Symposium Session 5

Abstracts

Lola de la Mata – Quietly Anarchic Self-Noise

Taking the ear as an actively anarchic being, one which asserts presence and holds artifacts – in the case of my left ear – chronic tinnitus, in this talk I will introduce how collaborating with my hearing difference guided new approaches to instrument and music-making through visual and physical engagement of quiet, teetering on the inaudible and imagined sound.

The Tacet Friction Harp, made in collaboration with percussion maker Matt Nolan, is tuned to my spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SOAEs). These were recorded at the Hudspeth Lab of Sensory Neuroscience, Rockefeller University, NY, by the late James Hudspeth and Brian Fabella whose research into the human hearing process incorporates SOEAs and nerve growth tracking. Our exchanges inspired not just the Tacet Harp, but a series of collaborative pieces between members of the laboratory and myself culminating in the conceptual album ‘Oceans on Azimuth’ released May 2024.

While ‘Oceans on Azimuth’ featured sculptural glass, metal and ceramic instruments inspired by forms from the ear, the Tacet Harp sought to move beyond traditional western notation and presentation formats in its gestural and choreographic approach. In addition, choosing to duet with the sounds caught within the stereocilia and emerging from my cochlea as a 14 tone chord, was a decisive reshuffling of perceived and socially accepted hierarchical norms within hearing culture. Often mistaken as producing an electronic sound, the tacet harp is entirely acoustic. The aim is not to endure its sound but to participate and enhance the experience by tilting the head off-axis, a journey guided by the ears. Its perceived directness and loudness seems to defy its sometimes dizzying effects, exposing the non-linearity of the ear and leading to auditory illusions or ‘ear tones’, a term coined by Maryanne Amacher describing psychoacoustic phenomena related to difference and combination tones.

Exploring with tactility its individual components including but not limited to, its tuned aluminium rods, opens up space for free play. One that can be solitary (Barbican 12/25), or as a duet with a dancer (FAT OUT Fest11/25). While the performance contexts will undoubtedly expand, I will experiment further with an exhibition format at Sonorities Festival 2026, where the harp will take the form of a sculpture installation open to audience interaction.

In addition to vibrating air, my practice approaches hearing and listening through visual and tactile means without diverging from surround experiences or assembly. Approaching difference laterally, rooted in disability and aural diversity studies, I propose that we choose to devise for audiences beyond the pre-conceived ‘normal listener’ with ‘perfect’ hearing, who I would argue does not exist, in an effort to move toward a taboo-less, more accessible human listening.

Eric Lewis – You Stepped Out of a Dream:  Imagining Imagining Futures–Jeanne Lee and the Politics of the Possible

To imagine the future we need to be able to imagine that things can be other than they are. In this paper I will explore the ways in which Jeanne Lee’s vocal practices and performances not only engage with the rich Black tradition of using the arts to explore the possible and free/renew the mind, but how at a personal level they have helped me imagine possible futures, and the role I might play in either helping bring them about, or prevent their actualization. I will focus on five performances and engage in a personal phenomenology of listening to describe ways in which these songs have broadened the horizons of the possible for me— allowing me to imagine new and better futures.

The songs I will engage with are:
You Stepped Out of a Dream
Leoni Antoniette
O Western Wind
Blasé
Angel Child

Kevin McNeilly – Flow, Fissure, Mesh: Improvising Poetics

This brief paper begins to outline a poetics of improvising—that is, a tentative theoretical grammar for multimodal improvised artforms—at the shifting intersections of noun and verb, of description and enactment, of saying and making, of praxis and poiesis. By offering readings—close listenings—of a handful of textual-musical examples from the poet Jayne Cortez’s 1974 album Celebrations and Solitudes (Strata-East ‎LP, SES-7421), a suite of her spoken poems accompanied by bassist Richard Davis, I’ll start to map out valences of extemporaneous accompaniment in a triptych of key tropes: flow, fissure, mesh. Drawing on critical-creative writing by Fred Moten, Fumi Okiji, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I’ll lay the groundwork for a possible approach to the temporalities—the extemporaneities—opened up in the interstices—the chiasmic spaces—between expressive, convergent, and divergent lines of flight.

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