Part 2

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

My work is usually reliant on projects ahead. At the moment, I have been biking every day for 3 weeks to a studio where I am in the final stages of composing and mixing a multi-channel installation with visuals. But I have also used the time for practicing for performance within the same installation, proofreading an upcoming paper and teaching.

But usually, if not on the road, I work from my home studio where I incorporate stretching after breakfast and then practice, compose and write, accompanied by good doses of espresso.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I like to turn this on its head. There are always some agencies at play, be they human, biotic or abiotic that challenge you or, as Alan Pickering stated, invite you into ‘dances of agency’.

For example, a space can inform you of its acoustics through reverberations and what it allows in terms of frequencies. And then there is this magic that one’s cognition is ‘nested’ across time and space. So, what is happening, as I work through listening, alone, is that I am constantly referring to a myriad of entities, be it other musicians, relation to audience in space, the acoustics of a space, movement of ocean streams, sounds of a city.

Of course, I relish in those moments when humans gather for a project and the wildly complex dance begins, between humans, technologies and whatever other entities are at hand.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

I often do work on a conceptual level, but it can take me into wildly different directions as I attune through various mediations. At its heart is perhaps a wish to create an augmented way of sensing the world.

As for music’s role in society then, it can have so many functions dependent on context. I usually include sound art in my thinking, and it can enhance awareness of political challenges such as climate breakdown. Sonic knowledge can also contribute to the redesigning of our urban environments. And intercultural collaborations do have a large role to play as we forge ahead in this world, that certainly needs us to wake up and listen to the other.

In fact, I believe that listening, in its many forms, should be part of the curriculum in elementary schools.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

You are asking a person that has never in her life used a song to heal a breakup (there was in fact a specific ‘moment’ when I found out that some of my friends used music in such a way). Rather music gets me to embrace vibrations and frequencies (and of course form), timbre, time, material, atmosphere and space etc. But through these perspectives, it may evoke feelings or thoughts some of which we link to such personal experiences.

But the abstractness of music asks me to be on the side of complexity. Felicia Konrad, one of my collaborators described it as she analysed her improvisation over the word ‘skal’ (meaning shell in Swedish) in one of my works in such a way that she ‘stayed with’ the sensorial feelings that it evoked, that she was in-between the sound and the word and its meaning. Add to that, that she often experiences sound sculpturally, and through such experience, the thickness of sensing just expands.

This being written, ecological sound art can certainly send me into environments which demand me to think about things that link to the above-mentioned topics. For example, the destruction of a 920-million-year-old granite and the utilitarian policies linked to the act.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

The division between different forms of knowing have shifted over time and across cultures. Therefore, the possibilities for thinking and doing across these boundaries are endless.

The connection between computers and music making is one example, creative AI and machine learning in music included. Human-geography has been employed together with performing arts to further cultivate an understanding of deep time. Social science, such as anthropology, has been a valuable tool in terms of practice-led research as has data collection and analysis been at the heart of gestural driven research in music.

These very same tools can in return come to work as artistic methods.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

There is a wonderful mutuality to this in that each of those tasks requires material engagement and technical skills. But the difference is perhaps best explained in that actions are ‘situated’.

It was Lucy Suchman that came up with the term ‘situated actions’ as she looked at interaction between humans and copy machines at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, through which she showed that human action springs from dynamic interactions with material and social worlds. In fact, it led her to refute some of the prevailing theories of the time around artificial intelligence that saw the human mind in computational terms instead of being embodied and situated.

And so I think that through many of my previous replies, given the situatedness of my work, it is safe to say that I would not have gotten to that particular sense-making through espresso brewing.

This being written, I can of course create a performance or a piece with my espresso maker and its beans. The act of giving an object instrumental agency is in fact inherent to many people’s experimental approach to music. Although that is a different story …

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

This goes back to the complexity of hearing and listening, its multimodal state, that links to the kinaesthetic, perceptive and affective system, which are embedded in the world. So as sound enters a body, multitude of processes are triggered that can stretch wide and far due to our nested cognition.

So, it is perhaps not strange from a phenomenological perspective that a sonic object, if listened to repeatedly as Pierre Schaeffer showed, does not manifest itself the same way to a single listener, or a group of listeners.