Body to Body/ Sound to Sound Seminar

Body to Body/Sound to Sound Seminar

What happens when you bring scientists together with musicologists and cultural theorists to talk about music and bodies?

This project involves postdisciplinary, critically-engaged explorations of the crucial role of bodies in relation to music: the performing body, the listening body, the gendered/ raced/ classed/ aged/ listener or performer.

The main contribution of this project is to define a problematic (or area of research) that has so far remained marginal in terms of music, despite highly fruitful interdisciplinary work of this sort on other artistic fields, and the gradual, mutual engagement between cultural theory and musicology.

The aim is not to come up with one specific model, but to create as many models as possible, according to their relevance to different musical approaches and situations.

All are welcome to attend - the seminar will take place in the upstairs studios.  

Speakers:

Melanie Marshall (University College Cork) researches the cultural contexts of sixteenth-century Italian vocal music and in particular questions of gender, sexuality, eroticism and embodiment.

http://www.music.ucc.ie/index.php?/staff/detail/dr_melanie_marshall/

What is going on when we perform music from the distant past? Performing 'early music' is now understood as a modern practice rather than an 'authentic' recreation of the past, but some ideas linger on - like the idea that we can understand this old music because of its (unchanged) affect on our (unchanged) bodies. But are modern bodies the same as Renaissance bodies? Or are bodies historically contingent - that is, do they vary according to time and place? Historical anatomy books with their single-sex model of human physiology certainly suggest a very different understanding of the body. And what might this mean for modern performing of and listening to old music?

Bonnie Gordon (University of Virginia) is a musicologist with interests in the history of science, castrati, gender & sexuality. Her primary interests centre on the experience of sound in early modern music making, and the affective potential of the human voice.

http://artsandsciences.virginia.edu/music/people/faculty/academic/BonnieGordon.html

Vocal Anatomies:  Breath, throats, tongues, lungs and chests comprise the stuff of the voice. We know today that the rush of air from the lungs as a singer exhales causes the vocal cords to vibrate.  The early modern experience of the voice was different, not wrong, but conditioned by a different set of truths about the body and its inner workings. As a kinesthetic entity with physical substance, the voice consisted of vibrating air that flowed through the throat of the singer into the vulnerable ear of the listener. The paper addresses sound's relation to the body in early modern Europe, and engages with medical and literary representations of the female body in Renaissance music-making. My attention to vocal anatomies rethinks Italian vocal music composed between 1580-1640-recuperating the physical stuff of the human voice and its imagined organic relation to bodily processes.

Bonnie's attendance is supported by the Society for Renaissance Studies, University College Cork School of Music, and [tbc] UCC College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences Graduate School.

R. Benjamin Knapp - Sonic Art Research Centre, Queen's University Belfast Ben leads the Music, Sensors, and Emotion (MuSE) research group at SARC, Belfast. His research focuses on the understanding and measurement of the physical gestures and emotional states of musical performers and audiences. For over 20 years, Ben has been researching and developing user-interfaces and software that enable the composer and performer to augment the physical control of a musical instrument with more direct neural interaction. From the invention of theBiomuse to the introduction of the Integral Music Controller (controllers that measure motion and emotion to augment musical instrument control), Ben has focused on creating a user-aware interface based on the acquisition and real-time analysis of biometric signals.

Niall Coghlan is a PhD candidate at SARC, where his research explores biosignals as a means of human-computer interaction with applications in the fields of music, emotion, interactive art, interface design and assistive technologies. He produces and DJ's contemporary electronic music under his alter-ego 2BiT with releases on several labels, as well as live performances all over Europe.  Niall will be presenting the background behind and initial results from the 'Emotion in Motion' experiment at the Science Gallery.

Eric Lyon (SARC) is a composer and developer of computer music software. He is a co-developer of FFTease, and his LyonPotpourri externals have also found favor in the MaxMSP world. His theoretical writing include papers on the music of Aphex Twin and XTC and numerous technical publications. His most recent computer chamber music work is "Introduction and Allegro," comissioned by NeXT Ens. Lyon has taught computer music at Keio University, The International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), Dartmouth College, and the University of Manchester, before joining the department of Music and Sonic Art at Queen's University Belfast. Lyon's current compositional work focuses on computer chamber music and spatial orchestration.

Prof. Murray D. Campbell (University of Edinburgh): Brass Lips and Cyborgs

Murray D. Campbell, professor of musical acoustics at Edinburgh University, has created artificial brass-playing lips.

http://www2.ph.ed.ac.uk/acoustics/members/mcampbell.html

Schedule

2 Murray D.Campbell

2.45 Marshall/Gordon

4.15 coffee break

4.45 Coghlan/Knapp/Lyon

6.15 reception