copyright by gabriella b. sturchio 2018
TRANSCRIPT
Copyright
by
Gabriella B. Sturchio
2018
The Report Committee for Gabriella B. Sturchio Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report:
Sound & Shadows
APPROVED BY
SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:
Teresa Hubbard, Supervisor Jeff Williams, Co-Supervisor
Anna Collette
Megan Alrutz
Sound & Shadows
by
Gabriella B. Sturchio
Report
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Master of Fine Arts
The University of Texas at Austin
May 2018
Dedication
To my sister, Bianca, and for those who pay attention and dare to remain curious.
v
Acknowledgements
This work would have not been possible if it weren’t for the support of faculty
including Leslie Mutchler, Teresa Hubbard, Jeff Williams, Anna Collette, and Megan Alrutz.
I give special gratitude to my creative peers who embraced me into their circle and imbued
my life with music, inspiration, and curiosity. You all have been immeasurably important to
this process.
vi
Abstract
Sound & Shadows
Gabriella B. Sturchio, MFA
The University of Texas at Austin, 2018
Supervisor: Teresa Hubbard
Co-Supervisor: Jeff Williams
This Master’s Report is a discussion of the ideas, research, and methods I have developed
over the course of my two years of study at the University of Texas at Austin. Throughout
this report I examine a relationship between my sound art and photography by connecting
shared modalities and language. I use my background in photography to contextualize a
similar approach to sourcing, editing, and composing my sound collages, “touch, we endure”
(2017), and “notice” (2018). I use aspects of queer phenomenology, disorientation, and affect
to explore shared subjects of tactility, vulnerability, intimacy, and identity.
vii
Table of Contents
List of Figures .................................................................................................................................... viii
List of Tables ....................................................................................................................................... ix
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................. 1
LISTENING ........................................................................................................................................ 4
SOUND & SHADOWS ..................................................................................................................... 5
FOUNDATION ................................................................................................................................. 7
LOOKING BACK ............................................................................................................................. 8
COMMON LANGUAGE ................................................................................................................. 9
QUEERING & ORIENTATION ................................................................................................. 12
AFFECT ............................................................................................................................................. 16
MEDIATIONS OF DISTANCE ................................................................................................... 18
PHYSICALITY.................................................................................................................................. 21
TRUTH IN THE FRAGMENT .................................................................................................... 22
PHOTOGRAPHING TIME .......................................................................................................... 23
VOICE ................................................................................................................................................ 25
FLUXIS TO CONTEMPORARY ................................................................................................. 28
MY SOUND COLLAGES .............................................................................................................. 33
MY PROCESS ................................................................................................................................... 36
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................. 43
TABLES .............................................................................................................................................. 45
FIGURES ........................................................................................................................................... 46
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................. 57
viii
List of Figures
Figure 1: the roundness of its contour, 2017 ............................................................................ 46
Figure 2: the garden 2017 ....................................................................................................... 47
Figure 3: the sheen, 2017 ........................................................................................................ 48
Figure 4: its body, 2017 ......................................................................................................... 49
Figure 5: Eye, 2016 ............................................................................................................... 50
Figure 6: the light, 2018 ......................................................................................................... 51
Figure 7: Bianca in Doorway, 2018 ....................................................................................... 52
Figure 8: Bianca Looking Out, 2018 ..................................................................................... 53
Figure 9: Stretch with Scar, 2018 ........................................................................................... 54
Figure 10: Selfie in Moss, 2018 ................................................................................................ 55
Figure 11: Scratches, 2018 ....................................................................................................... 56
Figure 12: Jen Davis, Untitled no. 53, 2003 .......................................................................... 57
ix
List of Tables
Table 1: Pierre Shaeffer, A la Recherche d’une Musique Concrète, 1966 ............................ 45
1
INTRODUCTION
The body is a unique instrument. It pulses with its own beat. It is its own source,
speaker, auditor, and recorder. The body is always paying attention. It is constantly listening
and being affected by sound and light. A whiff of perfumed air touches inside the nostrils
before entering the lungs. Sounds resonate towards the eardrum, vibrating over thousands of
tiny hairs. Pupils dilate to allow a bright orange sunset to enter the retinas. The traffic light
changes to green, a signal. A phone vibrates in a pocket, communication. Music plays
overhead in the supermarket, at the shopping mall, in the doctor’s office. Headlights whir by.
The automated voice on a bus murmurs. The body is a continual producer and consumer of
sound. It also reacts to light. It is constantly consciously and subconsciously in conversation
with its environment, recording and making sense of the course of the everyday. We make
meaning through recording, interpreting, and making sense of symbols. I confuse, and re-
contextualize recorded symbols throughout my sound collages.
I am interested in the way common sounds can become musical through attentive
listening and digital processing. I am similarly interested in the ways in which photography
and sound collapse distance and engage the body as a mediator.
I build from the legacies of philosophers such as Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir,
Sara Ahmed, and Jaques Lacan. I also look to artists such as Max Neuhaus, Susan Phillipsz,
Christine Sun Kim, Janet Cardiff, Alison Knowles, and Jen Davis. These artists and
philosophers investigate and use sound to challenge ideas of communication, vulnerability,
emotionality, and tactility. I also explore these topics in the relationship between my sound
2
art and photography by investigating shared modalities, language, and approaches. I use my
background in photography to contextualize sourcing, editing, and composing sound.
Throughout this report I mainly focus on my sound collages touch, we endure (2017)
and notice (2018). I discuss how these works challenge modes of communication, explore
permeations of time, and create opportunities for attentive focus and active listening. More
specifically, I use aspects of queer phenomenology, disorientation, and affect to help
describe the tactility of sound, the mediation of distance through the sounding body, and the
value of alertness. Philosopher Sara Ahmed explains how queer phenomenology,
“emphasizes the importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the
significance of nearness or what is ready-to-hand, and the role of repeated and habitual
actions in shaping bodies and worlds” (Ahmed 2). I borrow Ahmed’s utilization of
phenomenology’s concept of orientation as a tool to explore the ways the body is affected by
environmental sound.
My sound collages manifest through active listening and recording improvised
sounds from my everyday experiences. Sounds include: field recordings of city and urban
environments, scripted audio recordings, and unscripted musical expressions. I am most
concerned with utilizing chance and collaboration. Chance manifests through happenstantial
sonic events and untrained free flow musical composition. Collaboration happens though
receiving unprofessional gifted voice recordings. I scout, excavate, edit, compose, re-
contextualize sounds. I create collages that enmesh my audience in sonic symbols, twisted
abstracted sounds, bodiless voices, and music.
3
My work complicates the invisible and physical spatial arrangement of bodies across
physical and invisible distances. I confound relationships by re-editing sequencing, re-
organizing phrases, and creating fictional dialogues. I use sonic symbols and technological
editing processes to heighten, drain, or distort familiarity. I create an environment for
physical and psychological experiences that heighten bodily awareness and vulnerability. I
amplify tension though abrupt sonic cuts, repetition of phrases, and variations in volume. I
aim for these attributes to signal a colorful emotional and mental landscape.
I implement dim light and provide accessible seating within my installation space to
help encourage one’s comfort and attention. I encourage the shadows, leaking light, and
reflected highlights from the outside world into the space to become a stand-in for the
photograph or moving image. I use these mechanisms as a vehicle for a somatic experience;
the mystery of the space, place, time, and voice lingers in a familiar world turned inside out,
dark, and twisted.
4
LISTENING
The ear is a particularly unique organ due to its transductive qualities. The ear is
constantly recording, signaling, and being touched by information. Unlike the eyeball, which
can shut for protection, comfort, or sleep, the ear cannot. Ears are unabashedly open to all
noises: quiet, soft, hard or overbearing. Sounds don’t just stop at the ears; sounds are
mediated by the entire body. Different types of sounds directly influence and affect one’s
emotional, physical, and psychological state. These affects can change the orientation of a
body in space, the way it reacts to an environment, and its composition (Ahmed 7).
Listening is crucial for me and for my audience. Listening requires undivided focus.
Renowned field recordist Chris Watson explains, “Listening is not a light artistic whim, it is
quite a deep emotional and creative experience. Whereas hearing, we hear everything, but we
rarely get the chance to focus and listen.”1 Listening is an experiential understanding often
connected to, but separated from seeing. As opposed to seeing, which happens
predominantly through the interpretation of light and color through the retinas, focused
listening can activate a full bodily response. For example, when one is actively listening one
may be able to physically feel the way sound moves through one’s sternum, feet, or hands,
drawing attention to the present body. Similarly, active listening can encourage kinesthetic
empathy, or the ability for one to understand and experience the feelings of another by
observing one’s movement (Reynolds 1). I use Reynolds’ framework to interpret the way my
recorded sounds and voices physically move around the viewer. The audience can also
observe the ways others listen or respond in the space.
1 “Chris Watson Interview—The Art of Listening.” SYNK, 20 Dec. 2012, snykradio.dk/chris-watson-interview-the-art-of-listening/.
5
SOUND & SHADOWS
Tactile information is felt through sensory receptors in one’s skin. “The tactile system
provides us with information about touch sensations: pressure, vibration, movement,
temperature and pain.”2 Tactile awareness is important because it provides one with visual
perception, body awareness, and emotional security (Plowden). Tactility, and emotional
resonance are important bodily experiences to me because they often happen alongside
moments of vulnerability. My preoccupations with tactility and emotional resonance
overarch through my multimedia practice. I explore these topics through videos, books,
prose, and most notably medium and large format photography. My sound work and
photography however also have other strong associations to one another. They echo
through language, process, workflow, conceptual framework, and editing techniques.
My photographs function as physical objects such as highly detailed wall-hung
images and tactile handmade books. My handmade photographic books explore permeations
of touch and distance through subjects that fold, conceal, reveal, repeat, lead, stretch, bend,
pull, and make impressions on one another, contextually through page sequencing, or
literally within their content. Pages physically brush up against one another, stack, and reveal
relationships. Highly detailed depictions of skin and surfaces emphasize physicality and
temporal distance.
I specifically utilize film for its physicality and tangibility. Like the body, film is
sensitive and always reacting to how and what it is being touched by, such as light and
2 Plowden, Linda. “Tactile Sensory System.” Therapy Space, 20 June 2011, www.therapyspacebristol.co.uk/information-for-parents/tactile-sensory-system/.
6
chemicals. The photographic process allows me to acutely depict boundaries, surfaces,
visceral tactility, brief periods of interdependence, and layering of edges. Depicted
relationships are interpretations, experiments, and stand-ins for correlations between touch
and distance. My photographs might show the abstraction of a zoomed in face, a tear in
material, or one’s vulnerable bodily gesture.3 The speed of film and the length of shutter
speed allow me to acutely depict ephemeral and fleeting moments. Some of these moments
would otherwise go unseen by the naked eye.
3 See Fig. 1-6
7
FOUNDATION
After working with the photographic medium for over a decade, I started to wrestle
with moral and ethical concerns with object-making. Moreover, I fought with the way
photographs literally stop at the edges of a print. I sought to create environments that didn’t
confine to frames or strict boundaries. I wanted to engage my audience differently, through
one’s physical body and emotionality. I became curious if I could use my background in
photography and literature to compose sound collages that were as descriptive as large-
format color film. I wondered if sound could be as saturated as the southern orange glow, as
intimate as a portrait, as tactile as a book, or as physical as a print.
I started paying closer attention to my surroundings, and began to notice
characteristics of sound that I often tried to embody through my photography. For instance,
one evening I actively tuned in to the buzz of cicadas and found myself engulfed in the
experience. As I closed my eyes I entertained thoughts of swimming, Texas sunsets, the taste
of sparkling water, and the impending humidity. It created a sense of orientation, or bodily
direction by signaling to familiar locations, and past experiences. It was a sonic symbol
attached to a multitude of other symbols in a nearly endless cycle. This experience inspired
me to explore how sonic symbols that could describe a space, and signal an emotional
response. By actively listening to my environments, I started hearing sonic, and musical
values in everyday hubbub. I noticed the tonal range of electronic air conditioning, the
reverberation of high heel shoes on tile, and the crackle of thunder.
8
LOOKING BACK
Musician Max Neuhaus coined the term “sound installation” in reference to his
installation piece Drive-In Music (1967-68). His aim was to distinguish the genre as apart from
music, and draw attention to the incorporating and concern for a specificity of placement in
space rather than in time.
Within his practice, Neuhaus conducted sound walks called LISTEN between 1966
and 1976. He would guide his audience to a specific location and stamp the word LISTEN
on their hands. The task of these walks was to draw attention to the natural and improvised
aural environments constantly at play in everyday life in hopes of highlighting and uplifting a
more attentive form of listening that might transform the perception of noise to sound
(Born 82).
There are many different ways of entering the space of a sound installation, but
arguably all require a type of listening. French composer Pierre Schaeffer categorized four
basic modes of listening; ouïr: to perceive aurally, comprendre: to understand, entendre: to hear,
and écouter: to listen. He organized these terms by their objective, subjective, abstract, and
concrete qualities.4 He explained that perception requires attention, understanding gives
meaning, active listening is in relationship to an object, and passive listening is a mode of
listening to a sound’s attributes without reference to its source (Kane 15). Schaeffer is
especially known for his viewpoints on the acousmatic mode of listening, a term describing a
voice or sound whose source remains concealed. Likewise he recognized for his
commitment to describing sounds that fit outside the structure of music theory.
4 See Table 1
9
COMMON LANGUAGE
A photograph and a sound recording can share similar language such as space,
volume, silence, color, and circulation. Through editing, these attributes can be intensified to
create enhanced bodily affect.
In both mediums space is shaped, heightened, and manipulated through editing
techniques of post-process of analogue or digital editing. Sound can contain an illusion of
deep space and texture through panning, isolated speaker direction, and various modes of
editing. Through panning sound is pushed and pulled around the viewer, complicating and
challenging notions of location and spatial relationship.
Volume is represented through sound work through the loudness of information
through a speaker. Variations in volume heighten or reduce the impact of sound. In my
sound collages, the absence of sound becomes key. When sounds stop sounding, one
suddenly realizes how loud an environment was or how quiet it has become. I utilize absence
of sound, or silence as a way to signal one’s attention. Although simple, this editing
technique makes way for outside sounds to intermingle within the installation space, and
necessitates active listening.
Photography also deals with volume—namely silence. Visual images can be “loud”
or “soft” based on aspects of their content. For example, a subject may have a portrayed
noise such as through known attributes of an environment, or there could be signifiers of a
subject physically reacting in a way that cues towards a loudness. An image can also be read
as quiet, for instance, if the subject is more subtle, or if the palette is subdued in color.
Another way a photograph can be silent is through how a character may be enveloped in a
10
certain kind of psychological space. Although the colors in my photographs are bold and
often highly saturated, the portrayed subjects, surfaces, and characters are somewhat quiet.
My characters often self-consciously address the camera, or show signs of vulnerability
through body language or expressions of psychological unrest.5 This correlates to my sound
work when comparing modes of communication through the body. In sound, voice is
utilized as a vulnerable and raw expression of emotion, agency, or placement. In
photography, a character’s vulnerability and expression is often cued by one’s physical
placement in the frame, body language, or facial expression.
Color plays a huge role in describing subjects. For example, my photographs are lush
in color. They are vibrant. They distinctly favor the temperature of light, the warm glow of
Texas sunsets and the cyan shadows of nightfall. Color also has its place in sound. Sound
acquires the technical term of being colored when it has been modified from its raw form.
This modification can range from a filter, a specific processing, or a total abstraction. For
example, a sound’s warmth comes through aspects of heavy bass, and deeper, lower,
smoother, and slower frequencies. Discerning this color can happen through individualized
experiences of tonal timbre and physical presence in the ear.
Technology has increased the dissemination and reproduction of media. Digital
printing and online circulation makes sharing an image as easy as clicking a button. This
sense of repetition can keep the photograph alive and allows one to literally look back
through an indexed time. Repetition also plays a large part in sound work. Every time a piece
plays, it simultaneously enters, reflects, absorbs, and continually responds to its environment.
5 See Figures 6-11.
11
Every repetition and circulation is new since the conditions of an environment are never
truly static or stable. Alterations of pressure from bodies can change the shape sound takes,
and sounds can change the shape a body takes.
Various effects and editing processes create tensions that change one’s bodily
orientation, disorientation, and affect. I am interested in what it means to queer this
orientation—to disrupt, unsettle and make unusual or strange as a way to re-position,
question, and make connections between bodies in physical, temporal, mental, and
emotional spaces.
12
QUEERING & ORIENTATION
Extracted from their visual cues, sounds become abstracted and ghosted from their
source. They are a haunting of everything producing them, such as automobiles, rocks
underfoot, or vocal chords. Yet distinct by their source, the isolation of sound lends one’s
mind to build a visual landscape from one’s associations, memories, symbology, or
connotation.
When sound is detached or distanced from its source, it cannot be as easily located,
interpreted, or named. Sometimes a detachment from a source abstracts a sound. In order to
identify sound, a source requires either a pre-existing understanding, or a new set of rules for
which it exists. Creating a new set of rules is a type of a queering that I am after in my work.
Queering sound is important as it opens up new channels for interpreting the everyday. It
offers the opportunity for disorientation, which can be used as a tool for connecting people
through a shared experience. I am interested in exploring ways queered sound can also be
used to redirect focus and heighten awareness.
I am interested in theories of queer phenomenology and disorientation as a
foundation for my motivations and explorations. It is important to create and maintain new
spaces for queer ideologies and understandings of sound because sound is everywhere,
constantly affecting one’s body. To queer something is to reconsider the possibilities of its
structure, to challenge its normative understanding, and uplift unexpected and bizarre
outcomes of embracing the tilt-shift of a known axis. Queering sound, or opening it up to
queer possibilities allows sound to be reinterpreted and reimagined. By placing one’s body in
a queer sound space, one may experience a new, different, or heightened physical or
13
emotional affect. The shifting distance between a body and familiarity can change one’s
orientation and how one engages with the world. Creating affect is important because it can
help one feel more aware, sensitive, and vulnerable. Vulnerability can help aid in finding
commonality and connection with others.
In my work, the known axis is the voice and the field recordings. I tilt-shift sounds
by removing them from their environments. I re-contextualize sounds by pushing sonic
boundaries through editing, and replacing them back into the world. If orientation is the
familiar structure of the position of someone or something (like sound), and disorientation is
a challenge, turn, twist, skew, or removal of that familiarity, then sounds sounding without
their respective bodies are queerly disoriented. Through editing I am able to better control
and manipulate oblique qualities of sounds. I queer sounds by stretching, bending, blending,
focusing, and shifting sounds away from their raw format. I make them silky, slippery,
smooth, textured or gritty, attributes that change the way they affect one’s interpretation.
Using an extracted voice recording is particularly queer as it requires a sounding body
to produce words that are then captured and released back into the bodies of others.
Through this process, I wonder what it means to communicate over such a great distance,
from sounding bodies to and through mediated bodies. Sara Ahmed explains distance as a
lived experience of the moment of something becoming out of reach, potentially slipping
away (Ahmed 179). In listening, one enters and engages with a type of virtual-sonic meeting
situated within this slippage. In the installation space bodies dislocated both in geography
and physicality, and reality/unreality coexist. Through speakers ghosted bodies sound as the
14
audience’s body mediates, listens, interprets, and reacts. In this meeting sound collapses the
distance of the body, geography, and of identity.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that, “Instability...produces not only the intellectual
experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which is the
awareness of our contingency, and the horror with which it fills us.”6 This nausea he talks of
is one that reorients the body, and changes its shape by producing emotional and sometimes
physical responses. Sara Ahmed suggests that in staying with this nauseating feeling, one may
change one's perspective of these moments and potentially even find a sense of joy (Ahmed
11).
The shifting qualities of my sonic landscape become an articulation of a placeless
place that is held by the physicality of a real space. This space is uniquely interpreted through
one’s various mental, emotional, and physical experiences. These experiences can be new,
unexpected, or emotional, which can disorient a viewer. Disorientation as a thoughtful
artistic and aesthetic intention has value for it reorients one’s body and opens it to the
unknown. It is important to note that disorientation can also be a negative experience,
especially if is used as a tool to isolate, segregate, or discriminate people. Ahmed explains
that this “feeling of shattering, or of being shattered, might persist and become a crisis.”7 If
one never finds orientation, one can feel unsafe, like one has lost one’s place, community, or
stability. I use disorientation as a tool reorient my audience towards a commonality. I hope
6 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, 2002, p. 296. 7 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Duke University Press, 2006. P 157.
15
one finds a sense of presence through loss of orientation, a curiosity through removal of the
known, or a connection through the communal experience.
To incite a queering of sound means to recognize and allow for things not to make
sense either as parts, or as a perfectly fitting whole, but rather as a mosaic of pieces laying
besides and on top of each other composing a bigger picture. To me, this bigger picture
extends beyond the physicality of the sound collage itself, and includes the interactions it has
with the surrounding environment, and the affect it has within one’s body.
Practically, a bodiless voice will never reach out. There is no site of touch save for
the vibrational absorption of the recorded voice into one’s body. Though, this dispersal and
absorption is the conceptual place where both bodies are in continuous touch. I wonder
what it means to gain a greater consciousness of this mode of communication, and if it can
offer new directions for bodies to go, or allow people to attain a greater depth of
connection. If disorientation is a turn, a twist or a skewing of the known, then the sound
editing process is a mode that helps to produce this disorientation.
16
AFFECT
Though I never intend to create emotional turmoil, I hope that my work produces
visceral and emotional affect, or what writer, artist, and activist Gregg Bordowitz refers to as
the “constellations of sensations and clusters of what we refer to as emotions.”8 Affect can
change the way a body behaves in space. For example, by heightening one’s awareness of
one’s body, one might approach the world with a new sense of orientation, such as a new
sense of vulnerability. Vulnerability is important because it can help create an authentic
connection to others. I heighten affect by making one’s body vulnerable through intensifying
emotional responses, such as empathy or anxiety. Sound is great at producing anxiety,
particularly when it has elements of sonic chaos and hierarchy. In notice, I implement several
moments of heightened tension through distortion, sudden breaks, silence, or amplified
volume. I am namely concerned with inspiring empathy. Empathy is inherent in active
listening as it involves participation. To be empathetic is to acknowledge vulnerability in
another, a practice which can in turn make one vulnerable. In both pieces, I create space for
empathy by using emotional phrases, and sounds that burst, sooth, thrash, break, or lull. For
example, in notice, phrases include, “What does it mean to notice?” and “I keep the bright
promise to myself.” In touch, we endure, phrases include, “I was once feeling much more, and
then it was over,” and “The amount of touch we endure.” The words, their connotations,
and how they are used in repetition heighten opportunities for an audience to latch on to
meaning.
8 Sillman, Amy, and Gregg Bordowitz. “Between Artists.” Jan. 2007, www.amysillman.com/uploads_amy/pdfs/d60a92a24b.pdf. p 11.
17
On emotionality Bordowitz notes that, “One of the most challenging things
contemporary art can do is produce a new language of emotion, a new way of understanding
what we’re feeling now and how it is different from before.”9 This is particularly important
in contemporary society where emotions, experiences, and feelings have become capitalist
commodities, structured and produced within rubrics that standardize feeling. Socialized
ideas of vulnerability and emotionality contain upheld stigmas that negatively associate
towards weakness, and often, socialized femininity. I believe that there is great power in
vulnerability, and it is one way humans can find sincere connections and communication.
9 Sillman, p 7.
18
MEDIATIONS OF DISTANCE
My audience will have a different psychoacoustic experience depending on the
variation of either a physical or virtual space, or interpretations formed by past or present
memories. For example, in notice, the physical space is the room in which the piece lives, the
actuality of the shadows and sunlight on the wall, the physical temperature, and any outside
sound leaking into the space. The uniqueness of this physical space gives a sense of
experiential place and situates the audience for the experience and integration of the virtual
space. My places are created through environmental sound cues, and musical components. I
specifically use music as a thread to keep one’s body in an unconscious relationship to the
installation room. One’s body will often sway and keep with the rhythm of a beat. Vocal
performer, composer, and philosopher Nina Eidsheim suggests if we can understand the
“constellation of corporeal activities and sensualities” embodied in the musical experience,
we can “[reconfigure] the body’s position in relation to sense and meaning making.”10 I am
interested in how the familiarly of a musical experience can orient one’s body, and how
unfamiliarity can provide a deeper disorientation.
Music and sounds are materially transmitted and uniquely realized through the body.
I wonder with professor Bruce Holsinger, who asks, “What is it to ‘experience’ music?
Where and how is music located vis-à-vis the persons who listen and react to it? How do we
10 Eidsheim, Nina Sun. Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Duke University Press, 2015.p. 127.
19
approach music as a sensual, passionate, and emotional medium, and how might we account
for its widely varied effects on and interactions with the human bodies?”11
The human body itself resonates at a low frequency, yet it does not vibrate as a single
mass. Because of this sounds differently affect individual parts of the body. Eidsheim says,
“Each body or object, even if it appears to be wholly inanimate, is constantly in motion at
the molecular level. By the same token, every object vibrates, quite naturally, at certain
frequencies. Resonance refers to the coincidence of two phenomena,” one being the sound
source itself, and the second being the relationship and potential match of that frequency in
another object.12 When a source object and surrounding objects vibrate at a same frequency,
the source sound becomes amplified. This phenomenon can occur within the body,
changing the way the body physically responds and relates to what is being heard. This
experience varies based on an array of factors including one’s composition or attunement.
When one is experiencing my sound collage, one is experiencing a type of sonic-
spatial mapping (O’Rourke 76). This mapping occurs through the way sounds curate the
feeling of distance. Through editing, sounds move around the speakers, circularly, diagonally,
and across the room, creating dimensionality. Mapping can also occur through the ways
sounds symbolize specific location, such as through environmental cues like wind blowing,
or cars passing. Within my collage, sounds ebb and flow. They get closer and further away,
creating a spatial reality. The sounds go places. They fade or pass by. Sonic distancing can
provide a feeling of movement. This is apparent when sounds related to travel enter the
11 Holsinger, Bruce W. “Introduction.” Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer, Stanford University Press, 2001, p. 10. 12 Eidsheim, p. 171.
20
piece, such as a bus notification, the clatter of shoes on a floor, or the frequency of a place
taking off. I emphasize the literal circulation of a piece over multiple speakers as a moving
aural experience. The movement created through editing enhances the physicality of the
sound. This creates the dimensionality of a journey into a possibly familiar but strange
psychic landscape.
21
PHYSICALITY
Kinesthetic experiences of sonic textures remind the viewer of their physicality. One
can feel and locate sound with one’s ears as sound travels through one’s body. This can
create a deeply somatic experience. There is a physicality to sound; it has a body with
dimensions, density, vibrancy, rhythm, and texture. Sound can act as landscape turned inside
out full of edges, planes, fullness, flatness, roundness, and hollows. Because of this, I view
sound as sculptural, as claiming space through the way it organizes and touches bodies. As
an audience member, one is intimately intertwined with sound. One walks through sound.
Sound touches one’s body. One’s body inherently touches sound. In response sound moves,
changes, refracts, reflects, and keeps sounding until its energy is gone. I aim to draw
attention to the way sound’s physicality is felt in the present body.
One’s awareness creates one’s intimacy. One is distanced by one’s refusal to pay
attention. The body responds to sound in varying degrees, both unconsciously and
otherwise. In an interview with The Rubin Museum, musician Moby says,
“The way sound affects our body really depends on the meaning that we give it. If we’re exposed to a beautiful Baroque concerto, our body is literally transformed
by it. Our breathing changes, our metabolism changes, our neurogenesis changes; all these things change because we respond to something that we deem beautiful. Alternatively if you’re exposed to a truly grating, awful sound, it’s stressful. It stresses your systems and it impedes neurogenesis and compromises your immune system.” (Music, Molecules 15)
I am curious about the implications of working with sound. I wonder how sound might be
used to create accessible opportunities for connection.
22
TRUTH IN THE FRAGMENT
A sound clip. A photograph. A fragmented moment. The camera, or sound recorder
captures only a fragment of everything that is in constant production, construction, or
performance. Both mediums deal with illusions of reality. Both preserve moments through
tangible or archival means. It is nearly impossible to catalogue even one full minute of life:
the politics, the environment, one’s body, one’s breath, the spectrum of emotions.
The photograph is static in its catalogue of movement and its specific place in the
world. This flatness lends to an illusory perception of space and time represented by shifted
edges. Everything touches in a photograph. Every surface of every edge, every texture, and
every molecule is in direct relationship with its neighbor regardless of its actual spatial
distance. As a whole, the image becomes one flat extraction. Yet there is much depth in this
illusion. Though flat, a truly dynamic image has the ability to be emotionally penetrated and
entered into. Deep space is created through scale, depth of field, color, tonal range, texture,
composition, focus, and visual hierarchy.
Photography acutely describes details in an organized plane that shifts, twists, and
collapses not only the picture plane, but the actuality of the depicted moment. Truth is
suspended in an actuality so acute it becomes a fiction. An honest record of an exact
moment in time creates an unreality through endless pause; a contradictory fleeting
exactness.
This fleeting exactness speaks to the indexical qualities of the photograph. Subjects
are represented through light and chemical processes that record an acute visual facsimile.
23
PHOTOGRAPHING TIME
The documentation aspect of the photograph or sound recording is a type of truth
that emphasizes the reality of an event through the depiction of real time, objects, and space.
Something has to happen for the subject to exist. Arguably, nearly all photographers grapple
with “the presence of the now.” I align myself with contemporary film photographers
working in documentary manners. Photographers such as Elinor Carucci, Andrea Modica,
and notably Jen Davis include subjects of the body to communicate vulnerability, re-
addressed values of beauty, and ephemera.
In particular, Jen Davis uses the camera to document her body in real time. Davis
uses techniques within composition, light, perspective, or shutter speed to heighten a sense
of emotionality, mood, atmosphere, or cognitive presence. Davis’ longstanding project,
Eleven Years, showcases an exploration of the body, beauty, and identity through self-
portraiture. Her use of evocative light in images like Untitled no. 55 (2013) brings a sense of
theatricality and presence to the seemingly domestic environment. There is a depicted
comfort in the way her head barely rests on the pillow. The gesture of the hand and the
blushed chest and cheeks hints at a feverish longing, or perhaps a quiet moment of repose.
The shine on the hair and eyelids with the slightly parted lips illuminated in deep red brings a
tactile presence to the body, the skin. Davis draws attention to the way skin moves, gathers,
and how it is marked in photographs What Was Left (2007), and Untitled no. 53 (2013).13 The
camera captures what it looks like for skin to be grabbed and pushed together, which creates
a beautiful paper-like patterning on the skin’s surface.
13 See Fig. 12
24
Through her careful consideration of framing, Davis continually captures her body in
moments of vulnerability and beauty. In Untitled no. 37 (2010), Davis situates the camera so it
renders the reflection of light into a mirror in which we see her looking at herself. Caught is
the reflection of light against her skin, illuminating her chin and the lip of the mirror’s edge.
This precision and actuality is unattainable to most other medias, save for perhaps, sound.
The act of sound recording also inherently indexes a moment. Actual vibrational
patterns and sonic reverberations register on the recorder. This is particularly clear when
registering the complexities of one’s voice.
25
VOICE
The voice is a powerful instrument for communication. So much rests within its
details; the constriction of the throat, the dryness of the mouth, the inflection of tonality, the
breathiness or breathlessness of the speaker. The acute details of one’s voice become
highlighted when it is recorded. “The voice creates and intensifies aural experience for the
audience who is drawn into the voice’s intimacy. The power of the voice is heightened
through absence of visuals in an acousmatic listening experience” (Woloshyn 76). I am
interested in using the intimacy of one’s voice to direct my audience towards a familiar
connection, or empathy.
Powerful communication is heightened for one, especially when attached to a symbol
held dear, such as the voice of a loved one, or a person in power. Simone Beauvoir
recognized,
“It is impossible to locate a body outside its performative representation of culture. Material in a natural state is a phantasm to which we do not have unmediated access...the materiality that we can access—which includes sound and the voice—is determined by ideas and representations that are unavoidably subject to power relations.”14
Voices and sounds can also be associated with a traumatic event, or lead one to connect
back to an unexpected or unwelcomed experience, affecting one’s comfort.
A voice can arouse a multitude of individualized associations, perceptions,
connotations, relations, or memories. Alexa Woloshyn describes,
“The material voice remains utterly of the body as it emerges only through the enactment of the physiological vocal apparatus. But this material voice also articulates language—the semiotics and syntax of verbal communication. Thus, the voice mediates between two gendered concepts: the body, which is feminine,
14 Eidsheim p. 48.
26
natural and primal, and language, which is cerebral, masculine and civilized. The voice sits at the fringes of two seemingly stable concepts, flipping between being of the body (i.e. feminine) and of language (i.e. masculine), thus participating in a queer process: the voice negotiates and resists the tension of this gendered binary.” 15
A voice brings humanity and the body back into a space. I am curious about how assumed
identities changes the way voices are given agency, priority, or stigma. I find upheld
socialized markers of identity to be curious and unsettling. They often limits and close off
one’s identity.
In the West there is an upheld assumption that relationships are structured off a
heteronormative rubric. I hope to challenge upheld norms by re-contextualizing intonated
emphasis, re-organizing thought, and by changing the way each voice is utilized. For
example, in notice, and touch, we endure, I use two voices that are assumedly male and female.
This changes the interpreted relationship between the two voices. The audience is likely to
assume gender roles, privileges, and dominant structures within the coupling of voices. This
changes the way a narrative arc perceivably unfolds. Assigned gender roles can heighten or
relieve tension in the piece, especially when it seems like one voice is cancelling out the
other. In the beginning of notice, a repeated chain of two voices say “my imagination, my
unraveling.” The perceived feminine voice distorts quicker and more pronouncedly. The
next voice heard is masculine. One could interpret this as the female voice being oppressed
into oblivion. Towards the end of the piece, the female voice resurfaces as a recording, or a
memory repeating the phrase, “becoming night animal / unpierced satin / strewn across the
15 Woloshyn, Alexa. “Electroacoustic Voices: Sounds Queer, and Why It Matters.” Tempo, vol. 71, no. 280, Apr. 2017, p. 73. Cambridge Core, March 3 2017.
27
wet field that turns over so slowly / the day becomes new and newer / and newness
changes.” I am interested in queering this voice by distorting and stretching it. By
manipulating the voice it turns into more of an tactile experience. I intend for the physicality
of the sound to turn visceral. I create an opportunity for a heightened emotional response by
distorting the voice until is shrieks. I am also interested in stirring confusion about the
positionality of the audience. In one perspective the audience could be a voyeur listening to
somebody trying to break or fix what could be perceived as a tape player. In another
conceptual perspective one could be listening to another circle through memory until it is
corrupted and forgotten. The sounded act is multifaceted. It contains elements of hope,
frustration, anger, nostalgia, and mania. Likewise, I wonder how environmental sounds, such
as the forest, emphasizes or drains a psychological response. Different interpretations and
implications of sound, including markers of identity and location, changes an audience’s
potential empathetic or emotional response.
28
FLUXIS TO CONTEMPORARY
The 1960s was a rich time for cultivating expanded understandings and
experimentations for performers and composers. Throughout this time boundaries became
more elusive between creator and audience, art and life, high art and low art, and public vs.
private. Contributors to the avant-garde, international, and interdisciplinary Fluxus
movement reawakened concepts seen from prior Futurist and Dadaist initiatives. These
views privileged chaotic, messy, unpredictable, improvised, chance, and happenstantial
practices, processes, and performances.
Fluxus artists questioned the authority of the museum as the gatekeeper of value and
merit. They challenged the notion that only an institutionally educated audience can
consume art. They upheld concepts of production and process as more valuable and
enriching than a final product. Abstract scores and instructions for actions, games, paintings,
sculptures, and walks were also presented and upheld as art objects for their graphic
aesthetic qualities. These movements and different innovative ways of theorizing and
structuring art concepts helped pave the way for contemporary artists working in sound,
including Alison Knowles, Susan Philipsz, Christine Sun Kim, and Janet Cardiff.
Alison Knowles dissolved boundaries between life and art. Knowles often used her
position as a woman to critique the predominately white cis-male-hetero standards typically
seen, shown, merited, and celebrated. Knowles showcased sound in many of her pieces,
either as attributes to an experiential physical sculpture, or as recorded storytelling. Her
collaborative piece The House of Dust (1967) with James Tenney incorporates chance
operations as she fed specific words and phrases into a computer-generated program to
29
compose a prose piece. She chose the quatrain, “A house of dust / on open ground / lit by
natural light / inhabited by friend and enemies” as inspiration for constructing a sculptural
piece. Likewise, her event scores are recipes for action, generally consisting of one or two
lines with the intention of getting the audience to participate and perform. In The Identical
Lunch (1969) Knowles invites people to join her for a daily lunch in which she eats the same
thing: a tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, and a cup of soup, or a
glass of buttermilk. The work aims to draw attention to the nuance, repetition,
happenstantial, and repetitive actions one may experience through a lifetime. Knowles says,
“It was about having an excuse to get to talk to people, to notice everything that happened,
to pay attention.”16
Susan Philipsz explores the psychological and sculptural potential of sound through
site responsive, storylines exploring themes of loss, longing, hope and return. Philipsz says,
“These universal narratives trigger personal reactions while also temporarily bridging the
gaps between the individual and the collective, as well as interior and exterior spaces.”17 I
find Susan Philipsz’s work so encouraging because she has an untrained voice, can’t read
music, and doesn’t write any of her songs. I believe this empowers an authentic emotionality
within Philipsz’s voice. Her notable sound installation Lowlands, a 16th-century Scottish
ballad, was installed under bridges within Glasgow landscape. The reverberation and echo of
each bridge’s structure heightened the tonality and color of the piece. Philipsz let the
environment change, shift, bend, and shape the sound. Lowlands was also installed in her
16 Kennedy, Randy. “Art at MoMA: Tuna on Wheat (Hold the Mayo).” Art & Design, 2 Feb. 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/arts/design/03lunch.html. 17 Philipsz, Susan. “Biography.” Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artists/susan-philipsz/modal/bio.
30
gallery at Tate Britain as three black speakers in a white cube. I personally resonate with this
form. I find it exciting for her proclamation of sound being as valuable as a space-filler as
sculpture. The isolation of the room and the presence of the speakers allows a quick
assessment of where sound is coming from, so the viewer is able to direct their attention to
the psychoacoustic qualities of the space.
In conversation with Lena Corner, a writer for The Guardian, Phillipsz said,
“Everyone can identify with a human voice....I think hearing an unaccompanied voice,
especially an untrained one, even if it's singing a song you don't know, can trigger some
really powerful memories and associations. If I'd gone to music school and had proper
training, I would not be doing what I do today."18 I believe it’s important to note this
because her value of her own rudimentary skill helps locate space for non-professional and
untrained voices to enter into the public realm, a realm often saved for the mastered
musician. Her appreciation of her own place in the musical field draws attention and priority
back to ways one can capture and express humanity, and vulnerability.
Berlin-based artist, Christine Sun Kim works with sound as a tool to explore the
ways external social forces shape public expressions of private voices. Kim uses her primary
language, American Sign Language, to communicate to others the ways listening and silence
is mediated for her. In Face Opera ii, Kim composed an emotional score played on a digital
tablet to a choir of prelingually (referring to those who experienced hearing loss prior to
speaking) deaf people. The choir utilizes nuanced body language, movement, and facial
expression to relay the subtle variations and qualifications of speech (Lee 32-35).
18 Corner, Lena. “The Art of Noise: 'Sculptor in Sound' Susan Philipsz.” Art & Design, 13 Nov. 2010, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/nov/14/susan-philipsz-turner-prize-2010-sculptor-in-sound
31
Another piece, Speaker Drawings #1-10 (2012) utilizes the tactility of sound by
recording physical vibrational movements in ink. Kim attached inked nails, quills and cogs to
the bottom of speakers and subwoofers while they played environmental field recordings
and ambient sounds within the campus of Haverford College. This produced a visual
representation of the sonic qualities of the environment, translating for Kim, silence into
tangible marks.
Kim’s work often includes and responds to what she calls “hearing etiquette.” This
includes behaviors she’s witnessed from the hearing community as acceptable social
standards. Her piece, Nap Disturbance (2016) is in reference to accidentally waking her partner
up by making noises she couldn’t hear. For this performance, Kim and a team of hearing
and deaf performers produce domestic sounds from common gestures and with everyday
objects. Objects include folding chairs, and behaviors, like tip-toeing, or sipping from a cup.
These actions are performed in unison on a spectrum of what Kim calls “polite to not-so-
polite” to challenge the dominant hearing culture’s rubric. 19
Simone de Beauvoir writes, “To be present in the world implies strictly that there
exists a body which is at once a material thing in the world and a point of view towards the
world.”20 This point of view makes for a more complicated and arguably more interesting
positioning between an audience, invisible human bodies, and objects attached and
simultaneously detached to voice, and sound, as seen through the work of Janet Cardiff.
19 “Christine Sun Kim, Nap Disturbance.” Art Agenda, Carroll / Fletcher, www.art-agenda.com/shows/carroll-fletcher-presents-christine-sun-kim-at-frieze-london-2016/. 20 Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex, Vintage Classic, 2015, p. 7.
32
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s piece, The Murder of Crows (2008), is a 30-
minute mixed-media soundscape comprised of 98 speakers, chairs, music stands, and a
gramophone horn. This piece heightens the acousmatic. In the piece, a woman’s voice
recounts a series of dreams, or perspectives of a dream where cats, babies, and bodies are
threatened, or physically mutilated. Layers of sound travel through visible standing speakers,
including operatic songs, birds chirping, and environmental cues towards unease, and
discomfort. The immersive experience reveals vulnerability in the body; one’s emotional
landscape can’t help but move into an acute focus of this tragic, horrific, and curious recall.
This piece calls to question the placement of the audience to the speaker. One may wonder
if one is in the dream, a friend listening in on a story, a privileged figment of the speakers
subconscious, or perhaps a psychoanalyst listening to a client. The boundary between
internal and external collapses in the evocation of the dream space. When the dream space is
emitted into the physical space of the real, one may question the limits or boundaries of its
pervasive permeability; where does the dream start and reality stop? How does the body
respond to graphic recall? How long is the body affected by this experience?
33
MY SOUND COLLAGES
My sound subjects within touch, we endure, and notice contain rich textures, bright
colors, silky sonics, and moody tones. Subjects that demonstrate communication,
emotionality, flow, unconventional beauty, vulnerability, and chance excites me. Some of
these characteristics are inherent within my gifted voice recordings, which range
geographically from Canberra, Australia, Brooklyn, New York, Austin, Texas, and Winters,
California. Field recordings include sounds of travel such as airplanes ascending, foot traffic
on pavement, cell-phone tones, and ambient voices.
I am particularly interested in using voice as mode for invisible empathetic
emotionality. Human voice contains acute idiosyncratic details and timbres that interact
intimately with the audience. Albeit divorced from physical identity, voice becomes a
vulnerable, raw, and honest portrait. The ghosting of the physical identity allows the
aesthetic sound to do all the talking. One’s breath, intonation, and inflection stands in as
body language, and an exposed psychological space.
In both of my collages, touch, we endure, and notice, the viewer becomes a participant in
a shared psychological experience. The room is quiet and bare because it is full to the brim
with sound and shadows. The seeming emptiness of the room is left for the physicality and
materiality of sound. Light leaks through the curtain’s blinds, flashing shadows of organic
matter and glimmers of horizontal lines. External surround sound speakers emit six discrete
channels including a low-end frequency (LFE). The LFE produces deep tactile vibrations
that travel through the floors and walls. Through the speakers, repeated sounds including:
prose poems, repeated phrases, piano, environmental cues, and various contemporary noises
34
such as automated bus messaging, and a phone vibrating. All clips wax and wane, folding
into each other. Audio pans around the room, creating a sense of location and movement.
The sound sometimes becomes muddled and overbearing, or abruptly cuts to a complete
silence, drawing a heightened awareness to the space and external sounds that may filter
through the surrounding environment. During this silence, the outside world and the
installation space coalesce. One might wonder if something has gone awry. Particularly in
touch we endure, when silence comes one may question whether the track is over, or if the
vibrating phone they hear is their own or someone else’s in the room. I am compelled to
play with the viewer’s perception and challenge the impulse to check one’s phone. It is my
intention that moments like this create a heightened sense of awareness and attention. I hope
this encourages my audience to “tune in” to the present moment and away from daily
distractions. Perhaps one’s alertness lasts throughout the day. The piece cycles through after
about six minutes and continues on repeat.
In my collage, notice, I explore and complicate modes of communication through
assumed identity, power dynamics, and the distortion of voice. Notice uses two voices,
distinguishable as male and female. Throughout the duration of the piece the voices have
moments of isolation and contact with one another. Voices call, respond, and layer on one
another. At points, they almost meet in unison before falling out of sync again. I am
interested in the dynamic of using two voices, how they are likely to be read as a
heterosexual couple because they are gendered through socially upheld systems of
masculinity and femininity. I wonder what it takes to break modes of assumption, how a
voice must sound in order to lose its qualifications of gender. More importantly, I am
35
interested in complicating narratives by constructing fictional conversations. I intend to
continue challenging the ways vulnerability can be used as a tool for connection.
36
MY PROCESS
The way I scout and excavate my sounds is similar to how I find and compose my
photographs. When I am with a camera I am paying attention to the temperature of light
across the city scape, how the filtered glow through a car windshield creates a teal hue over a
driver’s eyes, or the way one’s hands might subconsciously rest against a body in repose.
Much like Phillipsz, when I am improvising on the piano, I am excitedly fumbling around
arrays of emotional phrasing, a stuttering and stammering through a sonic language in search
for the perfect words.
I find these moments of attentiveness to be subtle, and somewhat mysterious in their
characteristics of banality. I marvel at the residual evidence of these moments: the way the
wind blows over a single blade of grass, the refraction of light through a magnifying glass,
the blown out negative, the hand that moved at the last second. I hold the same sentiment
for sound: the way wind registers, the overheard conversation among strangers, the
registration of my body moving through a space, the way a zooming driver lays on her horn,
the construction workers drilling up the sidewalk. Sometimes the ambient artifact, or the
accident, is more rewarding than main point of focus. These artifacts and accidents become
even more heightened when using digital media technologies that provide endless editing
permutations and possibilities.
When I am sound scouting, I am also paying attention to the subtler cues in an
environment. I am consciously listening to the way people’s feet hit the pavement, the
reverberation of trucks on the highway, the sound of rain beating down on a plastic roof. In
scouting for photographs and sound, I go in search of awe knowing that I might find
37
nothing. More often than not this isn’t the case. The mere act of putting myself in the place
of being a receiver of the world lends to truly noticing not only how much sound is
constantly ebbing and flowing, but also the beauty in what comes out of paying attention.
I am concerned with improvisation as a part of my process because it provides an
immersive creative experience that allows me flexibility to play, collaborate, experiment,
distort, and push my application of sound. I am not confined to boundaries, like the edge of
a frame, and thus I can make meaning out of dissonant arrangements., Gillian H., Siddall and
Ellen Waterman, editors of “Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity,”
remark that,
“Improvisation is...a form of recollection and repetition: we call on learned repertoires of sounds and gestures and mobilize them in the moment. We cannot escape from our enculturation and our histories; indeed, improvisation is often a means of narrating the past through the filter of the present moment.”21
Improvisation acts as an operation of making that queers and questions the authority of
formalism as a rubric for composition. It leaves plenty of room for unexpected discovery or
change that innately counters politicized social designs and upheld systems of correctness.
I am particularly concerned with twisting the concept of correctness in art as it
relates directly back to my queer and disabled identity. I was considered legally disabled for
the first sixteen years of my life due to my cerebral palsy. Likewise, I’ve been first-hand
witness to my twin sister’s experiences with disability. Disability is an acknowledgment of
corporeal disobedience or nonconformity. A person with a disability is often seen, targeted,
and treated as faulty, one who doesn’t live up to socialized standards. I use my experience
21 Siddall, Gillian H., and Ellen Waterman, editors. Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 3.
38
with disability as one of many platforms for considering queerness. Queerness creates
transformative spaces by subverting common dialogues that box-in identities and bodies.
Queerness as a mode of production within my process is important as it empowers a
heightened sense of personal relevance. It encourages me to look at aspects of my work that
reflect my identity; aspects that are inherently political, break conventional barriers, or bend
rules. On rules and improvisation, Judith Butler says,
“We wouldn’t understand improvisation if there were no rules. In other words, improvisation either has to relax the rules, break the rules, operate outside the rules, bend the rules--it exists in relation to rules, even if not in a conformist or obedient relation. And this opens up the question of what leeway we have for acting in a rule-bound world...when we do replicate them, or even though we do situate ourselves in relationship to those norms, rules, and practices, there is sometimes a possibility of a kind of free play--an improvisational moment.”22
I find this particularly striking when recording myself improvising on piano. I have ideas
about what should sonically happen next, not from classical training, or any training for that
matter, but through the ways I’ve been exposed to celebrated music. Improvisation and free-
flow of piano composition allows me to break through ingrained ideas of correctness. Rule-
breaking turns my limited knowledge or mastery of the instrument into a truly valuable skill.
I push and prod solely for my emotional registry, and for my psychic necessity for musical
expression.
Collaboration is a huge part of my process. All of the voice recordings resulted from
an open call placed on my social media platforms, specifically Facebook and Instagram. In
22 Siddall, Gillian H., and Ellen Waterman, editors. “Improvisation within a Scene of Constraint: An Interview with Judith Butler.” By Tracy McMullen. Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 25–26.
39
this call, I asked anyone with an interest in participating to send me their email address. After
I received email addresses, I sent out a page with specific and clear instructions, reading:
Directions:
1) find a quiet room of your choosing 2) eliminate as much background noise as possible 3) read the text body below a few times to understand the language in your terms 4) when you feel ready, use the ‘voice memo’ or like function on your phone to record yourself reading the text body below 5) please read with your authentic intonation, this is casual 6) try your best to send a version you feel most happy about 7) please label your file as follows firstname_lastname_September
When people are reading my poems they are bringing with them the multitude of
experiences they have. The associations one may have with words, one’s emotional state
carries through language. To me, one of the magical components of this process is listening
and trying to make connections to the voice. I notice the variations in pronunciation,
intonation or emphasis that often heightens or drains the impact of a word or phrase.
Sometimes this difference can produce a more aesthetically pleasing sound, or alternatively
highlight an intensity or a sharpness. Music and improvisation scholar Julie Dawn Smith
explains, “Sound is inseparable from our experience of, and participation with, our body and
bodies of others.”23 I’ve found recordings that have “blemishes” of heavy breath, stutters,
pauses, or mispronunciations. To me, these feel like small cracks in the door that lets the
light shine through. I value these moments as breaths of fresh air that brings humanity back
into the digitization of the voice. I find these characteristics to be uniquely unrepeatable and
23 Smith, Julie Dawn. 2001. “Diva Dogs: Sounding Women Improvising.” PhD diss., University of British Columbia. p. 32.
40
therefore more valuable. There is a sense of vulnerability and empathetic chord is struck in
listening to these details. I hold priority towards choosing voices of people who sound
invested and somehow affected by what they are reading. I was pleasantly surprised to
receive nearly twenty recordings from distant locations including Canberra, Australia,
Brooklyn, New York, Austin, Texas, and Winters, California. I chose four voices to utilize in
constructing touch, we endure and notice.
The distance between the two voices I chose to incorporate in touch, we endure,
spanned from Canberra to Austin, collapsing a distance of over 8,600 miles. It is intriguing
to me that this process allows strange and distant voices to co-exist. By pushing two distinct
voices to into a small container, they are led to interact with one another.
It excites me that I can give something to the world, and in turn receive something. I
am interested in the array of voices and personalities I receive. It is important to me that I
create an opportunity for accessibility and collaborative inclusion. I found that being flexible
about what quiet meant, and asking folks to record using their cell phone made the exchange
feel more authentic, inclusive, and personal. Likewise this allowed anyone with a cell phone
and a curiosity to participate. I try to use tools, like a cell phone, that are commonplace and
more or less within reach for marginalized identities. The cell phone is a necessary studio
tool because it allows me and others to respond quickly and effectively. There is an inherent
beauty in using something simple to produce something so rich and full of potential.
The recordings come from an eclectic group of folks with varying backgrounds,
identities, geographies, ages, occupations, and expressions. Participants include close friends,
friends of friends, or total strangers. In this exchange, every voice feels like a gift and an
41
offering to my creative practice. Each recording, though not always present in the final edit,
affects me and makes its way into the work through virtue of the exchange.
Working collaboratively would not be possible without the technology of a voice
memo app, a cell phone, or other tools such as a computer, and editing software. I am
interested in the way technology transforms and enhances the opportunity for unparalleled
editing possibilities. New technology allows the expansion of creativity and the ability to
improvise, experiment, and create sounds that are hybrids, stand-ins, clips, repetitions,
nuances, or complete abstractions of their original source. Through technological
advancement, artists like me are able to explore more dynamics in sound art.
Technology allows for deeper experimentations and opportunities for sonic
aesthetics and arrangements. I am curious about the kind of re-contextualization and
transformation that occurs when one sound subject/object touches, leans into, absorbs,
enters, travels, repeats, or falls away from another. I am especially curious about how
repetition can change a subject’s identity, creating a whole new other. For example, for a part
in touch, we endure, I isolated all of the different high end “s” sounds from a clip and played
them in a loop without any breath or vocalization between the sounds. The re-
contextualization of sound, and expediency of time editing transformed the voice to mimic
cawing birds.
The “s” sound was created, amplified, and emitted through one’s body, digitized, and
re-amplified through speakers for other bodies to hear. Without the aid of technology, I
would have never discovered the possibilities and potentials for this sound. I am fortunate to
42
be able to utilize technology in my process, for it allows me to experiment with different
compositional techniques.
43
CONCLUSION
Recognizing sound can profoundly stimulate an otherwise numbed alertness. Sound
can evoke, as sound theorist Budhaditya Chattopadhyay explains, “Contemplative and
thoughtful imagery…of mental resonance and mindful personalization of sounds into
poetic-contemplative listening states.”24 Attentive listening is important because it can be
used as a tool to bring one’s awareness back to one’s body.
Continuous layers of sound and commonplace noises unfold moment after moment
often going overlooked or being condemned. My perception of commonplace sound as an
artistic experience is important because it addresses the value of paying attention to the way
sound affects one’s body. One’s body is constantly recording and unconsciously reacting to
sound. This changes how one experiences, orients, and communicates with the world. I
create sound collages that heighten experiences of sound. I use editing techniques that queer
narrative, voice, and sonic symbols. Queering sound cultivates new experiences and
occasions for emotional, psychic, and physical orientation. I use affect and disorientation as
tools to foster opportunities for curiosity, connection, and empathy.
Noise is inevitable. It is everywhere. In a truly soundproof room one can hear one’s
own circulatory system, the digestive organs pumping, the thud of the beating heart. Just
like a pupil adjusting to light, one’s ear adjusts to the amount of noise in a given space. The
quieter the room, the more one hears. The body is increasingly affected as noises change
24 Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. “Beyond Matter: Object-Disoriented Sound Art | SEISMOGRAF.” Seismograf.org, seismograf.org/fokus/sound-art-matters/beyond-matter-object-disoriented-sound-art.
44
volume. If noises get too loud, ears eventually stop being able to decipher distinction
between sound, which can damage one’s body.
The body is a type of a sounding object. It is both a receiver, transceiver, and
recorder of sound. Siddall and Waterman note, “sounding happens in bodies, between
bodies, in real time, in virtual time, in memory, in history, and across space.”25 Sound passes
through the physical threshold of skin, away from the cognitive gateway of reason. It
modifies bodily experience through stimulating the senses, which changes the perception of
time and space. Sound causes emotional stir. Boundless to form, sound permeates the room,
opening the barrier between one’s internality and the external environment. Sound collapses
distance.
Internally, muscle, fascia, bone, and organs push up against the skin, creating a
boundary, a separation, and a distance that outlines the space where physicality of touch
starts and stops. Light and sound travels this distance. Specifically, sound collapses the space
between transmitter, receiver, and recorder. Smith writes, “Our experience of, and
participation with sound is inseparable from our experience of, and participation with, our
body and the bodies of others. The resonances of sound waves register in the very fibers of
each and every body in ways that confound the assumed discreteness of exterior and interior
space.”26 One’s voice enters another’s body over and over in an endless cycle.
25 Siddall, Gillian H., and Ellen Waterman, editors. Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 2. 26 Smith, p. 32.
45
FIGURES AND TABLES
Table 1 Pierre Schaeffer, A la Recherche d’une Musique Concrète. Editions du Seuil, 1966. P 166.
46
Fig. 1
riel Sturchio, the roundness of its contour, 20” x 24”, archival inkjet print, 2017
47
Fig. 2
riel Sturchio, the garden, 20” x 24”, archival inkjet print, 2017
48
Fig. 3
riel Sturchio, the sheen, 20” x 24”, archival inkjet print, 2017
49
Fig. 4
riel Sturchio, its body, 20” x 24”, archival inkjet print, 2017
50
Fig. 5
riel Sturchio, Eye, 36” x 40”, archival inkjet print, 2016
51
Fig. 6
riel Sturchio, the light, 20” x 24”, archival inkjet print, 2018
52
Fig. 7
riel Sturchio, Bianca in Doorway, 36” x 40”, archival inkjet print, 2018
53
Fig. 8
riel Sturchio, Bianca Looking Out, 36” x 30”, archival inkjet print, 2018
54
Fig. 9
riel Sturchio, Stretch with Scar, 24” x 20”, archival inkjet print, 2018
55
Fig. 10
riel Sturchio, Selfie in Moss, 20” x 24”, archival inkjet print, 2018
56
Fig. 11
riel Sturchio, Scratches, 20” x 24”, archival inkjet print, 2018
57
Fig. 12
Jen Davis, Untitled no. 53, archival inkjet print, 2003
58
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Duke University
Press, 2006.
Beauchamp, Airek. “Live Through This: Sonic Affect, Queerness, and the Trembling
Body. “Sounding Out!, 27 Sept. 2015, soundstudiesblog.com/2015/09/14/sonic
tremblings-sound-affect-queer-body/.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex, Vintage Classic, 2015, p. 7.
Born, Georgina. Music, Sound and Space Transformations of Public and Private Experience.
Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 82.
Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. “Beyond Matter: Object-Disoriented Sound Art |
SEISMOGRAF.” Seismograf.org, seismograf.org/fokus/sound-art
matters/beyond-matter-object-disoriented-sound-art.
“Christine Sun Kim, Nap Disturbance.” Art Agenda, Carroll / Fletcher,
www.artagenda.com/shows/carroll-fletcher-presents-christine-sun-kim-at
frieze-london-2016/.
“Chris Watson Interview—The Art of Listening,” SYNK, 20 Dec. 2012,
snykradio.dk/chris-watson-interview-the-art-of-listening/.
Corner, Lena. “The Art of Noise: 'Sculptor in Sound' Susan Philipsz.” Art & Design, 13
Nov. 2010, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/nov/14/susan-philipsz
turner-prize-2010-sculptor-in-sound.
Eidsheim, Nina Sun. Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Duke University
59
Press, 2015.
Holsinger, Bruce W. “introduction.” Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of
Bingen to Chaucer, Stanford University Press, 2001, p. 10.
Kane, Brian. “L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the
Phenomenological Reduction.” Organised Sound, vol. 12, no. 01, 2007, p. 15.
Kaplan, Howard. “Music, Molecules, and the Middle Way.” Spiral, A Sound Issue, June
2017, pp. 14–17, rubinmuseum.org/images/content/SPIRAL_final_revised2.pdf.
Kennedy, Randy. “Art at MoMA: Tuna on Wheat (Hold the Mayo).” Art & Design, 2
Feb. 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/arts/design/03lunch.html.
Lacan, Jacques, “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.” Ed. Jacues-Alain
Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton & Co., 1998, 195.
Lee, Risha. “Mediated Voices, The Art of John Giorno and Christine Sun Kim” Spiral, A
Sound Issue, June 2017, pp. 32-35,
rubinmuseum.org/images/content/SPIRAL_final_revised2.pdf.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, 2002, p. 296.
“Music, Molecules, and the Middle Way.” SPIRAL the Sound Issue, June 2017, pp. 14
-17, rubinmuseum.org/images/content/SPIRAL_final_revised2.pdf.
O’Rourke, Karen, Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers, MIT, 2016, pp. 76–77.
Philipsz, Susan. “Biography.” Tanya Bonakdar Gallery,
www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artists/susan-philipsz/modal/bio.
Plowden, Linda. “Tactile Sensory System.” Therapy Space, 20 June 2011,
www.therapyspacebristol.co.uk/information-for-parents/tactile-sensory-system/.
60
Reynolds, Dee, and Matthew Reason. “Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural
Practices.” Intellect, 2012.
Schaeffer, Pierre. A la Recherche d’une Musique Concrète. Editions du Seuil, 1966. P 166.
Siddall, Gillian H., and Ellen Waterman, editors. Negotiated Moments: Improvisation,
Sound, and Subjectivity, Duke University Press, 2016.
Sillman, Amy, and Gregg Bordowitz. “Between Artists.” Jan. 2007,
www.amysillman.com/uploads_amy/pdfs/d60a92a24b.pdf.
Smith, Julie Dawn. 2001. “Diva Dogs: Sounding Women Improvising.” PhD diss.,
University of British Columbia.
Valle, Andrea. “Towards a Semiotics of the Audible.” Signata, no. 6, 2015, pp. 65–89.,
journals.openedition.org/signata/1063.
Woloshyn, Alexa. “Electroacoustic Voices: Sounds Queer, and Why It Matters.” Tempo,
vol. 71, no. 280, Apr. 2017, pp. 68–79. Cambridge Core.