Creativity and Cognition Conference, London.

THE CONTEXT IS SPACE. THIRTY YEARS OF COMPOSING WITH PLACE. 

Opening Keynote Speech, Creativity and Cognition Conference, UAL, London. 14.07.26

 

ABSTRACT

I am rolling through inner city streets in the gloaming, alone. I have no clear idea how to get home but will not use GPS to help me. Take time and be here. Sense the sounds and changing architectures with spacetime whilst moving. The curves and straights of people-made structures with the caress of winds on my skin and vibrations making sounds through my ears whilst skimming clouds shift light and the lights. Clock time disperses and perceptive boundaries dissolve into one shifting experience. I am loathe to use the immersive word. Immersion tends to imply a loss, a desensitisation. This experience is heightened. Some kind of ultimate human ability. It is from this awareness that I make work.

Through thirty years of practice, I have come to understand space not as a backdrop, but as an active medium through which meaning, understanding and learning emerge and evolve.

Since my early solo concerts I have had a fascination with place. With the variety of our experience of it, dependant on our condition, culture, education, time of day, presence or absence of others and more. An understanding of its power to influence, even determine our lives, our experience, our learning. It is this subtle, sublime force that has led me to an enquiry that is still, after all these years, exploring the same thing. A fascination with its articulation.

Yet what does it mean to articulate place? And what can be made from this awareness? I use this term by taking, transforming sound through it, using space as a fundamental compositional tool. The enquiry then is how to make the outcomes available — not to privileged concert audiences at certain times of day or night in bespoke spaces, but to everyone. These questions have occupied me for thirty years.

I begin with the violin, intimate vibrations under chin, physicality in music appreciation and making as a child. Later, audio worlds explode through electronics, samples, late 80s acid house. Listening. A five year adventure with a MIDI violin, then live sound and space processing with audiences, hitting London freelance solo. Playing in the room not on the stage. Community radio, London early noughties, net art, public art, live streaming, DIY, open source, free workshops. Six solo CDs and a growing desire to widen audiences and inspire listening for everyone. How?

 

 

Let’s move sounds, make compositions through space – relocating from the concert hall to the street. First with radio. Air as medium. This medium the material. Radio Cycle. Five years later, The Marvelo Project — precision of movement in space through GPS. Not an app. But independently and collectively built hard and software. A box for your bike. Free of the internet. The streets as scores.

And so bicrophonics is born. Making mobile compositions outside for anyone to hear. Through a selection of works and the sonic bicycles developed to perform them, this keynote explores that enquiry.   Let’s go.