Practice-based Research in the Real World

Wave Creatures: One-to-One Visual Translations of Sound

This research explores the intersection of art and technology through the innovative use of the oscilloscope in musical composition and performance. Originally a tool for scientific and industrial applications, the oscilloscope’s ability to transform electrical signals into dynamic visual patterns offers a unique opportunity for audio-visual expression. This study is motivated by a fascination with the device’s aesthetic and philosophical potential, as well as its capacity to bridge sound and image, creating a multisensory artistic experience. The central research questions guiding this investigation are: How can the oscilloscope be incorporated into compositional practice? Can it function as both a compositional tool and a live performance instrument? Is integration with acoustic instruments feasible, and how does it operate within an ensemble context? Through a combination of historical-theoretical research and practical experimentation, this study researches how the oscilloscope can indeed serve as a tool for composition, a performative instrument, and a collaborative element in mixed acoustic-electronic ensembles. The findings highlight the oscilloscope’s potential to redefine traditional musical practices, offering new dimensions of creativity and interaction, bringing unexplored possibilities along with strict limits and challenges. This research contributes to the growing field of multimedia art, providing insights for composers and performers interested in exploring the translation of sound to image, and technology.

Credits: Ning Cat

'Manyness'

Somewhere between Bataille’s ‘excess’, Lovejoy’s ‘plentitude’, Kant’s ‘mathematical sublime’ and Bergson’s ‘multiplicity’, lives a loosely articulated but dialectically ripe thread within metaphysical discourse. This presentation names that gap ‘Manyness’, an abstract site that examines the poetry and politics of magnitude and her promises of obstinacy. As one of the more notorious Sigmunds once said, “accumulation puts an end to chance.” In the same way that, for instance, mass production has industrialized the man-made accident, accumulation has become an end in and of itself.

In 1919 on the northern harbor of Boston, a large storage tank burst and released a wave of hot molasses through the streets, killing 21 people and injuring 150. This disaster was largely the result of corporate negligence, as the huge demand for industrial alcohol during Prohibition emboldened the United States Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA) to cut corners on safety inspections. Local urban legend says that on hot summer days, the sickly sweet smell of molasses still fills the air.

This lingering scent is an astute example of the resistance of Manyness. Immoderate volumes tend to stage the conditions for an unanticipated excess to be left behind, equipping the disruption with a resilience to time. This residue then names itself. In a way, the residue almost divorces the flood, betraying the spatial in a pursuit of the lasting. This ebullition, the posture of Manyness, is the opposite of scarcity. It is the refusal of the singular in favor of the swarm.

In this session, Kelsey will observe events implicated in the aesthetics of abundance as revolt, and how this research expanded into a material study of barricades, crystallized molasses, and glitter concrete. Such inquests interrogate the role of longevity and durability within dimensional congestions, potentially offering new insights towards sculpture, catastrophe, and demonstration.

Credits: Kelsey Corby

AnAmphibious Retreat

AnAmphibious Retreat explores processes of vilification and re-evaluation of wetlands—transitional zones between land and water that resist rigid categorization. The project focuses particularly on the Netherlands, a country historically shaped by the drainage of wetlands, now reconsidering the reintegration of these very environments. Central to this investigation are the themes of ambiguity, instability, and decay.
The project engages with the fluid meanings of “retreat”—both as a withdrawal from deeply-rooted beliefs, and as a space for study or leisure. Through a visual essay, it reimagines amphibious environments as sites of experimentation, critical inquiry, and ecological transformation.

The work unfolds through an open-ended adaptation of the “Goose Game,” a 16th century board game originally from Italy, using its cyclical structure as a playful journey through the evolving meanings and layered histories of Western understandings of wetlands.

On a material level, a process of decay and transformation is triggered by scratching the sealed surfaces of traditional Delft Blue ceramics, which depict images of extractive colonial dominion over the environment. On top of this, the ephemerality of the materials used, such as 3D-printed bioplastic, degradable in marine environments, and water-soluble blue ink, reflects the instability and transience of both this research and the environments being considered.

“AnAmphibious” functions as a deliberate linguistic glitch, suggesting both an indefinite article and a prefix of negation. It gestures toward the project’s core skepticism: can amphibious logics truly infiltrate systems historically designed to oppose them?

Credits: Roel Backaert

Absorption, Aesthetic Distance and Soft Activism: Examination and Composition of Secular Passions

Over the last seventy-five years, the Passion genre has undergone a huge transformation, with a new subgenre emerging: the Secular Passion. These works allude to the musical features and narrative structure of traditional religious Passions, but replace the central figure of Jesus with another suffering figure. While a number of these works have been analysed and contextualised within the larger Passion genre, no study has yet focused specifically on the subgenre, or on the ambiguities that arise when trying to discern how these works differ from other related forms.

To investigate this subgenre, my thesis turns to literature studies which illuminate the way in which the concepts of absorption (bringing the audience into the story), and aesthetic distance (forcing the audience to recognise the structure of the work), can be applied to musical features of a work. The outcome of an optimal oscillation between absorption and aesthetic distance in a Passion is that the listener will engage empathically with the suffering figure in the story, but will also be distant enough to engage in cognitive reflection on the events that led to their suffering. This thesis argues that a composer chooses to engage with the Passion genre in order to gently persuade a listener towards engaging in in pro-social behaviour as a result of the performance, not unlike the historical evangelising function of the genre. In this way, the goals of a composer writing a secular Passion align with the goals and mechanisms of soft activism.

Credits: Sara Ito