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The Garden of Adumbrations: Reimagining environmental composition1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2012

Robin Parmar
Robin Parmar*
Affiliation:
13 Richmond Park, Corbally, Limerick, IRELAND
*
E-mail: robin@robinparmar.com
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Abstract

R. Murray Schafer's soundscape, predicated on a schizophonic engagement with sound, and Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète, based on an acousmatic relationship, have for some time been the dominant approaches for those who wish to compose with sounds sourced from the environment. Following Brian Kane and Timothy Morton, this paper critiques the ideologies behind these systems, instead suggesting an approach that uses Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome as a generative metaphor. The Garden of Adumbrations, a multi-channel electroacoustic piece, is used to illustrate several compositional possibilities: the tracing of place through subjectivity, the machinic phylum as emergent intelligence, the interplay between Katharine Norman's self-intended and composer-intended listening, and the encouragement of accidents of listening. Also discussed are Antonin Artaud's Body without Organs, conceptions of Nature and the garden, and Luc Ferrari's Presque rien ou le lever du jour au bord de la mer. The goal is to develop an integrated and sustainable model of sonic practice that addresses the acousmatic while supporting an embedded and non-hierarchical relationship with our ecological milieu.

Type
Articles
Information
Organised Sound , Volume 17 , Special Issue 3: Sound, Listening and Place II , December 2012 , pp. 202 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

1

I wish to thank The Centre for Computational Musicology and Computer Music at the University of Limerick, whose resources I used in the development of The Garden of Adumbrations. Thanks to Christopher Keep for valuable suggestions as this paper evolved and also to my anonymous reviewers.

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