Abstracts and Bios

Friday, March 2

10:00 - 11:30 a.m. Session 1: Practice/Research (Tom Erbe, Chair)

Recital Hall (CPMC 127)

Sophie Stévance and Serge Lacasse (Université Laval)

Research-creation in music as an interdiscipline

The advent of artistic disciplines in North American universities in the early 1970s profoundly questioned the primacy of the scientific model (particularly the scientific method) recently adopted by the humanities and social sciences. Without rejecting this scientific model, the development of artistic disciplines has opened up ontology, semantics and disciplinary practices to novel scientific procedures and sets of languages while at the same time progressively adapting and assimilating certain characteristics of the scientific model and its general “method.” It is from this integration into the university ecosystem that the concept “research-creation” emerged. Appearing in Canadian universities in the 1980s, it can be described as the artefactual disciplinary counterpart to the scientific model and method in the context of the knowledge of higher learning. At the same time as this integration of the arts at the university level, new problems have gradually emerged and are multiplying in the field of contemporary reality, calling for epistemological flexibility which is at the very center of research-creation, its artefactual and scientific being. Seen from this point of view, research-creation in music can be considered a true method of interdisciplinarity (Stévance & Lacasse, 2018) where individuals collaborate using an integrated approach in their respective disciplines with the goal of mutual enrichment and enhancement. What are the conditions for interdisciplinarity of research-creation in music? How can spaces of dialogue, collaboration and interaction, concepts of the pause brought about by the hyphen that forges the expression “research-creation” (Stévance & Lacasse, 2013), be put in place, particularly in music? This communication therefore proposes to discuss this transversal space, the ecosophical interaction aiming to share unique experiences (creation), and to measure, describe and understand the entanglement of the relations that all the participants, researchers and creators weave together (research).

Will Saunders (Westminster University) with Anna Homler (performance artist and vocalist, Los Angeles)

An influence for Harry Partch in devising queer compositionist approaches to collaborative performance practice

Saunders will introduce a “queer compositionist” approach to audio-visual collaborative practice that resists essentialist durable specialism, favoring instead the shared and shifting equivalence of messy difference. Within this approach, acts of “oblique intervention” are seen to embrace the potential agencies of human and nonhuman elements whilst avoiding their assimilation into an abstract musical code. Foregrounded is the covert capacity that peripheral objects and collaborator actions have to mediate slowly forming modes of performance.

The central importance of an interpretation of the late Californian composer Harry Partch will be clarified. Saunders holds Partch as a queer practitioner—not a closeted homosexual—whose influence has been haunting his work. In attempting to avoid a slippery post-John Cage predicament, in which any sound can be defined musical, Partch has become Saunders’ queered scholarly alibi. Why not play at ignoring Cage as the author of deflected authorship? Why not rather attend to Partch’s largely ignored refusal to assimilate?

These ideas have been applied through a series of practice-based projects in both experimental theatre and improvised audio-visual performance. Saunders will present documentation of an ongoing performance work with the Los Angeles based free improviser/vocalist Anna Homler. He is delighted that Homler will be present and the final third of the presentation will be a short reflective discussion between the two artists.

Bio: Will Saunders (born 1983) works musically in collaborative contexts. Following a BA in Sonic Arts at Middlesex University he has continued to practice internationally and is currently a PhD candidate at Westminster University. He teaches on the BA Filmmaking and MA Experimental Film courses at Kingston University, London. www.juxt.co.uk, www.annahomler.com

Sam Topley (De Montfort University)

Sound Art and Craft: Making and Playing Textile-Based Electronic Musical Instruments

This cross-disciplinary research explored the creation of sound art through textile-based handcrafts, such as knitting, pompom making and embroidery. Brightly coloured woollen objects for the creation of live electronic music were made, culminating in a portfolio of new instruments, performance work and workshops.

The research followed a craft and practice-led methodology, where art and technology are intertwined and objects were made by hand. Textile-based approaches to the core elements of music technology were investigated and initially demonstrated in the form of swatches (handmade technological prototype pieces). This process iteratively addressed elements such as loudspeakers, sensors, circuitry and the design of interfaces with electronic textiles. As a result of the physical and theoretical research of these example swatches, objects such as giant pompom wireless controllers, knitted or ‘yarnbombed’ loudspeakers and electronic instruments with conductive pompom interfaces were made.

This research stems from a background of electronic instrument making, within a DIY culture where artists are crafting, experimenting and creating with technology as a postdigital method of music making. Collaborative and participatory approaches to playing the handmade objects were explored, focusing less on the mastery traditionally associated with playing an instrument, but more the facilitation of playful, inclusive and interactive environments which invited people to join in. ‘Playing’, in this instance, closer resembled a non-virtuosic and child-like process of play, whereby musical and performative ideas were generated and developed through the curiosity, imagination and idiosyncrasies of active participants. Instruments were also made with feminist, socio-political intent in ‘craftivist’ workshops, where electronic textiles and DIY textile handcrafts were used as a vehicle to working with electronics and music technology.

Bio: Sam Topley is a musician, maker and community artist from Leicester, UK. Her work explores sound and technology with textile-based hand crafts such as knitting, embroidery and pompom making. Topley is currently undertaking a PhD at the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, De Montfort University, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (Midlands3Cities DTP). http://www.samantha-topley.co.uk

11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Session 2: Audio/Vision (Sarah Hankins, Chair)

Orchestra Room (CPMC 136)

Viola Yip (New York University)

“Non-Cochlear” Music: Light as expanded musical materials (Installation on Saturday morning.)

Coined by Seth Kim-Cohen, the term “non-cochlear sound”—a parallel to the non-retinal art such as Duchamp’s fountain— is used to invite an openness to “rehear [the sounds], rethink them and re-experience them from a non-essentialist perspective.”

We are trained to consider music and sounds through their sonic properties and within fixed notations from our musical training. In this presentation, I am implementing an unorthodox way to look at music as an abstract form of vibrational energies that is conceptualized in our bodies through our understanding of music. I argue that sound is only one of multiple musical materials, and that any other vibrational, non-aural forces can function as music.

In my recent research and creative projects, my interest falls in investigating light as an alternative musical material. Light can be experienced in musical terms, such as rhythm, frequency (color), texture and intensity. Moreover, since we perceive light and engage it with another sensory organ, light offers different stimulations to our bodies. For example, a yellow incandescent light creates a warm sensation in our abdomen (chakra theory).

In this presentation, I propose the idea of light as expanded musical material, a literal kind of “non-cochlear sound”, that provides us non-sonic musical experience. I am going to demonstrate how our various modes of listening from the auditory culture can be adapted in perceiving light as music. When light serves as vibrational musical material that engages our visual perception, it generates new affects and sensations in our bodily experience of perceiving music.

Gust Burns (University of Washington)

Liquid Perception: Thinking with Sounds and (Post-)Cinema Studies

In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze formulates the concept of liquid perception: where movement on land is always performed between two points, the point in water is always between two movements; any given moment is located simultaneously at the completion of one movement and the emergence of another. Such an organization of images characterizes, for Deleuze, the French pre-war school of cinema. But doesn’t this kind of movement characterize sounds (there are many examples, from Cage to NGA Fish), and especially sounds heard by the contemporary ear, even better?

My presentation follows from a broad question: how can our attempts at theorizing sound borrow productively from ‘film theory’, specifically Deleuze’s study of cinema and more contemporary theorizations of the post-cinematic?

Specifically in this paper, I outline a trajectory traced by several key scholars of cinema, from Modernist cinema (Deleuze) to the networked post-cinematic image (Steven Shaviro). I note how the contemporary-image is now thoroughly audiovisual, structured largely with respect to acoustic principles (Chion, Shaviro), and how both Modernist and contemporary moving-pictures contain a direct (if implicit) relation to money. Recordings and sounds share a similar relation to money, and I chart the development from the extraction of surplus value (early vinyl) to the debt/credit relation (YouTube and audio streaming services). My own concept for the contemporary image, the stream-image, accurately captures the characteristics of digitally consumed moving-pictures, but applies with equal relevance to the soundstreams we now listen to (music streaming is both more ubiquitous and preceded video streaming).

In the spirit of Deleuze’s original project, I end my presentation with a few examples of contemporary sounds, categorizing them as variously liquid.

Bio: Gust Burns is a scholar and composer. His compositions deal largely with the obstruction of sound and listening, and so feature both audible and inaudible materials. His scholarly interests include the production and (dis-)articulation of the faculties. His project consists in charting and theorizing these phenomena through literature, music, and art history, specifically twentieth century African-American literature, and Sound Art. Intellectual protocols for this project include analyses of both capital/empire and (anti-black) racism. Gust is a graduate student in the department of English at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Anna Clock and Lauren Sankary.

‘I Could Turn You Inside Out’: The Radical Potential of Headphone Space in a Gendered Aurality (Demonstration on Saturday morning.)

Headphones reshape the contemporary listener’s perception of sound and space, redefining the relationship between the headphone listener and his/her aural, visual, and social surroundings. In this interdisciplinary collaboration, a sound artist/designer and a neuroethics researcher explore phenomenological, relational and ethical aspects of headphone listening in narrative, performance, and daily life. Drawing on Nancy’s philosophy of listening, Stankievich’s “phenomenology of interiority”, and Home-Cook’s phenomenology of listening and attentional spheres, the authors compare the way in which headphones mediate vulnerability and violence in the miniseries Big Little Lies (2017) and the film Baby Driver (2017). In Big Little Lies, headphones simultaneously insulate their listeners from external intrusions and exacerbate their vulnerability at the hands of abusive partners. Conversely, in Baby Driver, the headphones the protagonist wears allow him to commit acts of violence and aggression apparently not in line with his ‘true’ character. When entering the interior, private sphere of headphones, Baby is able to objectify his environment, whereas the women in Big Little Lies become objects of theirs, subjected to increased risk and vulnerability. These contrasting portrayals of the headphone-listener highlight a gendered and embodied intersubjectivity located between the interiority of headphone space and the external, visually-mediated world they encounter. Moreover, when viewed in light of the recent surge of media designed for consumption through headphones, in particular the youtube cult of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos which objectify the audience through the use of binaural recording techniques, the potential for headphone space to subvert and blur the distinctions of conventional subject-object relations in media, performance and the daily life of individuals is significant. Through this reflexive comparison of the interiority and exteriority of headphone space, we investigate the potential of headphone space to both reinforce and/or subvert gendered intersubjectivities.

Bios: Anna Clock is a London-based composer, sound designer and musician with an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She studied Music (composition) and English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and cello performance at the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

Lauren Sankary is a Neuroethics Fellow at the Cleveland Clinic. Prior to obtaining her law degree and MA in Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, she studied Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Installations

John Burnett (University of California San Diego)

Splay

Splay is an audiovisual installation that serves as a continuation of my work with (dis)embodiment in digital representations of identity. In these works, I have designed software that takes both audio and visual materials and interpolates them into (and past) target forms. The visual component of this software accepts 3D models as inputs and traces a transformation into other 3D models. The audio component follows a similar process but with sonic material. These two medial layers are linked such that they form an interconnected assemblage, thus sonic properties affect physical properties and vice versa. The first inputs I tried with this system were models found for free on the internet titled “The Standard Male/Female Body”. In this instance I simply interpolated from the male form to the female form, and in a moment of apathy let the process continue. That is to say, if ‘0’ is mapped to the male form and ‘1’ is mapped to the female form, ‘0.5’ will give us somewhere in between. However, we do not need to stop at ‘1’ – what does ‘1.5’ give us?

This work is a continuous, unending series of these interpolations. Bodies will become machines. Organic matter transforms into geometric constellations. There will be no loop, or even a linear path. All of these materials are subject to each other.

Bio: John Burnett (b. 1993) is a multimedia artist based in San Diego, California. Drawing from a background in music composition, sound design, and technology, John seeks to create technologically augmented, reactive installation and concert works that derive their materials from the present environment or synthesize entirely new virtual spaces. They are also engaged in research that explores audiovisual technology, sound synthesis, and the influence of sound in culture. John is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and is currently attending UC San Diego in the pursuit of a PhD in music composition.

S. Mendelsohn (University of California San Diego)

Security Chorus

Bio: S. Mendelsohn combines strategies drawn from experimental documentary and theater to create sound, video, and performance works. Raised in New York, they are currently an MFA candidate in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego.

1:00 - 2:00 p.m. Break

2:00 - 3:30 p.m. Session 3: Space/Resistance (Kirstie Dorr, Chair)

Orchestra Room (CPMC 136)

Eugenia Siegel Conte (University of California Santa Barbara)

Sounding Sacred: Reconstituting Secular Sonic Space through Chorality

Use of the word “space” in Sound Studies affords the sonic properties of spatial acoustic heightened, if not equal, importance to the sound in that space. Awareness of how sound behaves in space affords listeners parameters to project or imagine space through sound, and to extrapolate details of their surroundings by ear. Long decay and heavy reverberence may, for example, suggest a Christian religious institution simply through the sonic properties of the gothic cathedral, an architectural referent based on a long history in Europe, the Middle East, and North America (Thompson 2002, 181).

In this paper, I suggest that recognizing aural architecture (Blesser and Salzer 2007, 83) of reverberence can conjure a religious space, even in non-religious contexts; and that, through this process, the imagined space can be dually recognized as secular and sacred. I will draw upon a performance by Icelandic choir Árstíðir, who extemporaneously performed at the Wuppertal train station in Germany. Inspired by the station’s acoustics, the ensemble sang a 13th century Icelandic hymn, which was filmed and added to their YouTube page in 2016. A reading of this performance, and the ways it uses spatial narrative to sacralize a busy transport hub, will show how the train station space is imbued with extrasonic meaning through this example of chorality (Connor 2016).

This work attempts to broaden discussions of architectural space as its own set of parameters never entirely realized, rather than being entirely contingent on the music or sound that resounds inside it. These spatialized understandings, created through sounding, show how acoustic possibility can additionally guide the listener through a relational interplay between sound and space layered on top of actual sonic input.

Bio: Eugenia Siegel Conte is a Ph.D. student in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the Assistant Editor of the Society for Ethnomusicology Student News publication. She is currently interested in voice studies and sound studies, and how they may be applied to choral musical practice.

Audrey Amsellem (Columbia University)

Noise of Silent Machines: A Case Study of LinkNYC

In early 2016, the city of New York and the Google-owned company CityBridge launched LinkNYC, a communication network that enables residents and visitors to access Wi-Fi, browse the web, charge their phones, and make domestic calls—all for free. The ten-feet tall kiosks scattered around the city to replace pay phones are equipped with two LCD screens, three cameras, a tablet, speakers, a microphone, and 30 different sensors. Almost immediately after its launch, the public raised several concerns about LinkNYC: noise complaints concerning users listening to loud music, homeless people gathering around the kiosks, moral outrage regarding users watching pornography, as well as the potential threat to privacy the kiosks present.

This paper argues that LinkNYC functions as a neoliberal apparatus of listening and silencing in the public sphere through data gathering practices and restrictions on usage of the kiosk in the name of security, morality and accessibility. Through a crossdisciplinary ethnographic socio-technological study of LinkNYC, I engage ethnomusicological thinking in current discussions about surveillance, using sound studies literature in order to consider how listening functions as a form of both surveillance and silencing. I investigate the marketing strategies of techs carried out by utopic discourses, the current political threat of blurred boundary between public and private interest, and conflicting notions of the public space by historicizing noise containment in New York City, as well as discuss forms of resistance against LinkNYC and its larger neoliberal ideology. Although primarily based on fieldwork, this paper is at the theoretical intersection of sound studies, urban studies, and post-structuralist and legal literatures on privacy and data gathering. Through this case study, I demonstrate how power and control circulate through sound, sound politics, and listening practices.

Bio: Audrey Amsellem is a second year PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. Originally from Paris, France, she received her B.A in Music from Columbia University. Her research interests include: music and property, copyright law, music piracy, politics of access to music, music in the digital age, transhumanism and hacktivism.

Asher Tobin Chodos (University of California San Diego)

The Blues Scale: Historical and Epistemological Considerations

Today, the blues scale is familiar to most people who have spent time in music school. Although there has been since 1967 a broad consensus as to what that scale is, for the first half of the 20th century there was actually a good deal of disagreement on that point. A close look at the history of the blues scale reveals that disagreements over its content are bound up with widespread ambiguity concerning its epistemological status. This paper seeks to illuminate that epistemological confusion, proceeding in two ways: first, it historicizes today's blues scale by laying out the main blues scales proposed between 1938 and 1967, attending to the role these scales played in the institutionalization of jazz education; second, it demonstrates that these scales differ not just in content and attitude but also epistemologically. Because of its social overtones and political implications, disagreements over the nature (and even existence) of the blues scale have frequently been heated. This paper argues that these disagreements derive in part from a persistent epistemological confusion that has characterized much of the discourse surrounding this musical idea.

Bio: Asher Tobin Chodos is a pianist, composer and musicologist. He is a former Dave Brubeck Fellow, has a BA in Ancient Greek and Latin, and is pursuing a Ph. D. in music at UC San Diego. (www.tobinchodos.com)

3:00 - 4:00 p.m. Session 4: After Humans (Michael Trigilio, Chair)

Recital Hall (CPMC 127)

Tobias Linnemann Ewé (University of British Columbia)

Terror far subtler than the ear, or: How much alienation can one inhumanist take?!

To what extent do attempts to move away from human finitude do disservice to their own project? We may try to better understand non-humans through biology, acoustics, sound art, theory-speculation and creative research, but eventually these tactics turn back on themselves in ouroborosian fashion – humanly rationalising that which may have no rationale. Speculating about the sonic experiences of things, we end up applying the very violence we seek to discombobulate. Where does that leave us? How do we probe the minds, materials and assemblages of alterity without our own essence oozing in in the process?

Subjects listen with more than just their ears (Goodman 2010, Kassabian 2013, Schrimshaw 2017) and sound exists beyond the heard, which means that the limits of sonic experience changes depending on the nature of the listening subject. It follows then that humans, animals, infrastructural networks, tuning forks and machines are not just receivers and transmitters of sound – they are also transducers of vibration implicated in the co-production of sound. (Kahn, Douglas 2013) Sound artists like Maryanne Amacher, Alvin Lucier, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, and Morten Riis explore how this finitude of human sonic experience can be technologically and aesthetically expanded to include more than the audible. This is to suggest that aurality’s reimaging of thought’s critical limits is as much an aesthetic as a critical matter.

We must ask; how do aliens listen to us? How can we listen through alterity? The purpose of this paper is to critique, conceive and confuse currents in s0nic materialism through a theory of vibrational ontology that accounts for the sonic experience of the }}outside{{.

Bio: Tobias Linnemann Ewé is a PhD researcher working on how sound artists since the 1960s have explored listening beyond the human sensorium. This project involves an exploration of psycho-acoustics, transduction, inhumanism, speculative theory, and the history of exhibiting sound art. Beyond this, his interests include theory-fiction, alienation, digital folklore, xenofeminism and cybernetics.

Julian Scordato (Conservatory of Brescia)

Earth Song

Low frequency radio waves propagating in the Earth’s atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetosphere assume distinct characteristics in relation to the emitting source as well as the receiving point, affected by phenomena such as reflection, refraction, and diffraction. Considering the electromagnetic radiations generated by natural disturbances, the author aimed at transposing these phenomena into an audio feedback network in order to achieve imaginary results by exploring the effect of space-time parameter variation: a kaleidoscope of sounds floating in a dynamic system with ever-changing variations of the rules of the counterpoint.

Audio data courtesy of CARISMA (Canadian Array for Realtime Investigations of Magnetic Activity), operated by the University of Alberta, funded by the Canadian Space Agency.

Bio: Julian Scordato is a composer, sound artist, music technologist, and professor at the Conservatory of Brescia, Italy. He studied Composition and Electronic Music in Venice and Sound Art at the University of Barcelona. His works have been performed and exhibited in over 100 festivals and institutions.

Joel Rust (New York University)

Voice, after the Anthropocene

A barren rocky planet has been terraformed into a monocultural forest farm. Genetically identical trees were planted in a hexagonal grid on any cultivable land; a minimal ecosystem was constructed around them, to provide enough resources for their growth and a survivable atmosphere. A town was built where the human engineers and managers lived and worked. But the venture has failed. The trees aren’t growing right, and it isn’t clear why. The company has cut its losses and now there are only four humans who remain on the planet, wrapping up its operations. The last transport ship is now nine hours late.

As the humans carry on waiting, they become aware that the planet and its lifeforms, for so long a resource or a backdrop, a fake thing made for their use, is a more complex being than they had perceived. They begin to hear a voice – at first in ethereal strands on the borders of audition, but then stronger and wilder, as if it has been searching for a way of making itself understood – like a radio operator, transmitting on different frequencies until it finds one that elicits a reply – and once it does so, it resonates, it feeds itself on itself, growing until it is the only thing left.

This is the plot of an opera I'm writing, entitled The Conifers; the ‘planetvoice' constitutes the work’s electronic part. Drawing on concepts of voice, agency and interconnectedness from anthropology, ethnomusicology, and sound studies, this presentation is part theorization, part technical explanation, and part performance of this voice.

Bio: Joel Rust is a PhD student at New York University, where he studies composition. His scholarly focus is sound and the city in the early twentieth century. Currently, he is developing an opera, The Conifers, with poet David Troupes, supported by a Jerwood Opera Writing Fellowship at Aldeburgh Music.

4:00 - 5:30 p.m. Session 5: Humans/Instruments (Amy Cimini, Chair)

Orchestra Room (CPMC 136)

Asha Tamirisa (Brown University)

Logics and Rhetorics of Modular Interfaces in Electronic Sound

Discourses in electronic sound have a tendency to focus on teleological histories, inventors, and “objective” scientific explanations without giving full consideration to the amalgam of social and political factors tied to technologies of sound production. This presentation seeks to disrupt some of these “givens,” weaving together the historical, technical, and interpretive by examining the ways in which particular logics of sexual difference, human connectivity, and social organization are rearticulated in modular interfaces. Modularity presents an interesting site of inquiry due to the simultaneous codifications of various social configurations, notions of the body, and developments in media and computing technologies that occurred at mid-century. Because of the relevance of modular interfaces to history of computation and their enduring presence as tools in electronic sound, they present a productive site of commentary on the social relevance of technologies and can serve as a grounding paradigm for thinking and re-thinking engagement with sound. This presentation will integrate media archaeological methods with feminist science and technology studies perspectives, thinking through the ways machines can be read as cultural artifacts and reflect larger social and cultural logics. The presentation will also reflect on the complexity of what this means for artists that engage these technologies – the various paths these ideologies may or may not take in sonic practices.

Bio: Asha Tamirisa works with sound and moving image and researches media histories. Currently, Asha is a doctoral student at Brown University in the Computer Music and Multimedia department, and is concurrently pursuing an M.A. in Modern Culture and Media.

Kevin Davis (University of Virginia)

Instrumentality in the Expanded Field of Music Composition

Many histories of sound art, improvisation, and other experimental musical practices trace a similar lineage, from Luigi Russolo to John Cage, the often-credited liberators of noise and sound. Yet sound and noise are resultant phenomena—the result of some physical transfer of energy through a medium or media. Musical sound, in particular, is typically the result of an actor engaging with some instrument. Despite the importance of materialist elements in music, traditional Western notions of music consistently diminish the significance of musical instruments, instrumentality, and many of the materialist or non-human agents within our complex musical ecosystems. Though both the recent “non- human turn” in the humanities and recent Deleuzian-Spinozistic theorizing suggest exciting new paradigms for philosophico-musical scene analysis that consider materiality as integral, the case for an explicitly neo-materialist musical analysis, especially within music composition, is rarely made.

In response, this presentation develops an analysis of musical instruments and the nature of musical instrumentality. Building on the “techno-phenomenology” of Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour, James J. Gibson, and others I propose a theory of musical instrumentality that lays the groundwork for alternative readings of the compositional value of often-marginalized musical practices. To develop this concept of instrumentality and the materialist musical hermeneutic it implies, I draw from discourses of tools and objects and combine them with those concerning musical instruments specifically. By considering musical instruments as a nexus for the flux of culture, music, and sound, an alternative framework is developed for contextualizing ontologically complex contemporary practices while expanding the boundaries of the compositional.

Bio: Kevin Davis is an improviser, composer, and cellist. He has degrees in composition from University of Memphis (BMus), the Centre for Advanced Musical Study (MA), and University of Virginia (MA, PhD). He is currently an instructor at the University of Virginia, teaching courses in composition, music theory, and music technology.

Etha Williams (Harvard University)

La femme clavecin: Vitalist Materialism, Reproductive Labor, and Queer Musical Pleasure in the Late Eighteenth Century

When Denis Diderot posited that the philosopher is a kind of harpsichord—a “sensitive instrument” susceptible to sympathetic resonance—he was not concerned only with cognition: sexual reproduction was at stake, too. As he develops the metaphor of the “human harpsichord” (l’homme clavecin) in D’Alembert’s Dream, Diderot imagines how this sentient harpsichord might reproduce: “it would live and breed of itself, or with its female, little harpsichords, also living and vibrating.”

The human harpsichord metaphor has recently garnered attention within music studies for the ways it speaks to theoretical concerns with instrumentality, materiality, and the agential capacity of material things. But the hypothetical claim that l’homme clavecin might reproduce has been taken less seriously; and the questions of gender, sexual difference, and sensible desire it raises have consequently been passed over in silence.

I argue that the human harpsichord metaphor points to an ambivalent, and fluid, relationship between vital materiality and gendered reproductive labor. I place D’Alembert’s Dream in dialogue with two other depictions of harpsichord-playing in Diderot’s oeuvre: the fictionalized account of his daughter’s harpsichord lessons in the Leçons de Clavecin and the account of a nun’s same-sex seduction by her mother superior in La religieuse. The Leçons de clavecin illuminates the ways sonic sensibility was bound up with the reproductive labor of heterosexual marriage, in preparation for which musical training formed a symbolic dowry. La religieuse, on the other hand, locates in the homosocial space of the nunnery a queer experience of musical pleasure—the possibility of which is latently present in all sensible matter. Together, the three texts transform l’homme clavecin into an ambiguously sexed femme clavecin. And, read with work by Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti, they suggest that our own materialisms must account for the ways that materiality is gendered and that gender is materialized.

Bio: Etha Williams is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. Her dissertation, "Promiscuous Agencies: Eighteenth-Century Keyboard Playing and Philosophies of the Body," explores how the keyboard shaped theories of embodied cognition, emergent consciousness, and vitalist ecology in later-eighteenth-century Europe. More broadly, she is interested in the challenges aurality has posed in theorizing the relationship between knowledge, embodiment, and sensation.

7:00 - 9:00 p.m. Keynote Performer: Clara Latham

Experimental Theater (CPMC 122)

Click here for Clara's program notes and bio.

Saturday, March 3

9:30 - 11:30 a.m. Session 6: Gender/Sexuality (Sarah Hankins, Chair)

Orchestra Room (CPMC 136)

Max Silva (University of Chicago)

Commas, Overtones, and Pain Play: Kinky Relationality in the Music of Georg Friedrich Haas

Georg Friedrich Haas’s “coming out” as a kink dominant has already been connected to his music—specifically, some construe his use of completely darkened performance spaces as a means of putting the audience in submissive headspace. But is there something kinky about the sound itself?

Extending Cusick’s and Maus’s work on listening as pleasurable submission in general, I contend that Haas’s music affords a listening experience similar to the experience of submission in some kinds of BDSM scenes, specifically those where the dom focuses on crafting an overwhelming sensory experience for the sub. While much in Haas’s aesthetics of slowly savored sonorities could resonate with erotic sensation play, I focus on a particular technique: a pair of intervals, initially perceived as mistuned variants of each other, is gradually perceived radically differently through recognition of their derivation from separate overtone series. Like a BDSM session where the dom forces the sub to attend to the quality of the pain until it is transfigured into something radically different, Haas’s music transfigures irrational commas into meaningful overtone-quality transformations.

In both cases, the submissive position is not entirely passive: the breakthrough depends on the sub actively working to master the sensation through coming to know it. This suggests an intervention in existing theories of music analysis as domination. Whereas Maus has interpreted structuralist music theorizing as a defensive overreaction to the threat of emasculation when music penetrates and overpowers us, here music-theoretical self- domination enables us to fully inhabit submission. This self-mastery also enables both the music theorist and the S&M switch to share their experience by dominating others, lovingly helping them achieve the same breakthrough. I conclude by considering the resistant, transformative potential of this dialectical relationality in music-as- pain-play, both as it relates to larger modernist ethical projects, and to other discourses of S&M.

Bio: Max Silva is a PhD candidate in music theory at the University of Chicago. He works on late modernism (especially Boulez, Ligeti, and spectralists) in relation to phenomenology and perception, ethics and ideology, and pleasure. His article on Haas’s in vain and political ambivalence is forthcoming in Twentieth Century Music.

Anthony Rasmussen (University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States)

Acoustic Patriarchy: Hearing Gender Violence in Mexico City’s Public Spaces

In Mexico, femicide and sexual assault have reached epidemic proportions. In Mexico City however, instances of gender violence often take on more insidious forms. Characteristic catcalls, whistles, and mumbled obscenities are ubiquitous features of Mexico City’s public spaces and channels of transportation. Adapting ethnomusicologist J. Martin Daughtry’s concept of belliphonic listening to a peacetime, urban environment, this paper explores how individuals embody, comprehend, and contest the acoustic patriarchy in which they are immersed. For the perpetrators (typically men), the deployment of these sounds demonstrates a hypermasculine ideal and a command over these acoustic territories. For victims (typically women), these sounds serve as both a warning of potential physical confrontation and as a form of trauma endured as a part of daily urban life. These circumstances affect how victims choose to dress, where, when and with whom they are willing to travel, and how they behave in public—the overriding strategy of many victims is to pretend they simply do not hear. Others assume a different tack, such as the street performance group Las Hijas de Violencia (the Daughters of Violence), who confront harassers with toy guns filled with confetti and an onslaught of punk rock music. This investigation is based on the testimonials of both victims and perpetrators and aims to demonstrate how broad patterns of social inequity and violence are transduced into quotidian interactions as well as the central role that sound plays in these interactions, both as an indicator and weapon of gender violence.

Bio: Anthony Rasmussen is a postdoctoral fellow with the UC Institute for Mexico and the United States. He specializes in urban sound studies and holds a PhD from the UC Riverside. His work can be found in Ethnomusicology Forum and in a forthcoming volume of Women and Music.

Alec MacIntyre (University of Pittsburgh/Seton Hill University)

“Be Nice or Get Out”: Sonically Creating and Enforcing the Boundaries of Queer Space in Pittsburgh

“Be Nice or Get Out.” So proclaims a sign next to the front door of the Blue Moon Bar in Pittsburgh. This directive encapsulates the rules for belonging in the space and is enforced by the bar’s staff, drag performers, and regulars through their influences on the venue’s soundscape.The Blue Moon is an inclusively queer space, a safe haven for trans and gender non-conforming people often marginalized even within the LGBT community, and, thus, its insiders are particularly invested in maintaining the bar’s “niceness.” In this context, being “nice” is a rejection of cis- and hetero-normative pressures to “pass” or assimilate, instead prioritizing the rights of queer people to exist as they identify. Sonically, this manifests as an eclectic mix of musical, conversational, and ambient sounds reflecting who is in the bar at a given time. If, however, an outsider tries to impose cis- or hetero-normative values on the space, insiders often respond by using musical sound to passively reject the offender, drawing attention to their non-membership in the space and encouraging them to be nice or get out.

This presentation depicts both aspects of the Blue Moon’s soundscape: the eclectic mix of sounds reflecting the bar’s people and used to welcome insiders, as well as use of sound to neutralize threats to “niceness.” In my analysis, I adapt Steve Goodman’s concepts of affective tone and weaponized sound (Sonic Warfare, 2010) to describe the politics of creating and defining the boundaries of the Blue-Moon-as-space through its soundscape.

Bio: Alec MacIntyre received his PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2017 and does research on queer aesthetics, politics, and performance art in the United States. He currently teaches World Music classes at the University of Pittsburgh and Seton Hill University and works on fundraising for several non-profit organizations.

11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Session 7: Traditions/Innovations (Wilfrido Terrazas, Chair)

Orchestra Room (CPMC 136)

Sean Colonna (Columbia University)

Sonic Phenomenology in Duke Ellington’s Daybreak Express

Like other train-inspired works of the twentieth century such as Pierre Schaeffer’s Étude aux chemins de fer (1948) or Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988), Duke Ellington’s Daybreak Express (1933) draws much of its musical material from the sounds of train motion; however, unlike these later pieces, Ellington’s orchestrates psychoacoustic processes instead of utilizing recordings as the foundation for the composition. His music represents the processes of Doppler shift, object streaming, and inattention deafness as they impinge upon an embodied subject’s perception of a train accelerating to a steady speed, maintaining that speed for some time, and then slowing down to halt. In this paper, I first demonstrate the musical means by which each of these processes are depicted in the piece’s introduction, drawing on Albert Bregman’s work on auditory scene analysis. I then show how the structural aesthetics of these processes are used to articulate more abstract musical ideas in later sections. The second portion of this paper examines some of the philosophical and historiographical issues Daybreak Express raises. Adopting an Aristotelian understanding of mimesis, I investigate the ways in which Ellington’s piece could be considered mimetic while also showing that his music invites us to rethink the ways in which mimesis connects to phenomenology. I conclude by describing the ways in which Daybreak Express presages by almost forty years both the aesthetic attitudes and compositional techniques of spectral music, traditionally understood as beginning with French and German composers in the 1970s. I ultimately argue for thinking bidirectionally in time about Daybreak Express, as it participates in and problematizes discourses that both preceded and succeeded its date of composition.

Bio: Sean Colonna is a second-year PhD student in historical musicology at Columbia University. Prior to starting his graduate studies he joined Teach for America, founding the music program at a charter school in Arkansas. In 2014 he received a Fulbright Scholarship to work in Germany as an English Teaching Assistant. His research interests include: opera and nationalism, musical modernism, black studies, and the aesthetics of political enfranchisement in the United States. His current work centers on black composers in and around the time of the Harlem Renaissance, exploring how their compositions both participated in and expanded the boundaries of traditional Euro-American compositional practice.

Audrey Slote (University of Minnesota)

Categorize Me, I Defy Every Label: Janelle Monáe’s Blurring of Binaries and Vision of Utopian Freedom in The Electric Lady

At the end of the music video for “Q.U.E.E.N.,” Janelle Monáe raps, “Categorize me, I defy every label!” This statement expresses a project realized throughout her album The Electric Lady. Monáe creates a world through music, lyrics, explanatory text, and videos in which she blurs the distinction between binaries of gender, sexuality, and human/machine identity, while also creating ambiguity with other constructs like the linearity of time. Her deconstruction of binaries is rooted in broader Afrofuturist goals of undermining restrictive norms and asserting agency and subjectivity in the telling of historical narratives.

In this presentation, I will disentangle the threads of binary blurring at play in the album, identifying how Monáe expresses them through layered sonic and visual elements. I will analyze the music video for “Q.U.E.E.N.” as a microcosm of the album’s deconstruction of categories, connecting concrete musical details to the philosophical paradigms of Afrofuturism. Finally, I will suggest that the continuous blurring and breaking down of binaries points to a utopian vision of freedom and wholeness that is specifically Afrofuturist in nature, fulfilled in the conclusion of the album. My approach blends concepts from Afrofuturism, feminism, and queer theory with modes of harmonic, formal, and rhythmic analysis that draw upon theories of J.D. Kramer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Joseph Straus.

Bio: Audrey Slote is an M.A. student in Music Theory at the University of Minnesota (UMN). She holds degrees in cello from St. Olaf College and UMN. Her current work combines music theory with Jewish studies, feminism, and queer theory, and focuses on how the experiences of marginalized groups are expressed in music.

Otto Stuparitz (University of California, Los Angeles)

The Indonesian Jazz Archive: Canonization, Curation, and Identity

Abstract: Authority over the Indonesian jazz cannon has rested in the hands of a select number of individuals and institutions. As Indonesian jazz obtains a place in the world jazz repertoire, the most prominent institutions of Arsip Jazz Indonesia (Indonesian Jazz Archive) and Warta Jazz have been instrumental in cultivating a specific cannon that centers on the ensemble Indonesian Jazz Allstars. This telling of Indonesian jazz de-emphasizes connections to both Dutch colonialism and African American racial concepts and cultural lineages. By implicitly and explicitly arguing that Indonesian jazz is unique and distinctly Indonesian, these institutions frame postcolonial Indonesia apart from Dutch colonial and global influences. Based on ethnographic study and archival research, this paper sheds light on the global flows of postcolonial Indonesia as the nation engages an outside musical practice by localizing it into its own musical culture. These recorded materials have shifted from something promoted by the Dutch, banned under the Japanese and first Indonesian government, to something that has gained renewed popularity in the current liberal political period. The opening of these archives to public is an act of resistance against the establishment policies that often targeted jazz as a part of the Dutch colonial lineage, embraced by the non-dominate Indo (mestizo) and Chinese Indonesian populations. The community archives I consider—Irama Nusantara, Arsip Jazz Indonesia, Lokanata Project, and Warta Jazz—contain historical recordings not documented elsewhere in national Indonesian or colonial Dutch archives. These archives must be understood as privately maintained and curated institutions with specific goals for each project that relate to each archivist’s particular concept of Indonesian identity. By articulating the entanglements between styles, descriptions, and meanings of Indonesian jazz, this paper analyzes how genre, archive, identity, community, and participation in the postcolonial nation are simultaneously constructed in relational and mutually constitutional ways.

Bio: Otto Stuparitz is a Ph.D. student in UCLA’s Department of Ethnomusicology and the Editor-in-Chief of Ethnomusicology Review. He has led the Intercultural Improvisation Ensemble at UCLA and performs with regional Balinese gamelans. His academic work has explored recording studio aesthetics and gong kebyar pedagogies related to time, economics, and value. His dissertation investigates the history and contemporary practice of Indonesian jazz.

10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Installation and Demonstration

Viola Yip (New York University)

“Non-Cochlear” Music: Light as expanded musical materials

(Paper on Friday morning)

See above for abstract and bio.

Anna Clock and Lauren Sankary

‘I Could Turn You Inside Out’: The Radical Potential of Headphone Space in a Gendered Aurality

(Paper on Friday morning)

See above for abstract and bio.

1:00 - 2:00 p.m. Lunch

CPMC Front Courtyard

2:00 - 4:00 p.m. Keynote Speaker: George Lewis

Click here for George's abstract.

7:00 - 9:00 p.m. Performance Session

Experimental Theater (CPMC 122)

Alexander Dupuis (Brown University)

Loup-Garou

Loup Garou is an audiovisual performance which places a singer within a system of recursive audiovisual processes. The performance extrapolates on the implicit connection between lycanthropy and feedback established in Robert Ashley’s piece titled The Wolfman, but imagines this lycanthropy as a tool for astral projection rather than the impetus for a horror story.

The Wolfman is a performance in which a so-called lounge singer’s microphone is amplified to the point of aggressive feedback. The singer positions their mouth close to the microphone in order to use the vocal cavity as a filter for the feedback sounds, influencing the feedback loop with sounds that are disproportionately soft in relation to the powerful howl that emerges. Feedback is, in this context, a reflection of the transformative powers associated with werewolves, in which the typical human body comes to possess inhuman strength. It is also more loosely an analogy to the cyclical nature of the transformative process, which in modern times is often tied to the appearance of the full moon.

The feedback of Loup Garou is used to reference a different mythical association of lycanthropy, that of astral projection and travel. This fits in with certain mythical Scandinavian notions of mind/body division, in which there is an astral body or hide which can be manipulated separately from the physical self. The incorporation of video feedback serves to underscore this point - the feedback is quite literally a projection of the physical aspect of the performer. Over the course of the piece the video feed is transformed, resulting in different relationships between the projected self and the physical. At first they are closely related, resembling an aura, then transforming into a giant, then becoming so large as to abstract into forms which might resemble the astronomical or the molecular.

Daniel Fishkin and Ensemble (University of California San Diego)

Body Piece No. 2

BP update:

I intended to return to this piece in order to re-examine the OKCupid online dating platform. I've been in a relationship for a few years, so I haven't been aware of how online dating has changed. But I was also disturbed by OKCupid's decision to disable "usernames.", now mandating users to display their real name. This disturbs me not only for a loss of privacy, but also for a loss of poesis—a user's ability to craft their own identity textually and thusly their online avatar. In fact, the original score of my OKCupid piece was "usernames.rtf".

Anyway, I didn't redo this piece as I had intended. It was difficult for busy grad students to commit to my stringent rehearsal schedule. Nor could I bring myself to return to the dating platform in order to generate new scores—maybe I was just out of practice. So, I decided to use my original text corpus from 2014, spanning countless OKCupid profiles, built collaboratively by the students of the Wesleyan University Laptop Orchestra and later by various art historians, for a concert at the Brooklyn Artist Residency, Room and Board. I'm not sure whether or how OkCupid stores the data of their daters. But, unlike facebook, which memorializes countless users after their death by preserving their digital tombstones, people on OKCupid just seem to disappear—when they find love or, when they lose hope in the idea that there's always another match waiting on the next page. Returning to the old texts, it was a joy to rediscover the dark hopefulness of these lost souls. I now perform Body Piece as a solo.

--dinercandles, 2018

Bio: Daniel Fishkin’s ears are ringing. Composer, sound artist, and instrument builder. Completely ambivalent about music. Daniel studied with composer Maryanne Amacher and with multi-instrumentalist Mark Stewart. He has performed as a soloist on modular synthesizer with the American Symphony Orchestra, developed sound installations in abandoned concert halls, and played innumerable basement punk shows. Daniel’s lifework investigating the aesthetics of hearing damage has received international press (Nature Journal, 2014); as an ally in the search for a cure, he has been awarded the title of “tinnitus ambassador” by the Deutsche Tinnitus-Stiftung.

Akiko Hatakeyama (University of Oregon)

ち — Chi

Trembling lights grow and cease. Small shimmering flames create a world – an ephemeral world tied to the past, present, and the future. The orange light, fuzzy yet powerful, coexists with sounds and my voice and communicates with the air at the scene. Sounds are like connected with the ground and keep our feet stable.

A custom-made instrument called myaku placed on a table senses luminance. The intensity variant of each light source, a candle, is translated to the amplitude of each sound sample. The performer controls the sound and visual by lighting and moving candles. Candles portray various cultural meanings, and they may evoke unique memories on everyone including myself. The performance is a way of purification through a ritualistic sharing of the space, time, and experience being in the environment. The warmth, smell, sight, and sound all speak to us.

The title ち - chi could mean blood, earth, knowledge, lateness, planting, and more in Japanese. Creation of this live interactive performance piece went through a process of solitary contemplation, reflecting my life experiences as a woman from a restrictive culture, who currently lives outside of it but not completely.

Bio: Akiko Hatakeyama is a composer/performer of electroacoustic music and intermedia. She explores the boundaries between written music, improvisation, electronics, real-time computer-based interactivity, and visual media. Her research focuses on realizing her ideas of relations between the body and mind into intermedia composition, often in conjunction with building customized instruments/interfaces.

Jasper Sussman and Alexandria Smith (University of California San Diego)

mother woke me (wake me)

Common interests, goals, and camaraderie brought Alexandria and me together in the making and performance of mother woke me (wake me) , a piece featuring unusual and vulnerable sonic qualities on trumpet and voice within an electronically produced environment. Our goal in working together was to explore and discover a model of unconventional collaboration that reconstructed the roles of performer and creator and questioned the ideal environment in which excellent artistry occurs.

In the making of the piece, Alexandria and I chose to eliminate the roles of composer and performer, instead adopting a democratic system not dissimilar to a rock band’s. Our creation process involved embodied improvisation, notational experiments, movement explorations and thoughtful communication around ideas of personal history and identity, aesthetics, and individualized working styles. Additionally, we drew from ideas of Affect Theory, a theory often applied to theatrical and visual art, Stanislavsky’s Method (also theatrical), and the Japanese dance form butoh to foster an embodied performance practice rooted in emotional intensity. We found that discovering a clear emotional trajectory, aided by internalized stories and textual material, created an intensified experience of connection to each other and to our material. As Stanislavsky explains it, “Inside of you, parallel to the line of physical actions, you have an unbroken line of emotions verging on the subconscious. You cannot follow the line of external action sincerely and directly and not have the corresponding emotions” (1936, p. 329). This intensity of emotion, its vulnerability, is what led us to our unusual timbres, our graphic and instructional score, and our personalized story behind the piece built from experiences of pain and that pain’s relationship to acceptance and personal power.

Bio: Jasper is a composer, performer, improviser, and scholar pursuing a Ph.D. in Music: Integrative Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her current work involves discovering, archiving, mastering and composing for the myriads of expressive capabilities that the human voice possesses, and understanding these sounds musically, culturally, and anatomically.

David Stout (University of North Texas)

The Janus Switch

The Janus Switch v.2 (2016) is a digital performance work merging live cinema and electronic sound in a poetic exploration of generative audio-visual feedback structures. Janus, the two-headed Roman god was notable for his ability to look in two directions at once. He was known as the god of doorways and passages. The Janus Switch is a techno-poetic realization of these ideas, where signal streams are switched rapidly back and forth to create a wide range of sonic and visual interactions. The system software, created by Cory Metcalf in collaboration with David Stout, allows for realtime mixing of mathematic data to create an evolving array of hybrid audio-visual forms and aesthetic behaviors. While the technical methods can be interesting in and of themselves, the work is driven by the visceral experience produced by the fleeting imagery that emerges in the process of navigating the system. The work is paradoxically, highly composed and thoroughly improvisational. The image vocabulary, like music, reveals its source as a kind of fluid state of transitory becoming. What emerges for the viewer is a dynamic subjectivity, as the audience must actively complete the circuit to co-create the meaning or apparent “thingness” of what the mind and body is confronting. In this process of “Janus Switching” many things, places and ideas come and go, including allusions to landscape, cellular life, plant forms, mechanistic structures, gateways, glyphs and vessels, just to name a few. All of the resulting sound comes from the direct sonification of the image processes. The sonification methods allow for working in both tonal/atonal and/or timbre oriented modes including a wide array of subtractive noise-based soundscapes.

Bio: David Stout (MFA CalArts) is a visual artist, composer and performer. As co-founder of the international duo, NoiseFold, he creates installation and performative works in visual- music, data-visualization, VR and generative glass-sculpture. David directs the Hybrid Arts Laboratory at the University of North Texas, and coordinates the Initiative for Advance Research in Technology and the Arts (iARTA).