Sonic Geometry

artistic research by Nirantar Yakthumba

In this research project, Nirantar investigates how a pink-noise signal can be constructed by material procedures in a timescale sensible to us and how this signal can be used to structure a live musical practice.

छिन्नमस्ता (Chhinnamastā) is the productive outcome of this research, developed in collaboration with members of the Kali Ensemble: Gregor Connelly, and Joel Gester Suárez. In this work, Nirantar articulates a highly precise method of listening, responding, and tuning that produces complex and ever-changing periodic wave phenomena, distributing themselves in innumerable specific spatio-temporal figures. Unlike a traditional fixed composition, Chhinnamastā is open in time and none of its moments are specified beforehand, only unfolding as three decorrelated pink-noise signals are interpreted from the dice rolled by the players. As a result, the sounding waveforms gain a complexity that is immanent to the continuous perceptual process of the work — spread out over days, weeks, months, untempered durations — inscribed in any material that could document it.

Nirantar Yakthumba is a musician and composer from Nepal, based in the Hague, the Netherlands. He is currently a Master’s student at the Institute of Sonology, with the help of a scholarship awarded to him by the Konrad Boehmer Foundation. In his research, he investigates the relations between sound, materials, force, and geometry, and how people individually and collectively make sense of these relations through practice.

During his Bachelor’s studies in composition at the Royal Conservatoire, the Hague, he studied composition with Peter Adriaansz, Calliope Tsoupaki, Cornelis de Bondt, and Jan van de Putte, as well as contemporary piano with Gerard Bouwhuis. He graduated with distinction in 2023.