The fourMs Forum is a monthly seminar open for all interested researchers.
INTIMAL: Interfaces for Relational Listening
Ximena Alarcón Diaz
This presentation will show the work in progress of INTIMAL: a physical-virtual interactive embodied system for relational listening, within the artistic practice of improvisatory telematic sonic performance. Departing from the question what is the role of the body as an interface that keeps memory of place? this practice-led research explores the body as a mediator in the listening process in the human migratory experience of cultural and geographical dislocation. Taking as a case study the experience of Colombian migrant women in Europe, INTIMAL will be informed by their listening experiences and tested as a catalyst in a process of healing and reconciliation within the context of Colombian post-conflict and peace building. Thus, the system will interrelate the multi-sensorial experience of nine Colombian migrant women who will be deeply listening to their bodies, memories and dreams, as these overlap experiences lived in their native country and in the new places where they have migrated. Memories of a shared historical place will be also triggered, by using creative retrieval of oral archives from many other Colombian migrant women?s testimonies. These listening experiences will inform women’s real-time expressions with voice, body and spoken language. The dynamics of these interactions will be further mediated by the Internet, in a public Telematic Sonic Performance, which will interconnect them from the cities of Oslo, London and Barcelona, where they reside.
The history of musical notation and harmonic music. A case of coevolution with possibly wide theoretical implications.
Henrik Sinding-Larsen
The lecture will summarize the theoretical argument in my chapter “Musical notation as the externalization of imagined, complex sound.” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination (forthcoming 2018) and hint to how the argument, that in this chapter is mostly concerned with consonance and harmony, could be extended to rhythm. The critical moment in the history of notation was when the medieaval music theorists (aroung 1000 AD) changed from the ancient Greek use of tetrachords to the modern focus on octaves, and from a Greek version of alphabetic names and note symbols to note-heads on a staff. The octave-based symmetry and iconic graphic representation unleashed new combinatorial possibilities that gave rise to Gothic polyphony and later modern harmonic modulations. Central to the transition is the representation of pitch space as a grid (the staff), first only conceived with diatonic spacing and Pythagorean tuning, but later with a chromatic, equidistant spacing of 12 semitones. This involves more general theories about creating coordinates and maps of any kind which also are relevant for creating maps of time and rhythmic events.