"Sound~Currents" activates improvisation in electro-acoustic musicking through a methodology navigated by resonance, vibration, and transduction. The research explores how resonance, technologically engendered through vibrational transduction, unveils other pathways to co-creation and alternative modes of listening – providing an expansion and diversification of current improvisational music practice.
The resonances of and between instruments, people, and spaces guide how we make music together. By mounting transducer speakers and microphones inside musical instruments in ensembles, the sounds from one instrument can vibrate the surfaces, membranes, and strings of the other. This practice opens the possibility of «sounding through» and «playing» the other and establishes a new interwoven sonic ecology.
Sound~Currents challenges traditional practices within improvised music-making vis-à-vis sense-perception, meaning-making, and potentials residing within acoustic instruments.
We begin listening with the skin and smelling sounds escaping the human ear.
I propose this methodology—a set of relational and co-dependent practices—as a foundational principle for creating change and reorienting the status quo in an ever-more entrenched, solidified, and separated world.
At the SAR conference, the Sound~Currents praxis will be exemplified through a performance presentation – a musical interview and dialogue with pianist Magda Mayas. The potentials embedded in the research need to be actualized, as the core of the research lies in encounters and physical presence. My guitar and electronics are amplified through Mayas’ piano using transducer speakers, and the encounter is fully improvised. It marks the release of our joint album «Sounding Through» (Playdate Records, 2025), which is based on a series of improvisations conducted in Berlin in 2021.
Stephan Meidell
University of Bergen, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, Grieg Academy (Department of Music)
Guitarist Stephan Meidell is a synthesist – a musical adventurer who unites styles and idioms through improvisational gestures and refined sound design. His paradoxical music exists where genres dissolve into fragments that can be picked apart and combined in new ways.
Meidell engages with sounds from electronic, acoustic, and electromechanical instruments and machines and recontextualizes them in new and surprising ways. He has released numerous albums and written commissions for dance, theater, and audiovisual collaborations. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate.
Magda Mayas
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
Magda Mayas is a pianist and composer performer living in Berlin. Over the past 20 years she developed a vocabulary utilizing both the inside as well as the exterior parts of the piano, using amplification, preparations and objects that become extensions of the instrument itself.
She holds a PhD from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and is a professor at Luzern University of applied Sciences and Arts. Magda performs internationally solo and in collaboration with a large number of musicians and composers and has released over 40 albums to date.