Research Catalogue

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.

This exposition gathers all the essential information needed to get started with the Research Catalogue (RC) platform at the Iceland University of the Arts (IUA). It offers a clear overview of how to create a profile, start an exposition, and navigate the basic functions of the platform. The goal is to provide staff with a central reference point for working with RC in the context of artistic research and institutional use.

Cylinders and discs recorded

This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, production, performance, and technology. This interview features Bryan Senti, American composer, violinist, and producer, whose work bridges classical tradition, Latin American heritage, and cinematic experimentation. His music, ranging from solo albums such as Manu to film scores and collaborative projects, combines impressionistic harmony, acoustic warmth, and electronic texture, shaping a distinct post-classical voice that is both intimate and expansive. In the conversation, Senti reflects on the integration of composition and production within the digital environment, the evolving relationship between notation and sound, and the ways in which tools like the DAW and immersive formats such as Dolby Atmos redefine musical form and spatial perception. He also discusses authorship in film music, the ethics of technology, and the need to preserve a human, performative presence in an increasingly algorithmic landscape. Senti’s reflections reveal a vision of music as a living craft, an art of listening, shaping, and reimagining sound, where composition becomes a dialogue between emotion, material, and space.

Abstract This exposition investigates musically framed silence by extracting and analyzing auditory data and proposing new analytical strategies to deepen engagement with silence as a compositional element. It reontologizes ambient sound as capable of bearing musical and narrative significance. The study centres on Cageance (accessible at https://cageance.webflow.io)¹, the author’s web-based international collaboration extending John Cage’s 4′33″, exploring how chance-generated environmental sound may function ecologically, musically, and narratively. Using a Cageance performance recorded in Portugal as a case study, the research applies a multimodal analytical framework combining Schaferian soundscape theory, conventional musical analysis (including Schenkerian reduction), and dramatic analysis. Visual mapping methods classify sounds into soundmarks, signals, keynotes, and ecological categories (biophony, geophony, anthrophony), while revealing emergent musical and dramaturgical properties within the soundscape. The study proposes new notational and analytical approaches for non-composed sound, positioning silence not as absence, but as a generative site for compositional and narrative inquiry. These findings contribute to ongoing discourse in sound studies, ecological musicology, and practice-as-research methodologies. ¹ The Cageance platform functions best on tablet or desktop devices; headphones are recommended.

By combining text and three video essays, this contribution presents a multimodal ethnography of loudspeakers in the Roma neighborhood of a Romanian village. It is based on video recordings, which were left out of the analysis and editing of my documentary films because of sound distortion. Revisiting my fieldnotes and the “ethnographic rubbish,” here I establish a critical study of my initial position – for 15 years I wasn’t paying attention to loudspeakers as an object of study in their own right – and I argue how these sounds have become auditory markers of the neighborhood since, at least, the beginning of the 2000s. The article thereby contributes to the fields of both anthropology and sound studies. It shows how the use of loudspeakers is made up of rivalry, interference, fame, fraternity, and familism. Moreover, the analysis shows how the lines between public and private spaces, and between oblique listening and noise cancellation are continually reconfigured in a community obsessed with mutual acquaintance.