Keynote 1: Monty Adkins

Title: Dark Ambient – ProtoU: a case study

Photo credit: Ethan Dodd-Adkins

Keynote 2: Eddie Dobson

Title: Opportunity for all: the social and cultural mediators of eudaimonia* in sound.

*https://www.britannica.com/topic/eudaimonia

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PAPERS

Lauren Redhead: ‘Voice’, Sonic Representation and Discourse

In this paper, I consider sonic representation as an aesthetic category within music(s) that employ electronics or technologies, very broadly understood. Following the #metoo and Black Lives Matter movements, many festivals and concert series have sought to improve their inclusion of underrepresented groups in contemporary music, often expressing this as a matter of ‘voice’. While acknowledging the importance of such programming, I question whether these initiatives necessarily give ‘voice’ to unheard or unsounded ideas that might originate outside of the communities that such festivals have traditionally represented. This follows from the observations of Bernadette Baker—in an educational context—who describes how ‘voice, identity, and representation have been considered cognate terms presumed to bear some relationship to the construction of knowledge and the circulation of power’, (Baker, 1999: 365) and Marie Thompson who observes that, ‘increased audibility does not necessarily cohere with transformations in the conditions of artistic, economic, and social re/production’ (Thompson, 2020: 289). My previous work (Redhead, 2015) has considered how the discourse of material in contemporary music has led to an institutional preference for women whose work displays masculinised concepts. Here, I extend this critique to consider ‘voice’ as an aesthetic category and to differentiate between voices and discourse. I seek to avoid ‘deploying an unproblematized concept of voice to address […] truth and power effects,’ (Baker, 1999: 380) by questioning whether is an unbroken link between identity and structural representation, that can be aesthetically expressed. Rather, proceeding from Ursula K Le Guin’s (2004) definition of technology as ‘the active human interface with the material world’, I consider artistic strategies from within the Sonic Cyberfeminist, Xenofeminist and Black Quantumn Futurist movements to highlight what Thompson describes as ’the relationship between the field of artistic production, capital accumulation, and relations of social reproduction’ (2020: 289).

References

Baker, Bernadette (1999). ‘What Is Voice? Issues of Identity and Representation in the Framing of Reviews’, Review of Educational Research. 69.4. 365-383, https://doi.org/10.2307/1170770

LeGuin, Urusla K. (2004). ‘A Rant About Technology’. Ursula K LeGuin Archive. http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-Technology.html

Redhead, Lauren (2015). ‘New Music as Patriarchal Category’, in Gender, Age and Musical Creativity, ed. by Catherine Haworth and Lisa Colton. Aldershot, Ashgate.

Thompson, Marie (2020). Sounding the Arcane: Contemporary Music, Gender and Reproduction. Contemporary Music Review, 39.2. 273–292. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2020.1806630

Lauren Redhead is a composer, performer, and musicologist. Many of her compositions are published by Material Press (Berlin), her organ music is published by Firehead Organ Works (UK) and her most recent albums have been released on the pan y rosas discos label (Chicago). In her writing about music, Lauren focuses on the aesthetics and socio-semiotics of 20th and 21st Century musics. Lauren is Reader in 20th and 21st Century Music at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Adam Stanović: Composing Tin Hau: moral, ethical, and documentary conflicts

Between 2016 and 2020, I had the privilege of working in Hong Kong, as an external examiner for one of the various universities. During my visits, which always lasted around a week, I stayed in the Causeway Bay area of the city where, jetlagged and unable to sleep, I would spend hours wandering the balmy, midnight streets recording the sounds of the city at night. The recordings that I made over this period were used to compose a 21-minute work, commissioned by the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, Paris, drawing upon the sounds of people, animals, machines, traffic, and electricity, among others. Significantly, however, the period during which these recordings were made coincided with a dramatic transformation of Hong Kong’s political landscape, and I have little doubt that the sounds I recorded captured something of this significant moment in our recent history. Unable to shake this awareness of what I had inadvertently captured, my attention turned – more than ever before – to the ethical and moral implications of enacting a compositional practice that is so clearly associated with a delicate and controversial situation (of which, admittedly, I knew relatively little). Curiously, there is very little written about the ethics and morality of composition involving recorded sounds, yet there seems to be a pressing need for our attention in this regard; the field (of acousmatic music, at least) is increasingly populated with works that intentionally draw upon social and cultural references real-world events, situations and contexts. Thankfully, however, this topic has been widely addressed elsewhere, particularly in relation to documentary film and photography. This paper considers what might happen if we apply similar ideas to the world of music, and is submitted alongside the composed work “Goodnight, Tin Hau”.

Adam Stanović started composing electronic music over twenty-five years ago. His works are mostly realised on a fixed medium, sometimes accompanied by instruments, electronics, film, and animation. Collectively, they have been performed in over 500 international concerts, and received prizes, residencies and mentions at competitions around the world, including: Bourges (France); Métamorphoses (Belgium); Destellos (Argentina); Contemporanea (Italy); SYNC (Russia); Música Viva (Portugal); Musica Nova (Czech Republic); Ars Electronica Forum Wallis (Switzerland); Klingler ElectroAcoustic Residency (KEAR, USA); MusicAcoustica (China); Prix Russolo (France); and Red Jasper Award (USA). For further information, see: www.adamstanovic.com

Dr Manuella Blackburn: The representation of diversity in sample packs

This paper focusses on representation issues associated with sample packs that contain culturally diverse sound content. Sample packs are commercial products catering to a broad array of end-users who work with samples as fundamental building blocks in music production, sound design and commercial audio. Documenting the process of creating a non-Western, multi-musical instrument sample pack presented an opportunity to navigate and confront commercialisation norms involved in selling culturally diverse sound material via online distribution platforms. A close-up view of the handling of diversity within downloadable products indicates representation issues within visual artwork, text descriptions, labelling and titling conventions used for branding and marketing. The paper examines the connections and interactions between sample pack distributors, producers, musicians and end-users to illuminate supply and demand trends, while providing an update on continuing debates of cultural appropriation. Such debates merge and intertwine with larger, systemic challenges of categorisation for those who curate and sell these products, and sample retrieval for those who search for and purchase these sounds. Drawing upon first-hand experience of sample pack development in collaboration with musicians of Indian musical instruments and Milap (the UK’s leading Indian arts development trust), as part of the Instruments INDIA project provides a case study to better understand, influence and inform more desirable commercial practices in the future.

Dr Manuella Blackburn is a researcher and an internationally recognised, multi award-winning composer of sound-based music and digital arts. She has been working with sound for over 15 years and has created projects for fixed media, instruments and electronics, installations, and music for film and audio-visuals. Her music is published on the Montreal-based label, Emprientes DIGITALes and she has received over 250 performances and exhibitions world-wide. Dr Blackburn’s research interests focus on three primary areas: sampling and intertextual procedures, intercultural creativity, and compositional methodologies. Her research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and she is currently researching the history of sound libraries as a precursor to the contemporary downloadable sample pack.

John Dack: Translating Pierre Henry’s ‘Journal de mes sons’ – a report

The composer Pierre Henry (1927-2017) worked with Pierre Schaeffer in a series of collaborative works such as the ‘Symphonie pour un homme seul’ (1950) and ‘Orphée 53’ (1953). Despite their close working relationship there were many underlying tensions and Henry eventually left to pursue a career as an independent composer working for film, television, theatre and dance. Henry’s written output is certainly much smaller than Schaeffer’s who confidently described himself as an écrivain rather than composer or administrator.

Nevertheless, Henry’s writings deserve to be more widely known. They are documents that describe his personal history and musical development thus revealing the evolution of his personal musical language. The ‘Journal de mes sons’ (dedicated to Anne Rey) is a relatively short work. First published in 1996 it recounts in poetic, almost dreamlike language his early use of self-made instruments as well as the gradual realisation of the importance of the radio medium and musique concrète. He decided, as a teenager: ‘To be an inventor of sounds’ (Etre inventeur de sons). His description of working in the studio reveals a preoccupation with the actual materiality of equipment and how it is physically manipulated to produce sounds. Henry claims this was ‘In a way, a return to the instrument’ (En quelque sorte un retour à l’instrument’. Such passages indicate unequivocally the relationship between the use of recording technology and musical language.

My intention is to give a brief summary of how my colleague Christine North and I were invited to translate the ‘Journal’ and to discuss the kind of language use by Henry. In fact, the ‘Journal’ is unusual in that Henry also produced a radiophonic version of the text spoken by Florence Delay. Resembling perhaps a radio drama, excerpts of Henry’s music form a background to the words read by Delay. Thus, the ‘Journal de mes sons’ has two independent but related existences.