The composition program in the Glenn Korff School of Music will be hosting the Boulder Image and Sound Network (BISoN) ensemble from the University of Colorado Boulder. Directed by Hunter Ewen, BISoN is a groundbreaking, five-member quintet that performs a wild variety of music using nothing but iPads. They will be giving a mini concert and talkback session for composition students.

The event is free and open to the public.

Exploration, both artistic and technological, is the foundation of their ensemble. With every performance, they try to do a new collaboration, new technical workflow and new hardware and software set up.

BISoN is an extension of the laptop ensemble, but the use of iPads (rather than laptops) allows them a greater amount of freedom within their performances. The iPads not only have virtual buttons, knobs and sliders, where you touch it to move them, but they also have the acceleration of the iPad itself. So as people move around you can, for example, throw a sound by turning the iPad in a certain direction, or maybe turn it into a steering wheel that controls some filter or some sound. You can throw it up in the air, ring it like a bell, shake it like an Etch A Sketch, and all these movements can be programmed to do different things.