Leonardo Music Journal | Page 2 | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

Leonardo Music Journal

LMJ 30 - Sociosonic Interventions: Distributed Authorship in Socially Engaged Sound Practices

How do creative sound practices function in the context of socially engaged art? Toward developing a practical methodology, this paper focuses on sound-led projects that stage socially engaged art practice in community settings, including some involving the author. Aesthetics, ethics and politics are employed as interrogative lenses for distributed creative processes.

LMJ 30 - Microbial Sensing: Constructing Perception through Technological Layers

The author introduces the concept of looking without seeing to describe the layered use of technology required to experience microorganisms during the making of The Stars Beneath Our Feet: an audiovisual installation for Lumiere Durham, a four-day international light festival produced by Artichoke in the U.K. First, the author describes the experience of technological layering when attempting to perceive microorganisms in the visual field and then the methodology adopted to determine how the same microorganisms might be perceived in the auditory field.

LMJ 30 - Tactical Soundwalking in the City: A Feminist Turn from Eye to Ear

This article investigates a turn from eye to ear in the literature and practice of walking-as-art. Arguing for listening as a feminist and ecologically oriented mode of engaging with the world, the author examines the practice of soundwalking (Westerkamp) and Deep Listening (Oliveros), placing them in conversation with the work of Michel de Certeau, and concludes with a discussion of the creative projects of Suzanne Thorpe, Viv Corringham and Amanda Gutierrez in order to chart the importance of relational listening practices today.

LMJ 30 - Interspecies Bodies and Watery Sonospheres: Listening in the Lab, the Archives and the Field

In this text, the author brings together scientific interspecies communication experiments, artistic practice and feminist posthumanities to inquire into the transformative role of sound and listening. Departing from an archive with recordings of human-dolphin language experiments, this research attends to sound as evidence and listening as a situated knowledge practice, with ethico-political implications that trouble Western, visually oriented knowledge systems.

LMJ 30 - Transductive Wind Music: Sharing the Danish Landscape with Wind Turbines

In this article the authors present their sound art project Nephew vs. Overheard as an exploration of a messy, fragile and incoherent local approach to public ecological art, an approach that aims at creating links of affectivity with technological creatures, such as large wind turbines, with which we share our landscape.

LMJ 30 - The Hearing Test: Evidence of a Vegetal Entity

The author’s artistic experiment The Hearing Test focuses on detection of high frequency clicking sounds that are emitted by the tips of plants’ roots. Scientists have claimed that plants’ roots produce high frequency clicks between 20 and 300 kHz by bursting air bubbles. But while the phenomenon has been described, its cause remains unexplained. This lack of knowledge opens up possibilities for multiple interpretations and invites experimental approaches as well as speculation concerning plant intelligence, the role of species-specific hearing and sound as evidence.

LMJ 30 - A Conflux of Musical Logics: Memory, History and the Improvisative Music of SLANT

The author discusses SLANT, an improvisation-based project he coconceived, recorded and performed on tenor saxophone in duo with pianist and new music specialist Richard Valitutto. The project deconstructs sound worlds such as late nineteenth-century Romanticism, avant-garde/free jazz, microtonal spectralism and southeast European rural music. Drawing on George Lewis’s systems of improvisative musicality, the article analyzes SLANT through the lens of sociomusical experience.

LMJ 30 - Now I’m Digital, Where Is My Ritual? Exploring Post-Digital Performance Objects as Totems for Agency and Ritual

The author argues that significant aspects of electronic music performance have been diminished in the rush to incorporate the latest, often discreet (as in intentionally unobtrusive) technologies. He identifies these aspects as agency, ritual and, to a lesser extent, serendipity and mess.

LMJ 30 - Exploring the Nexus of Holography and Holophony: In Visual Music Composition

In this article the author explores the idea that, owing to their shared three-dimensional nature, holophons and virtual holograms are well suited as mediums for visual music composition. This union is ripe with creative opportunity and fraught with challenges in the areas of aesthetics and technical implementation. Squarely situated upon the bleeding edge of phenomenological research and creative practice, this novel medium is within reach.