Ephemerides (Work-In-Progress)

Ephemerides begins with the hypothesis that microtonal synthesis can lay blueprints for unknown sonic worlds. What I’m contributing, however, to the world of microtonality is another hypothesis that tonality has strong parallels to gendered expression. 

Last year I constructed the first couple of iterations of Ephemerides as a fairly open-ended microtonal keyboard synthesizer, with MIDI mappings, familiar equal temperament tunings, and musical interval construction similar to Just Intonation. I wrote an algorithm for mapping out pitch classes, first in MaxMSP, then in C++ on Bela, and finally as a VST Plugin using CMajor.

This year I’m reimagining this instrument through voice. Instead of a capacitive touch or MIDI keyboard, the musician selects pitches (and the space between them) by adjusting their vocal resonances. Vocal resonance was specifically chosen because of its inherent characteristic as a secondary sex characteristic and a demonstration of the performativity of gender. I plan on working with people who express gender and music in diverse ways to design an instrument that favors continual exploration, discovery, and alignment of vocal expression with gender expression. 

After this comes a further probe into the similarities of how gender is encoded with how technology is encoded. Pulling from my performance and musical experience with live coding, I intend to build a live coding interface that programs Ephemerides on the fly. It would be interesting to see if I could write code to change how the voice sounds, and use the voice to write code. 

Relational and Diverse Listening Practices

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This summer June is leading a workshop with Brittney, Nicole, and Andrew on using different forms of technology to explore different modes of listening.

Abstract

Listening is fundamental to music practices and provides technical and cultural context to the design of musical instruments. Through various entanglement theories of human-technology relations, we can understand listening as a Baradian apparatus that motivates, propels, and evaluates the design of new musical instruments. Further, we can use listening practices as a method to de-center the human. We propose a workshop primed by emerging theories in sound studies to critically examine how listening appears, how it functions, and how it performs. Through guided mediations, hands-on exercises, and prompted discussion, we aim to integrate a plurality of listening experiences and suggest tuning our listening toward more entangled design practices.

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Overview

This workshop explores the concept of 'Entangled Listening' or 'Listening-as-Baradian-Apparatus' through a combination of technological and conceptual prompts. Presented as scores, participants will first engage with listening practices through technologies that modify hearing perception (i.e. ultrasonic audification, high-sensitivity microphone playback, and tactile listening), then write their own scores to communicate their own experiences. Finally, we will conduct a discussion of the experiences in trying to understand and translate listening experiences. By asking directed questions about similarities and differences we aim to have a productive conversation about aural diversity and what that means for design. Sharing of listening experience through score is more generative than reproductive; it intends to produce modes of relation without dictating what an experience is or how an experience should be.

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Key Concepts

• Listening practices, with or without technology, can actively shape and reshape imaginations, memories, and interactions with the world.
• Working with certain audio technologies demonstrates an ambiguity between making music, exploring sound, and designing musical instruments.
• A tracing of accountabilities and responsibilities in designing musical instruments and working with machine listening can begin to formulate in considering how sound is produced and how sound is perceived. 

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Using a host of activities, from graphic and textual scores to mediated discussion, we aim to have a productive conversation about aural diversity and what that means for design. What felt easy to communicate? What felt really difficult to translate as a somatic or listening experience? If you are someone who has a disability in hearing or mobility, what are ways that people in this room can better accommodate your experiences

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Research is supported by a UKRI Frontier Research (Consolidator) grant EP/X023478/1 (RUDIMENTS) and by the Royal Academy of Engineering under the Research Chairs and Senior Research Fellowships scheme.

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