Guest pianist Oni Buchanan and author/poet Jon Woodward will perform Uncanny Valley, a piano/poetry/electronics concert-length work by composer John Gibson, at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 27, in Riverside Recital Hall on the University of Iowa campus. The performance is free and open to the public.

In this program, the piano performance of Buchanan joins and reflects the spoken text of the poem Uncanny Valley as performed by its author, Jon Woodward. Uncanny Valley is a long serial poem in 16 sections, meant to be read aloud, with numerous optional repeats throughout the text. These repetitions act as accumulations of sound, maddening as well as hypnotic, and Gibson's piece provides a sonic environment in which they can truly blossom.

Although the two performers determine the pacing, the musical specificity of each section (from Morse code to sine waves to jazz to a brief quote from Schumann) reflects the poem text in ever-different ways. Digital samples triggered by the reader enmesh the piano and spoken text, haunting the music with echoes of itself. Extending outward from the phenomenon of "semantic satiation" (whereby a single word loses all apparent meaning and identity when repeated for even a short duration), this program investigates whether the same satiation is possible with phrases, sentences, pairs of verse lines, or musical forms.

The School of Music is part of the Division of Performing Arts in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For accommodations at the concert contact the School of Music at 319-335-1603. For a UI arts calendar and details about upcoming events visit the new Arts Iowa website.