‘Inbetweenness’: Transcultural Thinking in My Compositional Practice

This thesis explores the notion of ‘in-betweenness’ through transcultural thinking in my compositional practice as a commentary to my portfolio of compositions. My thinking has been inspired by Tim Ingold’s philosophical idea of ‘wayfaring’ as a way to navigate processes by which insights emerge from collaborative investigations. My portfolio makes an original contribution to music by engaging with Malaysian Chinese and Indigenous cultural materials in fresh ways with a focus on music and dance collaborations with Indigenous Malaysian references, aural/oral traditions in Hakka poetry, and traditions of pattern making related to Borneo bead work. These projects have enabled me to deepen my experience and understanding of notions of entanglement and of how highly diverse elements can be unified through collaboration, presenting a series of case studies that also vary in style and the modality of discussion used. The discussion focuses around four main aspects related to intercultural exchange and collaboration: the value of negotiation, the meaning of ambiguity, strategies for navigating cultural meanings, and processes of cultural and musical transmission. Through these, I gain insights into the perception and practice of cultural exchange to find a new creative threshold for opening up new cultural dialogues in my compositional work

Violin Augmentation Techniques for Learning Assistance

PhDLearning violin is a challenging task requiring execution of pitch tasks with the left hand using a strong aural feedback loop for correctly adjusting pitch, concurrent with the right hand moving a bow precisely with correct pressure across strings. Real-time technological assistance can help a student gain feedback and understanding helpful for learning and maintaining motivation. This thesis presents real-time low-cost low-latency violin augmentations that can be used to assist learning the violin along with other real-time performance tasks. To capture bow performance, we demonstrate a new means of bow tracking by measuring bow hair de ection from the bow hair being pressed against the string. Using near- eld optical sensors placed along the bow we are able to estimate bow position and pressure through linear regression from training samples. For left hand pitch tracking, we introduce low cost means for tracking nger position and illustrate the combination of sensed results with audio processing to achieve high accuracy low-latency pitch tracking. We subsequently verify our new tracking methods' e ectiveness and usefulness demonstrating low-latency note onset detection and control of real-time performance visuals. To help tackle the challenge of intonation, we used our pitch estimation to develop low latency pitch correction. Using expert performers, we veri ed that fully correcting pitch is not only disconcerting but breaks a violinist's learned pitch feedback loop resulting in worse asplayed performance. However, partial pitch correction, though also linked to worse as-played performance, did not lead to a signi cantly negative experience con rming its potential for use to temporarily reduce barriers to success. Subsequently, in a study with beginners, we veri ed that when the pitch feedback loop is underdeveloped, automatic pitch correction did not signi cantly hinder performance, but o ered an enjoyable low-pitch error experience and that providing an automatic target guide pitch was helpful in correcting performed pitch error

INSAM Journal of Contemporary Music, Art and Technology 9 (II/2022)

The Editorial Board of the INSAM Journal of Contemporary Music, Art and Technology decided that both issues of 2022 will be dedicated to one main theme, namely, “Fighting for the attention: Music and art on social media”. We can say that this call for papers went very successfully, as we are now presenting to you INSAM Journal No. 9. In a year which has seen many grave turbulences on socio-economic and political levels on a global scale, we have once again confirmed the importance of social media for communication and the spreading of news, and we have also seen the limitations of these tools. Turning to music and art on social media, our Main Theme section consists of five intriguing papers, Beyond the Main Theme section has two articles, (Inter)Views bring three exciting pieces, and the Reviews one festival report

An Embodied Perspective on Piano Timbre: Conceptualisation and Communication in Performance and Educational Context.

This thesis presents three empirical studies which explore the conceptualisation and communication of piano timbre from the perspective of the performer, the listener, and the pairing of teacher and student. The research started from the perspective of the debate between acousticians and musicians on touch-tone relationships, with the conviction that piano timbre should not be only concerned with the examination of sonic outcomes, but should aim to understand the phenomenology of experiences and conceptions related to piano timbre. Less is known about what contributes to the conceptualisation of piano timbre in terms of metaphor, cross-modal experience, mental images etc.; whether, and how, a timbral intention in piano performance can be communicated to others via sound and/or the body. By adopting an embodied perspective, this research has focused on an exploration of sound-gesture relationships in the perception and production of piano timbre, using a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The first interview study indicated that expressive gestures and the introspective experience of performers affect the way they perceive and describe piano timbre. The second study examined the embodiment of piano timbre and demonstrated through a perceptual experiment that the visual component of piano performance influences the perceived timbral experience of listeners. The communication of piano timbre is multimodal and integrates aspects from visual, tactile, kinaesthetic and sonic dimensions. The third teaching observation study implied that shared understanding of piano timbre is an emergent and enactive product in a piano lesson through the real-time collaboration and participation of both the teacher and the student. The whole thesis contributes to the understanding of embodied music cognition and has implications for expressive piano performance and teaching practice

Colonialisms, post-colonialisms and lusophonies: proceedings of the 4th International Congress in Cultural Studies

Colonialismos e pós-colonialismos são todos diferentes, mesmo quando referidos exclusivamente à situação lusófona. Neste contexto, mais do que procurar boas respostas, importa determinar quais as questões pertinentes aos nossos colonialismos e pós-colonialismos lusófonos. Com efeito, problematizar a própria questão é começar por descolonizar o pensamento. Em nosso entender, esta é uma das tarefas candentes no processo de re-imaginação da Lusofonia, que passa, atualmente, pela procura de um pensamento estratégico que inclua uma reflexão colonialista/pós-colonialista/descolonialista. Esta tarefa primeira, e mesmo propedêutica a qualquer construção gnoseológica, de descolonizar o pensamento hegemónico onde quer que ele se revele, não pode deixar de implicar as academias, centros de produção do saber e do conhecimento da realidade cultural, política e social. Neste sentido, descolonizar o pensamento sobre a Lusofonia passará por colocar em causa e instabilizar o que julgamos já saber e ser como ‘sujeitos lusófonos’, ‘países lusófonos’, ‘comunidades lusófonas’. Trata-se, assim, de instabilizar a uniformidade, mas também as diferenças instituídas, que frequentemente não são mais do que um novo género de cânone integrador e dissolvente da diferença. Por outro lado, não podemos deixar de praticar uma atitude vigilante, de cuidado e suspeição, em face do discurso sobre a diferença irredutível, que pode tornar-se (como no passado) na estéril celebração do exótico. Fazer com que a diferença instabilize o que oficialmente se encontra canonizado como ‘diferença dentro do cânone’, implica negociar e re-inscrever identidades sem inverter dualismos. Uma reflexão pós-colonial no contexto lusófono não pode evitar o exercício da crítica às antigas dicotomias periferia/centro; cosmopolitismo/ruralismo, civilizado/selvagem, negro/branco, norte/sul, num contexto cultural de mundialização, transformado por novos e revolucionários fenómenos de comunicação, que têm também globalizado a marginalidade. A tarefa de re-imaginar a Lusofonia implicará necessariamente a deslocação, inversão ou até implosão, do pensamento dual eurocêntrico, obrigando-nos a repensá-la dentro de uma mais vasta articulação entre local e global

Colonialisms, post-colonialisms and lusophonies: Proceedings of the 4th International Congress in Cultural Studies

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