Aural Transposition, Psychogeography and the Ephemeral World

Katt Hernandez

Aural transposition sits at a crossroads between being a tool for practice and creating work, and being a tool that illuminates aspects of another entity. In day-to-day music practice, transposition can be an age-old tool for learning material, or a multi-layered exploration of an object or place. Transposition can also be a means of recreating places, real or imagined, through the transposition of ghost traces back into sound. And the transposition of spaces onto other spaces is possible through multichannel sound arrays. The territory for re-imagining both sound and place lies in the impossible space between the sounding entity at hand and the instrument that transposes it. Just as in the dérive of psychogeography, the spaces between well-trod paths leads to a world beyond the banal. This exposition first situates these practices in psychogeography, and amongst other artists whose work utilizes various transposition, soundwalking or psychogeographical practices. It then discusses those aspects of my own artistic practice and work—across a spectrum of electroacoustic music, improvised violin work and collaborative composition for an ensemble of mechanical string instruments— that are centered around aural transposition as an act of psychogeography.

Acknowledgements

My PhD work is based at and funded by Lund University. In addition, the multi-channel works cited in this paper were created, for the most part, in the electronic music studios at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, for which I thank my former teacher there, Bill Brunson, as well as the faculty and students of the electronic music department from 2015 - 2018. Some of the works were also worked on at the Electronic Music Studio in Stockholm. I would like to thank the peer reviewer assigned to work with me, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, for his illuminating insights. I would like to thank my doctoral advisors, Stefan Östersjö and Henrik Frisk, for their inspiring guidance and support in the writing of this exposition. And I would like to thank all the collaborating artists in these works, and those who were kind enough to give me permission to use materials here.

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