Research Catalogue

In this exposition I’m showing you my journey for these past two years of investigating my artistic practice through the meeting of identity and aesthetics. Due to my Iranian background, I have felt a need and curiosity to bring together my Iranian and European identities. This project is a dialogue between myself and music, encompassing sounds, arrangements, physical presence, materiality, technology, context, and politics. By politics I mean; history, cultural appropriation, diversity, colonisation, beliefs, and the current needs of the western culture. A project involving confrontations with habits, default parameters, and elements within digital audio workspaces, thereby incorporating scales.

Digital overview of artistic works by musician Jordan Sand

In this autoethnographic arts-based research, I return to the gift of music in my life and use it as the ultimate form of expression. I explore the process of navigating my own transgenerational trauma through composing and working with musicians from different musical and cultural backgrounds. Something like home explores the effect of finding common ground of love and compassion between my family members, especially those who have been navigating the traumas of war. I collected stories, memories, and impressions from my family’s childhood, and composed music that is inspired by them. In the first sections I discuss some concepts related to the transmittion of war trauma , and Bowen’s family system theory. Moreover, I relate to reasearches and projects that have been concerned with trauma art therapy and dealing with cultural trauma through music. As well as showing examples of composers who have been working with similar processes. In this project, I unfold my compositional process, and I present some possibilities of dealing with harmonizing traditional Arabic music, using partials from the harmonic series. I also share my process of collaborating with a lyric writer and a videographer who have helped me to bring the stories to life. Throughout the process I discovered that engaging with the stories unlocked new artistic outcomes and some unexpected artistic practices, expressions and results. Another important outcome of this project was the need for coming up with approaches that were used for transcultural music making and engaging the musicians with the stories but making sure to leave space for their own artistic identities to come across and shine. In the near future, I am hoping to use this project as a basis of my doctoral research project which will focus on memory expression through music by working with the diverse citizines of the finnish community.

I explain "microtones" as the sounds between the piano keys, making it universally understandable. This widespread understanding through "piano keys" demonstrates how the 12-tone equal temperament (12-TET) has become standardized as the dominant system. When 12-TET was introduced, it created a hierarchy where diverse sounds were forced into a rigid system. Other sounds were marginalized and coded into one of the twelve tones, physically embedded in the piano's keyboard. As a result, pianists became subordinate to these physically embedded conditions of the piano. In this project, I attempted to dismantle this organizational principle. By deterritorializing these fixed tones and liberating the peripheral sounds now called "microtones," I explored not just the piano's timbral possibilities, but also the interactions that emerge in these spaces - between sounds, between people, between cultures... Through collaborations with over 30 composers, I discovered that microtones exist in the "ma" (space) between standardized tones, representing voices that don't fit into established systems. What began as an exploration of piano timbre evolved into an investigation of humanity itself, generating new meanings through ongoing dialogues and discoveries.

This article is emulating fictional informal notes that the author would have taken during his research. The handwritten annotations of Marinus de Jong (1891-1984), and his artistic and pedagogical legacy, have formed an interesting case study within the Flemish Archive for Annotated Music (FAAM) at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp. The “making of” the documentary Imaginary Conversation with Marinus de Jong, recorded together with pianist Anna Alvizou, is presented in a playfully manner.

NY FUGE – visualisering af soundscapes refers to an area where artistic expression in the form of hand drawing evolves, questions itself, changes and renews itself. The project is an exploration of the relationship between sound and image at the center of artistic expression. - Questioning how knowledge arises, is used, reused and changes in unknown contexts. I work with graphic translation of acoustic areas via hand drawing in two selected sound- scapes with Hi-Fi and Lo-Fi contrasting qualities in a remote and an urban soundscape. Parallel to the artistic development, I explore underlying / inherent processes of artistic work in my case. I am questioning the way in which the present and past experience interact and what role intuition, imagination, reflection-in-action and, not least, the knowledge of the body play in the artistic space of action. I am focusing on the active act in the present moment, where I draw, where my artistic expression takes shape and manifests itself. In the project, I seek to move closer to an understanding of how artistic knowledge is developed during creative work processes.