Adriana Minu - Annual Progress Review Year 1. May 2020

  

Contents


      A few questions

 

  1. Starting points

 

  1.1. Sensory Stimuli

  1.2. The First Workshop

 

  2. Epistemic Shifts

 

  2.1. Sociality and Culture

  2.2. Encounters with the Ecology of Perception

  2.3. Arlington Baths

 

  3. Emergent answers

 

  3.1. Atmospheres

List of References


Born, G., Lewis, E. and Straw, W. eds., 2017. Improvisation and social aesthetics. Duke University Press.

Böhme, G., 2017. Atmospheric architectures: The aesthetics of felt spaces. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Böhme, G., 2000. Acoustic atmospheres: a contribution to the study of ecological aesthetics. Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, 1(1), pp.14-18.

Bresnahan, A., 2019. Perceiving Live Improvisation in the Performing Arts. Perception, Cognition, and Aesthetics, pp.106-119.

Clarke, E.F., 2005. Ways of listening: An ecological approach to the perception of musical meaning. OUP USA.

Coessens, K. ed., 2019. Sensorial Aesthetics in Music Practices. Leuven University Press.
Engels-Schwarzpaul T., 2017. Approaching Atmospheres: Translator’s introduction.  in Böhme, G., 2017. Atmospheric architectures: The aesthetics of felt spaces.

Manning, E., 2013. Always more than one: Individuation's dance. Duke University Press.

Minu, A., 2019. Composing with the sense, an introduction. Talk delivered at Sound Thought Showcase, December 2019.

Petitmengin, C., 2006. Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive sciences, 5(3-4), pp.229-269.

 

Tillmann, L., 2014. In solidarity: Friendship, family, and activism beyond gay and straight. Routledge.

Vadén, T. and Torvinen, J., 2014. Musical meaning in between: Ineffability, atmosphere and asubjectivity in musical experience. Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 1(2), pp.209-230.

If one tries to investigate qualities of a sensory experience in an artistic experiment, what might emerge may not be connected to the initial experience through a route that travels directly from one modality to its afferent descriptors (e.g. taste = sweet), but rather through a spaghetti junction that combines layers upon layers of cross-modal or amodal information.
In the cookie investigations I did with my musician friend, we discovered that the taste was so peripheral to the experience of tasting the cookie, we barely even got to discuss it. Instead what took over was the context: the way the cookie was laid down (the direction my arm moved from when I put it on the post-it), the way the deep red of the surface it was on was permeating the visual field and blending with the neon yellow of the post-it, or the way the sharp edges of the post-it square were felt in the body.  The sensuous object, or sensory stimulus as I was calling it, wasn’t just the physical object that ended at its physical borders but became the object plus its elongation into the environment, containing the environment into itself. I accidentally answered my first question ‘what is the sensory stimulus’ by trying out a potential response for the second ‘how do I do it?’.


 Our experiment didn’t stop there. Once we gathered granular qualities of the experience, we created a linear narrative that we could investigate musically.

2.2. Encounters with the ecology of perception


It occurred to me, after the initial exploratory workshops, that the way I formulated the premise of the research very much aligned with cognitive science’s information-processing approach to perception. This approach says that we perceive the sensory chaos in the world through our sense and use our mind to structure it and make sense of what’s going on, in order to form a coherent understanding. I was looking at input, which was external, to be processed by a musician in order to deliver an output. I was prepared to deal with the complexities of the performer (or so I thought) but the rest of the equation should have been fairly simple. After the workshops I was no longer looking at the research from that angle. At a talk I gave at Sound Thought in December 2019, I was fully embracing ecological approaches to perception as a framework for further investigations:

“Eric Clarke (2005) talks about the ecological approach to perception, when the structure is in the environment itself and the process of perception is an exploration that picks up on already structured perceptual information. So, instead of having sensory chaos as input, we have an environment with its own order.


In this case, the perceiving subject moves through the environment, like a video camera, picking up the perceptual information and responding to perceptual cues in the environment. It’s a nice approach because it’s less anthropocentric and it creates a back and forth between the environment and the perceiver.

In my explorations, the ecological approach ties the experience to be perceived and the musician in a closer union. James Gibson talks about the concept of affordances – qualities of the object that determine what a subject can do with it. The experience to be perceived is the object and the musician is the subject. But since both have their own set of affordances, both need to be investigated. “  (Minu, 2019)

It felt like a step in the right direction.


In January I set out a few research trips in order to be with the space on my own. I was looking to see what the affordances (in Gibson’s sense) of the spaces might be. On one of the visits I made a few notes in attempt to capture some of them. I couldn’t figure out how to invite musicians to join me into the space - should I design an encounter with the space for them based on my own experience? Should I send them a list of all the spaces and ask them to pick one that they felt a connections with? As one of my supervisors reminded me - my experiences might have nothing to do with theirs. The same struggle re-emerged: do I categorise and analyse, or do I jump-start and observe what emerges? The first option was the easy one while the second asked for trust in my own artistic intuitions from both myself and the participants. I bit the bullet and sent out a call for participants (click here to view it). I scheduled 7 initial encounters with the space with 7 musicians but only managed to visit the space with two of them before Covid-19 forced Arlington to shut and sent us into social isolation. You can see some embryonic traces and get an idea of the atmosphere in the Turkish suite explorations here. I'm yet to connect these two encounters with the bigger narrative so I will refrain from expanding on them now.

Bonus practical exercise


Please read all of the steps beforehand:

1. Find an object with a strong smell. Perhaps the easiest would be to grab a perfume or a hand cream, anything that you have around that you know has a smell. Don’t smell it just yet.


2. Sit down, close your eyes and bring the object to your nose.


3.Take one long inhale through your nose, sniffing the object.


4. Put the object away and exhale. Stay with the smell for a moment. You can open your eyes if you wish or keep them shut.


5.  Try to go back to the first moment you were aware that there was a smell. Re-live the inhale in your imagination.


6.  At the same time that you re-live the inhale, try to make a sound with your voice that retains the same quality as the smell. You might try out a few sounds until you find one that works. Always do the search while re-living the inhale.


7. When you are happy with the sound you have found, utter it with confidence.

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If you try out this exercise with multiple smells you might notice that there is a difference in the quality of the sound based on the smell. You might also notice a similarity in the construction of the sound that is determined by the quality of the inhale: a long inhale through your nose. You may want to try this exercise breaking down the long inhale into several consecutive small inhales through the nose until your lungs fill with the scented air.
 
*The development of experiential information over time might make you want to add multiple sounds as you go deeper into the exercise. An easy way to do this would be to record multiple layers of voice. I found, since the voice is a monophonic instrument, that working with that restriction is an interesting way to develop various timbres or techniques for making the sound. I recommend you use the monophony of the voice to your advantage and find ways to ‘contort’ it into whatever it needs to become.

3.1. Atmospheres

In the theoretical realm, which I visited in parallel with the practice, answers were emerging.
I came to find that before the analytical layer there is another layer, a pre-objective one, in the sense that it precedes the observation of individual objects or properties. (Vaden and Torvinen, 2014) This layer is what Gernot Bohme (1995, tr 2017) calls atmospheres: a mood, a shared reality between the perceiver and the perceived, an in-between. In the case of atmospheres, the quality that objects have are their ecstasies: a way to emanate into space and modify the surroundings, creating a sphere of presence. A perceiver has to step into this ecstasies-infused space and be bodily present in a particular way (Bohme, 1995, tr. 2017) to sense these atmospheres.

Bohme offers a suggestion about investigating atmospheres saying that the particular nature of an atmosphere becomes clear when different atmospheres are set apart from each other (Bohme,1995, tr.2017). This verbalised what I was already feeling in the multitude of spaces at Arlington Baths: these spaces can determine actions, reactions, resonances, but how? Atmospheres was one answer - look for the in-between.

If atmospheres are “emanating from and produced by things, people and their constellations” (Bohme,1995, tr 2017, 23) this means that 1. there is a thing proper and 2. it has an emanation, its atmospheric leakage, out of itself and into the space it shares with the perceiver. But the thing proper must be there and the perceiver must be there. And the thing is not limited to being an inanimate object but it can be a space, a person, a sociality that is produced by people in the first place. So, let’s take the swimming pool space at Arlington as an example. If one steps into that space, there are a lot of constituting elements that create that space: the acoustic of the space, the sound, colour, smell and presence of the water, the social dynamics between members, the light in the space, etc. But we know that atmospheres are pre-objective and not reached through analysis so in order to be bodily present with the atmosphere of the place, one has to allow oneself to be affected by all these elements as one force and keep returning to a holistic view of the space if they get distracted by analysis. So how do we reach this bodily presence? And how do we differentiate between our own mood and the emanating mood that things, people or spaces might produce? How do we not get drawn into the analytical layer of observing objective properties that things have and how do we stay present to their emanations? And how can this be turned into a method? Into a set of steps that one can take to be bodily present in this way?

Bohme warns of the dangers of drawing the subject out of itself to listen in the common space between the perceiver and the perceived, defining listening as a “being-beside-yourself”: “Human beings who listen in this way are dangerously open; they release themselves into the world and can therefore be struck by acoustic events. Lovely tunes can lead them astray, thunderclaps can shatter them, scratching noises can threaten them, a cutting tone can damage them.” (Bohme, 2000, p18) Sure, we can acknowledge the ‘threats’ and make a note about their ethical implications in practice (which are not to be dismissed) but there is also a question of the advantages of such an approach. And if listening is being-besides-yourself, can uttering sounds be seen as a being-beyond-yourself? Can we have a leaky self and a leaky object, both blending into each other, negotiating how much of themselves permeates into the other, perhaps forgetting that there is a self and an other, existing instead as an ‘in-betweenness’? Does this extend the method further?
To see what this really meant in practice, I searched for and uttered the atmosphere of my living room. The task I gave myself was: find the space between yourself and the room; when you’ve found it, utter it, sound it out, make it tangible. You can listen to it and see a transcription by clicking here.




2.3. Arlington Baths

I was a member of Arlington Baths, about 4 years ago when I last lived in Glasgow. As soon as I moved back I started a new membership and told everyone I met about the place. I was weary of doing research in there as it was my personal place of relaxation and recharge but something was telling me I had to - the environment felt too present. The wet heat in the steam room would speak to my body directly at skin level; the rhythmic moves I had to go through to swim from one end of the pool to the next would force my visual perspective to travel between two worlds: one above water, one below; and the Turkish suite was an artistic installation in itself: the tiled floors, curved walls and deep hum of the heater made sure the sensation of being there stayed with you long after you left.


2.1. Sociality and culture

 
“All human beings exist in culture, which is why they are “persons” as opposed to merely homo sapiens” (Margolis, 1995: 190; 2010: 10 cited in Bresnahan, 2019:115). There is a (performance) culture that we’ve accumulated, that defines us, that we exist in and a micro-sociality that gets created between two people when they are together in a room, in this case, attempting to investigate sensory qualities of experiences. Embodied memories surface, tensions, fears and cultural analogies come to light. There is perhaps a fear of  judgement, what one might think of what the other does and a desire to impress/not disappoint. These performance cultures ended up taking primacy over the sensory qualities that were investigated in the first place. This led to a second unintentional answer to the ‘what can the stimulus be’ question: beyond a physical object and the environment it is experienced in, the socio-cultural context is also part of the ‘sensory stimulus’. I was ready to leave the concept behind.



Georgina Born writes “the social can be more or less reflexively grasped or foregrounded by musical actors - composers, musicians, listeners - as a dimension of aesthetic experience. Such a reflexive awareness can in turn be more or less experimental or inventive in its orientation.” (Born, 2017 p.39)


Doing the cookie experiment with my friend allowed me to accept as valid my own responses to performing music (improvised singing usually) with others.  I avoided putting myself at the centre of the research as I knew that over time I had become an anxious performer and that it could be a distraction from the main focus. The way the threads were coming together it seemed unavoidable (and a necessary methodological shift during Covid-19) that I would need to investigate myself as a performer. I started these explorations by reflecting on my own process of improvising to a pre-recorded track - an account of this is found in this document. An audio example can be found here.  I then jumped into an improvisation with professional musician Fritz Welch and captured my experience here.

These documents are part of a narrative that is still ongoing. At present I am taking accordion lessons, improvising with Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra over Zoom, doing online classes on improvisation based on Feldenkrais and Action Theatre and am getting ready to start online singing lessons with London based improviser Maggie Nichols.

A few questions

 

What if a score stops being a semiotic representation and starts being an aesthetic object instead?

 

What if the musician digs deeper within themselves to find solutions and there isn’t an exact answer to the question?

 

What if being a musician is knowing an embodied trade that allows one to create responses that are beyond language and beyond representation?

 

What if musical practice is about learning new ways to relate to what your body already knows?

 

what if it takes time to unlearn instincts to resolve or to control?

 

what if practice means rehearsing shifting your perception?

 

what if composing means creating supporting structures, labyrinths and ladders musicians can explore?

 

what if composition methods are less about the scores and more about a process a musician can go through?

 

what if working with sensory objects: scents, tastes, sounds, images or tactile materials is just another way to create perceptual tunnels that enable a narrow focus on an experience?

 

what if it’s not about the sensory objects and more about the ways we relate to them? what if it’s about both?

 

what if a sensory object is not a simple object and always carries complexities with it?

 

what if the starting point is not creating an ontology of sensory objects but is understanding and determining ways to relate to them?

 

what if I stop removing myself from the process, accept that my body knows things as well and try out different ways to relate to different sensory objects?

 

what if the distinction between subject and object is useless and I can look at what happens in-between instead?

 

what if what I need to support others is learning how to be ok being myself first?

 

what if what I need is to start slow and to build trust with others first?

 

what if there already is trust between me and someone else and choose to work with them first?

 

what if the complete opposite is true? x 100 (only proceed when you’ve considered the complete opposite and have developed an intuition to go down the chosen path)


2. Epistemic shifts

My friend played piano, re-living the experience and attempting to find a sound that was qualitatively similar to the experience of tasting the cookie. Soon enough something else emerged - the focus on the sensuous experience was overpowered by my presence. My presence interfered with their embodied presence in the memory of the cookie we’ve just unpicked, triggering analytical thoughts that made them wonder about my opinion on the content of their piano improvisation.  We didn’t know each other creatively well enough to be confident in our experimentations. We were friends but we hadn't been friends for very long. We needed more time to build trust and understand each other’s aesthetic and cultural traits and preferences.

 

 


1.1. Sensory stimuli

I started with a made up container-concept which I called a sensory stimulus. This term was supposed to identify two qualities of an object: 1, it is to be perceived through the senses and 2, it determines a change from the previous state in the human being that interacts with it, it stimulates a response. The question this initially led me to was: How can I determine what this sensory stimulus can be for a musician if I work with them in practice? Should I have a collection of ‘sensory potent’ objects that they choose from? Should I give them a questionnaire to fill in before a workshop that aims to draw out what particular sense they have a sensitivity to that informs me on the objects that I should bring into the session? And how do I know that the objects that I chose have a strong enough resonance for them to really ‘draw them in’? Can I encapsulate essential properties of such things that stretch over continuums such as bitter-sweet, sharp-soft, bright-dark, etc. And what would I base the classification on? My own experience of them or do I set time apart with a musician to compare our respective continuums?

In October I found myself sitting in a demo class in the Library of Olfactive Material, near Trongate, sniffing paper freshly dipped in tiny brown bottles. This seemed to be one of the steps forward that was hopefully going to connect the dots. After two hours of sniffing I had a headache and my nose was runny. I left thinking - I have no clue what to do with this information but perhaps I can bring musicians back here one day. I let it rest. On my way back to the West End I stopped at the Material Library in the Lighthouse - a collection of sustainable building materials. I opened all the drawers, touched all of the materials with my eyes open and closed and took photos. But then… nothing happened. What was I going to do with these materials?

1.2. The first workshop



I short-circuited the thought process that seemed to lead me deeper into analytical thinking and started in the middle. I asked a musician friend to join me into a workshop in which we can look together at how to turn one of these sensory stimuli into sound. I put aside the question of what  the stimulus can be and I focused on the how.  This was another question that was nagging me - once we’ve chosen a stimulus, how do we translate its sensory qualities into sound? I found a starting point for an answer in Claire Petitmengin’s Micro-phenomenology interview method (Petitmengin, 2006).

 
This method focuses on meta-awareness - being aware of our own awareness, borrowing from Husserl’s phenomenological conversion - and documents it. It is a tool to gather verbal insight into the qualities of an experience for a perceiver on a granular level, aiming to answer, for example: How does a particular experience of a particular smell/taste/image/memory make one feel? It focuses on both diachronic (developing over time) and synchronic (developing at the same time) information to construct a detailed description of the experience from the perspective of the person experiencing it. I brought a few different objects to the session: a few slices of lemon, some tea bags, a cookie, my (precious) Chanel perfume, some post-it notes. We decided to try out this experiment focusing on the taste of a ginger bread cookie.

3. Emergent answers  

1. Starting points

Image 4 - The Turkish suite in Arlington Baths

Image 2 - Ginger bread cookie and workshop context

Image 1 - Library of Olfactive Materials

 

  Examples of practice

 

  Audio


  Audio 1. Vocal Improvisation

  Audio 2. Living room atmosphere

 

  Video (with Stereo Sound)

 

  Video 1. Arlington Turkish Suite

 

  Documents


  Document 1. Things that happen when I sing

  Document 2. Improvisation with Fritz

  Document 3. Arlington Call for participants

 

 (This is a repository. To understand the practice in context, follow the text below.)

Image 3 - Workshop notes and structure