Many thanks and congratulations to all SARC Members Symposium participants who demonstrated a fantastic display of high quality research across a breathtaking range of topics and approaches to sound and music, as demonstrated in the programme below. It was a great atmosphere and a real opportunity to develop a collective sense of a re-imagined SARC, looking towards the public re-launch next year. 

Pedro Rebelo
Director

10.45 - 13.00: 5 Minute Talks

Stefanie Lehner: From Anamnesis to Amnesty? Sounds of Violence (and Reconciliation) in Post-Conflict Northern Irish Theatre. This paper explores the effect of intrusive sounds in two post-Agreement theatre productions: (1) Tinderbox’s 2019 adaption of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi as Ubu the King, and (2) TheatreofplucK’s 2018 performative verbatim audio walk, So I Can Breathe This Air, written by Shannon Yee and based on interviews with the Rainbow Project’s Gay Ethnic Group (GEG). In very different yet comparable ways, sound in both the Tinderbox and the TheatreofplucK production has a powerful transformative effect, which is experienced as both distressing and potentially empowering. If Ubu the King immerses us into the soundings of war and violence, So I Can Breathe This Air concludes by creating a sound space for amnesty and reconciliation. I argue that the theatrical experience of belliphonic sounds can (re)trigger lingering sonic ghosts, what Augoyard and Torgue (2005) describe as anamnesis : ‘the physical recollection – literally the re-membering – of sound through the body’ (Brown 2010 : 215). Such violent sounds literally intrude and have the capacity to (re)trigger traumatic (sound-)memories. Yet, as Daughtry (2015 : 276), importantly, recognises, intrusive sounds can be also used to create countermemories to violence by the creative act of ‘intentionally “mishearing”. This paper develops this notion by suggesting that intrusive theatre noises can have the capacity to alert onstage characters and off stage audiences to possibilities of transforming anamnesic noise wounds to counter-sounds that can potentially provide or evoke amnesty.

John D'Arcy: Listening and Singing Back: An overview of recent projects. This presentation will provide an overview of recent projects led by John D'Arcy including the vocal ensemble HIVE Choir and aural diversity project Do You Hear What I Hear. 

Jacob McQuillan: Helical Spring Mode Grouping. A brief overview of ongoing research on spring reverb simulation: The main vibrational elements of a spring reverb tank are helical springs. The coupling between bending, longitudinal, and torsional oscillations gives rise to complex vibrational behaviour characterised by several distinct echo patterns in measured impulse responses. After formulating the numerical solution to PDEs governing helical spring vibrations and framing an eigenvalue problem, mode grouping allows separate visualisation and analysis of various echo patterns in a modelled impulse response.

Xiaoyu Liu: The Collective Authenticity of WTC: A Postmodernist Investigation of the editions of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Based on J.S. Bach’s keyboard work ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’, this research focuses on the issue of performance practice. The research is mainly concerned with critical edition, performance convention, and authenticity under the influence of postmodernism. To achieve this goal, this study applied interviews to investigate the interpretation of this work by modern musicians. The research findings are a combination of theory and practice. Insights into the problems of editions and summaries of 18th-century performance conventions, and to integrate them with the performers, the purpose of the research is to develop a postmodern view of performance practice, also to provide a reference for the study and interpretation of Bach's works in the context of contemporary performance practice

Yang Yang: Traditional Chinese Values and Perfectionism-Impacts on music performance anxiety (MPA) in Chinese university piano students. Given the pervasive influence of Confucianism-based traditional values in Chinese society, and the relationship between perfectionism and music performance anxiety (MPA), this research focuses on exploring the connection between traditional Chinese values, perfectionism, MPA, and performance outcomes in Chinese university piano students. To achieve this goal, this study applied a structured questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to investigate the factors contributing to MPA and its effect on musical performance. Overall, the research findings provided insights into how these values and perfectionism influence MPA and performance in Chinese university piano students.

Tim Fosker: Moving on from the sounds of language to the language of sounds. There has been extensive research on the crucial role of our ability to process the many characteristics of sound and music for acquiring speech and language. However, this research has primarily focused on our ability to represent, discriminate, and categorize sounds for language acquisition, neglecting the impact that language itself has on how we perceive, discriminate, and categorize sounds. We know that learning a language changes the way we discriminate speech sounds, because we are using these sounds differently. Fundamental linguistic theory suggests that language may have other, less direct, impact on our auditory perception too. In this brief presentation, I will highlight, with examples, some questions that we are only just starting to ask about the importance of language to sound perception.

Simon Waters: The Social Lives of Musical Instruments. A brief overview of recent research growing out of my 55 year + obsession with musical instruments, most recently in the context of my Visiting Fellowship in Material Culture at the RCM and residency at Ringve Museum, Trondheim. The presentation will touch on the manner in which digital technologies contribute to and challenge understandings of historical musical instruments, and in particular their status as 'objects'.

Matthew Rodger: A research overview of perception, action and skill development in musical ecologies and beyond. I will present an overview of research I have been involved with both in and outside of SARC, investigating the roles of perception in action and skill development. This includes projects about learning techniques on musical instruments and interfaces, but also skill development domains outside of music, such as habilitation for children and young people with visual impairments. I will highlight key findings, as well as what I see as exciting directions for future research.

Elen Flugge: Listening practices in sonic commons. A brief overview of methods and deliberations from recent PhD research conducted in Belfast. The project used a variety of listening-based methods guided by sonic arts, ethnography and urbanism, to investigate the auditory experiences of inhabitants. The talk will focus on the method of conversational soundwalks, how these developed, and what conclusions emerged.   

Frank Delaney: Broadcast, Film and Screen/Media Music and Audio Research. I am currently working on a series/variety of outputs that enquire into industry practice in screen music composition, look at how broadcast can change how people engage with their physical world from a digital vs physical placemaking perspective and a large scale practice as research output that looks at intergenerational trauma and how national events can alter a cultures trajectory and how cultures use music and narrative to document these events

Miguel Ortiz: Instrument Design at SARC. I will talk about various paths followed in the design and/or augmentation of musical instruments using technologies. From technical aspects to motivation and the integration of said instruments within performance practices.

Trevor Agus: Phase-vocoding at the frequency resolution of the auditory system. Phase vocoding already generates a useful representation of sound, that allows us to edit sounds in terms of their coherent audio components, rather than making changes to arbitrary fixed ranges of time or frequency, which means that we can better keep track of any audio artefacts we might introduce. However, existing phase vocoding methods extract components that are closer than the frequency resolution of the auditory system, meaning that their manipulations have less direct perceptual relevance. This poster describes a first attempt at extracting components at the frequency resolution of the human auditory system, with a view to allowing perceptually relevant manipulation of even the transients that are excluded from traditional phase vocoder representations.

Bihe Wen: The other piano. I would like to briefly talk about a piece I am currently working on for prepared piano, and to give an improvisational performance example that lasts around 6 minutes.

Michael Speers: Ground Drum: Speculative Instruments and Complex Sonic Ecosystems. This project seeks to develop a virtual acoustic percussion instrument, modelled on an ancient instrument known as the ‘ground drum’. The development of this instrument is being explored through the use of physical modelling synthesis techniques, microphones and feedback, towards a system that can actively and sensitively integrate with a natural environment. The hypothetical nature of the ground drum through sparse historical accounts invites further speculation into its properties and through the use of physical modelling synthesis, digital simulation of physically impossible attributes can be explored. The project will manifest in electroacoustic compositions, performance systems and sound installations and seeks to demonstrate the value of listening to and learning from the complex sonic sensibilities of natural ecosystems.

Maarten van Walstijn: Physical modeling of musical instrument collisions. Collisions play an important role in the sound production mechanism of musical string instruments. Impactive contact modelling must therefore be incorporated in time stepping schemes for simulation and sound synthesis. Recently, explicit schemes based on energy quadratisation have emerged as a means of numerical modelling of nonlinear vibrations that avoids the need for iterative solvers, which significantly enhances the applicability to real-time sound synthesis and removing some of the limitations arising in the design of virtual-acoustic instruments. This talk will give a brief overview of the latest progress on avoiding possible physical artefacts and on modelling hammer-string interaction with time-variant parameters.

Maruska Svasek: Playing by the rules. This presentation/workshop reflects on three research and teaching projects in which I collaborated with academics and students from different disciplines, using a playful approach based on a set of randomly assigned and self assigned rules.

Sound Space Environment: Sonic Engagements with Deserts, Forests, Rivers, and Cities. Sonic methodologies reveal new insights to our surroundings, can make perceptible phenomena beyond our other senses, and give voice to changing environments. This panel shares some of the ongoing work of individuals within the Sound Space Environment Research Group at SARC, including sonic engagements with four contrasting sites: ‘singing’ sand dunes (Lara Weaver), forests (Robert Coleman), rivers (Pedro Rebelo), and cities (Georgios Varoutsos). Through a combination of sharing sonic fieldwork, creative practice, spatial audio, personal ethnographic accounts and critical reflections, we explore the capacity for modes of sonic observation and creative practice to engender sensory knowledge-making and heightened ecological awareness.

Lunch

14.00 - 14.20: 5 Minute Talks

Sarah McCleave: Technology and the promotion of theatre dance. The profile of individual dancers was enhanced by associated publications of images or arrangements of music to which they had performed. This brief talk will consider the impact of lithography (as compared with the earlier technique of engraving) on the dissemination of such material.

Zeynep Bulut: Voice, Speech, Skin. In this short talk, I will present an overview of my forthcoming book and research initiatives on voice and environment, and music and medicine.

Ian Woodfield: Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. I have just completed a study of the material legacy of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. It will be published later this year in: The Cambridge Companion to the Magic Flute, edited by Jessica Waldoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, October 2023). The manner in which Zauberflöte established itself as a cultural icon in late- eighteenth-century German society is remarkable. It permeated daily life in countless ways: fashion, pet naming, board games, risqué party entertainments, mechanical toys, children’s playlets, and whistling birds. While this represents the escapism of Zauberflöte’s fairy-tale plot, darker strands are woven into the fabric of its early reception. It swept across Europe during a period of bloody revolutionary war, and all sides made use of it in their political propaganda. Papageno was ensconced at the heart of the Prussian military establishment when one of his tunes was added to the carillon of the Potsdam Garnisonkirche. At the same time, his music, under the banner of freedom, entered the republican song repertoire. After Napoleon’s cataclysmic defeat near Leipzig in 1814, a satirist was quick to wish him a derisory farewell as he sailed back across the Rhine. What better choice than the language of the opera: auf wiedersehen! My next project will be a study of one of Mozart’s most significant patrons: Countess Wilhelmine von Thun und Hohenstein. It will examine the role of her salon in Vienna in the late 1770s, and present new contextual information on the support she offered to Mozart during his first year in the city as a freelance musician in 1781.

Isaac Gibson: These Lost Voices - ''I Wish I Could Hear Their Voice Again’’. Isaac Gibson will give an overview / showcase of his latest research project, "From My Perspective," which aims to provide end-of-life hospice patients with the opportunity to leave audio-recorded memories for their loved ones in a unique and interesting way. By sharing this work, we can also consider the memories and stories that we want to leave behind for others, while we have the opportunity to do so. By recording voice, we have the ability to capture a sense of self that is unique to an individual. If you think back to the voice of a loved one who's died, you can probably think of all sorts of phrases, mannerisms and tones that made their voice unique to them. So, recording someone speaking can be a really valuable and powerful way to remember them. But it's also something that we often don't think to do until it's too late.

Chris Corrigan: B-format ambisonics for capturing height in Dolby Atmos Music. Dolby Atmos has been adopted as the default format for streaming 'spatial audio’ on a number of streaming platforms including Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+ and music streaming platforms such as Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal. Dolby Atmos for Music adds a height dimension to commercial channel based surround formats such as 5.1 and 7.1. This demonstration will illustrate the use of B-Format ambisonics to derive height information for Dolby Atmos Music replay. The examples presented will focus on recording techniques for live acoustic music and will feature recent recordings made with the Ulster Orchestra and the Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble.

14:25 – 15:05: Panels

MEDL: MEDL (Music Ecologies Design Lab) Panel. Miguel Ortiz, Matthew Rodger, Paul Stapleton, Maarten van Walstijn, Simon Waters - MEDL explores questions related to the design and performance of musical instruments and the environments with which such practices are entangled. This area of interest raises complex questions, which we feel are best addressed through combining different disciplinary and indisciplinary perspectives, including from (but not limited to) the fields of music performance, psychology, music acoustics, numerical simulation, creative coding, physical computing, musicology and critical improvisation studies. For our panel, we will begin by presenting a selection of MEDL related projects. This will be followed by a discussion focused on questions and insights that have emerged during the course of our collaborations.

Performance without Barriers Team: How music might allow us to re-think access for a diversity of people. We propose an open conversation between researchers of our group, discussing the different ways in which our research is re-imagining ‘access’ to music, how we collaboratively re-design and re-think musical instruments, digital audio workstations and music performance. Our contribution will be a mix of show and tell and audience-facing discussions, covering topics such as co-designing new musical instruments in Virtual Reality, co-designing VR Environments with People with Dementia as well as insights into our explorations and findings from our current AHRC funded project where we explore access in digital audio workstations with a global community of visually impaired and blind sound creatives.

Sounding Conflict: Sounding Conflict: From Resistance to Reconciliation. Sound, music and storytelling are important tools of resistance, resilience and reconciliation in creative practice from protracted conflict to post-conflict contexts. When they are used in a socially engaged participatory capacity, they can create counter-narratives to conflict. Based on original research in three continents, this enquiry advances an interdisciplinary, comparative approach to exploring the role of sonic and creative practices in addressing the effects of conflict. Case studies illustrate how participatory arts genres are variously employed by musicians, arts facilitators, theatre practitioners, community activists and other stakeholders as a means of ‘strategic creativity’ to transform trauma and promote empowerment. Panel with Fiona Magowan, Stefanie Lehner and Pedro Rebelo

15:25 – 15:45: Georgios Varoutsos, SARC PhD Lead. Review and discussion of SARC PhD lead role.

16:00 – 17.30:  Performances

Helena Hamilton: On Wanting. On Wanting is an audio-visual installation which continues Helena’s work on blurring boundaries between digital and physical media, and sound and visual art. It was originally created to be experienced in the home environment, but has been remixed for the SARC Lab. This work utilises gradually transitioning colour, as an evolving effect that bleeds into a physical space. Sound has been intentionally sourced from Helena’s everyday sonic environment. The foundation of this is the nursery rhyme A Farmer Wants a Wife, recorded from one of her child's toys. A nursery rhyme, interpreted and used in this work as material that signifies a contemporary condition of perpetually seeking instant gratification. She has playfully time-stretched it multiple times, creating drones which form the basis of this work. Other layers of audio included reflects personal joyful moments in domestic space. Such as rain, birds, and Rice Krispies. The final audio sample is pencil on paper. Helena utilised the sound of mark making whilst listening to the drones, primarily following the sound rather than the visual.

David Robb: The Songs of Gerhard Gundermann. Dave will perform three songs of the East German protest singer Gerhard Gundermann. As part of his current AHRC Fellowship Dave has translated these into English and is currently recording them with a band at Redbox Studios in Belfast for his next CD release. Gundermann, who died prematurely at the age of 43 in 1998, was a miner who simultaneously had a successful career as a protest singer. Dave will sing ‘War’, a song about the unchanging power relationship in society despite East Germany’s change from communism to capitalism in 1990 and ‘Coming and Going’, a song written at the time of the Bosnian War calling for more tolerance to be shown to immigrants. As a miner, Gundermann developed an acute awareness of the damage being done to the environment. His song ‘Grass’ is a celebration of healing power of nature.

Vivienne Griffin: M E R C Y. Mercy is a video work in two parts. The first section is a text based video work allegorizing the collective unconscious nervous breakdown. The black and white text video uses a speed reading technique, it consists of multiple voices which are communicating about disparate subjects. One voice describes the potential smell of a digital rose, another voice recounts the memory of a 10 second video they viewed and yet another is an internal monologue. The second part of Mercy was made with Turing Institute researcher, lawyer and court advocate Cari Hyde-Vaamonde. Part two uses visual metaphors in a virtual world to describe complex systems in Cari’s research. For example - the maze describes black box Ai, the rubbish in the maze refers to datasets which are dirty. The stairways within Mercy refer to decision tree branching algorithms. Mercy takes on the problem of explaining complex systems to non-computer literate users.

Conor McAuley: Musical Pathways: Exploring bodily movement in improvised drumming. Conor will perform a short improvisation and discuss how elements of his PhD research inform his practice.

Simon Mawhinney: Transitional Objects. Transitional Objects is the most recently project by Simon Mawhinney. A piano work in a single movement that explores narrative over a duration of 100 minutes.

Paul Stapleton & Ricki O’Rawe: -ence. Paul Stapleton & Ricki O’Rawe - Our performance is a continuation of a collaborative artistic research project that goes under the name of -ence. Our duo improvises live remixes of augmented 7” vinyl records combined with performance on, and sequenced sampling of, custom-made elecroacoustic instruments. Our collaboration draws on O’Rawe’s experience in art installation contexts and with electronic dance music group Not Squares, and Stapleton’s work as an instrument inventor and improviser in groups such as Ens Ekt and 3BP. Our project is concerned with both making ecologies of improvisation and the estrangement of cultural practices. Our conceit is that the vacillation between the uncertainty of improvisation and the stability of the familiar palate of sounds and structures associated with dance music might create a dissensual groove, one that appeals to a dancefloor’s desire for rhythm and movement while simultaneously disrupting its expectations, defamiliarising our engagement and slowing down our perceptions.

17:30: Close

Conclusions, in-conclusions and next steps…