Be(com)ing “In-Resonance-With” Research: Improvising a Postintentional Phenomenology Through Sound and Sonic Composition (original) (raw)
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Listen while you work: negotiating power and meaning in post-concrete music.
2019
Following the radical affordances of the then-recent technologies the microphone and tape, Musique Concrète proposed that all sound could now become music. In that moment, new boundaries in music were crossed, not just in the way theorists and composers acknowledged at the time as a flattening of sonic hierarchies, but also in the explicit revelations of meaning and power embedded in this newly recorded sound world. In arranging music from what I call s-sound for shorthand throughout (pronounced suh-sound), sound made not by musical instruments and voices but from traditionally regarded non-musical material sources or events, we are activating new ways and forms of both composing and hearing such that both the newly audible subject and the listener are implicated directly in the work, a recontextualising of what Barthes calls in his 1985 book The Responsibility Forms:‘recognising oneself in the space’. The listener can no longer be unheard, they have become a collaborator essential to both mining the strata of meaning within, and the procedural functions of the work. Along with the capacity to hear or tell stories through sound, comes an ethical dimension. Who gets to tell whose story? If composers are aware of how audiences are listening to, or missing these meanings, then it follows that this awareness and accompanying power not only interacts with the fabric of the work, but can be a tool for composition itself. What follows is a contextualising of 25 years of practical research that culminated in a book called The Music. PhD by publication, this thesis accompanies the following works :20 Pianos, A Nude, A Week in The Life of a Tree, Chorus, More More More, ONE PIG, ONE ROOM, Recomposed - Mahler’s 10th Symphony, Requiem, Speaker, The End of Silence, The Machines Our Buildings Used to Hear, The Music, The Recording, The Unheard. This thesis is not intended to be a detailed analysis or exposition of my compositional techniques, or of technologies used. I shall look instead at how I have tried to amplify, construct and examine meaning in my music by using precise s-sound recordings to tell or retell specific stories and negotiate the correspondingly inferred power with musicians, collaborators and audiences. The end point of a music made this way, might well be the “birth of the listener” following the Barthesian death of the composer, and in Chorus(2016), the final work in the thesis, the listener, as part of a temporary community finally becomes the composer.
A performative paradigm for post-qualitative inquiry
A performative paradigm for post-qualitative inquiry, 2021
In this article, the authors explore and contribute to producing a performative research paradigm where post-qualitative as well as artistic research might dwell and breathe. Entering a thread of discussion that started with Haseman's A manifesto for performative research in 2006, and building on their own friction-led research processes at the edges of qualitative research, the authors plug in with performativity, non-representational theories and methodologies, postqualitative inquiry and post approaches. A performative paradigm for post-qualitative inquiry is proposed, where knowledge is viewed as knowledge-in-becoming as the constant creation of difference through researcher entanglement with the research phenomenon and wider world. A performative paradigm produces a space for movement, (artistic) freedom, (post-qualitative) experimentation and inclusion. A performative research paradigm also offers provocations that shake long-established notions about what research is and should be. Within a performative research paradigm, learning/be(com)ing/knowing is always in-becoming-as is the performative paradigm itself.
The Interview as Convergent Point - between qualitative research and performance art
Peripeti, 2021
This article explores how a combination of qualitative research and immersive performance has given Inga Gerner Nielsen insight into her audience’s aesthetic perception and imaginary realm in a performance installation. It begins by affirming that to ask an audience open questions about a performance only provides testimony of the after-rationalizations of their experience. The author introduces a phenomenological interview method which draws on sense-memory techniques directing the interviewee to produce thick descriptions, actualizing the lived experience in the interview. In response to Norman K. Denzin’s call for a performative dialogical social science, Nielsen examines why interview material should be conceptualized as performance and explores how working artistically with the interview setup can serve to highlight inherent power dynamics. The article ends with examples showing how the interview was turned into a central immersive element of Inga Gerner Nielsen’s artworks.
Introduction to After Sound: Toward a Critical Music
2016
After Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of sound. This book is called After Sound because music and sound are, in Barrett's account, different entities. While musicology and sound art theory alike often equate music with instrumental sound, or absolute music, Barrett posits music as an expanded field of artistic practice encompassing a range of different media and symbolic relationships. The works discussed in After Sound thus use performance, text scores, musical automata, video, social practice, and installation while they articulate a novel aesthetic space for a radically engaged musical practice. Coining the term "critical music," this book examines a diverse collection of art projects which intervene into specific political and philosophical conflicts by exploring music's unique historical forms. Through a series of intimate studies of artworks surveyed from the visual and performing arts of the past ten years—Pussy Riot, Ultra-red, Hong-Kai Wang, Peter Ablinger, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and others—After Sound offers a significant revision to the way we think about music. The book as a whole offers a way out of one of the most vexing deadlocks of contemporary cultural criticism: the choice between a sound art effectively divorced from the formal-historical coordinates of musical practice and the hermetic music that dominates new music circles today.
Organised Sound, 2022
This article addresses the precedence given to sound in musical analysis and argues that socially engaged composers might reconsider the importance they place on sonic output and instead pay greater attention to how we critically engage with the subjects that stimulate our musical practice. G. Douglas Barrett’s theorisation of music ‘after sound’ is established as a crucial methodology, one that provides an important discourse around critical engagements that have largely been neglected in favour of investigations into abstracted sonic materials. The vocabulary provided by Barrett is, in this article, used to meaningfully appraise the impact of a situated musical performance and its dialogue with society. Specifically, the three authors collectively explore the implications of Barrett’s writing for the conception, formation and evaluation of their own socially engaged compositional practices. Subsequently, this discussion also illustrates the methods by which Barrett’s approach is i...
EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND THE POLITICAL: PERFORMATIVITY IN THE ART OF JOHN CAGE
Performance Philosophy, 2022
This text aims to explore some of the philosophical inquiries that arise from experimental music, focusing on the following question: How is music, without words, capable of producing and enacting political thought? Focusing on John Cage's art an exploration of the performativity of music is proposed, understanding performativity both as the effects that music has on its audience, and its “theatrical” quality. Cage’s work is especially well suited for this objective, inasmuch as it is based upon both an explicit desire to modify the perception of its audience, and an interest in developing an art form that is closer to “theatre” (in a broad sense). As Alejandro L. Madrid has suggested, using performativity as a lens of analysis to study music shifts the question “What is music?” to “What does music do?” and “What does it allow people to do?” Through a revision and discussion of Cage’s art pieces, the author of this text argues that Cage’s work supposes a destabilization of traditional notions and roles, allowing people to listen to their surroundings with greater attention and pleasure (thus questioning Eurocentric and anthropocentric conceptual and sensorial frameworks inherited from the past), and to perform atypical social relations of an anarchist nature.
Qualitative Research Journal, 2019
In this special issue, we have sought to engage with researchers and documentary/arts practitioners using sound as a part of their inquiry into the social and beyond. We situate this issue within a burgeoning body of interdisciplinary work in sound studies, which has explored sonic possibilities in research and practice in sociology, history, anthropology, social geography, education, performance and cultural studies. The ephemeral nature of sound is part of what makes it special; its consumption is based on a temporal experience, a fleeting moment of comprehension that accumulates to create a greater understanding of the whole form (LaBelle, 2015). By focusing on the sonic qualities highlighted within these contributions, a layer of understanding is made possible that cannot be replicated in another form. To be clear, we are not saying that sound and phonographic methods (the use of recording and playback, see Gallagher and Prior, 2014) should be elevated above visual, textual and other sensory accounts, we want to continue to build on the argument that sound offers us a distinct way of understanding in terms of being and knowing (Sterne, 2012; Gershon, 2013; Feld and Brenneis, 2004). We agree with others (Pink, 2015; Bull and Back, 2016) who acknowledge the richness of sound as part of a multisensory shift in the methodological literature and also part of a turn toward the non-representational and performative. As a visceral and vibrational force, sound offers us considerations into that which falls between representational meaning, moving toward “how life is composed in the midst of affects” (Lorimer, 2008, p. 552). Aural approaches can articulate knowledge about places, spaces and the environments around us, conveying timbral information and frequency, but also the “immaterial, invisible, taken-for-granted atmospheres and emotional resonances” (Gallagher and Prior, 2014, p. 269). As LaBelle (2015) eloquently identifies what makes sound so extraordinary is its relationality, “it emanates, propagates, communicates, vibrates, and agitates; it sends the body moving, the mind dreaming, the air oscillating” (p. xi). As such, sound offers us something generative and emergent in the ontological and epistemological realms, holding the material and non-material in complexity through what Gallagher (2016) conceptualizes as “vibrational assemblages” (p. 43). In bringing this special issue together, we also sought to reflect the ideas of Gergen and Gergen’s (2011) about performative-oriented work that creates “truth zones” through creative, democratic and polyvocal knowledge pursuits. In crafting this special issue, we aimed to push back on hegemonic modes of knowledge production in the academy, which have often privileged written text as the sole channel through which we can collect, analyze represent and disseminate research. We also seek to contribute theory in relation to sound, rather than simply how sonic methods and techniques can be incorporated into qualitative research, following Back and Puwar’s (2012) call to mobilize sound and listening as a way to re-imagine modes of social research and develop social methods that are collaborative, imaginative and lively. Thus, we sought pieces that were generated from documentary studies and artistic-led practice, and those that are conceptualized as being anchored in qualitative methodology more broadly.
Improvisation, Indeterminacy, and Ontology: Some Perspectives on Music and the Posthumanities (2021)
Contemporary Music Review, 2021
In this article I address some questions concerning the emerging conjunction of musical research on improvisation and work in the ‘posthumanities’, in particular the theoretical results of the ‘ontological turn’ in the humanities. Engaging with the work of the composer John Cage, and George E. Lewis’s framing of Cage’s performative indeterminacy as a ‘Eurological’ practice that excludes ‘Afrological’ jazz improvisation, I examine how critical discourse on Cage and his conception of sound is relevant to the improvisation-posthumanities conjunction. After discussing some criticisms of ontological and materialist approaches to sound, I consider the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, posed as offering an alternative to these approaches. Following an examination of some limitations to ANT based around the themes of critique and abstraction, I draw from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Georgina Born to suggest that work on improvisation and the posthumanities may be fruitful, but must be part of a pluralistic mode of inquiry that does not reject critique and abstraction, as some work in the posthumanities has done.
The Well Tempered City: Participation and Intervention in Sound Art
Leonardo Electronic Almanac (Cybernetics Revisited issue), 2017
The article argues that if a sound artist while exploring a city as a site for artistic research does not remain a listener but instead registers his or her presence in the phenomenological development of the artwork by intervening and participating in the urban sound environment, the outcome can transcend mere impression of the urban space and become a critical reflection of the dynamic relationship between the artist and the city.