How people filter their perception of the environment is key to our work together. Considering audience and musicians as active perceivers receiving & processing multiple data not units in space.
Definition & Concepts in Denis Smalley – Spectromorphology, acted as a stepping off point for discussing this idea of ‘Perceivers’ in relation to compositional thinking. How we perceive also opens up the questions of how we embody an experience, what embodiment is and equally what information is embedded in us that enables us to create. How we organise ourselves sensorily to create a sound and finding ways to override the history we bring to creating sound.
Then Claire described Maggie Nichols method of compositional improvisation ‘Scribbling’ that somehow in it’s immediacy she experienced a bypassing of player-consciousness to access a deeper vocal language through the instrument. Perhaps Jane’s method of site specific ‘Soundings’ has as a similar impetus? There’s something so immediate about using the voice for getting the sound out, for externalising raw cognitive input, what sound shapes are happening, texture, gesture etc..
..and so our next collaborative actions emerge: 360º listening and soundmappingto befollowed bydeep listening outdoors – vocalising the perceived environment in situ – returning to the soundproof room to channel that through instruments and drawings.
As reference here’s some documentation of a workshop we did previously with a group finding ways to vocally sonify objects, which threw up a lot of questions about which senses (rather than individual sense) we each channel our perceptions through: http://www.janepitt.co.uk/trans-space/2014/02/12/filtering-perception/
