Muscle Memory (Sound art composition on LP (and USB back-up) + contextual information)
- Submitting institution
-
City, University of London
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 505
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- February
- Year
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This research explores and interrogates notions of the act of listening as ‘musicking’ (Small, 1998) combined with understandings of identity as constructed through association with recorded music (Frith, ‘Music and Identity’, 1996). The compositional process combines autobiography and ethnography, heard in recordings of conversations between the composer and collaborators, who discuss recorded works while listening to them in domestic spaces. Multiple perspectives and modes of listening are presented within the piece, and illustrated by the composer’s presence: documentary recordist, participant-observer, electroacoustic composer, enthusiastic music fan. The contingent and transitory nature of these varying positions creates a work in which the listener is regularly made conscious of the act of listening while simultaneously being invited to participate in that act. As such, Muscle Memory questions ‘how one work can comment on and analyse or critique another through its own agency as music’ (Waters, ‘Tullis Rennie’s Muscle Memory: Listening to the Act of Listening’, 2015: 31). The composition demonstrates how ‘music, like identity, is both performance and story, [it] describes the social in the individual and the individual in the social’ (Frith, 1996: 124). The vinyl edition of this output is an important aspect to the research, providing the ‘compound, multidisciplinary character’ of recorded music manifested in a physical object, one that presents ‘a medium for sound, but also as a medium for text, art, design, and a general confrontation with the world.’ (Grubbs, Records Ruin The Landscape, 2014: xi). This object, disseminated publicly and presented for listening in similar domestic spaces to those inhabited by the composer-performers within the work, creates a contextual feedback loop within which audiences may further actively participate, through listening (as evidenced in the contextualising video).
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -