Aaron Wyatt
Aaron Wyatt, a Noongar, Yamatji, and Wongai man, is a violist, composer and software developer. A member of Decibel New Music ensemble, he created their animated graphic notation app, the Decibel ScorePlayer. Since 2020, Aaron has been a major contributor to JackTrip, a system for high-quality audio network performance over the internet, initially developed out of Stanford University, USA. Aaron is a rising star in the contemporary classical world, having worked with Deborah Cheetham, Cat Hope, Electric Fields and the Western Australia, Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney Symphony Orchestras plus many more. Aaron is Speak Percussion’s Artist In Residence: an ongoing position that empowers first nations artists to self determine projects with the full support of the whole company.

Eugene Ughetti
Eugene Ughetti, the Co-Artistic director of Speak Percussion, explores the materiality of percussion, engaging with broad ideas such as drumming aged rum, supersonic performances and the percussive military. He is known for tackling complex and ambitious art music projects whether as director, composer, performer or conductor.

He includes Pierre Boulez, Liza Lim, Steve Reich and John Zorn among some of his many collaborators.

Eugene founded Speak Percussion in 2000.

Eugene has worked closely with Aaron on Digital Echoes as both performer and collaborator.

Speak Percussion
Speak Percussion takes percussive art to its physical and conceptual extremes. We shape the sounds of 21st century Australian percussion music through the creation and presentation of ambitious arts projects. Internationally recognised as a leader in the fields of experimental and contemporary classical music, Speak redefines the potential of percussion. From solo concerts to massed sound events, interdisciplinary projects to sound installations, participatory work to album releases, our “breathtakingly impressive” (The West Australian) work is presented locally and globally in concert halls, theatres, galleries and site-specific locations.

I created Digital Echoes as a way of continuing to explore the themes of landscape and connection to country that I was looking at in Our Place, a 20 minute live performance and audiovisual installation work that I created for and with Ensemble Dutala, Australia’s first First Nations chamber ensemble. In this new work though, I wanted the electronic component to be generated live rather than being prerecorded, and this led to the idea of combining two of the major coding projects that I’ve either been responsible for or have contributed to: the Decibel ScorePlayer and JackTrip. Inspired by Chris Chafe’s work on using the topology of the internet to create different virtual reverberant spaces, I decided to use JackTrip to map out parts of the Australian landscape as a series of delay lines, and used the ScorePlayer to continue my practice of combining elements of traditional and animated graphic notation. I also took inspiration from previous works produced by Speak Percussion that made use of transducers to combine percussion with electronics. The result is part soundscape, part hybrid instrument, that hopefully captures a sense of time and space.

With thanks to Speak Percussion and Deadly Fringe, Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Concept, realisation and performance: Aaron Wyatt
Collaborating Artist / Performer: Eugene Ughetti
Collaborating Company & Producer: Speak Percussion