Embodied/Encoded: A Study of Presence in Digital Music
(2024)
author(s): Robert Seaback
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
Presence in Embodied/Encoded is concerned with the physical and embodied dimensions of musicking in relation to digital-informational representations of such phenomena. I explore presence through practices of recording, creative coding, audio production, and spatial electronic music composition. Of particular interest is the link between presence and the sensual/corporeal aspects of sound production and listening. Research in embodied music cognition and extended reality provide a foundation for this type of meaning formation.
In the context of immersive electronic music, I suggest that physical presence – a sense of ‘being somewhere’—emerges not just from images/representations of place, but from peripheral aspects of the (embodied) acoustic experience such as spatial proximity and distance, diffuseness, resonance and reverberation, noise floor, etc. Consequently, musical meaning in “Embodied/Encoded” moves away from the symbolic dimension of electronic sounds toward meaning as an outcome of embodied interaction with the environment. The concept of presence can also apply to ‘mixed’ music, or combinations of acoustic and electronic sources, in which virtual presence is complicated by real bodies and spaces.
Digital technology renders sound a flexible, malleable entity—a ‘flickering’ signifier to borrow from Hayles—capable of reconfiguring presence in creative ways. The dance between encoded and embodied dimensions inspires and informs this artistic research. Through a body of immersive music and multimedia documentation, I unpack connections between presence and its digital abstractions.
Feedback Saxophone: Expanding the Microphonic Process in Post-Digital Research-Creation
(2024)
author(s): Greg Bruce
published in: Research Catalogue
The microphonic process is the term I use to encapsulate how microphones, loudspeakers, and related media are used to support, extend, and innovate musical practice. In this research-creation thesis, I contextualize, document, and analyze my own application of the microphonic process – feedback saxophone. My feedback saxophone system combines the unique characteristics of the tenor saxophone with the idiosyncrasies of various microphones and loudspeakers to produce and manipulate acoustic feedback. While there are examples of similar systems, there is no standardization and little documentation exists outside of audio recordings. Furthermore, my work employs feedback in a systematized fashion that challenges its conventional, indeterminate use in performance and composition.
To support this research-creation, I discuss the history of the microphonic process, examine contemporary “microphonic” practices, and use these findings to describe and analyze my own works. For the history of the microphonic process, I discuss how microphone amplification changed popular vocal technique through the work of early-microphone singer Bing Crosby. I then discuss how microphonic instrumentaria were variously employed by avant-garde and popular artists using the examples of Mikrophonie I by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hugh Davies’ feedback work Quintet, and the guitar-feedback practice of Jimi Hendrix.
Following this discussion of instrumentaria, I establish the contemporary context in which my research-creation occurs by examining two present-day microphonic saxophonists, Colin Stetson and John Butcher. I use their distinct electroacoustic practices as a springboard to explain recent musical-technological trends: from the accelerating consumption of digital media in the new paradigm of sound, to the reactionary concepts of post-digitalism and the minimally augmented instrument. Lastly, I describe the creation of three concert etudes for my post-digital, minimally augmented feedback saxophone system, and critically examine the new works’ processes of creation, musical materials, and aesthetics.
Extra-dimensional accordion playing using a surround sound system: Creating new music
(2023)
author(s): Kaat Vanhaverbeke
published in: Research Catalogue
Approaching the accordion bellows technique explicitly three-dimensionally instead of linearly has been a major step in finding my artistic voice as an accordionist. Hypothetically, the spatial movements implied in playing the accordion, prompt an extra musical dimension and affect with an audience. By addressing this aspect of accordion playing in compositional collaborations and by amplifying the movements of accordion playing and using a surround sound system, the technique, and hypothetically its impact on the audience, is made uncommonly explicit.
In two phases and from two different perspectives (i.e. the perspective from an external composer and the composer-performer's perspective) new music for accordion and electronics was created, where the electronics are in both cases directly derivated from the accordion part. However, what it means to amplify and use the particular extra-dimensionality of accordion playing, was left open to the respective composer.
The resulting music, presented at the research concert on September 22, 2023, in Studio LOOS The Hague, has shown two individual compositional approaches, yet it was clear that the movements of accordion playing functioned as an interesting and central dissonance within the music.
In both the roles of performer and composer, this research has shown its significance. In collaboration with composers, it has introduced a way of working where this specific way of playing the accordion can be established in contemporary repertoire, whereas the electronic-artificial connection between music and movement has created interesting compositional tools suited for future projects.
Case-Specific Electroacoustic Systems
(2022)
author(s): Alejandro Montes de Oca
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
This composition-based project of artistic research introduces the term Case-Specific Electroacoustic Systems to describe a set of electric, digital, and acoustic devices that are interconnected in a particular way to embody a specific sound work. The artistic research states that when the sound composition process occurs in tandem with the electroacoustic system configuration and design process, a particular creative practice is engendered. The main research questions are how the development of such a system becomes another parameter of sound creation, and how this influences the artistic ideas and process elaborated around a specific sound work. In the course of the doctoral trajectory five new sound works were created and presented, thus forming the artistic portfolio of this doctoral project. Each work included the composition, design, and creation of a case-specific electroacoustic system. An introduction to the concept of Case-Specific Electroacoustic Systems, its contextualisation, and an analysis of the artistic practice and the outcomes of each of the five artworks are presented in this written thesis. The complete scope of this doctoral project, including the media material of the artistic portfolio and this artistic doctoral thesis, is contained within the exposition Case-Specific Electroacoustic Systems, published and archived in the Research Catalogue online database.
Analysis for 'Derailed'
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Metehan Köktürk
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Derailed is a collective audio-visual work of KompozitArt Collective, conceptualized on life’s evolutionary course which is transformed to an industrial stage with humanity. Perceiving the existence and evolutionary process of life in a very general perspective is the initial inspiration. It is aimed to question the life process that starts in the water and comes to the land and is systematized itself in the results of its own process with a creative approach.
Source Signals 2
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Kees Tazelaar
connected to: KC Research Portal
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Source Signals is an album with music I recorded between 1981 and 1985. The album showcases a transition from pop-oriented guitar tracks to experiments with electronics in which the guitar was the main sound source. Several bass guitar overdubs and one guitar overdub were made before the album was released in 2019. My rediscovery of these tracks and the decision finally to release them also triggered a renewed interest in the guitar as a musical instrument.
After the LP Source Signals was released, I had been playing guitar at home almost on a daily basis, initially without a concrete plan. Gradually, however, an idea developed to compose an acousmatic multichannel work in which guitar playing would be the only source. This became Source Signals 2, an acousmatic eight-channel composition of almost 28 minutes.
Timbral Microperspectives
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Martyna Kosecka
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Project "Timbral Microperspectives" rediscovers the processes leading the composer in his/her artistic preferences through the immerse analysis of the factors of artistic discovery, lifelong learning, and contribution. The starting point for executing "Timbral Microperspectives" research lies in investigating innovative solutions in various tuning systems' interrelations within a musical composition. Driven by the initial idea for distinct timbral concepts, creative, quite often non-musical impulses or attraction by certain sound phenomena, Martyna Kosecka tries to rediscover and establish microtone's functioning in the harmonic landscape of music, as well as its overall significance in the creation of her new musical work. What is the process of transformation of the artist within the artistic process? What can be the possible triggers that shape our decision making in art? How if to document our choice-making and analyze it along with the growth of artistic creation itself?
This project contributes to the dialogue within musical aesthetic and artistic research theories. It provides a new look at the compositional processes and corresponding methodology practices in an artist's self-development.
Shekasteh Mouyeh
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Saman Samadi
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Radif – or, the traditional repertoire of Persian classical music, consisting of more than 200 short melodic motions (gusheh), which are arranged into seven principal modes (dastgāh) with five secondary branches of these modes (āvāz) – is the oldest documented version of Dastgah music, developed by Mirza Abdollah in the 19th century. This exposition represents the confrontation of these microtonal modes with and within electroacoustic music material and techniques, and the problematisation of the results along with objects of video-art and visual effects, creating a set of compositions that would exhibit novelty; furthermore, the assemblage of them for and through a live performance utilizing improvisational methods as an attempt to expand timbral possibilities in a contextual relationship with Western contemporary classical music. The aim of this artistic research is producing a syncretistic multimedia work of art that could serve in assimilating two perspectives of Eastern and Western into a new coalescence towards the grail of a universal totality of classical forms.