Research Catalogue

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.

Cylinders and discs recorded

The concept of non-hierarchical collaboration in score-based music offers a new perspective on the score and the instrument as distinct agents within the creative process. This case study, based on my co-creative collaboration with composer Francisco Corthey, explores how my relationship with the instrument – and other experiential factors – shaped the development of the composition, addressed ethical questions surrounding collaboration, and contributed to the production of musical meaning in a work presented to me as a notated score. By sharing control over musical parameters with my instrument and body – and by deliberately unlearning aspects of my instrumental technique – I aimed to cultivate a practice specific to this work, one that treats the musical composition as a site- and context-responsive event. This approach led me to examine how elements such as performance context, venue, and audience affect the emergence of meaning and inform my evolving performance strategies, through processes of responsiveness and an awareness of fragility as a generative force. Several of these reflections are gathered in the Shared Space model – an ongoing artistic experiment that explores inclusive, responsive practices within concert settings. Download Accessible PDF

‘Selective Retention: Composing through Queries and Graphs’ reflects on composing through software systems while focusing on reinterpreting musical materials through computational methods. The exposition examines two projects that utilise software tools as temporal portals, merging algorithms with composition to create new musical contexts. It highlights the evolving relationship between these tools and their source materials, emphasising a process of iterative approaches and adaptation. The text also explores the emergent nature of creative intention and the importance of addressing local details in sound and coded data. Within the exposition, software applications are exposed, the ideas behind them are discussed, and examples of music composed with them are presented. Download Accessible PDF

This exposition explores how different technologically mediated presentations of guitar sounds work as materials to form an acousmatic electroacoustic composition. By juxtaposing processed guitar recordings with computer-generated realizations of guitar sounds, this work considers how composition can be used to engage with changing interpretations of instrumentality and liveness that stem from new music technologies. This includes the notion that such concepts can be an integral part of a sound work that uses fixed media. Here, listening to the boundaries between real and virtual guitars is more than just a technical feature. It informs stylistic choices and references different genre trajectories in electroacoustic music. The featured piece, "Obsession", is used to discuss changing approaches to dealing with the abstraction of source material, hybridization, and algorithmic procedures as aspects of acousmatic music. Additionally, the piece serves as an investigation of the guitar as a unique electroacoustic instrument. Download Accessible PDF