ESSAYS

A selection of essays I have written as part of my Master in Composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and my Bachelor of Arts in Geography at the University of Oxford:

2022

• Artistic Research and Environmental Change: Reflections on the Production of a Collaborative Audio-visual Installation [Master Dissertation, winner of The Rose Lawrence Horner’s Award 2023.]

• How has Big Data influenced the practice of listening?

2020

• Vinyl Records: An Account of Allure and Toxicity Evoking the Elemental

• Sound in the Everyday: A Participatory Ethnography in Starnberg, Germany [Bachelor Dissertation]

See below for abstracts of each essay for reference.

2022

Artistic Research and Environmental Change: Reflections on the Production of a Collaborative Audio-visual Installation

In this essay, I analyse the process of producing an audio-visual installation focusing on environmental change in the 21st century. I locate the project in a longer tradition of artistic research engaging music and the environment. I reflect on the practical implications of navigating the intersection of artistic practice and the verbalization of conceptual and contextual ideas, taking a narrative rhetorical approach that aims to give room to the unique potential emerging from the productive tensions in artistic research. I commissioned five composers to write pieces for the installation. I examine the aspect of collaboration in the realization of the project, arguing that the conservatoire institution played both a facilitating and disciplining role. Through interplay with visual media, I examine how music can become active in shaping ontologies of environment. The latter discussion focuses on the potential for composition to direct environmental thinking by reworking broader fields of artistic and conceptual reference in relation to the listener, generating affective impulses through the notion of resonance. I argue that the project sits precariously between functionalized artistic research that reproduces Western knowledge about the environment and art that is free to formulate critical alternatives.

How has Big Data influenced the practice of listening?

Big Data has become something of a buzzword in recent years. Indeed, the Google Books ‘Ngram Viewer’ registers a 300-fold increase in the textual occurrence of the term between 2007 and 2019. With the rise of social media, and the digital more broadly, enormous datasets combined with sophisticated statistical analysis increasingly drive decision-making in some of the largest corporations in the world in a range of sectors (Davenport & Dyché, 2013; Fourakhi et al., 2019; Popovič et al., 2018). The music industry, and particularly music distribution, has become increasingly intertwined with the world of Big Data through streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer, which dominate contemporary recording revenues (Koutsomichalis, 2016; O’Dair & Fry, 2020), as well as social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok (Maasø & Hagen, 2020). The integration of Big Data into corporate processes has been central to the creation of surplus media environments (Batistič & van der Laken, 2019; Verhoef et al., 2022), which translate into experiences of listening revolving around the management of excess (Hagen, 2015; Webster, 2019). Moreover, practices of listening are increasingly rendered as a functional component of the data-driven digital economy in their temporal distributions and content (Drott, 2018a; 2018b). This essay will discuss the aesthetic implications of Big Data on the practice of listening. Big Data and listening practices are intricately intertwined at multiple sites simultaneously, existing in a tense, dynamic relationship in which both elements reproduce certain tendencies in the other. Analysis of listening alongside, and through, Big Data reveals what I argue to be an apparatus of governance (Foucault, 1976) that gradually aligns practices of listening with the demands of a digitized economy, albeit not without opportunities for alternative expression.

2020

Vinyl Records: An Account of Allure and Toxicity Evoking the Elemental

The elemental allows thinking about nature/culture in ways that do not separate the two and focus rather on entanglement, mediation, dynamics, intra-activity and process (Starosielski, 2019). A number of cultural geographers and anthropologists have focused on the elemental through different concepts (e.g. Jue, 2015, 2016; McCormack, 2017; Neale et al., 2019). In the first section (Section I) of this essay I would like to draw on the concept of elemental media to illustrate the ways in which vinyl transports meaning and experience within and through contemporary everyday life-worlds. John Durham Peters argues that anything that can accrue meaning becomes an object of mediation (Peters, 2017). I engage this idea also drawing on McCormack’s work on elemental infrastructures, in which he highlights that elemental media “operate as a diffuse field of relations that can be configured technically” (McCormack, 2017). ‘Thinking through’ (Jue, 2015) the medium of vinyl, then, as a technical configuration of broader elemental media (in this case crude oil), I discuss the material allure of the vinyl record as an aesthetic and artistic medium. I draw on examples from the techno electronic music scene to illustrate these ideas.

In the second part (Section II), I would like to engage with the molecular dimensions of vinyl, thinking through the lens of its constituent molecule, polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Nicole Starosielski argues that the elemental provides a way of making the environmental political (2019). Indeed, particularly elemental thinking focused on the molecular allows us to attune to the ‘temporally and spatially dispersed residues of contemporary political orders’ (Shapiro, 2015). Michelle Murphy argues that it is particularly the act of “making synthetic molecular relations explicit [that] is a complexly political act” (2008) (emphasis added), since the molecular relations of contemporary life are often obscure, and obscured. In thinking molecularly, I would like to draw out the material dynamism and porosity of contemporary more-than-human ecologies to suggest that the consequences of the PVC in vinyl records are an irrevocable condition of contemporary life, while being unevenly distributed across populations and time. I argue that in engaging with vinyl through the lenses of elemental media and molecule, we might highlight the diffuse spatio-temporalities and unequal relations of contemporary everyday life, and the complex, often contradictory, entanglements of art, consumption, everyday life and toxicity.

In the spirit of writing cultural geography creatively, of “revealing some of the engaged and embodied practices of cultural geography that lie behind the […] expressions of our scholarship” (DeLyser & Hawkins, 2014), I include two auto-ethnographic vignettes from my experience playing a DJ set with vinyl records for the first time. These vignettes take the form of reflective poetry, to begin to evoke how experiences of listening and performing music on vinyl are “inseparable from the self and from intimate human relationships” (Cresswell, 2014). Alongside a number of other vignettes, I aim to craft an experimental form of narrative, writing through the lenses of elemental media and molecule to produce an ‘excursion’ (Lorimer & Parr, 2014) reminiscent of a kind of written collage. I incorporate personal experience, perspectives from ‘expert’ individuals in the techno electronic music scene and narratives encountered while browsing vinyl-related websites and even while scrolling on Facebook thinking about my essay. The “story told, and the story of the story’s collation, proves inseparable, caught up in tense relation” (Lorimer & Parr, 2014). I suggest that the vinyl worlds that come apparent through elemental media and molecule evoke ‘milieu- specific experience[s]’ (Jue, 2015), challenging the notion that such experiences must be located ‘within’ a defined milieu. I wish to evoke the intricate, and intimate, ways in which vinyl is entwined in everyday worlds and experience, through and between the concepts of elemental thinking.

Sound in the Everyday: A Participatory Ethnography in Starnberg, Germany

This paper explores the ways in which sound is implicated in individual everyday experience. I draw upon research conducted at a large lake feature, Starnberger See (south- eastern Bavaria, Germany) over a six-week period with an innovative methodology employing participant sound-diaries, in-depth interviews, ethnography and sound recordings. I reflect extensively on the implications of my methodology for geographies of sound and the everyday and discuss the opportunity of employing participatory research methods to challenge the traditional researcher-researched hierarchy. The main body of text is accompanied by a series of audio tracks produced during the research period, with the aim of developing ways to discuss sound that transcend textual representation.

I conceptualise personal experiences of sound as two-fold: as arising from an interplay between precognitive encounter and continuous ascriptions of meaning. The latter process is framed by discourse and language; I develop a more nuanced register for the sounds at Starnberger See using German words that I encountered in my interviews. I demonstrate that by focusing on soundscapes as assemblage in the Deleuzean sense, we might become aware of both the quantitative and affective dimensions of sound in their actualisation through a range of bodies in space, but that this is not the whole picture. At Starnberger See, soundscapes, and the narratives surrounding them, were both disciplined and contested in a number of ways. Drawing upon Legg’s concept of assemblage/apparatus (2011), I argue that the Foucauldian concept of apparatus might be useful in better understanding how sound emerges as part of a landscape and how it is experienced on a personal level. More broadly, through these discussions of, and interactions with, place, power and experience, I reaffirm the notion that the everyday is an unstable concept which is difficult to define.