Simon Waters

NUNTIUS: A Computer System for the Interactive Composition and Analysis of Music and Dance

This investigation examines the degree to which notational integration of the two media of music and dance is possible. A distinction is made between the interaction of music and dance, and the practical issues of the composer/ choreographer relationship, with a tentative classification of both. The authors then describe their computer-based compositional and choreographic system, NUNTIUS, which provides direct data transfer and interpretation (structural patterns or processes) between the two media.

Touching at a Distance: Resistance, Tactility, Proxemics and the Development of a Hybrid Virtual/Physical Performance System

This is a paper about resistance and affordance as they relate to music-making in the most extended sense, and perhaps about empathy if this is understood as a capacity to ‘read’ the resistances and affordances of objects, bodies, people, and environments. It proceeds from a set of broad working assumptions which inform one individuals musical practice, via description of a musical-instrument-making project which is a hybrid of physical and virtual elements and is designed to test those assumptions, to a speculative finale in which it is suggested that musicking might, in some circumstances, be regarded in itself as a form of resistance. It moves from the intimate and personal, through what might be regarded as local concerns to more global observation, prefiguring the structure of the performance system it describes: the Virtual-Physical Feedback flute.

Timbre Composition: Ideology, metaphor and social process

Timbral music is frequently considered in phenomenological terms which purport to have objective or non-metaphoric status, and which suggest that music can be usefully regarded as a system of autonomous timbral objects. The author suggests that current debates concerning the interpretive status of the observer, and changes in the representational nature of language make such analyses problematic, drawing attention to the extent to which social processes construct the context for musical phenomena, and the languages in which they are described. Timbral listening is therefore considered as an intentional process.

Making the Archive and Archiving the Making: insights and outcomes from a major research project

This paper seeks to address some of the problems faced by those archiving an area of musical practice – electroacoustic music and the sonic arts – which is, by definition, involved with technologies which change and develop, and which unsurprisingly is itself in a state of flux and transformation. Drawing on the experience gained from two linked research projects – one looking at the development of the practice, the other seeking to archive it – it is suggested that the two apparently disparate areas of activity can be fruitfully regarded as overlapping in many respects. Both activities involve selection and aesthetic judgement, both strive for an elusive ‘completeness’ while acknowledging its impossibility, and at a technical level the strategies now emerging for searching and collating information from ‘separate’ archives look increasingly like the strategies used in some areas of ‘real-time’ composition and performance practice. It is argued that archivists of material from such a disparate and rapidly developing practice, rather than aiming for spurious ‘coverage’ of the field, should acknowledge and celebrate their difference from each other, while conforming to simple principles which will allow their archived content to be searched and collated dynamically by individual users, each querying and configuring the material optimally for their own purposes.

Engendering Hope: A person-centred reflection on technology and gender

This paper examines instances of recent musical and artistic works and asks to what extent it makes sense to regard certain practices and technologies as gendered. It looks at a number of strategies for making, suggesting that male gender stereotypes are as prevalent and unhelpful (to practitioners) as female ones. It looks at aspects of the working environments of practitioners to determine whether changes in such conditions might alleviate the gender mismatch in enrolment in higher education courses featuring ubiquitous technologies. The paper identifies historical precedents for technology gendering in which readings of such gendering have shifted radically, suggesting they offer scope for optimism in our longer-term reading of the gendered-ness of current practices. The paper also touches on the extent to which a ‘research’ ethos––the foregrounding of the essential human attributes of inquisitiveness and empathy––may contribute to our capacity to tell better, less binary stories of otherness in all its forms.

Tullis Rennie's Muscle Memory: Listening to the Act of Listening

This paper explores a recent, broadly ‘electroacoustic’, fixed medium composition by Tullis Rennie, which uses his background in ethnographic fieldwork to explore (in this case through auto-ethnography) modes of listening, and the role of technologies in mediating this listening. Muscle Memory: A conversation about jazz, with Graham South (trumpet) (2014) begins to answer questions about how one work can comment on and analyse or critique another through its own agency as music, bringing composition and ethnography together in fruitful collision, and illuminating the human capacity to manipulate and be manipulated by musical activity. The paper uses the piece to test the extent to which four functions, identified by Simon Frith (1987. Towards an aesthetic of popular music. In R. Leppert & S. McClary (Eds.), Music and society (pp. 133–49). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) as crucial to the meaningfulness of popular music may, in the context of ubiquitously technologised music, have broader application than he originally intended.

Contribution Towards an Ethics of Listening: An Improvising Musician’s Perspective

The practice of “free-improvised” music would seem to present a privileged site for the study of contingent relations: a world in which individuals dynamically adapt within a network of conduct which constitutes its own meaningfulness; in which sound and touch seem co-extensive. This would seem to be an ideal context for the discovery of empathic and ethical behavior. It is argued here, however, that “doing” empathy is in itself improvisatory, and that improvising can thus be placed centre-stage as an essential adapting and organizing skill, rather than a peripheral or abstruse “aesthetic” conduct.