Research Catalogue

Documentation of preliminary steps and collection of musical material and related reflections during the first Term of the Master's Program in Improvisation and World Music. December 2022

The project 'Breaking Circles' is matriculated in the field of social design - an area within the design field that has renewed itself in recent years. Social design is user oriented towards vulnerable and exposed groups within society. Serving a sentence in prison is often associated with a range of penalties. Norway has only one penalty; denial of freedom. The inmates have the same rights as the rest of society, and are supposed to take part of it. The Norwegian Correctional Service’s unofficial slogan reads: ‘better out, than in’ meaning that rehabilitation overcomes penalty. The inmates have both the right and a duty to work, getting educated or attending amendment programs. The goal of their work is to qualify for working life after prison. Having to go to prison will without a doubt be a personal crisis for anyone, and can lead to loss of jobs, housing, personal economy and social network. Inmates could benefit from building professional networks to avoid seeking out old acquaintances in criminal networks after prison, heading into criminal relapse. Having worked with design projects in the western region of the Norwegian Correctional Service, I have seen the vast areas and systems within prisons and the service that are untouched by design strategy. Design has considerable potential to help inmates benefit from their surrounding systems, both within prison and outside. I aim to use social design to ease inmate’s transitions to becoming potential employees through their work within prison. To be able to do that, there are several problem areas to address: the content of inmate’s work in prison, inmate’s tools of sentence progress, barriers between prison and society and the lack of established professional networks to prevent criminal networks taking over after serving. Using graphic design and visual communication in social design can contribute to a dawning interest in design and creative practice to prevent recidivistic crime and social marginalization. Breaking Circles is a project with a strong emphasis on design experiments through field work in a real-life context: prison.

Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on crevasses and mistakes, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to slip into another form of existence, say, a chair? Contextual note: These essays were first published as part of the book Choreographic Poetry (2019), a collection of literary scores for dance. They were written in the framework of my PhD in artistic research at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Choreographic Poetry: Creating literary scores for dance. Thanks to the dancers and musicians who contributed to the process of developing the PhD project. To Chrysa Parkinson, Anne Gry Haugland and Bojana Cvejić for their valuable contributions during the process of writing these essays. And to Jeroen Peeters and Mette Edvardsen for further editorial dialogue. Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays. www.jannecamillalyster.no Varamo Press embraces the unexpected and values the arbitrary circumstances in which writing comes into being. Snatching, wording, printing, it gives a paper form to various kinds of literature that have a fleeting life elsewhere. Gestures is a series of essays. www.varamopress.org

Towards a (per)sonal topography of grand piano and electronics How can I develop a grand piano with live electronics through iterated development loops in the cognitive technological environment of instrument, music, performance and my poetics? The instrument I am developing, a grand piano with electronic augmentations, is adapted to cater my poetics. This adaptation of the instrument will change the way I compose. The change of composition will change the music. The change of music will change my performances. The change in performative needs will change the instrument, because it needs to do different things. This change in the instrument will show me other poetics and change my ideas. The change of ideas demands another music and another instrument, because the instrument should cater to my poetics. And so it goes… These are the development loops I am talking about. I have made an augmented grand piano using various music technologies. I call the instrument the HyPer(sonal) Piano, a name derived from the suspected interagency between the extended instrument (HyPer), the personal (my poetics) and the sonal result (music and sound). I use old analogue guitar pedals and my own computer programming side by side, processing the original piano sound. I also take out control signals from the piano keys to drive different sound processes. The sound output of the instrument is deciding colors, patterns and density on a 1x3 meter LED light carpet attached to the grand piano. I sing, yet the sound of my voice is heavily processed, a processing decided by what I am playing on the keys. All sound sources and control signal sources are interconnected, allowing for complex and sometimes incomprehensible situations in the instrument´s mechanisms. Credits: First supervisor: Henrik Hellstenius Second Supervisors: Øyvind Brandtsegg and Eivind Buene Cover photo by Jørn Stenersen, www.anamorphiclofi.com All other photo, audio and video recording/editing by Morten Qvenild, unless stated.

This thesis is an autoethnographic, practice research investigation, offering further knowledge to the field of somatic practice, pain, and discomfort. As this thesis is a practice research inquiry, I offer practice to the field that is further supported by my autoethnographic positions. Embodied research and the lived experience are therefore central, exploring how somatic practice can support the sensations of pain and discomfort. Whilst practice is at the forefront of this investigation, theoretical frameworks from the somatic field, practical offerings from other practitioners, therapists, and researchers, and already established somatic ideologies have informed the research process and have offered an integrated approach to supporting the understanding of how practice can support pain and discomfort. Both the practical and theoretical elements of this research emphasise the importance of improvisatory movement and relationships with the self to engage with a sense of freedom and self-expression. By adopting different somatic principles within practice, together with a theoretical understanding of the applications of somatic practice to the body, this research explores movement and wellbeing from a practical perspective, whilst drawing upon key ideas from the somatic field of research. The refined set of principles that this thesis contributes to the field are: The Breath, Movement Economy, The Skeleton, Rotation and Flow, Embodied Rhythm, Stretch, Extension and Elongation, Dynamic and Light Self-touch, Noticing and Addressing Habits, and Rest and Active Stillness. Each somatic principle was explored practically throughout this investigation, resulting in an in depth, subjective approach to analysing data through the lived experience and the narratives of others involved in the research process. A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Birmingham City University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Supervisors: Dr Polly Hudson, Dr Carrie Churnside

The practice-based PhD research project comprises the development and application of composition strategies and techniques generated through interdisciplinary collaboration to integrate elements and ideas from non-sonic disciplines into the musical discourse of new music-theatre works, specifically opera. I explore mechanisms of mapping and association that engage with both the specific subject matter of each piece and the creative collaborative environment in which they are created, thus generating different compositional resources that I use to inform the creative process. By using mapping techniques, I can deeply engage and communicate a subject matter on different levels in the musical composition. The framework for this research is the intertwining of art and science on a variety of levels from a music compositional perspective. Within this framework, I explored the integration of knowledge and data from the natural and social sciences to inform the composition of four science-based music-theatre works: In response to Naum Gabo: Linear Construction in Space No. 1 (2020), Autohoodening: The Rise of Captain Swing (2021), The Flowering Desert (2022), and TRAPPIST-1 (2023). With this approach, I aim to closely link these works with their particular subject matter instead of being composed based just on my personal musical taste. By consistently and cohesively applying the strategies and techniques explored in this research, the outcome is not creating music about science or music inspired by science, but, instead, music embedded with science in which the scientific data and knowledge inform the composition decisions. The subject matter is therefore intertwined within the musical discourse, its performativity and theatricality, and its relationship with the other disciplines and collaborators involved in the creation of these music-theatre works.