Sonic Objects

Workshop

This sonic workshop encourages participants to reflect upon transdisciplinarity, and associated 'disciplines-as-ecosystems', and to do so through improvisation experiences blended with structured reflections. The sonic soundscapes, created through experimentation in the workshop, the flow of the sound processing, and the interaction of the participants all present opportunities to realize deeper understandings about creative practice and participants' own conditioned personal responses or approaches.

The session can raise a certain amount of unease and uncertainty as practitioners are presented with an unfamiliar creative canvas. While possibly a direct result of complexity in action – participants engage with new knowledge that may overlap with old, new practices challenging old approaches, new ideas struggling to harmonize with well-crafted plans and new perspectives on other disciplinary approaches. The workshop effectively places practitioners at the edge of their comfort zone, overlapping new and unfamiliar areas, aware of the challenge of this newness, and only vaguely sensing their influence over this space. These edges allow participants to hold up a mirror to how their own practice(s) collide, agitate and/or synthesise when called on to experiment and improvise with different practitioners.

The workshop process also encourages participants to express variation in their experience of creating an abstract 'object', one that is produced through the interaction of analogue inputs and digital and analogue processors. This is an ephemeral, subjective and multi-layered abstraction that lacks visual presence, yet can fill a space. Along with the methodology and timeline involved this may develop a level of personal discomfort and prompt participants to act out a conditioned response, or they may find that the workshop perimeters allow them to adopt an atypical approach and grapple more effectively with these intangible qualities and become more comfortable with its ambiguity. Whatever the emergent outcome, the workshop is designed to surface variation in experience in order to "bridg[e] differences across age, race, culture, language, borders" (whether disciplinary or transdisciplinary).

Timetable

Participants will be invited to immerse fully in the process of sound making. The session will be setup with some microphones and audio processors that then feed into speakers. The microphones capture inputs, and the processors help to modify and build on this signal. The participants will be invited to contribute source audio and control the modulation and processing of the sound created. We will then pause this sonic space to reflect upon the process and how it relates to the theme being considered. These observations and discussions will touch upon emerging themes and personal responses. They offer a way to explore threshold concepts or practices (Meyer and Land, 2003; 2006) they feel they may have begun to traverse or assimilate. The workshops are flexible and can bend and yield to address emerging themes that become more prescient, the emphasis being co-created through the workshop process.

Participants are invited to use the audio processors with minimal demonstration and contextualisation at first. After an improvised audio piece has been created the group will be asked to respond to what has just happened, then discuss this in a group, looking at emerging themes, emotional responses, involvement and interaction. It is usual to ask the group if they would like a little more explanation about the function of the equipment being used, and if so at this point we may demonstrate the working of the processors and give a little information about how each device works and its effect on any sound. After this explanation the group would then begin a second improvised sonic collaboration, after which we would ask them to reflect upon the same ideas. It is usually at this point that we may introduce the theme of the workshop (e.g. transdiscplinarity, creative processes, relationship to individual practice), introduce any theoretical context in relation to these themes, and get participants to discuss this in relation to the workshop. This means that empirical and experiential experience informs the participant's assimilation or questioning of this new knowledge.

Interaction

This is a fully interactive session where we will be acting as facilitators, co-producers and collaborators, and the audience will be able to co-produce, collaborate and reflect actively through the activity of the workshop. Even if somebody just lurks or sits at the periphery of the workshop they can still have valid input about the process or about their own response to being placed in the 'disorientating dilemma' noted in our abstract. This is an inclusive workshop so positive and dissenting voices are given the respectful space to air and explore these views, with a focus on balanced contribution all round.

We will also be placing ourselves at a level of risk as each workshop relies on a lot of technical setup and needs to be facilitated sensitive to the participants' needs. This kinship with the participants creates a flatter hierarchy as we are seen to experience the same dilemma that the other participants do.

Takeaway

The takeaways for the participants will be:  Considering the value of metaphoric experiential workshops to explore aspects of creative practice, ideation and habituated behaviours.  Having space to reflect the views and experiences of other participants and the commonalities and differences arising from the 'edges' of disciplinary practices    Using a methodology that puts the facilitators into a similar space of uncertainty, trepidation or excitement (or a mix of all of these), and how this invites participation without judgement. 

Outcomes

Feed into research around this practice, critique the processes and practices, seek refinement or opening up of the methodologies. 

Abstract

This experiential workshop will involve participants in creating short soundscapes using a range of analogue and digital audio equipment. Improvisation experiences will form an initial 'disorienting dilemma' (Mezirow, 1991), followed by discussion and knowledge exchange around the theme of transdisciplinary pedagogies and transformative learning. The workshop connects to the conference theme of 'Edge Effects' - in this case approaches associated with inter-, multi-, trans-, disciplinarity teaching and practice and from analogue to digital and back.

We will be exploring:

a) how shared experience can be viewed through a range of discipline and subject lenses
b) how commonalities and contentions between making processes in arts practices and sound improvisation can inform understandings of transdisciplinarity
c) how support for learning, in its broadest sense, is enriched when it involves the overlaps and edges of practice and experience; where boundaries are pushed and perspectives change.
d) how the shift between analogue and digital in a hand's on yet ephemeral experience helps to model the complex interface between technologies, practices and perspectives that the participants are drawing parallels with.

This workshop design builds on the 'Exploring flow through sonic objects' series of workshops run for students by UAL-wide Academic Support since early 2017. Students attending these workshops have mostly been visual-based practitioners from diverse discipline or subject areas, and have noted that working with sound has been beneficial regardless of originating discipline: comments include that it created a 'conducive mental space' and '[the workshop] has genuinely helped me with moving my current project forward, even though I am focussing on moving image'. No experience of sound design or music-making is necessary.

References

Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative dimensions of adult learning. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.