This audio paper is situated within artistic research and explores the qualities and function of timbre, memory and materiality within the practice of musical improvisation from the viewpoint of musicians of different generations and backgrounds.

The title bears reference to a quote from Cecil Taylor and explores the nature of improvisation in music making as a philosophical and ethical approach to life.

Within the dialogical nature of the piece, musicians Cecil Taylor, Andrea Parkins, Tony Buck and Mazen Kerbaj discuss questions around structuring a composition in real-time and the thought processes and different systems and categories of sounds and techniques they have developed to facilitate that.

In this audio paper I will focus on two ideas. The first is the ephemeral city.

The conscious re-imagining of the cityscape, from elements ranging from the historic to the fantastical, can effect an individual’s sense of place as much as the physical structures that comprise it.

The second is the term psycho-sonic cartography. I have developed this as a possible way to cover both a wider swath of the population than the term psychogeography, and as a more specific set of activities related to sound and, more specifically, electroacoustic music.

This audio paper is an exploration of the conceptual ideas for, and the sonic results of, a site-specific day-long installation/performance in the Gothenburg harbour presented at the Gothenburg Art Sound Festival in October 2016.

The piece is titled Invisible Sounds, A ‘stethoscope’ towards sounds unheard, and its aim was to create a performative situation where the participating artists, as well as audience and by-passers, could explore the complexity of urban noise.

An aim with the project was to highlight and make ‘visible’, or heard, concealed soundings in order to reveal “invisible mobility below the surface of a visual world” (Voegelin, 2014, p.3).

An audio paper on H e (a) r; a soundscape connected to ecology, acoustics and embodiment, drawing on encounters and what happens in the connection.

A fluctuation between hear-here-hér*-her. Originating in a work for the ensemble Nordic Affect’s concert at Nordic Music Days 2016, the piece has now been developed into both a quadrophonic and stereo version of H e (a) r (2017/18).

The work has been released on Nordic Affect’s album on the Sono Luminus label.

This audio paper is an exploration of part of the process of making Drinking (2014) – a piece for voice, Vietnamese zither đàn tranh, and electronics.

The composition is developed from composer William Brook’s project After Yeats in which Brooks provides an instruction describing a collaboration between a performer and a composer.

After Yeats is not itself a composition, but should rather be seen as a method with which a composer and a performer may realize a score (Brooks 2013).

Mundanisation is a process through which unfathomable technological complexity is camouflaged and turned into the ordinary.

The concept addresses how a protective layer between overwhelming, even ominous complexity and commonplace everyday life is engendered when technologies are used.

It moves beyond understandings of technologies as something that become domesticated.

The audio paper assembles voices talking about the electronic production of a sound and music in Malawi, its link to the digital media circulation and relationships of media with social experiences such as religious rituals, local and global economies.

The presented case concerns an experimental ethnographic fieldwork project with a local band named Tonga Boys.

Two sides of the experiment were: the production of a CD and the multivocal emergence of the anthropological knowledge.

This paper argues that the documented history of human interaction with radio is a matter to be unravelled, and pirated.

The ‘first documented radio listening experience’ is questioned, and followed by the proposal for alternative radio histories – that disrupt, critique, and reach beyond the usual masculine, Western, ‘modern’ tellings of this era.

In 1937, the Chinese artist and writer, Ling Shu Hua wrote to Virginia Woolf, asking for help writing her autobiography in English.

She asked Woolf if she could call her “teacher” or tutor”, which some critics find strange as Ling was already a well-established and well-regarded writer in China.

However, autobiography was not a typical form at that time in China, especially for women, while Woolf had spent much of her writing life thinking about how to best combine fact or everyday lives, and fiction in her work. 

San Gottardo is a remote hamlet situated in Italy, on Pennine Alps, and founded in 1255 by the Walser, a population coming from the German-speaking area of the canton of Valais in Switzerland.

In this place, the Walser gave life to a unique culture that survived through centuries thanks to the isolated location of the village, the absence of tourism and, above all, the exclusive use of an Alemannic dialect: the Tittschiu rimellese.