Sound Thought: Motion Brochure

SOU N D T HO UG H T MO T I O N SHOWCASE OF POSTGRADUATE ARTS RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW CONCERT HALL 7PM, AUGUST 16, 2019 www.soundthought.co.uk

Sound Thought: Motion

Friday August 16th, 2019 – University of Glasgow Concert Hall Sound Thought is a festival series of music of music and sound research, composition, and performance run by postgraduate students from the University of Glasgow.

Sound Thought has hosted annual events since 2007, having previously collaborated with the Centre for Contemporary Arts, The Old Hairdresser’s, Pipe Factory, The Arches, eSharp, LUX Scotland, Subcity Radio, Floored Music, and Glasgow New Music Expedition.

One of Sound Thought’s key aims is to promote the work of postgraduates and to showcase the wide-range of creative practice and research occurring.

The committee has collaborated with the College of Arts to present an evening of artsbased research and practice. Postgraduates from the fields of creative writing, English literature, philosophy, and music will deliver presentations, performances, and screenings of their work.

The committee would like to thank: Brooke Gordon, Davina Smith, and Steve Reid.

Sound Thought: Motion is supported by the University of Glasgow College of Arts PGR Community Building Fund.

Sound Thought: Motion Committee Kevin Leomo Andrew Rae Jamie Macpherson Alessio Wagner Sonia Killmann

#soundthoughtmotion

Bewölkt Sonia Killmann & Jakob Urban Bewölkt (meaning cloudy) is an audiovisual piece, which was created as a collaboration between the visual artist Jakob Urban and sound artist Sonia Killmann. The video was created by Jakob, who has put together a performance and poetry to the music, which make it possible for the sounds and visuals to be interpreted and perceived from various angles. The image might seem clustered, as there are several focal points appearing in the video, which make it possible for it to be viewed several times. The sounds are composed of field recordings and a simple piano track that complements the various excerpts of mundane imagery of the video. With all audio and visual elements combined however, the mundane turns into something rather confusing and yet gripping.

Sonia Killmann: Sonia is a recent Glasgow University graduate, as well as a composer and sound artist from Belgium. Her works usually involve field recordings, which have been placed in a traditional musical context. Being a jazz musician herself, some of her works are inspired by jazz harmony and include live improvisation. Sonia has spent the past year exploring the various ways in which sound can be perceived and crossing boundaries between field recordings and instrumental performance.

Jakob Urban: Jakob Urban (*1997 in Brussels, Belgium) studies Philosophy and Film in Berlin and works as an artist across multiple media with a focus on performance, video and installation. His works often deal with cultural heritage, identity, intimacy and difference within a contemporary sociopolitical context. Drawing from multiple sources and inspirations at once, Jakob is interested in the blurring of boundaries between stillness and movement, 3D and 2D, recording and real time.

How David Foster Wallace Sounds Like R.D. Laing William Allen This paper listens to schizophonic sound in David Foster Wallace’s 1996 Infinite Jest. Composer R. Murray Schafer coined ‘schizophonia’ in 1969 to name the ’split between an original sound and its electroacoustical transmission or reproduction.’ It is a ‘nervous word,’ suggestive of ‘aberration and drama,’ and ‘related to schizophrenia.’ Acknowledging Schafer’s problematic coupling of terms, I will listen to three instances of schizophonia in Infinite Jest. Each involves an auditory, catoniainducing entombment, accompanied by variously doubled-up ringings, knockings, and voice-overs.

I will argue that the text’s verbal and virtual soundscapes recreate psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s theory of the schizoid ‘divided self’, embedding echoing patterns of entombing ‘in-twos’ into paragraphs. Text looks mute, 2D. But the boundaries between soundless page and sounding board are often broached: written words can sound aloud in silent reading. As Angela Leighton writes, ‘a literary text is a bottomless well of potential noises.’ Letters from Wallace to Don DeLillo demonstrate the younger author’s open-eared-ness towards texts. In 1996, he acknowledged DeLillo’s comments on ‘the physical architecture of clauses and words and letters’ as ‘real interesting,’ yet admits he ‘identified with them not one whit,’ since he considered himself ‘maybe 100% aural.’ A postcard one year later states: ‘I have little sense of the sculpture of the alphabet, little visual acuity at all [...] I think my neurology is almost all sonic and rhythmical.’ Stephen Burn writes that Infinite Jest invites the reader ‘to learn how schizophrenia manifests itself in the human brain.’ Drawing on Garrett Stewart’s model of ‘phonemic reading,’ a practise ‘to do not with reading orally but with aural reading,’ this paper will suggest an auditory counterpoint: that Infinite Jest makes us hear how schizophrenia—or, rather, Laing’s reading of schizophrenia—manifests itself in the human brain.

I received my undergraduate and MPhil degrees at the University of Cambridge, before joining the University of Glasgow as a PhD student in 2018. My AHRC-funded doctoral project, titled ‘Sonic Neurologies: Sound and Schizophrenia in the work of David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers’ listens to the interactions between sound and neurological disorder in contemporary American fiction. It proposes a type of close reading that attends closely to the virtual and verbal soundscapes of texts, listening to both the fictional sounds of their storyworlds, and the real sounds their words comprise on the page. The project argues that an aural phenomenology of schizophrenic speech and experience amplifies and clarifies these soundscapes, through which these texts innovate phenomenological representations of consciousness and neurological disorder.

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(False) Appeals to Nature Adam Castle “(False) Appeals to Nature” is an open discussion of composers’ and sound artists’ varying attempts to “appeal” to, or mimic “nature” in our work. Leading discussion by example, the presentation/discussion will feature several examples of my own practice and work through both pre-recorded media demonstration and semi-improvised live demonstrations of works (and potential audience participation) specially relating to concepts and notions of aleatory and aspects of chance in my own “appeals to nature”.

Adam Castle is a composer, researcher and sound artist from Aberdeen, Scotland now based in Glasgow. His work seeks to pose questions about the philosophies of artistry and processes of creation. Multidisciplinary in nature and with a multi-national background his practice often varies in mediums and styles as well as combining various elements of these.

Nothing comes from nothing Jordan Henderson Between 2009 and 2013, Planck, a spacecraft launched by the ESA (European Space Agency), recorded the relic signal of the big bang. That signal travelled through space for 13,800,000,000 years, was then stored on a myriad of computers before being emitted from the loudspeakers surrounding you.

Nothing Comes from Nothing is an enactment of our universe’s past and future, from the big bang to the heat death of everything. All the sounds heard have their origin in data recorded by spacecraft launched by the ESA or NASA and have then been arranged in chronological order: relics of the big bang, beautiful images taken by Hubble of other galaxies and nebulae, to the smaller probes launched within our own solar system collecting signals from the planets, all of which, are finally “red shifted” out of existence, mirroring our universe’s future heat death as everything slowly turns to radio waves.

Jordan Henderson (b. 1994) is an MMus Composition and Creative Practice student at Glasgow University currently researching animated scores within a dynamically evolving live-electronic system in an attempt to join together the traditional score-based composition and the possibilities afforded to us by computers.

Pure Sound: Traversing the Ambient Vernacular Maria Sledmere & Max Parnell We are postgraduate students based with the Creative Writing department. Our research often has an ecological focus and hinges on the relationships between identity, intimacy and mediation within urban, rural and virtual environments (and the collapse of distinctions between each). As a collaboration, Pure Sound combines sound production with creative-critical writing practice, incidental/‘sonic’ ethnography and performance. Pure Sound: Traversing the Ambient Vernacular c omprises an experimental audio-lyric essay which weaves together original prose-poetic sequences (performed live with two speakers) with digitally-edited field recordings taken from various European cities in June 2019. Taking its cue from Lisa Robertson’s term ‘ambient vernacular’, Pure Sound follows its narrator’s frustrated attempts to seek ‘authentic’ sound amid the din of late-capitalist urban space. Attending to the situational nuance of a present-tense thickened by urban density and midsummer heat wave, Pure Sound hones in on the unnoticed, fugitive noises that characterise the procedures of everyday travel and encounter. Taking as its central motif the public piano found in train stations, Pure Sound gestures towards points of sonic contact between street performance, transport, commercial space, tourism and infrastructure.

Emphasising the surreal quality of transitional soundscapes, Pure Sound presents field recordings edited to decontextualise and defamiliarise notions of performance and presence, alongside minimal/ambient visual materials presented simultaneously via projector. Through manipulating the

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collected raw sounds, the piece seeks to draw out some of the obfuscated nuances and idiosyncrasies found within these urban spaces. Rather than seeing the editing process as a way of obscuring the 'true' sounds, this manipulation instead looks to reflect the often-nebulous way in which one encounters abrasive, chaotic and multilayered urban noise. Working with loops, echoes and modulations, it stages a journey between the inside and outside, touch and gesture, present and memory, simulation and authenticity. Collapsing figure and ground in moments of proximate encounter, including a unique cycling event in Marseilles, the performance captures the unexpected intimacies and potential economies of dislocation and desire within corporate and civic space. By following the protagonist’s ventures between cities, including an interlude ‘retreat’ to the south-west coast of France, Pure Sound reveals the way sound environs the space(s) of memory.

Maria Sledmere is a SGSAH-funded PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, working on creative-critical approaches to anthropocene aesthetics and the everyday. Her work traverses forms including the lyric essay, poetry, asemic writing, affective criticism and experimental journaling. With A+E Collective, she recently hosted ‘eco-clinic’ workshops and performances at UNFIX festival (Glasgow), NEoN festival (Dundee) and Assembly (Aberdeen), and facilitated reading groups at Market Gallery and the Glasgow Zine Library. Notebook, a sound-poetry collaboration with Scott Crawford Morrison, was performed at Più (ix) in 2018. She has worked on multimedia projects and promotional materials with producers including Lanark Artefax and North Sea Dialect. Maria is also Poetry and Nonfiction Editor at SPAM Press, a freelance music journalist and editor of Gilded Dirt.

Max Parnell is a Glasgow based writer, currently undertaking an Mlitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. He holds an MA in Literature and Portuguese from the University of Glasgow.

In 2015, he spent a year working as a history of art research assistant at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He currently works as a poetry translator (Brazilian Portuguese to English) and poetry editor at SPAM Press. His first collection of poetry, Gente, was published by the Rio de Janeiro based editor, Multifoco. His work has also appeared in SPAM, Adjacent Pineapple, From Glasgow to Saturn and Gutter. His current writing focuses on exploring posthumanism and including modern technology, such as augmented reality, into his practice.

Developing Cross-Cultural Cello Techniques Kevin Leomo & Emily De Simone This presentation will trace my interaction with traditional Korean instruments and demonstrate the subsequent development of string techniques for cello. Having previously worked with and composed for haegeum (two-string fiddle) and geomungo (six-string zither) players, I am now collaborating with cellist Emily De Simone to develop new performance techniques for cello influenced by the performance practice and sounds of these Korean instruments.

Kevin Leomo is a Scottish-Filipino composer based in Glasgow who writes primarily for acoustic instrumental forces. His works have been performed by Psappha Ensemble, Glasgow New Music Expedition, Neave Trio, Ensemble Móbile, Society for New Korean Music, TaiHei Ensemble, Ensemble Okeanos, and The Hermes Experiment. Kevin is currently undertaking doctoral studies with Dr. Drew Hammond and Dr. Jane Stanley, where he is researching aspects of cross-cultural composition. Kevin is co-director of the Scottish Young Composers Project, the University of Glasgow’s music outreach project, where high school students from across Glasgow receive free mentoring in composition and a workshop of their work. Kevin has held the role of Sound Thought committee chair since 2016. www.kevinleomo.com Emily studied with Robert Irvine at RSAMD and with Robert Cohen at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano. In 2007 she began an active freelance career in Scotland playing with Scottish Opera, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, BBCSSO, Auricle Ensemble and Ensemble Thing. Emily enjoys both performing and teaching and supports these with her interest in the somatic awareness through movement practices. She is a qualified Feldenkrais practitioner. Emily teaches at the Big Noise centre in Govanhill.

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work in progress Jose K Sani The piece is an experiment to explore spatial motion and immersion in electroacoustic soundscapes.

It is worked out in 6 channel format and submitted link is its binaural render. It is made from recorded sounds and sample library sounds. I wanted to bring out multidirectional motion and structural formations and explore spectral characteristics of sound through this piece.

I am a sound design student at University of Glasgow. I am very new to any kind of compositional practices and the submitted piece is third among my compositions and first multichannel work. I am interested into multichannel 3D formats like ambisonics and binaural technologies and learning the current developments happening within the 3d audio field.

Space Feeling Jo Tomlinson Using Vilém Flusser’s part scientific treatise, part spoof, part philosophical discourse '!"#$%&'()*(+,- ./0)&/"1,-' (Vampire Squid), as a point of departure, Tomlinson uses the juxtaposition of Vampire squid and human beings to explore the spaces in between the physically inhabitable and the abyss of the virtual.

Space Feeling (VEdit) is a video collage of intertwining layers, oscillating between visual and audible structures questioning the intersection of the ‘self’ within these spaces, and the potential of expanding our sensory understandings of everyday communications and technologies.

Jo Tomlinson (b.1985, Scotland) Tomlinson is an artist working across moving image, sound and installation. She is interested the cross pollination of sensory modalities and how they inform each other and contribute to our subjective conscious perceptions. By deconstructing and reconstructing the familiar to present new contexts, her work aims to play with perception thresholds and gain a deeper understanding of how we interact with our surroundings. Research underpinning works is based on philosophical enquires into sensory perception and subjective consciousness. Tomlinson is currently a postgraduate student on the MLitt philosophy programme at Glasgow University.

Recent selected exhibitions include: Bring Your own Beamer, The Lighthouse, Glasgow, 2018, Somatic Grip (Solo), Patriothall Gallery, Edinburgh (2017), Fields of Wheat, Transmission Gallery Glasgow (2017), Space Feeling (solo), Hill Street Design House, Edinburgh (2-17), Glitch, Carlisle Contemporary Art Space, Carlisle (2017), Radiophrenia (broadcast), CCA, Glasgow (2016), MBLabor, Max Bill Platz, Zürich (2016)

Barons Haugh: A Sonic Response Alessio Wagner Barons Haugh: A Sonic Response is the sonic output for an RSPB artist residency Alessio Wagner has been working on during 2019. alessiowagner.co.uk

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