The Sonic Atelier #7 – A Conversation with Caroline Shaw
(2025)
author(s): Francesca Guccione
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, performance, production, and technology.
This interview features Caroline Shaw, American composer, violinist, singer, and producer, whose work moves fluidly between concert music, studio production, and film scoring. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Partita for 8 Voices, Shaw combines historical sensibility with experimental curiosity, creating sound worlds that merge the human voice, instrumental gesture, and digital texture into a single expressive continuum.
In the conversation, Shaw reflects on the interconnectedness of composing, producing, and performing; on the role of technology as both a creative and tactile medium; and on the shifting perception of time, form, and space in contemporary music. She also discusses the relationship between notation and sound, the dialogue between acoustic and digital realms, and the value of presence, collaboration, and shared listening as vital counterpoints to digital mediation.
Shaw’s reflections reveal a vision of music as a living organism, at once human, technological, and emotional, where composition, sound design, and performance converge into an embodied act of imagination and connection.
Intermundium - Inhabiting the Space Between Musical Worlds
(2025)
author(s): Trina Bass Coleman
published in: NMH Student Portal
Inhabiting the Space Between Musical Worlds
Focusing a cultural lens and awareness of my own diverse musical heritage in order to manifest with clearer intention as a singer/composer moving forward; to untangle the given strands of musical/cultural influence and weave them more purposefully together.
An exploration of the elusive space between stylistic borders utilizing my own voice, jazz and classical instrumentalists, two choral ensembles of varying style, historically-based poetry and original texts, improvisation, and original compositions.
Between Data and Breath: Machine Learning, Musical Embodiment and the Emergence of Voice
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Jonathan Reus
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
From vocal deepfakes to artificial voice actors and pop star avatars, data-driven machine learning has intensified embodied, musical, and social complexities of voice. While disembodiment and decontextualisation of voice have been musical concerns since the invention of sound recording, AI voice synthesis accelerates these processes and adds new perceptual, cognitive, and social layers.
Many ontologies from voice studies imagine voice as resisting fixity, yet in today’s technological climate this resistance may be losing its ontological imperative. Voice is in transformation - possibly crisis - requiring both curiosity and care in paradoxical tension. These changes also unfold within a technological arms race for innovation, profit, and global AI supremacy. Artists are not only early adopters, but experimentalists and bards who participate in the narratives around AI and vocality.
This thesis evaluates the changing vocal condition through first-person artistic research with AI voice technologies, exploring their poetics and potentials in three artworks created between 2021–2025. In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit was a year-long generative radio broadcast exploring machine learning as a intergenerational vocal memory. iː ɡoʊ weɪ is a hybrid extended voice performance practice using real-time voice transfer to unravel vocal identity on stage. DadaSets investigates the invisibilized vocal labour of AI voice through collaborations with artists, new scoring systems, the absurdist dataset-making performance Bla Blavatar vs Jaap Blonk, and the invention of the voice synthesis instrument Tungnaá.
These works are analyzed through an interdisciplinary lens: experimental vocal traditions and the embodied musical-technological ethos of STEIM, alongside philosophies of voice, cognitive neuroscience, and material anthropology; while predictive coding theory frames compositional notions of uncanny, pathological and convivial technologisations of voice. Voice data emerges as paradoxical - both disembodied and relational, material and emergent, gift and commodity - functioning as the basis for musical animacy and collaboration within a rapidly changing socio-technical landscape.
Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger (ca. 1581 – 1651) : Betrachtungen zu seinem Leben und Umfeld, seiner Vokalmusik und seinem praktischen Material zum Basso continuo-Spiel
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Anne Marie Dragosits
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The thesis of Anne Marie Dragosits presents a new perspective on Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger (ca.1580-1651), who is nowadays only famous for his works for theorbo and lute, his remarkable output of vocal music of all genres being still mostly neglected from musicologists and performers. The thesis aims to change the perception of the composer via three different angles: A reconstruction of his life and career with a substantial amount of new biographical information builds one pillar of the book, whereas in the second part his vocal works are approached and contextualized as prototypes of radical „stile novo“ in Roman characteristic. The last third is dedicated to questions about basso continuo and Roman performance practice in Kapsperger’s lifetime, dealing also with the composers’ own material on continuo as fount of inspiration for continuo players of all instruments.
Important notice from the author:
Further research after finishing the PhD has unearthed important new archival material. Some of my hypotheses have been strongly confirmed, but some chapters of the biographical part of this thesis are not valid any more. Please find an updated version of Kapsperger’s biography here:
https://www.lim.it/en/essay/5964-giovanni-girolamo-kapsperger-9788855430470.html
Vienna, the 14th of November 2020
Anne Marie Dragosits
Inhabiting the Space Between Musical Worlds Focusing a cultural lens and awareness of my own diverse musical heritage in order to manifest with clearer intention as a singer/composer moving forward; to untangle the given strands of musical/cultural influence and weave them more purposefully together. An exploration of the elusive space between stylistic borders utilizing my own voice, jazz and classical instrumentalists, two choral ensembles of varying style, historically-based poetry and original texts, improvisation, and original compositions.open exposition comments (0)