Panels – INTIMAL: Interfaces for Relational Listening

Talk with Martin Scaiff @ St. George Theatre. Great Yarmouth. Yarmonics Festival. Photo by Ranieri Spina

I am very grateful for the invitation to Yarmonics Festival in Great Yarmouth. The festival is a gathering creating sense of place at Great Yarmouth, through sound and listening. I offered a talk about the INTIMAL embodied system for relational listening, as a set of technologies to listen to what I have called “Sonic Migrations”.

The panel on which I talked was focused on Sound and Health and was chaired by Martin Scaiff. AM Kanngieser connected via Zoom to offer her talk. Martin’s talk focused on the experience of listening activities with children and teenagers, while AM Kanngeiser on the awareness of consent for listening/recording marine creatures’ sounds. I found both talks fascinating as they expressed an urgency of exploring these listenings for sustainable futures.

I received wonderful feedback and questions such as “what would be my ideal interface”, and “how do I negotiate place and presence” with Quantum listening. My ideal interface might be one that reinforces my individual and collective agency while I move with others co-present and across the distance. Regarding location, I still strive for sensing a balance, in which I remain grounded even across the distance. A technology that reminds me about the practice and reinforces the multiple possibilities of being that Pauline Oliveros invited us to explore. Still practising, and listening in the practice.

Thanks again for such a wonderful event!

Great Yarmouth Sea. The ‘easternmost’ that you can be in England. Photo by Ximena Alarcón.

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This week I had the great opportunity to participate in the panel discussion as part of the launch of the book NIME Reader Fifteen Years of New Interfaces for Musical Expression co-edited by Alexander Refsum Jensenius. I shared the panel with a variety of artists-scholars from different backgrounds between the panelists including composer Tellef Kvitte, percussionist Kjell Tore Innervik, interactive musician Charles Martin, popular music scholar Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen, and sound artist Trond Lossius.

Alexander proposed the panel to reflect on our experiences and respond to the questions of: what is a musical instrument?; why is it interesting to create new musical instruments?; how new instruments influence the performers?; and what is the future of musical instruments?.

I reflected on Installation(s) for improvisatory networked sonic performance as instrument and for me it was a great opportunity to bring in the discussion the idea of agency (rather than control), collaborative environments to connect (technologies, people, ideas, through sound), and the future of new instruments and distributed systems. Envisioning INTIMAL as a new system for installation(s) within networked improvisatory performances I highlighted the importance of listening and making relations between complex interactions: listening, remembering, expressing, and listening again in the improvisatory cycle through mediations, that expand our perception of sound as it travels in time and space, transforming fixed narratives.

Funders Stage 1

It was funded in its first stage by the Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship 2017-2019 awarded to Dr Ximena Alarcón Díaz, who developed it at the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion, Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo.

This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 752884, and partial funding from the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence scheme, project number 262762.

Category: Panels

Yarmonics Sound Festival Talk 23/09/22

NIME Reader – Book launch