Research Catalogue

In this exposition I’m showing you my journey for these past two years of investigating my artistic practice through the meeting of identity and aesthetics. Due to my Iranian background, I have felt a need and curiosity to bring together my Iranian and European identities. This project is a dialogue between myself and music, encompassing sounds, arrangements, physical presence, materiality, technology, context, and politics. By politics I mean; history, cultural appropriation, diversity, colonisation, beliefs, and the current needs of the western culture. A project involving confrontations with habits, default parameters, and elements within digital audio workspaces, thereby incorporating scales.

Digital overview of artistic works by musician Jordan Sand

In this autoethnographic arts-based research, I return to the gift of music in my life and use it as the ultimate form of expression. I explore the process of navigating my own transgenerational trauma through composing and working with musicians from different musical and cultural backgrounds. Something like home explores the effect of finding common ground of love and compassion between my family members, especially those who have been navigating the traumas of war. I collected stories, memories, and impressions from my family’s childhood, and composed music that is inspired by them. In the first sections I discuss some concepts related to the transmittion of war trauma , and Bowen’s family system theory. Moreover, I relate to reasearches and projects that have been concerned with trauma art therapy and dealing with cultural trauma through music. As well as showing examples of composers who have been working with similar processes. In this project, I unfold my compositional process, and I present some possibilities of dealing with harmonizing traditional Arabic music, using partials from the harmonic series. I also share my process of collaborating with a lyric writer and a videographer who have helped me to bring the stories to life. Throughout the process I discovered that engaging with the stories unlocked new artistic outcomes and some unexpected artistic practices, expressions and results. Another important outcome of this project was the need for coming up with approaches that were used for transcultural music making and engaging the musicians with the stories but making sure to leave space for their own artistic identities to come across and shine. In the near future, I am hoping to use this project as a basis of my doctoral research project which will focus on memory expression through music by working with the diverse citizines of the finnish community.

Cultivating a sense of ownership in beginner music students is important for fostering engagement and self-confidence in their educational journey. This study explores how integrating creative activities into a beginner clarinet curriculum promotes ownership among students aged 9–11. Focusing on three specific activities tested in multiple case studies, the research investigates students' relation with their musical development. Findings reveal that using creative activities as part of a personalized, student-centered teaching approach enhances students' motivation and engagement, ultimately fostering a stronger sense of ownership in their learning experiences. The study also offers practical insights for music educators seeking to creatively teach instrumental skills while creating a meaningful musical experience for young clarinetists.

Table of contents JSS issues

The Grand Tour Experiment: A Transformative Traverse of the Picturesque Landscape was a human-pulled carriage journey that re-envisioned the eighteenth-century traverse of the picturesque landscape, the subject-objectification of the view, and the imperialistic impulse behind the voyage pittoresque. This artistic experiment visually, kinaesthetically, and performatively explored the transformation from landscape to image that formed the basis of modern perception, as part of the colonial legacy inherent within the picturesque view. The Grand Tour carriage was pulled by human labour, evidencing the forced labour economy that impelled the European Enlightenment, while demonstrating in human terms, the use, abuse, and commodification of human and non-human animals. The Grand Tour proceeded from Binche to Brussels to Antwerp, Belgium in 2022. The Grand Tour experiment investigated the eighteenth-century picturesque gaze, which travelled unchecked over the landscape in industrialised Europe, a harbinger of the annexation and enclosure of land that had been commonly owned, traditionally used, or publicly accessible, while portending the colonisation of lands abroad. The picturesque gaze, an imperialist mechanism, still fragments the landscape, excising two-dimensional pictures from the three-dimensional world around us, a vestige and augur of the destruction of lands, cultures, and peoples. Shifting between early modern and contemporary perception, The Grand Tour bisected space and time in a cleaving manoeuvre, creating new fault lines in which multiple planes of space-time might co-exist. This experiment tested whether a new neo-picturesque framework could be forged in a dimension of space-time that alters according to the perception and orientation of the traverser, casting contingent new imaginaries into physical and psychic realms where they may or may not become realities, according to Arno Böhler’s philosophy as artistic research approach (2019). This experiment envisaged a plurality that did not exist in the eighteenth century but may have already been limned in its myriad contradicting, contrasting, and diverging modes of sensing and experiencing the world around us in a relational and now relative notion of space-time. Download Accessible PDF