A Garden of Sounds and Flavours: Establishing a synergistic relationship between music and food in live performance settings
(2024)
author(s): Eduardo Gaspar Polo Baader
published in: KC Research Portal
During the past decade, there has been a surge in the literature about crossmodal correspondences, consistent associations our minds establish between stimuli that are perceived through different senses. Correspondences between sound/music and flavour/taste have received particular scholarly attention, which has lead to a variety of practical applications in the form of food and music pairings, mostly examples of so-called ‘sonic seasoning’, a way to use sound to enhance or modify the tasting experience.
This thesis aims to explore the pairing of food and music from an artistic perspective. Its goal is to find tools that would allow to present both music and food as components of coherent live performances in which neither of them is a mere ‘seasoning’ to the other. Through the description and exploration of different ‘mediating elements’ between them (such as crossmodal correspondences, but also structure, ritual, narrative, and others), a wide range of possibilities is presented to whoever wants to match food and music in a truly synergistic manner.
Readers interested in multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary artistic practices of any kind might find the outcomes of this research useful for their own work.
Modes of Music Listening and Modes of Subjectivity in Everyday Life
(2018)
author(s): Ruth Herbert
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Technologically mediated solitary listening now constitutes the prevalent mode of musical engagement in the Industrialized West. Music is heard in a variety of real-world contexts, and qualities of subjective experience might similarly be expected to be wide-ranging. Yet though much is known about function (music as a behavioral resource) less research has focused on ways in which music mediates consciousness. This essay critiques conceptualizations of music listening in extant literature and explores how listening to music in daily life both informs and reflects subjectivity.
Psychological and musicological literature on music listening commonly distinguishes between autonomous and heteronomous ways of listening, associating the former with unusual and the latter with mundane, habitual listening scenarios. Empirical findings from my research, which used ethnographic methods to tap qualities of subjective experience, indicate that attentive and diffused listening do not map neatly onto 'special' and 'ordinary' contexts and that a distributed, fluctuating attentional awareness and multimodal focus are central to many experiences of hearing music.
HydroFiles
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Lia Mazzari
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
hydroFiles is a network of 8 live audio streams continuously broadcasting from various sites above and below sea level of the waterways of Amsterdam. In ‘live audio streaming’, microphones are embedded in places semi-permanently; they transmit sound continuously from one location to many possible listeners over the internet. Through these ‘streamers’, it is possible to tune-in to remote and hard to reach locations, it transforms the act of ‘listening to’ into ‘listening with’ environments, furthering an ethical reorientation to more-than-human life on a shared planet, and expanding geographic borders.
hydroFiles is supported by by Waterschap Amstel, Gooi en Vecht and by Waternet
hydroFiles has been produced as part of the artist research project Polyphonic Landscapes project led by The ArtEZ Professorship Theory in Arts, in collaboration with Zone2Source, Amsterdam.