Every Victoria Day weekend in Quebec, the city of Victoriaville hosts the Festival international de musique actuelle, an event that assaults the boundaries and limitations of existing musical genres. Over the past decade, a Toronto mini-fest presented by Roughidea and the Music Gallery has become a regular forum for musicians en route to the main event. The Swiss duo of Franziska Baumann and Matthias Ziegler combine technology, dance and improvisation into a compelling unit. Baumann complements her singing with the cyberglove, an electronic device that translates hand and arm movement, and spatial interaction into sound; Ziegler plays a striking array of flutes, the bass and contra-bass functioning close to the lowest threshold of human hearing. May 13. Contemporary improvised music not only bridges the ideas of electronic and acoustic space, but it also spans cultures. Xu Fengxia is a Chinese classical master who plays the guzheng, a kind of plucked zither, while violinist-violist Gunda Gottschalk’s background is in European classical music. The two have found a mutual idiom within Germany’s improvised music scene.—Brent Ledger