Symposium Session 4

Abstracts

Matías Homar & Angela López – Enactive Composition: Improvising Futures Through Adaptable Ecosystems

Our talk explores how embodied, enactive approaches to composition, across visual, sound, and movement, open pathways for inclusive, responsive creative systems. We present our work with self-developed interactive devices as tools for spontaneous, adaptive artistic engagement.

We frame improvisation as an embodied practice emerging from a variable ecosystem of interactions. These ecosystems are shaped by movement, sensory feedback, and environmental context, enabling creative responses to unpredictable conditions. Error and glitch are not failures but emerging tools, moments that unsettle stability, open new directions, and give discursivity to improvisation, revealing it as a process of continual adaptation rather than resolution.

We share insights from working with diverse communities, including deaf participants, dancers, musicians, people with mobility impairments, and those with mental health challenges.

We propose that improvisation, understood as a dynamic, enactive ecosystem, emerges most vividly when mediated by adaptable, inclusive technologies, embracing unpredictability, error, and rupture as fertile grounds for creative autonomy, social engagement, and adaptive futures.

Ed Williams – Decomposition: Queering Time and Timbre

For the Sonorities Festival 2026, I present my artistic research on the concept of decomposition as an experimental practice that proposes a historically- and radically-informed approach to improvisation.

Drawing on late medieval improvised polyphony, 21st century noise improvisation, performance art and queer phenomenology, I propose decomposition as one possible example of how we may learn to improvise through a catastrophic future together by giving our artistic ancestors a proper burial.

I will present extracts of pieces that demonstrate different facets of what a decomposition could be, through ensemble, duo and solo performances. In these pieces, musicians treat early modern repertoire from composers such as Frescobaldi, Rameau and JS Bach like decaying organic matter, collaboratively weaving an improvised tissue of timbres, intervals and silences that emerge from the diffraction, repetition and savoring of the original scores’ notes. Accompanied by these video and audio extracts, I will explicate how the string figures at play illuminate mutual resonances between medieval contrapunto alla mente, the contemporary performance tool “Real-Time Composition”, 16th-century concepts of microtonality, and trans*feminist concepts of compost, grieving and “queer time”.

Isabel Bredenbröker & Adam Pultz Melbye – Improvising futures between ethnography and sonic practice

What can ethnographical and sonic methodologies teach us about improvisation as a process of envisioning futures via speculative relations? We (anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker and sound artist and musician Adam Pultz) will unpack how improvisation was an essential component in the production of the sound installation Queer Sonic Fingerprint (QSF). QSF is a multichannel sound installation based on impulse response recordings of artefacts in ethnographic collections, as well as location recordings from museums and interviews with intelocutors (such as curators). Many of these collections and institutions have difficult histories, stemming from colonial contexts.

How does one envision and speculate about possible futures around these collections? During the research, production and exhibition of QSF, we found ourselves navigating several phenomena: the confounding rules and red tape of collection spaces, the complex social, spiritual, and political realities of ethnographic collections, the sonic and digital properties of impulse responses and other acoustic phenomena, as well as audiences of different backgorunds, aesthetics, and interests. With challenges and possibilities emerging in real time, we often found ourselves relying on improvisatory skills aquired through years of ethnographic field work and musicking.

Delivered in collaboration with IF 2026, with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada