Research Catalogue

Mesa de trabalho com inúmeros ícones identificáveis.

The EcoSomatics Conversations Series invites sharing of engagement, practices and thinking around environmental awareness through embodiment activities, dance and art. It posits a definition of EcoSomatics as of the body-mind-ecology and takes the form of open public dialogues between two (or more) people: independent artists, practitioners, and academics.

An eco-feminist perspective on photography Our vision has untapped, forgotten or perhaps undervalued potentials. These potentials lie within what I would like to coin “the peripheral gaze”. It is at the outskirts and at those distant horizons that I believe great insights lie. It is the gaze of interconnected matter. At the level of matter we are all equal: everyone and everything consists of matter. Looking with a “peripheral gaze” means seeing which materials are co-performing the image and seeing the ecological interconnections.

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.

Table of contents JSS issues

In this article we propose the concept of "sonic citizenship" as a framework for the multitude of ways in which we, in the rhythms of our everyday lives, form the aural background of each other, and how citizenship is practiced, negotiated, and maintained through everyday sonic activities. With examples of messy, fragile, and difficult interactions with sound from the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, we argue that the effort of tuning the soundscapes of the world needs to be complemented by an attuning approach that focuses on the negotiations we are constantly involved with in our everyday lives. The soundscape approach in the tradition of R. Murray Schafer implies that the soundscape is there as a landscape that we can uncover and tune. Conversely, the attuning approach of sonic citizenship understands soundscapes as relationships and dynamic configurations to which we must continuously attune, and which are themselves reconfigured via breaks in habitual attunements.