Active Imaginative Reading … and Listening

reading can be a multisensory experience, an active imaginative one during which we synthesize multidimensional, endogenous environments in which memory tracings form and are inscribed, making personal times with histories, nows and futures. Plentiful invitations for rich explorations await the reader of this LMJ issue. And, profoundly so, this one challenges us to listen hard—listen to sounds, yes, and also listen to challenging ideas and points of view. As we confront the multilayered forces of change in our current environments, open imaginative reading and listening become important sources of hope and guidance for actions directed at positive evolution.

We can imagine ourselves taking on the listening roles of Amazon creatures in Luca Forcucci's field recordings. Notably, Forcucci's process includes allowing time for nature to absorb human presence in its midst before recording and invokes deep listening as a fundamental skill. In addition to hearing these captured soundscapes, imagine if we could develop the listening skills of the animals making those sounds while they adapt to the changing forces in their environments. Might this help us understand our own environments better and address the sound pollution surrounding us that dampens our hearing? From this perspective, Forcucci also heightens our awareness of how presentation spaces interact with music creation.

The universe of gesture, wherein the origins of language might lie, and where music and dance are undifferentiated and inseparable, is brought to light in Daniel Portelli's investigations of gestural line and shape in multimodal compositional practice. Portelli explores the transformation of these shapes and how to record and present them as means for generating meaning in multimodal scores.

Marco Buongiorno Nardelli's work on generalized networks is one from which the imagination can spring. This article provides an excellent tutorial on network theory, using commonly understood musical materials. The topic of networks and networking is one of enormous breadth and importance today. It is easy to imagine how a huge range of differentiated entities in perception and conception can be placed at the nodes of such networks in generalized spaces. The tools that may emerge from this realm of music theory can be generalized and applied to endlessly expanding arrays of artistic interactions and human understandings.

Though the connections may not be overtly explicit, I am intrigued to speculate on subjects emerging in three papers that involve the dichotomous meanings of subjective and objective, endogenous and exogenous, conceptual and perceptual, sensory and cognitive, continuous and discrete, and in-time versus outside-time. Nora Engebretsen's paper brings a new approach to timbre in musical analysis that acknowledges both its perceptual and acoustical bases as fundamental. Engebretsen doesn't directly address the idea of semantics in music but does discuss the conveyance of musical meaning through timbre. This work brings new insights to ways of thinking about timbre and how we internalize its values, beyond scalable acoustic parameters. The notion of perceptual scaling is also forefront in Evelyn Ficarra's work on time scaling. Through the use of time-lapse techniques—common in visual media, less common in composition, somewhat more known in sound art—they investigate large-scale manipulations of temporal material and how they may be perceived and experienced. A third article by Mark Reybrouck suggests putting all this under a lens of musical experience in a process of ongoing knowledge construction.

Several articles concentrate on offering useful new tools. One is a low-cost beat-making, loop-sequencing instrument built with an easy-to-use form factor developed by Andrew R. Brown and John R. Ferguson. (I had the pleasure of trying out this device recently.) Michael Rhoades's work on holography and holophony brings new techniques to the rapidly evolving field of multidimensional sound diffusion, resonant holophons in multimedia spaces. Rita Torres offers new approaches to composing with resonant guitar multiphonics. Claudio Panariello's adaptive sound arrays that can react to environmental perturbations, Michael McKnight's highly developed Extended Reality (XR) techniques for telling stories to multiple listeners and Taylor Brook's software for cocomposing all add to our collective toolkit, enhancing the agency of now all-important developments in collaborative music and multi-arts realizations. Finally, Neal...