Diagramming Perception
(2022)
author(s): Mike Croft
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
This artistic research is a contribution to a larger research project titled ‘The Observation of Perception, considered through drawing’, hosted by i2ADS. The research begins with the hypothesis that perception can be diagrammed, in this case through and as a form of drawing that indicates how perception is for this investigator conceived and works in action. One of the two visual motifs of the work is also a meta-motif, in that as an action-camera placed over the eyes, it is the means by which the investigator records himself at work on the second main motif, which is his image as viewed in a circular hand-held mirror. The investigator approaches the initiative as a question of diagramming the self-same initiative, accepting whatever are its developed implications as the aesthetic of the work. Peirce's division of the diagram into elements of firstness and secondness, with the elusive recognition of diagram as an abstract entity before any communicative purpose, keys into a working practice that in any case veers towards the diagrammatic. The investigator's tendency to audio-visually record his working process has led him to a position where the logistics of the purpose paradoxically reveal the subjectivity – if not absurdity – of the self-same process. In this case, little by little, a contingent factor of a wart takes centre-stage as blind spot; at-once a torn hole within the drawing's material surface, the action camera as an illusory obstruction, and a factor that oscillates with and as the circular self-portrait. The presentation takes the viewer/reader through the process, largely perceptual, that is diagrammed on and as the artifactual outcome, the drawing.
Archived presentations from SAR 2021 - Vienna
(2022)
author(s): Jonas Howden Sjøvaag
published in: SAR Conference 2020
The 12th SAR Conference on Artistic Research of the Society for Artistic Research in 2021 was hosted by mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. It was oriented on the three attractors "care", "dare" and "share" and was the first SAR conference to be organized as a live online event. The online format also reached out in order to facilitate participation by individuals from new geographical regions and invited artistic researchers to share their work, processes, methods, discoveries, knowledge interventions, new insights, and understandings and to engage in exchange—in actions and words, and in ways complex and simple, conventional and unconventional, robust and fragile.
A selection of conference contributions has been assembled for documentation in this roof exposition managed by Jonas Howden Sjøvaag.
Research and Critical Edition of Capriccio Diabolico by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
(2022)
author(s): Eva Calvo López
published in: KC Research Portal
In short, the proposed work consists in a critical edition of Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Capricho diabolico, backed up by previous research in which I compare the manuscript and Andrés Segovia's interpretative edition. As a result of the significant differences between the two, I propose a version that is faithful to the original work, but without overlooking the collaboration between the two musicians.
Performing Music Theory
(2022)
author(s): Bart de Graaf
published in: KC Research Portal
In my thesis Performing Music Theory, I will examine how listening to recordings of musical performances may influence my analysis of Chopin’s First Ballade. Therefore, I take the music as heard in performance as the starting point for the analysis, rather than the score. By consulting recorded performances by various pianists, I will analyze how different performances may lead to different analyses. These analytical observations will concern phrase structure, harmony, topical analysis and form. The interpretation of form in particular is highly dependent on tempo choices that pianists make. In the case of the First Ballade, a piece with very few tempo indications, these choices vary widely.
I will show that in some cases clear analytical conclusions can be drawn from performances. And in other cases, rather far-fetched theoretical analyses must be made to describe the performer’s choices, demonstrating how problematic it is to base an analysis entirely on performances. What does that mean for the relationship between performer and theorist, and more particularly for the position of the ‘prescribing’ theorist, who considers analysis as a starting point in a musical interpretation? And what does this mean for the importance of the Analysis course at conservatories?
A Quest for Musical Clarity: Grounding Compositional Practices in Gestalt and Perception Theories
(2022)
author(s): Charles Baumstark
published in: KC Research Portal
What are the main theories on sound and musical perception? Is there a possibility for the composer to understand those ideas and use them as the basis for the organization of his craft? Would those be enough to create the musical ‘clarity’ I am looking for? Finally, can I find a way to formalize any of those theories in my composition practice?
As a starting point for this investigation, part one establishes the philosophical ground for this investigation about clarity, particularly stressing the difference between intention and object, between form and structure, and their complementary nature and interaction with each other, before drawing a first idea on musical perception through the lens of Gestalt theory.
Parts two and three detail the different elements that come into play while applying those ideas into my composition practice. I introduce a list of the parameters that will play a prominent role in the elaboration of the representation of the mathematical formulations seen in part four by developing further my understanding of the theories elaborated by Leonard B. Meyer around the idea of ‘expectation’ in his book Emotion and Meaning in Music, and articulating them from a practical point of view.
The fourth and final part of this investigation exposes a mathematical representation of my thinking on those ideas in order to conceive and use them in my composition practice. This ‘model’, based on an understanding of what will be referred to as ‘motion’, is the ground for the elaboration of the musical shapes in my pieces.
How to understand stage fright?
(2022)
author(s): Matylda Adamus
published in: KC Research Portal
Exposition 2022
What is stage fright, how to understand it and successfully perform with it?
