Music and Embodied Imagining: Metaphor and Metonymy in Western Art Music

This dissertation poses the question, How does music mean? If we acknowledge that music exists in the material world as a complex sound wave only, we must wonder how music, as felt meaning, arises. Scholars have often approached this question through considering music as a language. I do not employ this approach. In fact, I criticize this analogy and the epistemology on which it is based as reductive and inconsistent with musical experience. This analogy diminishes a whole-bodied experience to one that involves only the mind and ears and decreases resonant, lived meaning to content --metaphorically an object transferred by speaker to hearer through the representative and referential functions of symbolic forms. Departing from this analogy, I develop a theory of whole-bodied, lived meaning based on Lakoff and Johnson\u27s theory of conceptual metaphor and Polanyi\u27s epistemology of tacit knowing (bodily-based, culturally-inflected knowing that one can feel, but cannot describe in full). Using this new theory, I analyze the speech of young musicians at the Curtis Institute of Music, taking it as descriptive of meaningful musical experience. I argue that enculturated listeners feel musical meaning when, employing metaphoric and metonymic processes, they use whole-bodied imagining and perceiving to integrate dimensions of tacit knowing with the sound wave. In so doing, they transform the sound wave\u27s physical qualities (frequency, amplitude, complexity and duration) into music\u27s felt dynamic qualities and events (e.g., motion, force, intensity, tension, relaxation, mood, gesture or momentum). In this way, musical meaning comes to life through the energetic mediumship of listeners\u27 tacit knowing, resonating in and throughout felt reality. Listeners do not merely hear the music and thus grasp its meaning; rather, they live its meaning. Indeed, listeners may also, through participating bodily in live or recorded musical performances, live tacitly known, felt social meanings--such as a sense of identity or place--in intensified fashion. Thus, I suggest that symbolism involves a resonant level in which participatory, lived meaning effects a connection of participants with signs, and through signs, with each other and such transcendent social realities

Mobile sound: media art in hybrid spaces

The thesis explores the relationships between sound and mobility through an examination of sound art. The research engages with the intersection of sound, mobility and art through original empirical work and theoretically through a critical engagement with sound studies. In dialogue with the work of De Certeau, Lefebvre, Huhtamo and Habermas in terms of the poetics of walking, rhythms, media archeology and questions of publicness, I understand sound art as an experimental mobile and public space. The thesis establishes and situates the emerging field of mobile sound art by mapping three key traditions of mobile sound art - locative art, sound art and public art - and creates a taxonomy of mobile sound art by defining four categories: 'placing sounds', 'sound platforms', 'sonifying mobility' and 'musical instruments' (each represented by one case study). In doing so it develops a methodology that is attentive to the specifics of the sonic and mobile of media experience. I demonstrate how sonic interactions and embodied mobility are designed and experienced in specific ways in each of the four case studies - 'Aura' by Symons (UK), 'Pophorns' by Torstensson and Sandelin (Sweden), 'SmSage' by Redfern and Borland (US) and 'Core Sample' by Rueb (US) (all 2007). In tracing the topos of the musical telephone, discussing the making and breaking of relevant micro publics, accounting for the polyphonies of footsteps and unwrapping bundles of rhythms, this thesis contributes to understanding complex media experiences in hybrid spaces. In doing so it critically sheds light on the quality of sonic artistic experiences, the audience engagement with urban, public and networked spaces and the relationship between sound art and everyday media experience. My thesis provides valuable insight into auditory ways of mobilising and making public spaces, non-verbal and embodied media practices, and rhythms and scales of mobile media experiences

Musical Cities

Musical Cities represents an innovative approach to scholarly research and dissemination. A digital and interactive 'book', it explores the rhythms of our cities, and the role they play in our everyday urban lives, through the use of sound and music. Sara Adhitya first discusses why we should listen to urban rhythms in order to design more liveable and sustainable cities, before demonstrating how we can do so through various acoustic communication techniques. Using audio-visual examples, Musical Cities takes the ‘listener’ on an interactive journey, revealing how sound and music can be used to represent, compose, perform and interact with the city. Through case studies of urban projects developed in Paris, Perth, Venice and London, Adhitya demonstrates how the power of music, and the practice of listening, can help us to compose more accessible, inclusive, engaging, enjoyable, and ultimately more sustainable cities

Musical Cities

Musical Cities represents an innovative approach to scholarly research and dissemination. A digital and interactive 'book', it explores the rhythms of our cities, and the role they play in our everyday urban lives, through the use of sound and music. Sara Adhitya first discusses why we should listen to urban rhythms in order to design more liveable and sustainable cities, before demonstrating how we can do so through various acoustic communication techniques. Using audio-visual examples, Musical Cities takes the ‘listener’ on an interactive journey, revealing how sound and music can be used to represent, compose, perform and interact with the city. Through case studies of urban projects developed in Paris, Perth, Venice and London, Adhitya demonstrates how the power of music, and the practice of listening, can help us to compose more accessible, inclusive, engaging, enjoyable, and ultimately more sustainable cities

AutoPlay – driving pleasure in a future of autonomous driving

Automated driving technologies promise a relief from stressful or frustrating driving situations. Fully-autonomous cars of the future are expected to take over the responsibilities of driving and allow the now inactive driver to perform much more engaging non-driving activities than ever before. However, the design space of the autonomous driving situation is uniquely different from traditional driving. For example, research on advanced driving automation systems have shown that the transfer of the driving task from the driver to the system can be experienced as a loss of autonomy and competency and may result in a feeling of being at the mercy of technology. Furthermore, the relationship with our cars is not only instrumental. The car is a personal artefact, an extension of the driver’s body connoted with feelings of independence and power. The car’s emancipation to an autonomous agent require a new basis of interacting with the inactive driver to facilitate a pleasurable and meaningful driving experience. On the other hand, the relief from the driving task provides a unique opportunity for new types of activities during the piloted journey, amongst them, new forms of in-situ entertainment and games that are grounded in the contextual specificity of the automotive, mobile situation. This leads to the research objectives: What type of activities can support autonomous driving as pleasurable and meaningful? How should they be implemented to compensate for the constraints and drawbacks of the autonomous driving situation, but also to take advantage of the unique affordances of this new technology? To answer those questions, I designed and developed three working prototypes with the goal to envision future autonomous driving as a pleasurable and meaningful activity. Based on a research-through-design approach, I explored the potentials of the design space of autonomous driving by systematically aligning the core-interactions of the prototypes with the contextual constraints of dense urban traffic. Furthermore, I studied the impact of the three prototypes on the driving experience in a simulator set up as well as in a series of in-car user studies. This exegesis introduces the three prototypes as design artefacts and reflects on the findings of the complementary user studies. In doing so, it articulates a novel frame for understanding autonomous driving as a future design challenge for contextual activities. This research contributes to the increasing importance of user experience and game design in the automotive domain. As such, the contribution is threefold: (1) As design artefacts, the prototypes articulate a desired future of driving experiences in autonomous cars. (2) As a contextual design practice, the research contributes intermediate knowledge in the form of novel ideation methods and implementation strategies of non-driving activities. (3) As a conceptual frame for understanding autonomous driving, I propose three motivational affordances of autonomous driving (that were tangible experiences of the prototypes) as targets for aligning non-driving activities. The three prototypes presented in this exegesis articulate a desired pleasurable vision of autonomous driving of the future. As an inspirational frame, the three prototypes are studied to gain experiential insights into the challenge of designing pleasurable and meaningful non- driving interactions in a future autonomous driving context

Music, masculinity, and tradition: a musical ethnography of Dagbamba warriors in Tamale, Ghana

Chronic unemployment and decreased agricultural production over the last two decades have left an increasing number of men throughout Ghana’s historically under-developed North unable to meet the financial and moral expectations traditionally associated with masculinity. Paralleling the liberalization of Ghana’s political economy over this period, this “crisis of masculinity” has resulted in unprecedented transformations in traditional kinship structures, patriarchy, and channels for the transmission of traditional practices in Dagbamba communities. Driven by anxieties over these changes, Dagbamba “tradition” is being promoted as a prescription for problems stemming from poverty, environmental degradation, and political conflict, placing music and dance at the center of this discourse. Music, Masculinity, and Tradition, investigates the mobilization of traditional music as a site for the restoration of masculinity within the Dagbamba community of northern Ghana. Drawing on eleven months of participant-observation conducted with Dagbamba warriors in Ghana’s Northern Region, archival research, and ethnographic interviews, this dissertation explores the relationship between performances of traditional music, preservationist discourses, and the construction of masculinity in the first decades of the 21st century. Through analyses of the warriors’ ritual performances, including sounds, movements, and dramatized violence, I ask how traditional ideals and contemporary realities of Dagbamba masculinity are constructed, negotiated, and reinforced through performances of traditional music, suggesting links between the “iterative performativity” of the ritual and evolving constructions of gender. This dissertation offers insight into the musical construction of masculinity and the place of “tradition” in the 21st century. It also challenges over-determined notions of power/resistance through a critical evaluation of traditional musical performances as sites for the negotiation of ideas about gender, power, and history in contemporary Africa

Musical Cities

Musical Cities represents an innovative approach to scholarly research and dissemination. A digital and interactive 'book', it explores the rhythms of our cities, and the role they play in our everyday urban lives, through the use of sound and music. Sara Adhitya first discusses why we should listen to urban rhythms in order to design more liveable and sustainable cities, before demonstrating how we can do so through various acoustic communication techniques. Using audio-visual examples, Musical Cities takes the ‘listener’ on an interactive journey, revealing how sound and music can be used to represent, compose, perform and interact with the city. Through case studies of urban projects developed in Paris, Perth, Venice and London, Adhitya demonstrates how the power of music, and the practice of listening, can help us to compose more accessible, inclusive, engaging, enjoyable, and ultimately more sustainable cities