TO THE ONE I MISS
(2024)
author(s): Min Ji Cha
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
[SCHOOL] Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2024.
[DEPARTMENT ] BA Interactive Media Design
[SUMMERY]
How can one unravel their relationship with a void through exploring their personal experience and knowledge of emptiness?
Starting from the long lost frustration and unfulfillment for the inner void that I entail and wanting to define and understand what this void is and gain safety and peace in mind with it. By unraveling the complicated knot of the relationship between human and inner void, looking into different experiences of “missing” in my personal life and knowledge of emptiness, such as Korean cultural background, Language gap in translation,
Definition of “Home”, Ambivalence in emotion, Moon jar, Clay and The connection in everything.
Morten Qvenild – The HyPer(sonal) Piano Project
(2024)
author(s): Morten Qvenild
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
Towards a (per)sonal topography of
grand piano and electronics
How can I develop a grand piano with live electronics through iterated development loops in the cognitive technological environment of instrument, music, performance and my poetics?
The instrument I am developing, a grand piano with electronic augmentations, is adapted to cater my poetics. This adaptation of the instrument will change the way I compose. The change of composition will change the music. The change of music will change my performances. The change in performative needs will change the instrument, because it needs to do different things. This change in the instrument will show me other poetics and change my ideas. The change of ideas demands another music and another instrument, because the instrument should cater to my poetics. And so it goes… These are the development loops I am talking about.
I have made an augmented grand piano using various music technologies. I call the instrument the HyPer(sonal) Piano, a name derived from the suspected interagency between the extended instrument (HyPer), the personal (my poetics) and the sonal result (music and sound). I use old analogue guitar pedals and my own computer programming side by side, processing the original piano sound. I also take out control signals from the piano keys to drive different sound processes. The sound output of the instrument is deciding colors, patterns and density on a 1x3 meter LED light carpet attached to the grand piano. I sing, yet the sound of my voice is heavily processed, a processing decided by what I am playing on the keys. All sound sources and control signal sources are interconnected, allowing for complex and sometimes incomprehensible situations in the instrument´s mechanisms.
Credits:
First supervisor: Henrik Hellstenius
Second Supervisors: Øyvind Brandtsegg and Eivind Buene
Cover photo by Jørn Stenersen, www.anamorphiclofi.com
All other photo, audio and video recording/editing by Morten Qvenild, unless stated.
Living in and through our bodies: somatic principles that support the experience of pain and discomfort
(2024)
author(s): Maisie James
published in: Birmingham City University
This thesis is an autoethnographic, practice research investigation, offering further knowledge to the field of somatic practice, pain, and discomfort. As this thesis is a practice research inquiry, I offer practice to the field that is further supported by my autoethnographic positions. Embodied research and the lived experience are therefore central, exploring how somatic practice can support the sensations of pain and discomfort. Whilst practice is at the forefront of this investigation, theoretical frameworks from the somatic field, practical offerings from other practitioners, therapists, and researchers, and already established somatic ideologies have informed the research process and have offered an integrated approach to supporting the understanding of how practice can support pain and discomfort. Both the practical and theoretical elements of this research emphasise the importance of improvisatory movement and relationships with the self to engage with a sense of freedom and self-expression. By adopting different somatic principles within practice, together with a theoretical understanding of the applications of somatic practice to the body, this research explores movement and wellbeing from a practical perspective, whilst drawing upon key ideas from the somatic field of research. The refined set of principles that this thesis contributes to the field are: The Breath, Movement Economy, The Skeleton, Rotation and Flow, Embodied Rhythm, Stretch, Extension and Elongation, Dynamic and Light Self-touch, Noticing and Addressing Habits, and Rest and Active Stillness. Each somatic principle was explored practically throughout this investigation, resulting in an in depth, subjective approach to analysing data through the lived experience and the narratives of others involved in the research process.
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Birmingham City University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Supervisors: Dr Polly Hudson, Dr Carrie Churnside
‘LIBRETTISING’ SCIENCE: Using operatic narrative and performance to re-present scientific thought in an investigation of new methods towards developing contemporary opera.
(2024)
author(s): Roxanne Korda
published in: Birmingham City University
This practice-based research investigates presenting scientific concepts and research on the operatic platform through an interdisciplinary and collaborative process. It focuses on libretti writing and performance, using tools such as anthropomorphism, archetype and mythological characters to engage participants and the audience with the subjects on stage. The work explores how to create an experience which enables a deeper sense of the reality of the science presented, and makes the audience, performers and creative practitioners complicit in the existence of the concepts, or objects, being performed. The performativity of the work is allowed to play a key role in shaping the final piece, as the researcher explores the embodiment of the characters during the process of production towards cyclical presentations of the work.
This investigation includes two major collaborative projects in which I participated as librettist, producer and performer:
1. The Flowering Desert. An opera about the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, written to be performed specifically in planetaria. This involves a collaboration with: composer Daniel Blanco Albert; designer Alexander Kaniewski; filmmaker Tadas Stalyga; projectionist Leon Trimble; and the ThinkTank Planetarium (led by Colin Hutcheson).
2. Lipote: An Interconnected Journey. An opera/musical about deforestation due to intensive agriculture. Set in the soil from the perspective of the roots of trees. This involves a collaboration with: composer Oliver Farrow; jewellery maker Wanshu Li; choreographer Jingya Peng; and sound artist Leon Trimble.
Composition strategies for the creation of science-based interdisciplinary and collaborative music-theatre
(2024)
author(s): Daniel Blanco Albert
published in: Birmingham City University
The practice-based PhD research project comprises the development and application of composition strategies and techniques generated through interdisciplinary collaboration to integrate elements and ideas from non-sonic disciplines into the musical discourse of new music-theatre works, specifically opera. I explore mechanisms of mapping and association that engage with both the specific subject matter of each piece and the creative collaborative environment in which they are created, thus generating different compositional resources that I use to inform the creative process. By using mapping techniques, I can deeply engage and communicate a subject matter on different levels in the musical composition.
The framework for this research is the intertwining of art and science on a variety of levels from a music compositional perspective. Within this framework, I explored the integration of knowledge and data from the natural and social sciences to inform the composition of four science-based music-theatre works: In response to Naum Gabo: Linear Construction in Space No. 1 (2020), Autohoodening: The Rise of Captain Swing (2021), The Flowering Desert (2022), and TRAPPIST-1 (2023).
With this approach, I aim to closely link these works with their particular subject matter instead of being composed based just on my personal musical taste. By consistently and cohesively applying the strategies and techniques explored in this research, the outcome is not creating music about science or music inspired by science, but, instead, music embedded with science in which the scientific data and knowledge inform the composition decisions. The subject matter is therefore intertwined within the musical discourse, its performativity and theatricality, and its relationship with the other disciplines and collaborators involved in the creation of these music-theatre works.
Sonic Citizenship: About the Messy and Fragile Negotiations With and Through Sound
(2024)
author(s): Marie Koldkjær Højlund, Anette Vandsø and Morten Breinbjerg
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In this article we propose the concept of "sonic citizenship" as a framework for the multitude of ways in which we, in the rhythms of our everyday lives, form the aural background of each other, and how citizenship is practiced, negotiated, and maintained through everyday sonic activities. With examples of messy, fragile, and difficult interactions with sound from the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, we argue that the effort of tuning the soundscapes of the world needs to be complemented by an attuning approach that focuses on the negotiations we are constantly involved with in our everyday lives. The soundscape approach in the tradition of R. Murray Schafer implies that the soundscape is there as a landscape that we can uncover and tune. Conversely, the attuning approach of sonic citizenship understands soundscapes as relationships and dynamic configurations to which we must continuously attune, and which are themselves reconfigured via breaks in habitual attunements.
