Bangor Composer Premiers New Work: 28 October 2012

Working with a team of experts in dyslexia research from the Miles Dyslexia Centre at Bangor University, award-winning composer Professor Andrew Lewis will create a sonic art work with video using spoken and printed text as its raw material.  The audience will be immersed in a 360-degree spatial sound and visual experience, in which words will disintegrate and reassemble into new and surprising sonic and visual combinations, creating a kaleidoscopic, spatial labyrinth of sound, image and meaning.  Through sight and sound, Lexicon will convey the beauty, subtlety, and overwhelming complexity of the spoken language processing that presents such a challenge to people with different profiles of dyslexia.  The piece will explore not only the challenges, but also the life-affirming creative potential that dyslexia, and a fuller understanding of it, can bring.

The work will use as its source text a poem, As I See It, written by a 12-year old dyslexic boy 

My prolem is like a wast paper bascit full of scrunched up peses of paper.
Words are like lifes blowing in the wind
Just when I think I have cort up with them they blow out of rech.
A page is like a map I tri to find my way round
Maybe onebay the greadrefens will maykesens.

Lewis will be working with dyslexia experts, Dr Markéta Caravolas (Director, Miles Dyslexia Centre), Meg Browning and Ann Cooke, whose work in dyslexia research and experience in working with people with dyslexia will inform and shape the creative process.

Lexicon premiers as part of the Mantis Festival of Electroacoustic Music on Sunday 28 October 2012 at Martin Harris Centre, University of Manchester at 6pm.

Publication date: 24 October 2012