The bow presses on the edge of a sound,
offering some kind of promise,
to become transported?

Sensation, resistance, transference, understanding, repetition, adjustment, sensation, resistance, transference, understanding, adjustment, sensation, resistance, transference, understanding, adjustment, sensation, resistance, transference, understanding continuously mediating interface with physical objects, psychological tools of meaning, personal, and cultural evolution. The interrelationships that move through more senses than we comprehend. The micro/macroscopic blink, blur of our sonic life.

Over the last ten years I have thumbed a slow academic digression through social psychology and creativity research, and become fascinated by the dyadic inter-relationships that constitute composition. I analysed undergraduate collaborative practices, looking closely at how social, cultural, psychological and concrete situation resources creativity and learning. I then focused on helping to create better situations that offer this for women, girls and gender non-conforming people interested in music technology disciplines. Disciplines that are diverse (product development, composition, health, environment), and make an economically significant contribution to our creative industries, but still enjoyed by a predominantly (90%) male workforce.

Now, I press into the edge of my own sound.

In 2017 I built a modular synthesiser. VCO, LFO, Resonance Filter, Pitch to CV control etc. During my residency at Q-O2 I will explore methods of playing this synthesiser using CV from my violin via Ableton and the ctrl module; equipment Delta Sound Labs have kindly donated for this experiment.

I hope to develop a set of performance techniques and depending on this compose a series of short pieces inspired by Berio, Barbierri , Bach, Oliveros, Westerkamp, others… At this stage I am not sure if these will be piece for live performance or a short collection of recordings.

The work is also inspired by the idea of a Mycorrhizal network. Fungus colonizes a host plant’s root tissues however there is a mutually beneficial and mediating inter-relationship; there is mutual nourishment, and it is transmitting information and life source.[1]

Enormous thanks to Q-O2 for this opportunity to revisit my long dormant composition practice. I hope that it will become a springboard for new work.

[1] Mycorrhizal Network (Wikipedia)_
“Mycorrhizal networks (also known as common mycorrhizal networks or CMN) are underground hyphal networks created by mycorrhizal fungi that connect individual plants together and transfer water, carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients and minerals. The formation of these networks is context dependent, and can be influenced by factors such as soil fertility, resource availability, host or myco-symbiont genotype, disturbance and seasonal variation[1] (due to enrichment of nitrogen in soil affect michozial communities or effect of human activities of human affecting nitrogen cycle). By analogy to the many roles intermediated by the World Wide Web in human communities, the many roles that mycorrhizal networks appear to play in woodland have earned them a colloquial nickname: the Wood Wide Web.[2][3]. Wood wide web can be described as plants’ way of talking. Plants communicate through the mycorrhizal network in a similar manner to thoughts travelling over the brain’s network of neurons.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network

Phot credit: Imaginary Friends Photography