Andrea Cera

Andrea Cera (born 1969 in Vicenza) is an Italian electroacoustic composer, sound designer and sound installation artist.

Biography

Cera graduated with MA degree (Diploma) in Piano and Music Composition at the Conservatorio Cesare Pollini in Padova (Italy). He studied computer music at the Annual Programme of Composition and Musical Computing – IRCAM, in Paris.^[1]

Since 2000, Cera has worked with several choreographers including Hervé Robbe at the Centre Chorégraphique National du Havre, Edmond Russo and Shlomi Tuizer,^[2] Pascal Montrouge, Les Ballets de Monte Carlo.

Installation sites have included Centre Georges Pompidou, Fresnoy Studio in Lille-Tourcoing, institutions and art centres in Italy and France. One example of his work is Reactive Ambient Music (2005). This installation is a sort of a waiting room where reused external sounds of other installations are mixed with music material and influenced by an automatic generated program.^[3] In 2004 he realized NightRun, an interactive installation based on the screaming of the visitors. They are here (2008) is an interactive video and sound installation created for the 104 centre in Paris, in collaboration with IRCAM.

Andrea Cera has worked on several research projects with IRCAM (Paris), NOTAM (Oslo), Integra Project, DIST (Genova). In 2011 he presented Urban Musical Game,^[4] in collaboration with researchers from the Real-Time Musical Interactions team at IRCAM – Centre Pompidou, the design agency NoDesign and Phonotonic. For this installation, they used augmented sports balls to manipulate and transform an interactive music environment.^[5]

Since 2009, Andrea Cera has developed sound design tools. Examples of his work are the collaborations with a car manufacturer (Renault), a research team in sound perception and design (Ircam/SPD) (sounds for the electric vehicle), and Phonotonic.^[6][7]

Andrea Cera’s music is concerned primarily with hybridization (popular and avant-garde, normal and extreme states of mind, human and monstrous) and two-faced and ambiguous acoustic situations: " L’hybride, le monstre, le zombie, le double sont à la fois l’objet de mes pièces et le modèle de leur stratégie sociale ".^[8]

Works

Music for choreographies (selection)

• Hervé Robbe, Permis de construire (2000), music : Andrea Cera
• Hervé Robbe, Mutating Score (2005), music : Andrea Cera
• Edmond Russo, Shlomi Tuizer, Airports (Tenses 1) (2005), music : Andrea Cera
• Hervé Robbe, Wave 03 (2007), music : Andrea Cera
• Edmond Russo, Shlomi Tuizer, Les Avenants (Tenses 2-3) (2007), music : Andrea Cera
• Hervé Robbe, REW (2008), music : Andrea Cera
• Hervé Robbe, Next days (2010), music: Andrea Cera - The Kevi and Deni Project
• Edmond Russo, Shlomi Tuizer, Tempéraments (2014), music : Andrea Cera
• Yan Duyvendak, Sound of Music (2015), music : Andrea Cera

Sound Installations (selection)

• Innig (2002)
• NightRun (2004)
• Nature (2005)
• Undertones (2005)
• Reactive ambient music (2005)
• They are here (2008)
• Urban Musical Game (2011)

Instrumental, mixed and electroacoustic music (selection)

• Deliverance (1998) soprano saxophone and real time electronics
• MIDIfreaks corridor Catapults (2004) for big-band
• Dueling zombies (2007), for ensemble and real time electronics
• Distacco (2007), musical theatre
• Zoom-Up (2010), networked music for two keyboards and real time electronics
• War Games (2014), for 50 percussion players (festival "Le Printemps des Arts" in Monaco Monte-Carlo)

Other Projects (selection)

• Pink Squirrels (2015), text/sound/video. Video, Landing Page

Discography

• Trickster Museum, released: 1996, Label: TAUKAY 103, Contemporanea, Format: CD.
• Kevi and Deni, released: 2009, Label: TAUKAY 132, Format: CD.

Music videos

• Night Run, 2004, Le Fresnoy, Tourcoing.
• Next Days, 2010, choreography: Hervé Robbe, music: Andrea Cera.
• War Games, 2014, Place du Casino, Monte-Carlo.
• Pink Squirrels, 2015, text/sound/video.
• Sound of Music, 2015, Conception and artistic direction: Yan Duyvendak, Music: Andrea Cera, Texts: Christophe Fiat.

Bibliography

• Misdariis Nicolas – Cera, Andrea – Levallois, E. – Locqueteau, C (2012). "Do electric cars have to make noise? An emblematic opportunity for designing sounds and soundscapes", Acoustics 2012 (Nantes - France, 23-27 avril 2012).
• Rasamimanana, Nicolas – Fléty, Emmanuel – Bevilacqua, Frédéric – Cera, Andrea – Petrevski, Uros – Frechin, Jean-Louis (2012). "The urban musical game: using sport balls as musical interfaces", CHI EA '12 Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), Pages 1027-1030 ACM New York, NY, USA (draft version : http://articles.ircam.fr/textes/Rasamimanana12a/index.pdf)
• Cera, Andrea (2008). "Music that listens to what’s going to happen: internet enhanced, self-adapting soundscapes". ICMC International Computer Music Conference, Ann Arbor, MI: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, August 2008.
• Cera, Andrea (2007). "Entretien avec Andrea Cera" (propos recueillis par Emanuele Quinz). En : Trance, Paris, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts – Anomos, Mosign, 2007, ISBN 978 284056 245 0, pp. 108–113.
• Cera, Andrea (2007), "Noir miroir. Ambiguïtés topographiques, sociales et interactives de la musique". Musique in situ, Circuit. Musiques contemporaines, vol. XVII, n. 3, Montréal, Les presses de l’université de Montréal, 2007, ISBN 978 2 76062074 2, pp. 29–38.
• Cera, Andrea (2013), "Loops, Games and Playful Things". Contemporary Music Review, Volume 32, Issue 1, 2013, DOI:10.1080/07494467.2013.774122, pp. 29–39.

Notes

External links

• Andrea Cera - Official Site
• IRCAM Archives