Folding Space Folding Time [performance/film]

Folding Space / Folding Time is a piece commissioned for GIOFest XV that encourages the orchestra and our guests to explore memory, community and stories through time and space. Conceived in Tarraleah (on Palawa Country) in Tasmania, Australia September 14th-24th 2022, with Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and Australian Art Orchestra, Performed in Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, November 30th 2022. The work features archival recordings, graphic scores, video samples, and conduction gestures learned from theremin, telematic music making, and cross-cultural exchange. Thanks to Creative Scotland, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and Australian Art Orchestra, I was honoured to join the Tarraleah Creative Music Intensive Tarraleah (on Palawa Country) - travelling to the other side of the world to play with 30 musicians, 650m above sea level in the Tasmanian Highlands, for 10 days. It was the first time I had seen a truly dark, moonless sky - the milky way became visible as my eyes adjusted, and I saw shooting stars seem to break the laws of spacetime as they dropped through the atmosphere to the horizon in an instant. Poles apart, I discovered a housemate who was my twin - the same age, same instrument - in the past, we had even made the same graphic scores with optical prisms, to refract light into a colour spectrum. We shared a chopping board as we shared stories, cooking together in our kitchen. At AAO CMI, we learned: • how to extend the voice as Bae Il Dong, a Korean Pansori singer explained how we could find analogues of the breath in astronomy; • Chris Hale taught us to clap without moving our hands, as he progressively taught iterations of Korean Ho-Hup gestures; • Daniel and David Wilfred, from Ngukurr, in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territories, generously wrote us into their song cycle - we heard Daniel sing in his voice, his father's voice and his son's voice, a song that passes on intimate knowledge of his country; while David directed us to move with his didgeridoo. • Aviva Endean led us on a sound walk through dense forests and a huge valley drop; where the lyre bird and Peter Knight's trumpet fused and diffracted through dense mist. 10 days sharing a physical musical space (and home) with a community who are usually asleep as I wake, with no screens, no internet, no other people. This followed 2 years of playing with our global community through ZOOM every week, where our digital selves congregated in a simulated musical space - a telematic music making across timezones. 10 days of learning how to play music with the whole body; not just my hands. 10 days of learning to play music using memory and story; not just spontaneous impulse in the present. This followed 2 years of playing the theremin, where the body conjures unfamiliar synthesised timbres without touch. Further performances include The Living Land Film Festival at University of Central Asia in Kyrgyztan, a performance from the Frost Electroacoustic Ensemble in Miami, Florida

40Hz Auditory Stimulation and Naturalistic Soundscapes for the Treatment and Management of Alzheimer’s Disease poster shared at the Scottish Dementia Research Consortium, April 2023

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder, associated with memory loss, behaviour changes and physical impacts (Whitewell, 2018). It is the most common form of dementia. Reliable treatments to slow its progression are in high demand and 40Hz sensory stimulation may offer a solution. Humans with AD and mouse models of the disease exhibit lower gamma oscillations which are important for multiple areas of cognition (McDermott et al., 2018). Studies show that auditory and visual 40Hz stimulation elicit greater gamma oscillations in mice with AD pathology and alleviates symptoms (Martoerall et al., 2019; Olsen, 2021;Traikapi & Konstantinou, 2021). In humans, pilot studies have shown 40Hz sound stimulation to improve cognitive deficits (Figure 1) in mild to moderate AD patients (Clements-Cortes et al., 2016). Studies indicate that greater volumes elicit greater gamma oscillations compared to lower (Schadow et al., 2007). Figure 1: Change in SLUMS Scores (from Clements-Cortes et al., 2016). SLUMS = St. Louis University Mental Status Test, measuring cognitive deficits Immersive soundscapes such as forest and beach sounds present calming and therapeutic effects in and out of care homes (Cheng & Sabran, 2022; Houben et al., 2019; Voisin et al., 2021). Combining soundscapes and 40Hz sound stimulation may be beneficial to AD management as studies show sounds and music can help patients remember long- term memories and balance the sound stimulation. Literature Gap There is limited research on the effects of stimulation volume and on including 40Hz sound in combination with soundscapes and how this can be effective in the treatment and management of AD. Early investigation and optimisation of different stimulation protocols on gamma oscillations and on participant perceptions can be carried out in healthy older adults, prior to their administration to people with AD

Tuning into your Noise: Sound for Anxiety, TEDx Press Pause to Begin

3 years ago, Argo asked a group of people to, one by one, enter a dark room with 16 loudspeakers, a ‘sonic womb’. They were connected to a device that resembles a lie detector and a camera record their facial expressions. They were asked to listen to a soundscape and to pay close attention to the sensations they felt and the emotions or memories triggered. At Ted X the audience were asked to do the same. The audience were told about a new way in which you can use music for therapy – to trigger catharsis and to better understand and live with anxiety. Chills down the spine can be triggered by both musical bliss or high pitched abrasive sounds – the same sensation can be caused by either a positive or negative stimulus. There are anxiety symptoms which can be perceived as positive. But we know that these anxiety sympotms are surprising or distressing in our everyday experience. Nonetheless, they are vital, our body’s way of telling us something needs to change – we need to press pause, stop running away from unresolved traumas and uncomfortable emotions to confront our fears. Sometimes we need help to feel more deeply, and immersive soundscapes fused with emotionally manipulative music can provide this kick. No-one can ever be cured from anxiety: its an instinct that keeps us alive. What we can do however is educate ourselves about the benefits of emotional immersion, to understand our anxiety and learn from it, to improve our lives and discover just how resilient we can be. So if you are currently lost in a monotonous looping cycle of anxiety or depression, instead of tuning out, why tune into the noise, and even amplify it - so you can understand it better. The effects may surprise you

Violence in 5.1 at Inter #5 The Only Way is Ethics

I composed intricate soundscapes to elicit social, body, violent, and phobic anxiety as well as sensory irritation. These sounds should be used in Exposure Therapy, a branch of psychiatry that encourages the user to confront their fears to ultimately overcome them, through habituation and catharsis. 35 participants were individually bombarded by the sounds panned across the 16-speaker Ambisonic array at the Glasgow School of Art’s Digital Design Studio, whilst their heart rate, sweat secretion and breathing rate were recorded to accurately pinpoint the induced moments of anxiety. For Inter #5 a volunteer had their physiology recorded during a 5.1 mix of the Violence soundscape in a collective setting, to compare the differences in response

Attention, Memory, Expectation Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra's 24 hour soundscape composed with broadcast for Resonant Futurs Festival #12 Apo33

The Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra Global telematic improvisation group have played on ZOOM every week since March 2020. For this work we reveal the spontaneous distributed creativity amongst intergenerational, inter-disciplinary musicians from New York, California, Mexico, Wales, Scotland and Spain, as we co-create a response to you callout for submissions. We collectively reviewed the callout and crowd-sourced ideas - but focused to record a 24 minute piece based on "attention, memory and expectation" which we used time stretch to extend this piece to 200% speed, 400%, 800%, 400%, 200%, and back to 100% (and variations on this sequence) for 24 hours, inspired by Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho. This work responds to Chris Parfitt and Jessica Argo's ideas about when we listen to music (or just when we exist in the world) we have attention on the present, expectation of the future and memory of the past (and the way we perceive the present is coloured by our memory of the past / and the impatience of our expectation of the future (based on musicology theory from Wilson Coker and David Huron) Jessica Argo has assembled an edit of the conversational camaraderie, framing and construction of the piece which happens to weave in personal, national and global conflicts, tensions and alienation of capitalist exploitation of labour, that is often spontaneously reflected on as we console eachother and construct artistic responses, spontaneously in real-time. We collectively reviewed the callout and crowd-sourced ideas including: - a minute long piece, repeat it for 24 hours (Chris) - there seems to be an expectation that the artist would set up generative system to run 24 hrs - what does it mean if its humans, durational.... (Jess) - we have 700 hours worth of archive recorded since 2020 - how to incorporate our musical past into our musical present? - interest of improv is elements coming from each individual, thinking up interesting original sounds come out of each individuals lifestyle - why not break down the improvisation into every performer's component and string them out over 24 hours - stop and then the next thing - cut up the stems - single ideas 20 ideas strung together (process - important - democratic (got the transcript) (Constance) - what is lost? (Jess) - breathe in and out sound inside - then you have the sound (Bernd) Whilst we played as Jessica shared screen with fragments our feature-length compilation of commissioned artists films recently screened at Glasgow CCA's Gallus Disruptors event, scrubbing through time and visually zooming in perhaps overlooked small details, to mimic the selective focus during attention to the present, and fragmentation of memory. This work re-invents ideas from Jessica Argo's 2013 solo experimental animation and soundscape, Harmonising the Musical Present with the Musical Past (https://youtu.be/FaSKPuu_c84?si=zlqjGhU-GJRkiGB_), re-imagined as a collective. The films that the group respond to on the ZOOM call are obscured in this audio-only format - but its important to know that the audio format captures brief audio snippets of these original outputs that were catalysed by animated graphic scores, hand painted prompts and directed virtual backgrounds in works composed by Robert Burke (Melbourne, Australia), Yasuko Kaneko (Okoyama Japan), Instant Places (Laura Kavanaugh and Ian Birse, Ottowa, Canada). Also featured are audio excerpts from site-specific pieces spontaneously arising from the travels of our regular performers, from welding workshops to hilltop sprints. Ideas that traverse domestic and performance spaces, and those that blur the boundaries of the virtual and physical space are at the heart of our creative practice (and this piece)

Audio Engineering Society Guest Lecture: Telematic Music Making: Live Performance in the time of COVID-19, AES UK (online)

This lecture is an auto-ethnographic reflection on a practice which has been integral to my identity, performing cello and theremin with the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra. In this talk it is explained how we have expanded our performance practices during a time of physical distancing, restricted movement, closure of our physical performance venues and first and foremost a period of intense anxiety and mourning on a global scale. Using telematic music making, a group of musicians maintained (and widened) their community, individual performers kept a sense of identity, and built an impossibly huge archive of recordings as both audio visual artefact, raw material for reworks, and importantly, as oral history. In this lecture the following questions are answered: what is telematic music making? how do performers feel about telematic music making? how do performers rehearse telematic music? how do performers perform telematic music to an audience? Underscoring all discussion is an emphasis on both the practical technology implementation and the sensitive psycho-social dynamics of such methods. The lecture ends with a performance from the telematic orchestra. A definition of “telematic music making” from the iconic American composer, performer and scholar of improvisation George Lewis is as follows: “I think Raymond the thing that interested in being you first started calling for these extended improvisations twice a week was that I don't think maybe you didn't realise how long we were going to go on. You know, maybe like a maybe like a few sessions and then, but what happened was there was this need for extended community. I think people are starting to realise…. I just gave a talk last week on the topic of telematic Afrofuturism. It's a very odd thing. And, and we're starting to realise that there's something about telematics, you know, this combination of telecommunication and, and informatique, which is sort of coined in the 70s by these two French researchers. But it both thrives on distance and tries to eliminate it as a factor which is very interesting thing to think about quantum entanglement. So that what we've got here is a sense in which we will I don't know when I see 30 or 40 people on screen, in a GIO extended GIO improvisation or virtual GIO Improvisation, which doesn't feel virtual it feels like just improvisation. In the media of the technology. I don't know who's coming from where and I don't really care. But at the same time, it's always interesting to hear that John Russell was wherever he is, and Steve Beresford is wherever he is. You're wherever you are, everybody's where they are, and the sense that people are making these distances not matter anymore, or that they also do matter, and that theres this two different desires that are sort of existing in the same space, but they're not competing and they're not clashing, they are complementing. And that becomes very exciting for me in terms of how, that's what we'll probably need to do. Because, you know, I see the pandemic right now. It looks like it's coming to a new stage. Maybe for some people, it's made us more aware of a kind of common humanity like anybody can get the thing…

Violence at ISSTA 2017: Sound-Makers: Technologies, Practices and Cultures

Installation (audio) 2017 Violence extends the archetypal horror stinger into a prolonged Shaefferian musique concrete. Counter-conditioning occurs when the listener hears positive music coupled with abrasive material noises - so panic attacks are less frequently triggered by unpleasant sounds in everyday life. Throbbing piano gradually modulates from foreboding deep minor tones to a consoling major resolution in delicate high notes. Short extracts of cello are cut up and multiplied; whilst strings have been seen as supra-expressive voices throughout history (mimicking human cries but faster, with a more diverse dynamic and pitch range), in this soundscape the cello parts are physically unplayable in real-life. The organic breathy timbre of the cello comforts, but its digital manipulation causes unease. The listener is constantly being interrupted, never allowed to settle into the soundscape: there are numerous sudden interjections of metallic squeaks, but repetition gradually numbs their shock value. Just when the sound reaches peak saturation, there is a sudden dropout, akin to intrusive fearfulmemories barging in and out of focal consciousness in Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder. The gradual reduction of intensity is a hopeful metaphor: realistically, no-one is ever “cured” from anxiety - but eventually the mind can begin to realize positive attributes of the same memory trigger

Violence

Violence extends the archetypal horror stinger into a prolonged musique concrète. There are abrupt bursts and dropouts, akin to intrusive memories associated with Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder. A throbbing piano underlay transforms deep minor stabs to a delicate major resolution, and short extracts of cello are digitally multiplied as supra-expressive voices. One of five densely detailed soundscapes designed to elicit violent, phobic, body, and social anxiety as well as sensory irritation. The sounds should be used in Exposure Therapy, a branch of psychiatry that encourages the user to confront their fears to ultimately overcome them, through habituation and catharsis. Each sound has been painstakingly plotted across an ambisonic array in the Glasgow School of Art's Digital Design Studio

Experimental improvised sound design and music: classical strings and electric guitars.

This paper examines the role of the cello in the recording of Glasgow: A History in 16 Songs, from The Tenementals. The songs reach across a varied range, from ballads to a glam-infused rock sound, and cello is a fundamental component, rather than merely providing short decorative flourishes or solos. The paper analyses the specific practices of how the cello part was developed from early “demo” fragments of original songs before morphing into a larger experimental sound design practice. Here, expanded techniques were used, such as rough scratching of the bow on the strings to emulate punk guitar riffs, or the building of multiple discordant layers of ghostly hovering on strings on a song about Glasgow’s slavery history. In the recording studio, the cello is even processed through virtual “plugins” charging it through an amplifier and at times imposing reverberant acoustics from real sites in Glasgow. The paper will situate this study within a wider exploration of how musicians such as David Bowie and Queen have combined the raw virility of amplified electric instruments (guitar, bass) and extravagant multitracked vocals across a wide frequency range, with the opulence of classical orchestra segments