Research Catalogue

Calling Songs is a research into the possibilities of using the sounds created by insect and frog choirs in a musical composition/soundscape. An 8-channel speaker system was developed for this purpose, able to stand outside conditions and fitting into a natural environment. The voices of crickets and frogs have characteristics that make them sound almost electronic and therefore blend surprisingly well with the sounds that the muiscians of Zwerm can produce using effectpedals, loop-feedback, modular synthesizers and occasionally a guitar. The listener is invited to question the idea of culture versus nature. For the performers, the central question is how to give non-human life a voice in our artistic practice. Calling Songs is a collaboration between Johannes Westendorp, Zwerm and Pieter Verhees

An analitical overview over some key works from Stravinsky with the goal of selecting few elements that can help my compositional journey.

This exposition emerged from my participation in the second interval of the Simultaneous Arrivals (Simularr) Artistic Research Project—a research project inviting international artist-researchers to explore relational, situated, and process-based inquiries in dialogue with core researchers. Core researchers: Nayari Castillo, Hanns Holger Rutz, Franziska Hederer, and Daniele Pozzi. For the second interval, the visual artist and researcher Elena Radaelli and I were invited as visiting artist-researchers. (More information on Simultaneous Arrivals: https://simularr.net/about/) The exposition presents my process during the residency, i.e. my Traces and Paths Towards a Singularly-Plural Companionships. The eight-week residency (3 March-30 April 2024) took place across three sites: Graz (Austria); Lecce, San Cesario (Italy); and Klagenfurt (Austria). The exposition traces this journey through various mediums, including texts, graphics, video and audio material experiments, field encounters, and theoretical companions. My processes, are informed and shaped by my companion collaborators—human (research-creation companions), more-than-human, textual, and material—who co-inform and co-create the unfolding of the research.

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.