Walking in nature has long been associated with creativity. Yet walking's associated research and artistic practices remain dogged by representationalism. Concomitantly, intersectional concerns of race, gender, and dis/ability determine what kinds of bodies are allowed to walk where (and in this case, the where is Brexit-era Britain). This article attempts to navigate the complexity of these tensions, contextualizing a fiveday walking research-creation project along St. Cuthbert's Way that we called Queer Sonic Cultures. As academics and artists interested in the relationship between walking and composition, our initial propositions are to become affectedas we walked and to create sonic cultures (songs) using whatever affected us along the way. In using research-creation as a research methodology, we understand our artistic compositional practice of co-creating lyrics-melody-harmony-production-arrangement as the research. Unlike some forms of arts-based research that use an artistic form to disseminate research findings, in research-creation the artistic practice is the research and the theory. In the interests of continuing to make this apparent, we shall prefer to describe this contextualizing article as Academic Liner Notes. The Academic Liner Notes begin with a brief description of the location of the walk, contextualized within the tradition of walking and composing in the British landscape, and the use of sound-based methods and literature to represent such landscapes. Following this, we will introduce research-creation as a methodology contextualized within affect studies. We argue that the resultant sonic cultures (nine in total) rather than representing the walk, in fact, more-than-representationally intensify the affective dimensions of the relations we were part of along the way.
In this article, we take up feminist new materialist thought in relation to our music research-creation practice to problematize the white, en/abled, cis-masculine, and Euro-Western methodological orientation often inherited with sound methods. We think with our music research-creation practice to activate a feminist new materialist politics of approach, unsettling sound studies’ inheritances that seek to separate, essentialize, naturalize/neutralize, capture, decontextualize, and re-present. We unsettle these inheritances with six propositions: imbricate, stratify, provoke, inject, contextualize, and more-than-represent. These propositions, and this article’s uptake of research-creation, hold implications for scholars interested in critically enacting sound studies research as well as qualitative and post qualitative research in general.
Research-creation is a way of researching socio-material processes as art practices. Scholars and artists pursuing research-creation often reference Whitehead’s conceptualisation of the ‘proposition’ as a key theoretical device for speculative and creative work. However, this scholarship perhaps downplays the truth/false distinction that is essential to Whitehead’s account of the proposition in favour of the proposition’s potential as a speculative tool. In this paper, I explore the proposition as conceptualized by Whitehead. I think with a series of music theory concepts to theorise how Whitehead’s proposition explores a modality of truth. I then discuss how the concept is taken up in research-creation. I frictionally bring together Whitehead’s articulation of the proposition with that of the early Wittgenstein’s. Finally, I discuss some promises and perils of this approach, with direct relevance to questions around research method and methodology in the social sciences. This article is of relevance to scholars interested in research applications of process philosophy, graduate or post-graduate students interested in an introduction to Whitehead, and research-creation practitioners interested in the proposition.
Sound methods, including soundwalking, are increasingly being used across the humanities and social sciences. Yet, while scholars are drawn to such methods for their potential to disrupt the ocular-centrism of Euro-Western knowledge frames, the interdisciplinary field of sound studies (from which such research draws) has been consistently critiqued for its uncritically white and masculinist epistemological emphasis. In this short essay, I draw together examples of four soundwalking methods: soundwalks, listening walks, phonographic walks, and audio walks. I explicate each, thinking with examples from my ongoing in-school doctoral research project, to suggest that a compositional attention to voice, music, and inaudibility might make audible those populations whose oppression is enacted through their very inaudibility. This essay has implications for educators and walking scholars, as well as for the wider field of sound studies.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.