adriana  sá
trans-disciplinary   music

"Favela Real" (aka "Royal/ Real Favela") is the name of an off-grid place in the countryside, which I have been growing and nurturing together with John Klima . When invited to perform at Robalo, in Lisbon (July 2021), I started by making a soundscape composition with recordings from this environment - it would become a base-layer for live-performance. On top, I played my custom zither and AG#3.9 - my audio-visual 3D software that processes pre-recorded sounds and graphics based on pitch detection from the zither input; it processed country sounds as well. John played the mandolin cello. Later in the summer, Atau Tanaka and Josephine Berry came to spend some time in Favela. From this also emerged a creative collaboration that expanded the previous duo-work, culminating with a performance at Utero in Lisbon. Atau played his EMG muscle interface and Josephine used spoken word. Rather than projecting live-processed 3D image, here it made sense to show photos from Favela, taken by Josephine's daughter Agnes.

FAVELA REAL #2.1
UTERO | LISBOA | AUGUST 22nd 2021

Performance photos by Nuno Correia.

FAVELA REAL #1
PENHASCO | LISBOA | JULY 22nd 2021

Performance footage by Antonio Gomes.

Bellow is a screen capture from AG#3.9, the most recent version from my 3D software - which operates based on the sound of a zither with aged strings, a personal tuning system, and specific playing techniques. Once the image appears, it functions like a reactive stage scene - which extends the physical space without distracting attention from the relations between the sounds. The digital architecture from AG#3.9 is similar to the one of AG#3. It uses the same 3D engine (Irlicht) and audio library (FMOD), coded by John Klima. Beyond those similarities, the digital sound and image have now a very different feeling - the software processes sounds recorded in the countryside, and the images applied to the 3D world result from the graphic manipulations of my graphic scores.