Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 1. Doctoral Research Doctoral research undertaken in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University.

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  Composition as Commentary: Voice and Poetry in Electroacoustic Music (2020) author(s): Edmund Hunt published in: Journal for Artistic Research, Birmingham City University
  What is the role of a spoken or sung text in an electroacoustic composition? Does it represent anachronism, assigning the role of communication to the voice and thereby depriving more abstract electroacoustic material of its rhetorical force? Does the disembodied, electroacoustic voice distance the audience from the communicative power of the words that are heard? Although Simon Emmerson argued that the disembodied human voice in acousmatic music can often seem frustrating, this sense of disembodiment might be turned to the composer’s advantage, as the basis of a methodology for creative practice. In the process of developing a methodology to address questions of text, language, voice, and electroacoustic technology, I created two musical compositions. Both works used the untranslated words of an enigmatic Old English poem, ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’. At first glance, the idea of using a text in an obscure or ancient language that carries little or no semantic meaning for the listeners might raise further questions. Is this a deliberate attempt at obfuscation, hiding the paucity of the composer’s ideas behind a veneer of archaism or even naive exoticism? As my investigation progressed, I began to envisage the process of electroacoustic composition as a type of non-linguistic commentary on a text. Rather than hindering the listener’s understanding of a composition inspired by literature, the electroacoustic voice might help to reveal different interpretations of a text, allowing multiple ideas and identities to be heard.
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  From culture to nature and back. A personal journey through the soundscapes of Colombia (2020) author(s): Lamberto Coccioli published in: Journal of Sonic Studies, Birmingham City University
  The purpose of this essay is twofold: to celebrate the astonishing richness and diversity of Colombia’s natural and human soundscapes, and to reconstruct the process through which my direct experience of those soundscapes has influenced my own creative work as a composer. Reflecting on a long personal and intellectual journey of discovery that plays out on many levels – musical, anthropological, aesthetical – helps bring to the fore important questions on music composition as the locus of cultural appropriation and reinterpretation. How far can the belief system of a distant culture travel before it loses its meaning? From a post-colonial perspective, can a European composer justify the use and repurposing of ideas, sounds and songs from marginalised indigenous communities? In trying to give an answer to these questions through the lens of my own experience I keep unravelling layer upon layer of complexity, in a fascinating game of mirrors where my own identity as a "Western" composer starts crumbling away.
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  Re-mapping the curve of the young female figure; feminist media art practice, in the age of digital transformation (last edited: 2024) author(s): Sophie Hedderwick This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
  This practice research project (re) imagines the young female body and the transformation of adolescence; using the curve as an expanded motif, conceived in relational, figurative, temporal and geometric terms.   I reflect on how the adolescent body is (re) presented differently by digital technologies, through the prism of feminist post-human philosophy. I explore how new media can (re) imagine the pubescent  body in its polymorphous becoming using multimedia time displacement techniques and immersive technologies. Through multimedia technologies - photography, film, animation and 3D - I explore the female figure from an eco feminist perspective. I aim to emancipate the young female figure from a patriarchal representation and linear trajectory to one that looks both backwards and forwards to a possible future, a feminist space (Kristeva. 1981); using a feminist praxis to examine the possibilities of a non-linear arc of transformation. Through a series of iterative experimental digital artworks I (re)imagine the young female figure in terms of relational movement (Manning. 2009) and the post-human notion of becoming woman (Braidotti. 2016). I explore how the adolescent girl/woman moves in relation to the environment and others, using immersive digital technologies that privilege a sensory encounter.
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