Fine Arts and Music Collected Works - Research Publications

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Trauma is...

Rose, S ( 2021)

This is a fixed media work with sound and image composed using the Wave (Genki Instruments 2019). It was germinated through collaboration work with Little Songs of the Mutilated's April 2021 composition game based on Exquisite Corpse (Tanguy et al. 1925). I took from my finished and unfinished audio generated during the week’s contributions. Self-prompts centred on the phenomenology of trauma and exploring embodied experiences through definitions, stimuli (bushfires and other natural disasters), motivations for immortalising horrific moments in media and art of any kind, and how speech alters throughout the duration of an experience. Movements in this piece explored my soma-sensibilities as pertaining to 'flow' (Csikszentmihalyi 2009). Flow remains a sporadic occurrence; though it was fully present in 'First, there was nothing, then it exploded' (Rose 2020).
Crumble

Rose, S ( 2021)

This piece captures the mind splitting apart in attempts to reconcile abuse spiritually and intellectually. The overwhelming anxiety and self-blame give the impression of swimming through memories and fragments of the brain, unable to find a solid footing to concentrate. Some lines are emotionally charged; others intellectualise the experience to neutralise the emotional content. A final layer is taken from a Somatic Experiencing exercise, a trauma-informed therapy developed by Peter Levine. This text is a reconciliation and reaffirming text to reintegrate and own body, mind, and space for the damaged person. The text works through the different states and layers of thought that can arise following sexual trauma. This work was inspired by Laetitia Sonami’s Dreams of Control, Dreams of Chaos (2014) keynote presentation at NIME2014.
Drowning in the Weight of Your Expectations

Rose, S ( 2021)

This is a fixed audiovisual piece which explores the experience of grow-ing up “girl”. The societal pressures and expectations to be this and do that, as contradictions to societies expectations of girls and women. This work was created using gestural controllers to manipulate audio samples and live recordings. The piece begins with low frequencies created to mimic whales and clarinet is altered to mimic bird song. These progress over time to become field recording samples of real birdsong. There is a distant group of female singers singing “Tōhjvo”. The spoken word describes the frustrations growing up female through childhood, adolescence, and into the adult experience in male-dominated professional and academic environments. These experiences are additionally reflected in the private, personal lives of women as everyday sexism. The constant pressure to perform, to be “authentically” and “naturally” feminine – the bearers and organisers of life, with our intellectual contributions to society often dismissed and criticism of the system to be demanding, and “too much”. This work uses sample banks generated by four female or non-binary artists (Sage Pbbbt, Carol Robinson, Zineb Soulaimani, and Laryssa Kim) and was written in collaboration with the Fair_Play and Tsuku Boshi. Self-generated audio was also used in this work. I used two hand-based gestural control systems to manipulate all audio for this piece. The first was GLVD (Rose 2020), and the second was Wave (Genki Instruments 2019). Separate takes were recorded manipulating audio samples in isolation and pairs. The spoken text was effected using GLVD. The video shows an unexpressive woman slowly painting their face white while staring directly into the camera. The image ghosts as black eyes mirror the back-ground. A prismatic effect gradually becomes prominent over time. These references societies expectations of feminine presentation, plastering over issues rather than making the effort to larger changes, and the role that media structures perform in maintaining the status quo.
Feed the Machine

Rose, S ( 2021)

This work was written in collaboration with LSotM. This was a mass collaboration where all project participants were asked to submit 5-second samples for anyone (in the group) to use as sampling material. I used the following anonymous samples: “Feathered Industrial”, “Rhythmic breastfeeding Loop”, “Drums Hits for Dicing”, “SPACELOOP 2021”, “Banjo Glide”, “slow shower drone”, “Big Skip Door”, “Wavy Grass Sound”, “5 sec sound (plane)”, “Playing a Seesaw”, “Gold Pearls Brigid Burke”, “Vocal bird sounds”, and “Reverbed vocal sample” (13 total). I also used my contribution, “MassLSotM2021 sslllllllrrrrwwp”. I clipped around 2 seconds from each sample. The intro section is a wall of noise containing all sounds used in their entirety before any manipulation. This piece is a hard-pop-electronic work, edging onto a retro hip-hop feel in the drums and percussion. It leans heavily towards experimental music through these more contemporary genres. The instruments and some vocal lines and effects were built from the samples provided. Samples were gesturally and non-gesturally manipulated in various ways, including time stretching and pitch shifting. The lyrics explore the constant pressure in modern times to feed the content beasts (Id Est, traditional media companies and social media).
Ode to My Frayed Nerves

Rose, S ( 2021)

Ode to My Frayed Nerves is a composition that metaphorically represents the sensations that occur in my left hand due to a physical trauma. I have nerve damage in my left hand on the outer side of my palm and fifth digit because of a catastrophic slip with a utility knife while working. When the area is touched, electrical signals fire in my hand in places where I am not being touched. If the touch is unexpected, I go momentarily blind, in that I can’t concentrate on what I see with my eyes I can only “see” the sensation. To reflect the current physical situation and a simplified version of the journey from normal functioning to not, the vocal line builds through looping outward-to-inward phonation (including overtones, undertones, and multiphonics), stacking chromatically as a filter gradually exposes audible frequencies over time. As the filter opens past 10,000Hz, the audio quality is degraded through fuzz and grain delay effects which become a fuzzy noise, like dialling into television static. The piece uses the technologically mediated female voice, the singer uses extended vocal techniques. Please listen to this piece with headphones for the best experience.
Breathing I

Rose, S ( 2022)

Breathing I explores panic by manipulating live and sampled breath. It uses asymmetrical movement, derived from a children’s game melded with a therapeutic parallel, Rub-your-head-and-pat-your-belly, in that the arms control sounds in the different axis of movement. There is one live voice, one granularised breath, and one breath in a self-built tape scrub Max-for-Live plugin. The left arm scrubs audio horizontally, and the right arm scrubs vertically to mimic the task. The projections are torus meshes expanded and contracted according to the volume or scrub position of the breaths (for the two samples). Gesture functions as grounding through the intense concentration on being in the present and managing the threads of similar movement with the sound. The game is to try to control all three aspects of concentration and control through rhythmic, sound density, and timbre changes to illustrate waves of panic.
CALM

Rose, S ( 2022)

Yoga is a movement practice often recommended to manage trauma and anxiety symptoms due to the focus on one’s body and the generally meditative nature of the practice. However, in cases of sexual trauma, yoga may yield the opposite of the desired results when not used in a trauma-sensitive context. This is because the individual tries to focus on the body where they do not feel safe and encounter unresolved trauma. Thus, instead of a grounding effect, the individual hears the mental and physical pain they have endured repeating itself in the present. To reflect this, “stillness” audio material is routed to scream-like and abrasive sounds, while “movement” audio quiets the listener’s internal landscape. This contradiction is the impetus of this work.
Enough

Rose, S ( 2022)

Enough describes the ongoing burden of continuing to speak out for basic rights as women because our neoliberal society says one thing (sure, you can be equal) and performs the other (but we will continue to exploit and diminish you). It is the fatigue of existence while attempting to remain resolute and inwardly despairing. More pertinently, it is about surviving and persisting through repeated sexual abuse and harassment from multiple perpetrators. The gestures were adapted from conducting gestures . The right-hand advances the choir harmony, and the left controls the choir's position, spatialisation, and amplitude. In this, I reference Elena Jessop’s work with VAMP (2009). This piece is technically challenging to perform vocally. Therefore, gesture routing needed to be simple to make the work performable. I used choir conducting gestures as a nod to the unseen chorus of other victim-survivors and the aesthetic motivation of the piece. Thus, I conduct a vocoder-choir proxy, speaking for people that have experienced multiple occurrences of sexual violence. Additionally, this work has similarities to Imogen Heap’s song Hide and Seek (2005), which uses a harmoniser to synthesise the voice to create accompaniment and, later in the song, layers of voice.
New Hair/New Me (NH/NM)

Rose, S ( 2022)

This work describes the phenomenon of changing your body to exert control of self-following trauma. I control the effects on live voice and MIDI hand claps; all other music is pre-determined. The vocal effects alter reverb, delay, grain delay, pitch, distortion, playback, and Stutter Edit 2 (iZotope Inc and Transeau 2020). The gestures are mostly derived from two-handed gestures that can be used as meta-diegetic for the text. For example, the single finger point “drum hit” is a finger tutting, and when used with the left open palm in an upward direction, the roll controls grain delay (“thinking face”), “The bird” and the “two-handed bird” (so-called rude gestures) precipitate the use of distortion and Stutter Edit. Gesture selection was a marriage of technical, device, bodily, and thematic constraints in almost all works. The use of vulgar gestures takes from artists such as P!nk, who discuss and own their trauma in pop music and the punk-leaning aesthetics and actions that accompany the counter-culture presentation styles.
Placeholder

Rose, S ( 2022)

This piece describes dissociation and uses an all-looping, all-vocal approach from my established contemporary practice augmented by granular synthesis. The work aims to exhibit dissociation, which is a disconnect from reality; this song deconstructs the live voice to smear intelligibility. Dissociation often occurs when a person becomes too overwhelmed, and the brain tries to split from the present to preserve itself (Gleiser 2003; Vesuna et al. 2020). Fist gestures “pick up” the audio to be manipulated and apply audio effects and position in the multi-channel surround audio set-up. The harmony sets up a stable, though glassy and ambiguous bed for the melody which is granularised and separated from the live, acoustically heard voice.

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