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.
Embodied Bits
(2023)
author(s): Pedro Latas
published in: KC Research Portal
The Master research “Embodied Bits” concerns how trans-human, post-digital and post-internet ideas relate to my Queer experience. It is, in a nutshell, an ongoing research on how the technological world has spilled over into the biological world and how Queer folks are front and centre when it comes to taking advantage of technological developments in order to realise their identities.
The research question is “How do we perform ourselves in the digital realm?”. Though it started as a research on the practicalities and aesthetics of internet/networked-based performances it quickly opened a Pandora’s Box of social inquiry and analysis. Performing ourselves means performing ethnicity, gender, sexuality, cultural identity... There is an inevitability in drawing a direct connection between these topics and how do we, as singular and, paradoxically, plural human beings within ourselves engage with modern day technology. Through technology we are able to build ourselves, to draft new identities, to build again if they no longer suit our needs.
As an artistic research, “Embodied Bits” looks into how digital media has influenced human experience and focuses on the experiences of non-normative bodies and identities, in which I include my own. These topics are interlaced with my own compositional and performative work, always informed and inspired by the previously mentioned ideas and historical context.
Post-immersion: Towards a discursive situation in sound art
(2020)
author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Immersion is a much-used word in the domain of sound-based media arts. It is through immersion that the audiences are often made to engage with the artworks, using technical devices and medial dispositive that are at the intersection of culture and materiality in a post-digital era. In this mode of artistic representation, immersion operates as a context for realizing the production of presence as an illusion of non-mediation (Reiter, Grimshaw et al). The main concern of this proposed article is whether the audience tends to become a passive and non-acting guest within the immersive space often constructed by an authoritarian and technocratic consumer-corporate culture. I will argue in the article that in this mode of non-activity the audience may lose the motivation to question the content and context of the work by falling into a sensual and indulgent mode of experience, therefore allowing the consumerist-corporate powers to take over the free will of the audience (Lukas et al). From the position of a socially and environmentally committed sound artist myself, I will argue for producing a discursive context rather than an immersive one in sound artworks that aim to represent contemporary crisis such as climate change critically engaging with the Anthropocenic conditions. I will examine the possibility to create artworks where the individuality of the audience is carefully considered and taken into account as a crucial parameter. I will discuss a number of my recent works to develop and substantiate the argument.
Talking field: listening to the troubled site
(2017)
author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition examines my recent multi-channel sound composition 'Decomposing Landscape' (2015), inquiring into the complex, nebulous, and evolving relationship between sound and site that is thoroughly challenged in the practice of phonography or field-recording-based sound artworks dealing with environmentally troubled sites. Phonography-based compositions and sound artworks are developed through location-aware listening and field recordings made at specific sites and landscapes. The compositional strategy in these works relies on artistic interventions through the intricate processes of field recording and processing of recognisable environmental sounds using multi-channel spatialisation techniques. The artistic transformation renders these sounds into a blurry area between compositional abstraction and a portrayal of their site-based origins. The question is, how much spatial information is retained and how much abstraction is deployed in these sound artworks? A discussion of this work sheds light on some approaches and a methodology of handling site-specific evidence in sound art production.
Peri / G - Weaving together knowledge and embodiment - Finding the intersections between your own peer-reviewed scientific research and artistic work
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Katri Johanna Koivuneva
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This project explores how to approach the paradigm of embodiment and research in a post-digital society from a personal perspective, combining the academic, peer-reviewed lens of media education research with the artistic, embodied perspective of a dance artist.
The intersection of research and art in the digital age has been examined from myriad perspectives, yet often misses a crucial point: our bodies—and, by extension, the creation of art from a corporeal perspective—have been fundamentally altered in the frame of reference of post-digital and post-digital art. In the post-digital era, digitality is no longer a mere extension or prosthesis that perpetuates humanity. Rather, technology and computation have become so integral to our culture and bodies that digitality is only recognized as a core part of our identity when its absence is noticed.
Recent research shows that metacognitive awareness—our understanding of how and why we do things—aligns with approaches to learning and helps explain the strain we experience in post-digital environments (Koivuneva & Ruokamo, 2023; Koivuneva et al., submitted for evaluation; Koivuneva, 2025). Previous studies have often narrowed the concept of metacognition and its dimensions, but new quantitative methods, including those from my own research, have revealed additional dimensions of metacognitive awareness. These findings have significant implications for how we describe our reality. As Bogot (2024) asserts, "Culture moves through computation." Indeed, our evolved metacognitive consciousness is four-dimensional rather than two-dimensional. In post-digital environments, we consciously observe and focus on specific phenomena while also planning how to navigate these spaces in ways that reduce cognitive burden and foster meaningful connections with others. This helps us create deeper associations between the knowledge we acquire and our lived reality.
The phenomena from which we derive knowledge are all filtered through some form of computation. Scientists structure knowledge through various computational methods, while dance artists filter it through embodied practices. What unites these phenomena is that nearly all the information we encounter today is mediated by technology and computation, fundamentally altering how we relate to the world around us.
The way we learn has shifted, and our bodies now move within realities shaped by computers. The potential realities are expanding—limited only by the infinite possibilities created by artificial intelligence.