Theoretical Work, Essays
Sonic Microscopy: A Collective Performance - 2024
[10min excerpt, contact for full duration]
Exhibited at UdK’s 2024 Rundgang Festival and at Sounds About Gallery, Berlin
Sonic discoveries are improvised through the amplification and modulation of quiet objects including tin, glass, stones, water, and voice. This collaboration draws inspiration from Annette Krebs’ Live Electronics class at UdK Berlin. Performers: Thomas Lea Clarke, Sydney Christensen, Jeremy Segal, Angelos Tassopoulos, Nicole Luján and Oda Egjar Starheim.
The Great Salt Lake - field recordings, sound design, video + audio-paper - 2024
[silent video excerpt, contact for full viewing]
Exhibited at UdK’s 2024 Rundgang Festival
Site-specific field recordings from Utah’s Great Salt Lake accompanied by original compositions. The audio-visual piece doubles as an audio-paper, with research focused on the shrinking water level and the drastic implications that will come as a result.
M:Memory - field recordings, sound design - 2023
Memory is fleeting. Memory diminishes with time, memories fade.
An unexpected loss of life changes one’s relationship with memory and time entirely- it largely shifts priorities and brings a draw to documentation. Upon a visit from my mom to Berlin, I decided to make Memory tangible by creating this field recording piece during our visit through Berlin and to Prague.
Lilli & Camille - sound design, score, mixing - 2023
[excerpt, contact for full viewing]
Field recordings, original Foley, and original score, mixed, mastered for claymation short-film created by Iris Birke.
SCRIPTS - Project PALS— Public Attitudes towards the Liberal Scripts - sound design, score, voice actor - 2023
Voice actor, sound design, original score, mixing for a social theory research project conducted through UdK
Listening To Silent Earth: Non-Utilitarian Listening - 2024
Abstract: When artists, researchers, and scientists interact with a space, an ethical grey area emerges, highlighting the tension between human interaction and natural landscapes. The arms of the grey area reach further when specifically considering sound artists and field recorders whose work is observed base on the clarity of the sound, the innovation of a piece, the acoustic capture of a setting or tone, and so forth. Furthermore, what kind of interaction and modulation is appropriate?
This paper focuses on the interaction of the silent Earth: regions that are largely untouched by acoustic symphonies such as wildlife, flowing water, and urban noise. These regions tend to be expansive and remote, areas such as ice fields, salt flats, and dry deserts. If the purpose as sound artists and field recorders is to convey sonic data, how can these spaces be captured and appropriately represented if the sonic spectrum is nearly void of “interesting” events? This is an exploration advocating for a readjustment from colonial-capital epistemologies and Anglo-European language to an indigenous approach to our relationship with the silent Earth.
Contact for full 1-10 page essay
Sound and Capitalism: Connection and Relation to the Auditory Sense in an Era of Monetized Industry – On Geopolitics - 2023
Abstract: This research calls for awareness of capitalism’s impact in the department of sound studies. With a vast number of angles to consider, the following research uses the lens of geopolitics to analyze the cause and effect of capitalism. Anja Kanngieser considers five propositions of geopolitics: inequality, imperceptibility, translation, commons, and the future, which have produced this Anthropocene moment. This paper argues that through these propositions, one can recognize concerns emanating from capitalism, ways to challenge the implications capitalism has provoked across the globe, and how this influences the field of sound. This research brings to light the setbacks and barriers capitalism has brought to the subject of sound studies and its relative fields by using geopolitics as the lens.
Contact for full 1-7 page essay
Public space: Distinctions and connections between natural spaces and industrial zones - 2023
Abstract: This paper demonstrates the differences and similarities between the modernized world and the natural. The characteristics of ‘industrial zones’ (also referenced as ‘modernized zones’) are investigated, while areas that are seemingly untouched from modernization are explored, these areas referenced as ‘natural areas’. The rarity and convolution of the latter in the twenty-first century is analyzed. The cause and effect between the two polarities is investigated. Within the scope of modernized areas, differences and similarities between urban and rural areas is looked at to better explore the spectrum of industrialization and modernization’s spectrum. The paper takes into account the relationship between both industrial and natural land, gathers research from anthropological and social studies, and investigates the sonic outcomes.
Contact for full 1-9 page essay
Carrier Bag - Audio-Paper - 2022
Abstract: Ursula K Le Guin’s 1986 piece explores Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag Theory by applying it to trends of fiction and novels. In the study conducted here, The Carrier Bag Theory is explained while broadening Le Guin’s approach to the basis of evolution—the actual trajectory of human life differs greatly from what The Carrier Bag approach would’ve otherwise emphasized. This research looks at the model of evolution that is opposite to The Carrier Bag Theory (what is called here Powerful Hero)—what its outcomes are and will be. The research explains how The Carrier Bag Theory is synonymous to kinship and “rewilding”, a term this paper will define and explore. Current climate reports are considered. At large, this research compares and contrasts two courses of human life and behavior: the Powerful Hero and The Carrier Bag “kinship” model.
This body of work is accompanied by an audio-paper which narrates portions of this research and speculates what each of the two trajectory’s futurescapes may sound like.
Contact for the audio-paper audio file