Canadá
20 de mayo al 2 de junio del 2024
Kristian North (he/him) is a musician and composer who lives and works in Tio’tia:ke/Montréal. Recent works include multichannel soundscape compositions, audio/visual performances, digital ecosystems, and generative music. His practice is oriented toward both music and digital arts, with a concentration on multimedia and transdisciplinary research-creation. Additionally, he has an extensive background writing, recording, and touring original music throughout North America and Europe, both as a solo artist and in bands since ~2003. This experience in the music industry informs his compositional practice that values chance, live performance, and collaboration. He is currently pursuing his MA at Concordia University.
Description of the residency
My research-creation project explores the concept of a haptic aurality in soundscape composition, an aesthetic and perceptual model derived from visual art theory and phenomenology that extends the haptic beyond its common association to vibroacoustic phenomena in the sonic arts, orienting research towards psychoacoustics, haptic technology development and applications, and neuroscience. The soundscape composer's expression of haptic experience is significant as a justification for their manipulation of environmental recordings, a process which, performed arbitrarily, risks obscuring context and problematising the composition’s claim as soundscape. In creating justifications for invasive acts of signal processing that might otherwise be seen as obfuscating context, the soundscape composer simultaneously creates novel engagements between soundscape composition and acousmatic practice. In my own compositional practice, I extend the traditional notions of soundscape composition to include interactive environments, transdisciplinary performance, multimedia, and soundless ‘music’ for instance. By focusing on transformed soundscape composition, the work is centred in Don Ihde’s notion of a post-phenomenology that distances itself from phenomenology’s naturalism to consider the ‘translational capacity’ of technologies that allow humans to relate to aspects of their environment beyond the limits of their perceptual field and develop new philosophies from these augmented experiences. I hope that this project can contribute towards strengthening our relationship with our environment, aligning its ambitions with the activism and pedagogical approaches of acoustic ecology.
