986, and he later retired to Avignon in late 2004. Dhomont was married to visual artist Inés Wickmann, who created several video works that use Dhomont's music.Hungarian-Swedish conductor, composer, and computer music researcher Tamás Ungváry has died at the age of 87. Born in Kalocsa, Hungary, Ungváry started as a double bass player in the Hungarian state orchestra, later worked as a conductor, and composed several award-winning computer music works, starting with “Seul” (1972), one of several of Ungváry's works selected for the long-running World Music Days festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Ungváry's music was also recognized multiple times at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.Ungváry worked at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm, Sweden, from the 1970s into the 1990s, founded the Kineto-Auditory Communication Research (KACOR) Group at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and also worked at the University of Music and Performing Arts, in Vienna, Austria. Ungváry was involved with many innovative projects exploring human–computer interfaces for musical expression, the notion of the cyberinstrument, the use of various transducers and feedback in interface design, gesture mapping, interaction with dance, real-time synthesis, systems for computer music composition, informatics, telematic performance, and the use of the sonogram (the 2-D representation of an audio frequency spectrum displayed as varying color intensity changing across the time axis) to visualize musical structure. In 2019, UH Fest, the Hungarian festival of adventurous music, presented a special program as an homage to Ungváry, who performed along with young local musicians.The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, presented the International Computer Music Conference, 15–20 October 2023. Keynote speakers included Mari Kimura, who also performed “Rossby Waving” for violin and MUGIC motion sensor, and Pamela Z, who also performed “Quatre Couches” and “Other Rooms” for voice with live processing. Also in the conference's 19 concerts were “Infrasonic Soundscape” by Brian House, which highlights climate change by making audible the low-frequency vibrations of large-scale natural and mechanical processes; “35 mm (ver. 2)” by Ji Won Yoon and Woon Seung Yeo, which portrays the gayageum and geomungo (traditional Korean zithers, through audio sampling, film photography, and audio-responsive stochastic graphics; and Jeffrey Stolet presented “In Desperate Times,” inspired by events of 2020, bringing together Kyma, computer vision in Max, and a Wacom tablet.Among the twelve paper sessions, Nolan Hildebrand presented an approach for inserting the sound of a saxophone into the signal path of a feedback mixer (or no-input mixer) configuration, Julie Zhu offered compositional techniques for the Chinese sheng and electronics, mindful of opportunities to exploit difference and summation tones as well as ring modulation sidebands, and Damian Dziwis introduced PdXR, which allows Pure Data code to be used in extended reality platforms. The conference also presented a panel on historiographies of women in the field and three music industry lectures. There were three workshops, on building neural networks in Pure Data, algorithmically controlled sound design, and Sound in Motion (a telematic performance system), and there were eight installations, including “The Forever, *∼” by Miles J. Friday, which used audio feedback loops inside 3-D–printed tubes with digital signal processing.Web: icmc2023.org.cnAs part of the prestigious Venice Biennale exhibition, the 67th International Festival of Contemporary Music took place 16–29 October 2023 with a theme of Micro-Music, celebrating digital music. Brian Eno was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, recognizing Eno's visionary re-conceptions of the recording studio, immersive space, and the recording archive for new creative uses, as well as generative music. The Silver Lion award went to Miller Puckette for creating the widely used Max and Pure Data (Pd) graphic programming environments.Web: www.labiennale.org/en/news/2023-lion-awards-musicCanadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC) presented the 24th Jeu de temps [Times Play] awards for electroacoustic music artists from or living in Canada, selected from 34 works submitted from artists living in Canada, Norway, and the United States. Julie Delisle won First Prize for “Pipa aura Suichi,” which explores chains of gestures inspired by instrumental articulation sounds taken out of context, followed by Second Prize winner Jules Bastin-Fontaine for “Composition acousmatique 1.” “Fumigènes” by llAMKAll members José-Gabriel Bazán-Gauthier and Émile Gingras-Therrien won Third Prize as well as the Martin Gotfrit and Martin Bartlett Award for live electroacoustic practices, and Parisa Sabet Sarvestani won Fourth Prize in addition to the Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux Award for self-identified female or non-binary electroacoustic artists for “Silent,” for two voices, three acoustic instruments, fixed audiovisual media, and dance, inspired by “The Wind-up Doll” by Iranian poet Forugh Farokhzad. Mimi Allard won Fifth Prize and the Jean Piché Award for videomusic, new media, and creative coding for “Fleur de papier fleur de metal,” and Kristian North won the Hildegard Westerkamp Award for soundscape and sound installation for “Remiges.”Web: jttp.sonus.ca/2023The seventh Matera Intermedia Festival took place in a series of events in the fall of 2023 in the Italian cities of Castrignano de' Greci, Lecce, Potenza, and Matera. The award for acousmatic music went to Cameron Naylor for “Foxglove,” which explores close-recorded tree sounds; Elliott Lupp won the mixed-media award for “Strix,” for cello and electronics; Tasos Asonitis won the audiovisual award for “Exhibits,” in which human and algorithmic agents enter a dialogue and ultimately merge; and the sound art award went to Roberto Alonson Trillo and Marek Poliks for the installation “Hydra #2.”Web: www.mainfest.it/main2023The 2023 Prix Russolo, after a series of concerts in France (Annecy, Faverges, and Paris) and the Czech Republic (Ostrava and Prague), as well as Milan, Italy, Osaka, Japan, Riga, Latvia, and Leicester, UK, has concluded, with the prize going to Manfredi Clemente for “Oubliez-moi sous ces cèdres.” The concerts featured all finalists, who included Alexis Blais, Otto Iivari, Sangwon Lee, Pauline Patie, Antoine Tirmarche, and Romain Perrot.Web: prixrussolo.blogspot.comThe Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) hosted the ten finalists of the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition on 8–9 March 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. Max Addae won the first-place prize for the VocalCords, which allows the performer to stretch three rubber cords to modify the singing voice in real time. In second place was Jean-François Laporte's Babel Table, which features latex membranes excited by compressed air as well as percussive hits, and the third-place award went to Nicola Privato for Thales, which use sensors and magnetic fields to control music. Playmodes won the People's Choice award and the Honorable Mention for Education award for the sonògraf, which uses computer vision to play music by drawing images or arranging collages of found objects.Web: guthman.gatech.edu/2024-winnersThe Korea Electro-Acoustic Music Society (KEAMS) celebrated the 30th year of the Seoul International Computer Music Festival (SICMF) 6–8 October 2023 at Seoul National University of Education. Keynote speaker João Pedro Oliveira spoke on gestural connections between sounds and images. The four concerts featured works by 21 Korean composers and ten composers from the rest of the world, as well as Oliveira's “Light Particles” for cello, double bass, electronics, and video.Web: computermusic.asia/2023

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