Schedule – May 17, 2025

Kayla Yazdi & Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi – Persian Music Visualization

Persian Music Visualization project consists of twelve framed, textile-based visual works that creatively represent visualizations of specific pieces from the traditional Persian music repertoire, known as the radif. This musical system is structured around twelve primary modal systems, each called a dastgāh, with its own unique and complex set of melodic models and structures.

Typically, the opening piece(s) of a dastgāh are known as darāmad, which are the most representative of the mode due to their defining melodic patterns and structures. For this reason, we have chosen to base our visualizations on the darāmad of each dastgāh, selecting specific recordings—each featuring a solo instrumental interpretation. By analyzing and studying the distinctive characteristics of each mode, we have translated their essence into textile-based visual artworks through hand embroidery, machine sewing, and digital print. 

This project is generously supported by the Stanford Iranian Studies Program.

Héloïse Garry & Koh Terai - Of Sand and Sound

Sound and Light Installation | Location: Listening Room (128)

Of Sand and Sound invites you into an immersive sensory experience where light and sound materialize from two essential elements: sand and ice.  

In front of you, glowing tubes filled with sand and water pulse gently in the dark. The soundscape emerges from processed recordings of melting ice and a humming refrigerator -- materials often overlooked in daily life -- here reframed as an organic soundscape. Cracks, drips, hums, and shifts in pressure form a living sonic texture that blurs the boundary between stillness and motion.

Both the light and the sound arise from materials in flux each resisting fixed form, each caught in continuous transformations of states and temporalities. As these materials are sonified and illuminated, the installation poses questions about what can be captured, held, or represented, and what continually escapes.

Take a moment to stand, sit, or move around the space. What do you hear? What do you see?

Paper Session 1

Nima Farzaneh – The Sonic Sublime: Investigating Auditory Awe in Immersive Experiences

This talk focuses on the auditory dimension of sublime experiences, exploring how sound alone, and in combination with visual elements, contributes to the perception of awe in architectural and natural spaces. While visual grandeur often dominates discussions of the sublime, this study highlights the distinct roles of spatial acoustics—reverberation, spatial diffusion, and echo density—and the qualities of the sound source—harmonic richness, timbre, and tonal composition—in shaping profound emotional and perceptual responses. How does sound independently evoke awe, and how does it interact with visual cues to heighten these moments of transcendence? Drawing from psychoacoustics, music psychology, and architectural acoustics, I will examine how sonic parameters can be intentionally designed to induce awe, and whether these experiences can be tailored to address specific emotional and mental health conditions. This research uses psychophysical measurements, and physiological responses to capture the fleeting yet powerful emotional states triggered by soundscapes. The goal is to create immersive, multisensory environments where auditory awe is central to fostering emotional well-being. By advancing our understanding of the auditory sublime, this work seeks to uncover how sound can be intentionally crafted to evoke awe, transcendence, and therapeutic effects across diverse spaces and contexts.

Performance Session 1

Héloïse Garry – Langue Étrangère

LANGUE ÉTRANGÈRE reflects on the process of learning and inhabiting a foreign language, where meaning fluctuates between comprehension and abstraction. Constructed entirely from processed recordings of the composer's own voice, the piece unfolds as a multi-layered sonic landscape interweaving spoken fragments in French, English, Japanese, and Chinese. What is lost or revealed when language is stripped of referential meaning?

Mercedes Montemayor Elosua – Trip to Chiapas

Home videos of my trip to Chiapas.

Lightning Talk Session

Luna Valentin – Representing Paleolithic Soundscapes of Chauvet Cave

The prehistoric art of Chauvet Cave, a UNESCO site in southern France, has long captivated archaeologists, art historians, and the broader public. The spectacular paintings dating back to 36,000 years ago sheltered in the cave have been studied extensively for their visual import and cultural significance, along with other archaeological remains such as fire remains, paleonthological remains and anthropic structures. But these also exist in an environment shaped by unique—and largely unexamined—acoustic phenomena. This presentation explores how the Chauvet Paleoacoustics Project utilizes room acoustics research methods to investigate how ancient humans may have experienced and invested the underground galleries of the cave. This project relies on a combination of in situ room acoustic measurements and analyses, digital modeling, and the development of innovative auralization techniques to imagine how prehistoric artists and listeners might have engaged with echoes and resonances. Our work raises pressing questions about the possibilities and limits of representing a space that is physically remote, temporally distant, and delicate in its cultural heritage: to what extent can modern-day immersive simulations re-present ephemeral acoustic experiences from 36,000 years ago, given their ephemerality and the fragile conditions of the site? In what ways might these sonic investigations influence our interpretations of Chauvet’s iconic artwork, potentially illuminating its ritual and performative dimensions? Through the lens of paleoacoustics, we engage in reflecting on the tension between immediate and mediated experience. We ask how acoustic representation can clarify or obscure meaning across vast temporal and cultural divides, and whether these ancient echoes can be re-animated in contemporary setups: museum, or virtual spaces without diminishing their power.

Seán Ó Dálaigh – Dead Music

Alex Han – SMucK: Symbolic Music in ChucK

SMucK (Symbolic Music in ChucK) is a library and workflow for creating music with symbolic data in the ChucK programming language. It extends ChucK by providing a framework for symbolic music representation, playback, and manipulation. SMucK introduces classes for scores, parts, measures, and notes; the latter encode musical information such as pitch, rhythm, and dynamics. These data structures allow users to organize musical information sequentially and hierarchically in ways that reflect familiar conventions of Western music notation. SMucK supports data interchange with formats like MusicXML and MIDI, enabling users to import notated scores and performance data into SMucK data structures. SMucK also introduces SMucKish, a compact high-level input syntax, designed to be efficient, human-readable, and live-codeable. The SMucK playback system extends ChucK’s strongly-timed mechanism with dynamic temporal control over real-time audio synthesis and other systems including graphics and interaction. Taken as a whole, SMucK’s design philosophy treats symbolic music data not only as static representations but also as mutable, recombinant building blocks for algorithmic and interactive processing. By integrating symbolic music into a strongly-timed, concurrent programming language, SMucK’s workflow goes beyond data representation and playback, and opens new possibilities for algorithmic composition, instrument design, and musical performance.

Walker Smith – Musical Chemistry: State of the Art and New Frontiers

‘Musical chemistry’ is an emerging field of interdisciplinary inquiry involving music, chemistry, and intersections therein. Due to its notable absence in the literature, this field technically does not exist. However, there have been sporadic instances of research and creative work from scientists and musicians connecting the two fields dating from the 20th century to the present. This presentation will contextualize these developments within the author’s own emerging ‘musical chemistry’ research practice.  A core question of musical chemistry is how chemical paradigms—concepts, data, molecular structures—can be represented in music. Drawing on techniques of sonification, these endeavors seek to create sonic and musical representations of chemistry that communicate scientific information while also producing an aesthetically novel and enjoyable experience.

Smith will present ongoing work designing his Interactive Musical Periodic Table, an audiovisual instrument that converts the visible spectra of elements into sounds. He will discuss the strategies developed for transforming these sounds to create musically interesting compositions while retaining a high degree of fidelity to the scientific data on which the sounds are based. He will also discuss his developments into communicating these ideas with audiences, blending didactic communication with poetic musical expression. Combining costumes, audiovisual animations, and spoken narratives (ranging from scientific to poetic, didactic to metaphorical) with his soundscapes, he has developed a unique approach he calls (per)sonification. Smith will share excerpts from some of his ‘musical chemistry compositions,’ discuss current research being done by himself and others, and speculate on the future of this new field.

Paper Session 2

Simon Frisch – "sub terras ibit imago”:
 Image, Identity, and Motet Historiography in the “Black Hole” ca. 1500

Around 1500, a profound shift occurred in musical practice within the French court, a transformation with wide-ranging cultural, material, and experiential consequences for European notated music and its performance throughout the early modern period. While the stylistic hallmarks of this shift are evident, the mechanisms and motivations behind it remain elusive—what one scholar memorably described as a “black hole.” With musical settings of Dido’s famous final lines from the Aeneid (“my likeness will go beneath the earth”) as its guide, this paper approaches the edge of that black hole, identifying an evidentiary threshold where descriptions of polyphonic performance begin to emerge with greater frequency and detail. At this event horizon, we can explore how iconography, devotional culture, geopolitical conflicts, theological disputes, and anxieties over legitimate sovereignty were rendered into novel sonic expressions—and subsequently recorded in historical and literary representations—during the late-medieval and early modern transition.

John Fath – A Rising Star Confronts His Idol: Revisiting Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis at Expo ‘86

Known today as one of the vanguards of jazz, Wynton Marsalis gained fame in the early 1980s as a trumpet prodigy in jazz and classical music. Like many, Marsalis looked up to Miles Davis, who had been at the forefront of jazz trumpeting for decades. By the 1980s, Davis was well into his controversial “electric era,” where he pushed his music on through funk, rock, and pop, a turn that Marsalis disapproved of. Due to their fame and conflicting interests, Davis and Marsalis often spoke and spat about each other through popular interviews and magazines. In 1986, Marsalis eclipsed Davis as “trumpet player of the year” in DownBeat (Lange 1986). Despite their media feud, Davis and Marsalis interacted in person only once. At the 1986 Vancouver International Jazz Festival, Marsalis uninvitedly walked on stage and played during Davis’s performance.

The circulation of accounts and responses to the 1986 “encounter” has contributed to a convoluted cartoon that does not represent what might have actually happened (Marsalis 2015). These popular receptions are based on a conflict between so-called jazz traditionalists (like Marsalis) and so-called jazz evolutionists (like Davis). Several scholars write about jazz in terms of this tradition-evolution dialectic: as a “changing same,” (Baraka 1963) an “entire…avant-garde movement” (Washington 2004), or an “intratextual discourse” (Barzel 2012). However, the nature of the Davis-Marsalis conflict is far more complex.

In this paper, I investigate how Davis and Marsalis each fail to represent this dialectic and are ideologically self-contradictory. Drawing from jazz critics, newspapers, interviews, Davis’s autobiography, Marsalis’s biography, and academic scholarship, I assemble the material and ideological histories of their feud, their meeting, and the conflict’s legacy. In 1986, Davis and Marsalis are at odds, but across timelines, there is harmony in their ideologies and aesthetics. For example, in a 1986 interview, David Murray heard a 1964 Davis recording and confused it for a Marsalis performance, incorrectly parsing subtleties between the two (Mandel 1986). Through lenses of ideology, class, genre, and respectability, I disentangle the histories and legacies of this conflict to complicate and reinterpret this notorious moment in jazz history.

Performance Session 2

Calvin McCormack – Mindscapes: An Exploration of Collaborative Biofeedback

Researchers often examine the topographical maps of brain activity to better understand neurological functions. But today, they will shape spectral timbres and carve generative landscapes. Skin conductance has long been used to detect deception during polygraph tests. But here, these readings will modulate audio filters and animate the sky. Through approaches both precise and abstract, this composition integrates and transpose biofeedback into a generative, audiovisual collaborator and explore the artistic possibilities of physiological data as a creative interface.

Summer Krinsky – Helpless People

Helpless People is a song about the amplified thoughts and whims of a select few voices. These voices inescapably haunt our collective feeds, despite offering fundamentally uninteresting input. The piece is composed entirely from sounds made with vocal utterances.

Mohammad H. Javaheri – Requiem for Hands (2025)

Solo for Prepared-Detuned Piano and Disklavier Piano

This piece is part of my ongoing exploration of the co-existence of human and inhuman elements within a shared sound space. The composition draws inspiration from an extramusical idea—the eagerness of humanity for perfectionism and completeness, narrowing the beauty of being in favor of flawlessness. This pursuit often replaces and transforms the initial source, creating phenomena that may ultimately erase their origins, including the essence of existence.

Keynote: Ken Ueno – Music, Representation, and the Politics of the Singular

What are the limits of musical representation when the tools of transmission—notation, pedagogy, genre—are bound to histories of exclusion? In this keynote, I argue that the politics of representation in music must be reframed not as symbolic substitution, but as epistemological and corporeal struggle. Drawing from my practice of person-specific composition, I propose that representation can be reimagined through the material and embodied realities of specific performers, rather than idealized types.

My 2008 work On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis serves as a case study. In it, I analyze my own extended vocalizations—overtone singing, throat singing, and other subjugated techniques—extracting harmonic and structural data as the scaffolding for the piece. The work opens with a childhood recording of my voice played on a boombox, enacting a recursive self-portrait and an intertemporal counter-narrative to the abstraction of Western classical forms.

Alongside compositional insights, I draw from my critical writing, including Reclaiming the Aura: B.B. King and the Limits of Notation and Towards the Un-Corseting of Non-Western Bodies, to examine how dominant pedagogies enforce what I term “corseting”: a neocolonial disciplining of non-Western artists into the rigid aesthetics of Western music. Such systems operate through what George Lewis calls “exnomination”—the invisibilization of whiteness as a positionality—and are sustained by what Boaventura de Sousa Santos critiques as the Epistemology of the North.

By engaging alternate frames from Halberstam’s Low Theory and the Epistemologies of the South, I call for practices that resist corseting and instead valorize what dominant culture deems failed, marginal, or inaudible. This is not simply a critique—it is a composition of new pathways, rooted in bodily knowledge, personal history, and sonic particularity.

In this way, I offer a vision of musical representation as a site not just of depiction, but of liberation.