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.
A Performative Response to Sites of Surveillance: The Gorilla Park Project
(2022)
author(s): Shauna Janssen, Katrina Jurjans, Eduardo Perez Infante, christian scott
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The key interlocutor for this project is Gorilla Park, an irregular shaped parcel of land located on a disused railway track, in a Montreal neighbourhood called Marconi-Alexandria, currently a rapidly gentrifying quarter of the city. The uneven development in this part of the city is, in part, due to the increasing presence of Big Data and Smart City start-up companies.
The politics of the smart city discourse are deeply entangled with ideas of the ‘right to the city,’ and brings into question: who is the smart city for? What is a smart city? Current trends towards connectivity and mediated urban environments are generally predicated upon a ‘digital agenda,’ wherein the privileged position of smart and intelligent technologies is being furthered. In this exposition one of our aims is to problematize urban sites of surveillance through performative and sonic experiments.
Due to the global pandemic, however, we began to collaborate remotely and work with the documentation of our temporary occupation and in-situ exploration of Gorilla Park. As such, this exposition foregrounds an unfolding and iterative approach to artistic research that focuses on performative methods of urban research taking place in contested city sites; foregrounding the experimental use of bespoke sound devices and 360˚ video recordings, to situated methods such as walking, and hacking Google Earth imagery.
Research-Creation about and with Food: Diffraction, Pluralism, and Knowing
(2022)
author(s): David Szanto, Geneviève Sicotte
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
A hybrid approach for artistic-academic investigation, research-creation has proven effective in addressing complex socio-technical issues while usefully undoing the dualities that emerge within more conventional research practice. In the realm of food, this is particularly relevant, given that the knowledges that constitute food culture and food systems are pluralistic. Moreover, food embeds some of our most critical contemporary challenges, such as hunger, migration, trade, climate change, and justice. Methods that address the subjective and relational nature of food, such as those of research-creation, are therefore critical. This exposition presents two food-centered research-creation projects, created by the two co-authors, each of which aimed at three objectives: (a) the pluralization of methods, knowledge, and outputs; (b) collaboration in meaning-making, reflection, and feedback; and (c) ongoing epistemic and personal transformation. Geneviève Sicotte’s Signes de vie / Vital Signs is a digital, multimedia exhibition, largely presented through verbal, visual, and auditory content. David Szanto’s The Gastronome in You is a series of three performances about death, life, and the microbiome, using the materiality of a sourdough starter to activate the gustatory and haptic senses. By bringing these two projects into dialogue with each other, and through an experimental, “diffractive analysis” process, we present ways in which research-creation can help illuminate new forms of knowledge that engage with the distinct challenges and opportunities within food studies and for the future of food-and-human relations.
Between Agony and Ecstasy: Investigations into the Meaning of Pain
(2018)
author(s): Barbara Macek
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Pains are moving, alluring us to world-making-activities, attuning our bodies with other bodies and therefore putting us in relation to others. Pains cut into our net of habits, and even the slightest pain causes a transformation. Pains are crushing, deeply distressing, showing us our limitations – but also our capability to go beyond our limits, to outgrow ourselves.
In the course of my literary research for this project I generated 10 PAIN CATEGORIES that I derived from poems, philosophical and literary texts on pain, and my own experiences. These poetical/pictorial categories differ profoundly from pain categories as they are to be found in common pain questionnaires: They refer to the existential dimension of pain and do not differentiate between physical and mental pain in order to overcome the myth of this dichotomy. The next step of my project consisted in going into the field to look at, imagine and feel into pain. I conducted methodical observations in the casualty departments of two Viennese hospitals and developed my own method of "self-reflective observation in the mode of seeing/feeling". The assemblages as part of this exposition present the results of these investigations and reconstruct different perspectives on PAIN as an EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENON.
Sticky currents: Drawing folds in serial exhaustion
(2015)
author(s): Nicole De Brabandere
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The affective qualities of surfaces (and the skin) in drawing operations, wedging clay, and video are developed in this research exposition by activating them with both the concept and the practice of exhaustion in emergent series. The practical and conceptual framework emerges along side Deleuze's 'The Fold', Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the 'smooth' and the 'striated', and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's 'The Undercommons'. The images, videos, poetics, and concepts of the exhibition develop folding textures and generate charged affective worlds with the force to modulate habits and attunements. As these emergent worldings intensify an emergent corporeal, they also activate a research process that continually folds over and across itself, opening up to new affects, concepts, and subjectivities. Folds exhaust themselves in the multiple, unspeakable midst, until the gentle vibration sparks a current and starts to resonate the fine hairs on the surface of the skin so that they again become sticky.
Sonic Peripheries: Middling With/In the Event
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Petra Klusmeyer
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition showcases select parts of the doctoral dissertation from which it derives its title. To access the full thesis, follow the link to Leiden University Scholarly Publications (http://hdl.handle.net/1887/77342). The purpose of this exposition is to present a non-linear reading experience featuring a range of materials, including artifacts from a course of research events (see/visit Online Addendum) and individual experimental chapters (see/click, e.g., Experimenting Sound/Non-Sound).
About the research and dissertation
The research explores what and how sound does in certain art practices; it lends an ear to so-called ‘material-discursive’ events that come into expression as in/determined sonic occurrences through aesthetic practices. Likewise, the research done in and through the arts attunes to the vibrational immanence that underlies all experience. This view considers the sonic as a vibrational force and an affective, affirmative, albeit paradoxical event: oscillating between matter and matter-mattering, intuited as intensive force and apprehended as ‘aesthetic figure’ through sensation. This ambiguity or sense of betweenness is felt throughout the thesis and lies at the heart of the inquiry, which asks, among other questions: How do the material conditions of a sonic artwork-performance (the content) and the ensuing sensations (the form of expression) co-emerge; how are they produced in one another?
The dissertation has three main objectives. Firstly, it describes sonic art practice as experimental research and makes a case for curating such practices as a form of research; it positions this type of research as a contribution to new forms of knowledge and provides a resource for future research-creations and (reform of) evaluation practices. Secondly, it brings together philosophy and art to elaborate a genuine manner of working with sonic matter (mattering); it conceptualizes and materializes novel ways of thinking, and creates a case for writing itself as practice and curating/producing art as theory; that is, it seeks to practice what it theorizes and vice versa. Thirdly, it advocates a certain transformation of self that lets us side-step ourselves, intervene and invent possible worlds or future fabulations. Practicing a process-oriented exploration complexifies as it advances; it creates resonances between theory and practice, between audience and sound art, between the written thesis – inclusive of presented artifacts – and the reader. It wants not to reduce but foster awareness of the ongoing complexity of life.
Movements of Thought | Knots of Thought
(last edited: 2015)
author(s): Leslie Plumb, Mayra Morales, Csenge Kolozsvari, Diego Gil
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
M.O.T. considers ways of moving & thinking through embodied experience, & of thought itself as a mobile interplay across disciplines. K.O.T. is a mode of working-thinking between disciplines that push us to make perceptible the captures, blockages and interruptions in our academic/artistic projects.
M.O.T. considers ways of moving & thinking through embodied experience, & of thought itself as a mobile interplay across disciplines. K.O.T. is a mode of working-thinking between disciplines that push us to make perceptible the captures, blockages and interruptions in our academic/artistic projects.open exposition comments (0)