Polyphonizing as a Contemplative Practice
(2025)
author(s): Jakob Stillmark
published in: Research Catalogue
When composing with musical borrowings within repetitive structures, a dual perception often occurs, in which listening shifts its focus from the inherent representation of the borrowings to their immediate sonic presence. This shift in attention is frequently characterized as a form of aesthetic contemplation.
This paper demonstrates an artistic exploration of how the concept of aesthetic contemplation, along with contemplative practices, can inform the compositional process and what techniques this might require.
The research draws on a series of compositional experiments with repetition and fragmentation of musical borrowings as well as on experiences from meditative practice. A central insight of the project is that the aforementioned moments of dual perception are inherently polyphonic in nature. Building on this, a compositional approach of "polyphonizing" is developed.
Braced Under the Heating Sun: Embodied Listening Practices
(2025)
author(s): Melissa Ryke
published in: Research Catalogue
How can embodied listening be performed, from my ears (body) to yours? How are we (dis)oriented? ‘Braced under the heating sun’ is centred around listening to and documenting my childhood home and its aural particularities through processes of embodied listening. The project is based on my recordings and experiences there between February and March 2020 (bookended by the waning Australian black summer bush fires and the burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic). The house is made from wood and so bends with the weather. The wooden structure amplifies the sounds of our habitation. The house is located on the edge of a small town and next to a sugarcane farm in North Queensland. Although in a tropical climate it has no flyscreens, and air-conditioning in only one room. The windows are open all of the time to let a breeze through. Most evenings you can find green tree frogs, geckos and insects amongst other animals in or around the house. In this way nature (a wild exterior) pushes against and blurs into the home (an organised interior). It is never silent there, the sounds are a mix of all forces; human/animal, natural/industrial. For me, it resonates as a site that is connected to the world despite its rural location. In this house the “rhythms and cycles of the living and the immediate needs of every living being are highlighted and played out. It is where intensities proliferate themselves, where forces are expressed for their own sake, where sensation lives and experiments, where the future is affectively and perceptually anticipated” (Elizabeth Grosz 2008). In this audio paper, I discuss this installation work and my continued research on embodied listening.
tppt
(2025)
author(s): Catarina Almeida
published in: Research Catalogue
theory
practice
theorize practice
practice theory
...
By using any of these words I am establishing an order of importance among them. My body cannot vocalize two of them at the same time. How in the world can this terrible order of things be abolished? How can we relate to a possible merge of the dichotomy theory/practice through language?
"16"
(2025)
author(s): Catarina Almeida
published in: Research Catalogue
The theory & practice affair: this is piece "16" from the series "x out of 5448643200", and it is an arrangement of 16 possible combinations among 5448643200 available of the letters {p, r, a, c, t, i, c, e, t, h, e, o, r, y}. These letters make the word 'practicetheory', and also the word 'theorypractic'e. In fact, none of these two words exist, and yet are identifiable 'theory' and 'practice' as constitutive halves within them. Discourse not only describes the world but actually produces the world. We, as researchers and as artists - and particularly as artist-researchers - are in permanent tension with the two blocks, theory and practice, and despite our struggles to merge both, we are, through language, every time referring to one after the other. One after the other, in a hierarchy. We cannot speak the two words at the same time and, unless we invent a new word to refer to the crossbreed of the two, we are condemned to this limiting dichotomy. "x out of 5448643200" presents the hypothesis of billions of possibilities to re-write the productive merging of theory and practice. "16" shows sixteen of them
(Thanks to Steve Norton and Robert Stevenson for collaboration)
Home page JSS
(2025)
author(s): Journal of Sonic Studies
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Home page of the Journal of Sonic Studies
