Towards a Response-Able Electroacoustic Composition Practice: In Search of Sympoietic Multivalence

Year 2021, Volume: 5 Issue: 1, 31 - 46, 30.06.2021

Fulya Uçanok

https://doi.org/10.33906/musicologist.885272

Abstract

This paper proposes a relational model for electroacoustic composition practice. In the model, relationality focuses on perspectives of response-ability of the composer with more-than-human agents, within an entangled sympoietic musical space. Here, the response-practices are built on acts of listening that entail, aural analysis and embodied practice with material objects. Within the scope of this paper, more-than-human agents are narrowed down to only recorded sounds (fixed media sound files) and physical material objects.

In investigating such response-able compositional practices, the model follows Post-humanist and New-materialist strands focusing on various concepts proposed by Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. And in doing so, it aims to re-figure some of the conventional discourses about the concepts of poietic agency, and of multivalence within the composition practice.

Keywords

Electroacoustic composition, Response-able composition, Sympoiesis, Material agency, Intra-action, Sound-based composition

References

• Andean, James. (2014). “Towards an Ethics of Creative Sound” Organised Sound. 19(2): 173-181.
• Barad, Karen. (2003). “Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter” University of Chicago Press. 28(3): 801-831.
• Barad, Karen. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Barad, Karen. (2010). “Quantum Entanglementsand Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, Spacetime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-come” Derrida Today. 3(2): 240-268.
• Barad, Karen. (2014). “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together Apart” Parallax (Tandfonline). 20(3): 168-187.
• Bosma, Hannah. (2013). The electronic cry: Voice and gender in electroacoustic music. University of Amsterdam, UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository).
• Brown, Nicholas. (2006). “The Flux Between Sounding and Sound: Towards a relational understanding of music as embodied action” Contemporary music Review. 25(1/2): 37-46.
• Butler, Judith. (1988). “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in phenomenology and Feminist Theory” Theatre Journal. 40(4): 519-531.
• Calderon-Garrido, Diego; Gustems, Josep. (2015). “Temporal Semiotic Units (TSUs) in Audiovisual Analysis” In Enrique, E. (Ed.), Reinventing Sound: Music and Audiovisual Culture. 118-127. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Ceder, Simon. (2015). Diffraction as a Methodology for Philosophy of Education. Paper presented at AERA Conference in 2015 Chicago.
• Coole, Diana. (2005). “Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities” Political Studies. 53(1): 124-142.
• Cusick, Suzanne, G. (2006). “On A Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight”, in Brett, P., Wood, E., Thomas, G. C. (Eds.), Queering the Pitch 2nd Edition, 67-83. Routledge, Taylor and Francis, New York.
• Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Felix. (2013). A Thousand Plateaus. Bloomsbury Academic.
• Ettinger, Bracha, L. (1992). “Matrix and Metramorphosis” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. 4(3): 176-208.
• Ettinger, Bracha, L. (1994). “The Becoming Threshold of Matrixial Borderlines”. In Traveller’s Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement. George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, and Tim Putnam, eds. Pp. 38-62, London, Routledge.
• Ettinger, Bracha, L. (1995). The Matrixial Gaze. Leeds, U.K., Feminist Arts and Histories Network.
• Ettinger, Bracha, L. (1997). “The feminine/prenatal weaving in matrixial subjectivity‐as‐encounter” Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 7(3): 367-405
• Ettinger, Bracha, L. (2001). “Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze: Phantasm to Trauma, from Phallic Structure to Matrixial Sphere” Parallax. 7(4): 89-114.
• Gorne, Annette Vande. (2018). Treatise on Writing Acousmatic Music on Fixed Media. Ohain: Lien musical aesthetic review.
• Haraway, Donna. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, New York.
• Haraway, Donna. (2004). The Haraway Reader. Routledge, London.
• Haraway, Donna. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, NC.
• Impett, Jonathan. (2017). Introduction, In Impett, J. (Ed.), “Artistic Research in Music: Discipline and Resistance”: pp. 9-12. Orpheus Institute, Leuven University Press.
• Landy, Leigh. (2007). Understanding the Art of Sound Organization. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
• Le Guin, Ursula, K, (2004). The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination. Boulder: Shambala Publications.
• McCartney, Andra (1995). “Constructing and Contesting Gender in Thinking about Electroacoustic Music” Leonardo Music Journal. 5: 7-66.
• McCartney, Andra (1994). Creating Worlds for my Music to Exist: How Women Composers of Electroacoustic Music Make Place for their Voices. (M.A. Thesis), York University, Toronto.
• McCartney, Andra (2006). Gender, Genre and Electroacoustic Soundmaking Practices. Intersections. 26: 2, 20-48.
• O’Callaghan, Casey. (2007). Sounds: A Philosophical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Small, Christopher. (1999). “Musicking—the meanings of performing and listening. A lecture” Music Education Research. 1(1): 9-13.
• Smalley, Denis. (1996). “The Listening Imagination: Listening in the Electroacoustic Era” Contemporary Music Review. 13(12): 77-107.
• Smalley, Denis. (1997). “Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes” Organized Sound. 2(2): 107-126.
• Vande Gorne, A. (2018). Treatise on Writing Acousmatic Music on Fixed Media. Ohain: LIEN, Musiques & Recherches.
• Whitman, Walt. (2005). Walt Whitman's Leaves of grass: the first (1855) edition. New York, Penguin Books.