Research Catalogue

research expositions

• Structure-Borne Sound for Music and Intermedia Creation (last edited: 2018) author(s): Otso Tapio Aavanranta, Daniel Adrian Malpica Gomez This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  The object of the my Academy of Finland postdoctoral project (2014-2017)is to investigate and tap the potential of structure-borne sound as a medium for musical expression. Structure-borne sound is defined as audio-rate vibration induced into a solid element, giving rise to air-borne sound diffusion as well as to audiotactile perception when the vibrating element is brought in direct physical contact with the body. Structural audio vibration is an everyday phenomenon. It is omnipresent in music, for instance via the vibrating soundboards of chordophones and percussions. However, the electronic music praxis has almost exclusively adopted the moving-coil loudspeaker as its tool for sound diffusion. Structure-borne sound presents numerous possibilities for transforming a range of solid objects into sound-emitting speakers and thus a radical alteration of the established sound practice in music, theatre, installation art and intermedia forms. Sound can be induced into the structures and furniture of the performance space with structure-borne sound drivers, producing a macro-scale « instrument ». Sonically active architectures can also be designed, with altered acoustics or noise-cancelling properties. Audiotactile perception can be added to a concert setting, introducing a new perceptual dimension to the musical experience. This line of research merges issues of artistic creation, sound perception and sound driver technology in order to create a fertile research dynamic between art, science and technology. The two central research questions are the optimization of structure-borne sound quality for musical use, as well as the combination of vibrating solid elements, audiotactility, acoustic instruments and loudspeakers into « composite aural spaces », i.e. spatial instances of multiple sound-source audio.
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  IN SITU: Sonic Greenhouse. Composing for the intersections between the sonic and the built (2019) author(s): Otso Tapio Aavanranta, Josué Moreno Prieto, Daniel Adrian Malpica Gomez published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition presents and discusses a large-scale audio-architectural installation entitled "IN SITU: Sonic Greenhouse," which took place at the Helsinki City Winter Garden — or Talvipuutarha — in September and October 2016. Structure-borne audio transducers were employed to drive sound into the glass structure of the greenhouse in order to create an immersive sound experience emanating from the materiality of the building, transforming the site into a macro-scale musical instrument. Compositional strategies were developed in response to the context, emphasising the spatial dimension of composition more than the temporal and narrative ones, exploring an aural metaphor of transparency, as well as pointing towards the concepts of "sonic weather" and "sonic acupuncture." This exposition offers a reflective look at the work one year after its completion, fusing visual, audio, and textual elements to understand the piece’s aesthetic, theoretical, and experiential contributions.
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  Territories :: Dialects (last edited: 2019) author(s): Otso Tapio Aavanranta, Matthew Galea This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  Territories :: Dialects is a multifaceted research cluster converging at the third Research Pavilion in Venice. It brings together ‘Electronic Chamber Music’, a Helsinki-based live electronic quartet and Matyou Galea, a Maltese sculptor.The cell investigates zones of interface and interference between artistic practices, confronting the native territories of the cell participants with other forms of expression. While retaining each participant’s core activity and expertise, we collectively engage in a research process using, for instance, somatic techniques, sculptural and spatial approaches, conceptual framing as well as language-based processes. The background argument is that artistic research is recharged through a transdisciplinary component. As the research extends the ensemble’s scope from music and sculpture to a larger frame of expression, to other territories, layers of analysis, translation and communication are built upon the native craft of music-making. In this way, the inner dynamics of a specialist ensemble can become apparent and tangible to other artforms as common dialects to be shared, discussed and reformulated.
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  Matter Dialogues (2020) author(s): Otso Tapio Aavanranta published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This exposition relates Claude-Lévi Strauss' concept of bricolage with two examples of the author's artistic praxis, with the aim that the subjective case studies will contribute to highlight a more general methodological standpoint of contemporary artistic creation, namely: the artistic work as a dialogical, enactive process where the discussion with the artistic material takes a guiding role. The proposal intends to resituate a classic concept from structuralist anthropology, which I find strikingly useful for analysing contemporary intermedia artistic processes and works. The exposition discusses the philosophical implications of a practice that abandons itself to an unforeseen, dialogical relationship with the environment. The oeuvre then becomes an ecological process of using what is offered by the situation, in a constant discussion with the environment. Ideas, forms and materials are engendered, lost and transformed in a dynamic process that resembles a sort of artistic aikido. The ecological strand of the discussion on bricolage leads to Anna Tsing's "Mushroom at the End of the World" and Timothy Morton’s “Dark Ecology”, where the concept of Nature and the value of naturalness are abolished in favour of a flat relationship between human and her environment: an ecological system between different manifestations of being, where human-made phenomena are not regarded as extra-natural. An artistic practice of bricolage finds a favourable breeding-ground in such a conceptual context.
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  Co-Sounding: Fostering Intersubjectivity in Electronic Music Improvisation; video repository (2020) author(s): Otso Tapio Aavanranta, Alejandro Montes de Oca published in: Research Catalogue
  This exposition is the audiovisual companion to the Organised Sound article entitled: Co-Sounding: Fostering Intersubjectivity in Electronic Music Improvisation (Otso Lähdeoja & Alejandro Montes de Oca, 2020). The exposition showcases research documentation consisting of 23 video examples with explanatory notes, interview transcriptions, and electronic instrument design schematics. References and discussion pointing to the documentation exposed herein may be found in the Organised Sound article. The documentation shows three successive stages of research on the technological mediation of musicians' intersubjectivity within the electronic music context. A) Duo work on modular synthesizer B) '4-hands' deejaying C) Web-mediated music-making using digital audio workstation software and remote hardware control.
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  Intermediary Reflections (last edited: 2023) author(s): Otso Tapio Aavanranta This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  This text unfolds some salient aspects of the author's enquiry into the in-between, starting with the question of inter-musician intersubjectivity, and leading further towards a more general reflection on what may be found by shifting the scrutiny of analysis from posited objects and categories towards the spaces around and in-between them. The text constitutes a narrative broadly along the lines of the author's questions and partial discoveries, arising from an interplay of duo DJ co-musicianship associated with a theoretical exploration. The enquiry builds on Bernard Stiegler's notion of epiphylogenesis, that is, exteriorisation of knowledge into a technological milieu, and opens a horizon towards an immaterial exteriorisation, with shared imagination as a focal point of interest. From there, the text discusses how co-imagination might be mobilised as a part of artistic research apparatus, as a gesture of revealing ineffable qualities that are present in the in-between.
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  [in situ] : re-thinking the role of musical improvisation performance in the context of the ecological and cultural crisis. (last edited: 2024) author(s): Barbierato Leonardo This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
  If there is one thing that complexity theory has taught us, it is to consider phenomena not as isolated events with properties of their own, but to observe them from a different perspective: as relations in a vast network of interdependent systems. In this light, the role of contemporary music performance has changed, and will continue to change, precisely because the context in which it is created and takes place is constantly evolving. Artistic research can provide the tools to be aware of these changes and to actively re-act in this changing context, not by simply transposing the context or its elements into a representational or aesthetic framework, as happened with the avant-gardes of the 20th century, but by breaking cultural boundaries through transpositions into distant fields with isomorphic functional principles. It is precisely because of this characteristic, which reveals the intrinsic interdisciplinarity in artistic research, that it is possible to revolutionize the traditional conception of music performance and not confine it to an aesthetic regime, but rather expand it to include the context. However, since relationships are not unambiguous, it is not just a matter of revising the concept of performance, but also of reviewing the way we experience and live in the context, as artists, as human beings, and as elements of a circuit of which we are only a small part. In this paper, I will first examine how environmental and social changes have been reflected in performative changes and the ways in which the context of the ecological crisis and contemporary performance are interrelated. Then, I will focus on my research project, “[in situ]”, highlighting its site/situation-specificity, flexibility, immersivity, and interactivity, and explaining how it aligns with and differs from other contemporary music performance practices.
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