Magpick: an Augmented Guitar Pick for Nuanced Control

This paper introduces the Magpick, an augmented pick for electric guitar that uses electromagnetic induction to sense the motion of the pick with respect to the permanent magnets in the guitar pickup. The Magpick provides the guitarist with nuanced control of the sound that coexists with traditional plucking-hand technique. The paper presents three ways that the signal from the pick can modulate the guitar sound, followed by a case study of its use in which 11 guitarists tested the Magpick for five days and composed a piece with it. Reflecting on their comments and experiences, we outline the innovative features of this technology from the point of view of performance practice. In particular, compared to other augmentations, the high temporal resolution, low latency, and large dynamic range of the Magpick support a highly nuanced control over the sound. Our discussion highlights the utility of having the locus of augmentation coincide with the locus of interaction

Magpick: an Augmented Guitar Pick for Nuanced Control

This paper introduces the Magpick, an augmented pick for electric guitar that uses electromagnetic induction to sense the motion of the pick with respect to the permanent magnets in the guitar pickup. The Magpick provides the guitarist with nuanced control of the sound that coexists with traditional plucking-hand technique. The paper presents three ways that the signal from the pick can modulate the guitar sound, followed by a case study of its use in which 11 guitarists tested the Magpick for five days and composed a piece with it. Reflecting on their comments and experiences, we outline the innovative features of this technology from the point of view of performance practice. In particular, compared to other augmentations, the high temporal resolution, low latency, and large dynamic range of the Magpick support a highly nuanced control over the sound. Our discussion highlights the utility of having the locus of augmentation coincide with the locus of interaction

Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo

How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new

Platial Phenomenology and Environmental Composition

This study concerns field recordings, location audio gathered from unscored and unexpected sounds, which retain an indexical relationship to their origin in the natural world. The term “environmental music” describes aesthetic works that use field recordings as primary material. This practice requires an engagement with the ontology and phenomenology of place, but such relationships have remained under-theorised. This study addresses this lacuna by developing a rich vocabulary of place that can aid both the practice and analysis of environmental music. The historical development begins with the multiplicity of concepts of place known to the Ancient Greeks. One of these, Ptolemy’s geos, based on a God’s-eye view of the world, has dominated understandings of the world and its effects, hence the term “geography”. This perspectivism was reinforced first by Alberti’s optics, which placed a viewer in a strict topological relationship to the object of their gaze, and then by Cartesian rationalism, a philosophy that reduced place to mere secondary characteristics of an ordered, homogeneous space. Against this background, alternative models of place will be discussed. Topos, exemplified by tales like “The Odyssey”, emphasises the perambulations of an individuated subject, foregrounding the experiential nature of the journey. The klimata of Ptolemy models place as psychic zones of influence on the Earth. Plato’s khoros is both receptacle and material, a generative site of instability and unknowability. Taken together, these concepts assert the primacy of place as milieu, a responsive context that shapes, and is shaped by, being-in-the-world. The word “platial” is proposed to encompass this understanding. This thesis is supported by the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as interpreted by Tim Ingold and Edward Casey. Analysis of the environmental music of Dallas Simpson, Robert Curgenven, and the author illustrate how platial thinking can provide deep insights into a variety of creative sonic practices

Composing Places: Practices and Potentials of Sound Mapping and Locative Audio

Since the early 2000s, advances in mobile, networked, and locative technology have made the possibilities for combining sounds and places more numerous than ever before. This research-creation dissertation asks how people participate in creating and experiencing relationships between sounds and places via mobile technology. Working across the fields of media studies, mobilities research, sound studies and soundscape studies, this dissertation aims to contribute a focus on sound to the growing body of work examining locative media and mapping, while also contributing a focus on mobility and place to sound studies research. Through a research-creation project delving into sound mapping (the practice of attaching sound recordings to online maps, accessible regardless of the user’s location) and locative audio (the practice of attaching audio to particular locations to be listened to by a user in-situ on a mobile device), I examine the potential of ‘composition’ for understanding and challenging current mobile sound practices. Composition, as a concept and practice involving relationality and the dynamics of process and product, serves to open up the ways in which places and sounds may come together. For this project, I created three musical compositions using only recordings found on online platforms with sound mapping components. I also created two interactive, locative audio compositions situated in the neighbourhood of Verdun, Montreal, which led to twenty-four recordings of project participants engaging with the works. I corresponded with sound map contributors through e-mail, and I interviewed locative audio participants in-person. Putting these initiatives into dialogue with other projects, historical precedents, approaches to working with sound, and theorizations of locative media and mapping, I examine both the norms and the potential of current technologies and practices. I argue that the way place and sound come together through sound mapping and locative audio involves a continual interplay between: 1) maintaining established practices and existing bonds; and 2) attempting to forge new bonds and new ways of approaching places. Continued exploration and experimentation via composition contributes to understanding this interplay, shedding light on how people engage with places through mobile technology

-becoming-#langscape-[fold here] intra-rupting landscape, language, and the creative act

This fine art practice-led research sets out amongst the terrain of upland Britain. Impelled by the spirit of British Romanticism, Ancient Cynicism and the art of tactics in a contemporary context, the research interrogates language and employs writing to offer a new approach to landscape. Coleridge, Constable, Graham, Lanyon and Turner provide an art historical context to the idea of ‘landscape’. From an initial methodological focus on Baradian diffraction, attention is shifted to the employment of her concepts of ‘cutting together-apart’ and intra-action. These latter are re-purposed as the more muscular intraruption in which an exertive tearing is both uncomfortable and beneficial. Further concepts are mobilised to explore the terrains of landscape and writing: Deleuzian becoming and Foucauldian parrhēsia are utilised to reanimate human relationships to and with landscape. As a result, this thesis disjunctively combines language and landscape to propose the new term and concept of langscape. A term that recognises the impossibility of a (human) union with nature through words and writing whilst simultaneously revelling in the possibilities that recognition of the difference provides in a form of becoming-landscape. This research further proposes exertion as a logic for the creative act by recognising and embracing the performative potential of long-distance walking and running, and their disruptive relationship to writing and thinking. The potential of writing (as both a verb and a noun) is explored in a fine art doctoral research context with specific attention paid to the strategy of ‘art writing’. Resulting from this exploration, the binaric structuring of practice/theory is short-circuited by an exertive poiēsis that emerges from the performative activities of the research. The terrain and form of this writing enacts (and reconceives) the relationship of art and writing in and as the thesis. The thesis is written by the langscape

The poetics of translation : a thinking structure

Dans mon projet de thèse, The Poetics of Translation: A Thinking Structure, la traduction se transforme en méthodologie de lecture et d’écriture qui fait voir le mouvement de la pensée ainsi que ses effets poétiques dans la littérature contemporaine expérimentale. Plus précisément, les études menées dans ce manuscrit portent sur des textes où la traduction alimente une piste de réflexion dans le travail de création chez certains-es auteurs-es. C’est notamment le cas dans les traductions d’esprit expérimental d’Erín Moure et ses « intranslations » de la poète Galicienne Chus Pato (Secession/Insecession), du projet de « réécriture » de The Book of Disquiet et Le Livre de l’intranquillité de Fernando Pessoa pratiquée par le groupe de performance interdisciplinaire PME-ART, et de la traduction en tant « qu’image dialectique » dans le roman The Obituary de Gail Scott. Dans le corpus ciblé par mes recherches, la traduction dépasse ses fonctions normatives de médiation et de transfert d’une langue à une autre et s’avère être plutôt une utilisation à des fins épistémologique. Par exemple, la traduction comme épistémè sert dans les trois chapitres de ma thèse de méthodologie de lecture qui, comme événement poétique, pense la traduction à travers la poésie. L’objectif de cette étude est non seulement d’offrir une analyse novatrice et critique dans le cadre des études littéraires, mais aussi de contribuer à de nouvelles avenues de recherche ciblant la poétique de la traduction et la recherche création.The Poetics of Translation: A Thinking Structure is concerned with what can be known through the poetic and theoretical vectors of translation, both as a poetics as well as a reading methodology. More precisely, through a reading of contemporary experimental texts – those by Gail Scott, Erín Moure, Chus Pato, Fernando Pessoa and PME-ART – I investigate translation’s poetic and epistemological possibilities as well as translation itself as episteme (as knowledge and understanding). Erín Moure’s generative “intranslations” of the Galician poet Chus Pato (Secession/Insecession), the radical rewriting practice of English and French translations of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and Le Livre de l’intranquillité by the Montreal performance collective PME-ART, and the poetics of translation as dialectical image in the novel The Obituary by Gail Scott all contribute to my understanding of translation’s poetics as a thinking structure. The purpose of this study is not only to furnish an innovative and critical understanding of translation’s various permutations in contemporary experimental texts, but also to contribute to new avenues of research targeting translation and research creation while ultimately bringing translation on the side of poetry rather than the inverse. The works I examine thus offer modes of thinking about translation as a form of poetic juxtaposition and as a cypher that is concerned with what can be apprehended or understood in the elliptical space(s) of an in-between

Obiter Dicta

"Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought—gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic—interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran’s approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what’s granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird’s-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.