HYBRID RESONANT ASSEMBLAGES

HYBRID RESONANT ASSEMBLAGES is a conceptual framework to re-consider the role of touch within musical expression. – research project at Culture Lab (Newcastle University) together with John Bowers –

Concept + Demo

HYBRID RESONANT ASSEMBLAGES are conceptualized as combinations of varied materials excited by sound transducers, feeding back to themselves via digital signal processing. The framework is grounded on works by David Tudor (Rainforest) and by Nicolas Collins (Pea Soup) and extends them to explore alternatives to more familiar ideas of instruments and interfaces. Implicit norms of gestures performed with electronic music instruments are put in question and, in particular, a wider notion of touch is commended drawing on the philosophical work of Jean-Luc Nancy to recognise the performative value of withholding contact.

Touch + Resonance

The principle to set materials in vibrations and pick up their resonances is inspired by David Tudors Rainforest series (1968-1973). In this regard, SOUND OBJECTS are Post-Tudorian-speakers and -microphones at the same time, that resonate from frequencies originating in the assembled materials. Driven by electric energy they are on-goingly 'sonorous' and 'sonorized' [1] – comparable to the human ear drum, a drum membrane, reversible functions of microphones and loudspeakers and the movement of difference and tension not to touch, that lies in touching.

[1] cf. Nancy, Jean-Luc: Listening. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, p.42

V.6 Struktion

Based on the concept of HYBRID RESONANT ASSEMBLAGES several SOUND OBJECTS have been realized in 2013 and 2014. The last one was underlying Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of Struktion. Thus the assemblage became a paradoxical attempt to undo any structure or principle of organisation beyond construction and destruction, but leave it to a non-structure of a a pile (lat.: struo) with no firmly fixed order and without subsuming its co-present parts to an entity. Instead things were left to a process of contingent decomposition. Adding to that, the assemblage of different materials, contact microphones and loudspeaker transducers resonating from digitally processed feedback had various input and output signals, that were influenced by each other turning gain into a parameter of metacontrol. The latter has been realized in 'struktioned' SuperCollider Patch with Alberto de Campo and Hannes Hoelzl.

Installation with an invitation to the audience to touch and change it. Performer in the video: Korhan Erel.