Hearing the Tonality in Microtonality

In the late 1970s and 1980s, composer-pianist Easley Blackwood wrote a series of microtonal compositions exploring the tonal and modal behavior of a dozen non–twelve-tone equal temperaments, ranging from 13 to 24 tones per octave. This dissertation investigates a central paradox of Blackwood’s microtonal music: that despite being full of intervals most Western listeners have never heard before, it still seems to “make sense” in nontrivial ways. Much of this has to do with the music’s idiosyncratic approach to tonality, which I define as a regime of culturally conditioned expectations that guides one’s attentional processing of music’s gravitational qualities over time. More specifically, Blackwood configures each tuning’s unfamiliar elements in ways that correspond to certain schematic expectations Western listeners tend to have about how tonal music “works.” This is why it is still possible to hear the forest of tonality in this music, so to speak, despite the odd-sounding trees that comprise it. Because of its paradoxical blend of expectational conformance and expectational noncompliance, Blackwood’s microtonal music makes for a useful tool to snap most Western-enculturated listeners out of their ingrained modes of musical processing and reveal certain things about tonality that are often taken for granted. Accordingly, just as Blackwood writes conventional-sounding music in unconventional tunings, this dissertation rethinks several familiar music-theoretic terms and concepts through the defamiliarizing lens of microtonality. I use Blackwood’s microtonal music as a prism to shine a light on traditional theories of tonality, scale degrees, consonance and dissonance, and harmonic function, arguing that many of these theories rely on assumptions that are tacitly tied to twelve-tone equal temperament and common-practice major/minor music. By unhooking these terms and concepts from any one specific tuning or historical period, I build up a set of analytical tools that can allow one to engage more productively with the many modalities of tonality typically heard on a daily basis today. This dissertation proceeds in six chapters. The four interior chapters each center on one of the terms and concepts mentioned above: scale degrees (Chapter 2), consonance and dissonance (Chapter 3), harmonic function (Chapter 4), and tonality (Chapter 5). In Chapter 2, I propose a system for labeling scale degrees that can provide more nuance and flexibility when reckoning with music in any diatonic mode (and in any tuning). In Chapter 3, I advance an account of consonance and dissonance as expectational phenomena (rather than purely psychoacoustic ones), and I consider the ways that non-pitched elements such as meter and notation can act as “consonating” and/or “dissonating” forces. In Chapter 4, I characterize harmonic function as arising from the interaction of generic scalar position and metrical position, and I devise a system for labeling harmonic functions that is better attuned to affective differences across the diatonic modes. In Chapter 5, I synthesize these building blocks into a conception of fuzzy heptatonic diatonic tonality that links together not only all of Blackwood’s microtonal compositions but also more familiar musics that use a twelve-tone octave, from Euroclassical to popular styles. The outer chapters are less explicitly music-analytical in focus. Chapter 1 introduces readers to Blackwood’s compositional approach and notational system, considers the question of his intended audience, and discusses the ways that enculturation mediates the cognition of microtonality (and of unfamiliar music more generally). Chapter 6 draws upon archival documents to paint a more detailed picture of who Blackwood was as a person and how his idiosyncratic worldview colors his approach to composition, scholarship, and interpersonal interaction. While my nominal focus in these six chapters is Blackwood’s microtonal music, the repertorial purview of my project is far broader. One of my guiding claims throughout is that attending more closely to the paradoxes and contradictions of Blackwood’s microtonality can help one better understand the musics they are accustomed to hearing. For this reason, I frequently compare moments in Blackwood’s microtonal music to ones in more familiar styles to highlight unexpected analogies and point up common concerns. Sharing space with Blackwood in the pages that follow are Anita Baker, Ornette Coleman, Claude Debussy, and Richard Rodgers, among others—not to mention music from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Fortnite, Sesame Street, and Star Wars. Ultimately, this project is a testament to the value of stepping outside of one’s musical comfort zone. For not only can this reveal certain things about that comfort zone that would not be apparent otherwise, but it can also help one think with greater nuance, precision, and (self-)awareness when “stepping back in” to reflect upon the music they know and love

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2022, held in Hamburg, Germany, in May 2022. The 36 regular papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 129 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: haptic science; haptic technology; and haptic applications

Silent Light, Luminous Noise: Photophonics, Machines and the Senses

This research takes the basic physical premise that sound can be synthesized using light, explores how this has historically been, and still is achieved, and how it can still be a fertile area for creative, theoretical and critical exploration in sound and the arts. Through the author's own artistic practice, different techniques of generating sound using the sonification of light are explored, and these techniques are then contextualised by their historical and theoretical setting in the time-based arts. Specifically, this text draws together diverse strands of scholarship on experimental sound and film practices, cultural histories, the senses, media theory and engineering to address effects and outcomes specific to photophonic sound and its relation to the moving image, and the sculptural and media works devised to produce it. The sonifier, or device engendering the transformations discussed is specifically addressed in its many forms, and a model proposed, whereby these devices and systems are an integral, readably inscribed component - both materially and culturally - in both the works they produce, and via our reflexive understanding of the processes involved, of the images or light signals used to produce them. Other practitioners' works are critically engaged to demonstrate how a sense of touch, or the haptic, can be thought of as an emergent property of moving image works which readably and structurally make use of photophonic sound (including the author's), and sound's essential role in this is examined. In developing, through an integration of theory and practice, a new approach in this under-researched field of sound studies, the author hopes to show how photophonic sound can act as both a metaphorical and material interface between experimental sound and image, and hopefully point the way towards a more comprehensive study of both

An Enactivist Model of Improvisational Dance

An Enactivist Model of Improvisational Danc

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

A Literary Feminist Phenomenology of Place in Early Twentieth Century Women’s Writing

This thesis develops a critical approach to women’s experience by engaging with phenomenology and modernist poetics of place. It critiques the androcentricity of phenomenology and philosophical abstractions of gender and space, arguing that a feminist phenomenology with its focus on alternative modes of being in a diverse but socially and gender-stratified world can more aptly articulate experiential specificities that neither fortify nor fit into conventional paradigms of experience. This thesis discusses the imaginative and aesthetic rendering of women’s experiences of rooms in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, and Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover,” “Pink May,” and “Hand in Glove.

Lockdown Cultures: The arts and humanities in the year of the pandemic, 2020-21

Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society. This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analysed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past. The result is a book that serves as testament to the humanities’ reinvigorated and reforged sense of identity, from the perspective of UCL and one of the leading arts and humanities faculties in the world. It bears witness to a globally impactful event while showcasing interdisciplinary thinking and examining how the pandemic has changed how we read, watch, write and educate. More than thirty individual contributions collectively reassert the importance of the arts and humanities for contemporary society