Human Speed in Music
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Ned McGowan
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Despite the ubiquitous role of time in most everything we do there is still much to understand about its essence as a function of human perception. One way to learn about the cognisance of time is simply by listening to music. The rhythms, sounds, and silences of music are jacketed by the human condition. The expansive identity of time with its major implications in the realms of science, philosophy, and religion, tells little about our immediate experiences in music. The concept of speed, though, is full of enlightening character.
In this essay, I explore the experience of speed in music with an artistic research methodology. Based on my artistic and pedagogic experience, the arguments consider areas of performance, composition, and perception, and references are made to neurobiological research. A multitude of perspectives are presented here, such as an explication of speed, a study on tempo 10 bpm, the relationship between emotions and our perception of the speed of time, plus many musical examples, including compositions, tests of duration and maximum speed perception and a full range of musical speed.
The goal is to reveal properties about musical speed to provide a clearer concept for the reader to experience, interpret and conceptualize for herself.
PhD - architectures of speed
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Ned McGowan
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In 2016 I began work on a PhD at Leiden University / Orpheus Institute via DocARTES program. Supervisors: Henk Borgdorff, Marcel Cobussen and Richard Barrett.
Architectures of speed: reinventing the tools, functions and potentials of speed within rhythmical frames in music.
The speed of rhythms in live acoustic music, literally the velocity at which notes are sounding, can be defined in absolute terms based on clock time. But there is also the perceived speed that, in the simplest terms, states that musical material can seem fast, slow or some other relational quality.
Speed is articulated by sounding rhythm. Rhythms, however, manifest themselves through a myriad of various implicit and explicit frames, depending on the musical context, including tuplets, meters (traditional and "irrational"), tempo, polytempos, pulses, polypulses, polyrhythms (superimposed frames), additive frames, divisive frames, metric modulation, time brackets and other structures. Through analysis and composition this PhD will research the current practice, precise identities and possibilities of the various time frames in music and the bearing they have individually and in combinations on the speed of the music.
INERTIA, SPEED AND FUTURE: an artistic research on the unknown, from military disruptions to astronomy predictions
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Laetitia Catherine Morais
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The aim of this PhD is to provide an artistic research about unknown territories; pristine, fictitious, distant and immeasurable fields; to find clues or directions to reach them and to make use of the gained knowledge (Erkenntnis) for art practices.
It presents diversified approaches to questions as follows: which are the next boundaries of Art? What are the most advanced methods to move in an unknown field? How long-range observations provide closer approaches? How may advancements in perception inflect new imageries? What is the role of fiction in the development of a future? These main questions may elicit the paradigms of artistic research, once they directly relate with the production of new knowledge throughout artistic conceptualization. These questions invite to a reflection upon the future and how fiction may be introduced to scientific knowledge, in order to maintain an open perception of reality.
Therefore, fFor this analysis, I will focus on the introduction of methodologies - sometimes external to the field of art – such as military and astronomic observations of its surroundings. The military area is pointed out here by its cutting edge approach concerning surveillance, by making the invisible visible and vice-versa, through camouflage and landscape reconnaissance. The astronomic field is also brought to this research by its unstable nature, collapsing time and space, that is, studying data from the past until the present, with the aim to uncover a possible future. The materials used for their observations such as lens, absorbing and reflective surfaces, evoke an imagery (either by literature, music, comics and cinema) related to science-fiction, but they are, nonetheless, the most effective equipment for the observation of far away objects…
Both areas promote incursions into the unknown, throughout practices, techniques and tools that frequently combine two crucial factors: inertia and speed. It is departing from these main concepts that I raise questions around new aesthetics of the future, analyzing military and astronomic techniques used to disrupt or improve perception, and how these have been intercepting with art as a visionary mean. In this sense, I wish to contribute for a broadening conception of the unknown.
Therefore, this project is a gathering of information from different sources of knowledge, a study on space and time, a relocation of imageries – making (thinking and doing) – aesthetics. It is also a key for an artistic discourse capable to dialogue without constraints, combining conceptual objections with experimental practice, applied in diversified fields.