Live-electronics and speech samples: contribution to Practice Sharing
Practice Sharing is an online presentation of expanded approaches to language-based practice within the field of artistic research (2020). I was invited to contribute to this edition of the Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group Research, conceived and co-organised by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin.
➔ link to Practice Sharing on the Research Catalogue
My practice as a composer and improviser is focused on creating and playing live-electronics systems that process speech samples into electroacoustic sounds. To me, the speaking voice not only provides a resource with an endless sonic potential but can also open up a distinct, defamiliarizing perspective on language. By deconstructing words into their phonetic building blocks, by stretching, compressing, blowing up, or iterating over the separate speech particles, and by reorganizing the original syntax, I compose musical structures that offer for the listener an unusual encounter with language.
Using speech as the source material for live processing, I aim to create a body of work which is situated at the intersection of sound and text. In my works music and language are in a continuous interplay: A constant fluctuation between background and foreground positions, a continuous recontextualization of semantic syntaxes and sonic material, resulting in a network of emergent links and associations.
I am interested in developing further my live-electronics tools and to be able to connect between researchers, musicians, and their audience. In the following phases of my work I intend to collaborate not only with musicians but also with speakers, whose original voice content is combined with its processed version. The result can be thought of as a hybrid of musical composition and a lecture, featuring concepts and discourses as much as musical aesthetics.
