Whilst living in society there is violence in being apart, and even more so in pandemic circumstances. Avoiding others through fear of contamination is a particularly noxious way to stand apart, since it compounds two equally destructive movements: containing oneself and excluding others. As a sound artist, my own form of resistance was to try and find ways of insulating against isolation, by creating private listening experiences and making them available publicly. This was achieved collaboratively, working in groups through online platforms, and using binaural sound-capture and design, and GPS-tagged audiowalks through geo-locating platforms such as Echoes. Through these, one can still share an intimate embodied dramaturgy, experiencing through another body’s aurally instigated kinesthesia, moving and listening “together” while apart. This paper is a meditation on how the pandemic has shaped our circumstances and it discusses the potential of the audiowalk, as process as well as outcome, in creating possibilities for shared experiencing in times of isolation.

Keywords: embodied listening, public space, relationality, permeability, audiowalk

This article examines the performance of quarantine clapping in New York City during the height and wane of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. I use the concepts of novel and hybrid ecosystems to frame quarantine clapping events, as a way to interrogate notions of normalcy, novelty, permanence and change as experienced in New York City during quarantine. This cross-disciplinary approach is also an attempt to contextualise quarantine clapping within multiple registers — the pandemic, the climate crisis, and ongoing socio-cultural moves toward justice.

Keywords: clapping; ecosystem; novel; hybrid; COVID-19; New York City; conservation;

Cashmere Radio is a not-for-profit community radio station based in Lichtenberg, Berlin. The ambition of the station is to preserve and further radio and broadcasting practices by playing with the plasticity and malleability of the medium. This is the community’s collective diary, a conversation of diverse situated knowledges and experiences of negotiating extraordinary circumstances in physical isolation while continuing work within a community of broadcasters. We have asked community members to share (anonymously, if they so wish) how their practice has changed technically, conceptually, or psychologically over the past several months. These responses have been given in a variety of media and have been interwoven in this audio paper. In itself, this publication reflects the values of community, diversity, and experimentation that underpin the work of Cashmere Radio.

Keywords: community radio, broadcasting, radio, multimedia

The acts of play involved in both creating and participating in music, sound installation, and videogames, have parallels that are yet to be fully explored or even defined. In our work, we are attempting to chart out this territory, noting important features of this hybrid creative landscape and work towards a practice of interactive audio gaming. What if composers adopted the conventions of videogame design and videogame play when creating a new piece? What if videogame designers adopted the conventions of musical expression, in composition and performance, when designing a new game? We created the small game/composition The Way In as an initial response to these questions, following a practice-as-research methodology. This work grew in part out of previous projects of The Audio Games Lab, a research group based at the University of Alberta that is interested in all the ways sound, music, and soundscape can function within the medium of games, and vice-versa. It also grew out of our longstanding collaborative artistic project Evidence, and a recent multichannel sound installation we were beginning to work on when the COVID-19 lockdowns occurred. In this paper, we describe the artistic processes that led us to rethink our approach, given the new circumstances, and to create this work as an intertwining of musical and ludic processes. Using this example as an entry point, we uncover what we see as the new field of creative expression that opens up at this intersection, acknowledging notable precursors to this work, and suggesting directions for further fruitful inquiry.

Keywords: videogame, generative art, music, game development, music composition, ludomusicology

This paper describes a series of improvisational musical actions that the authors have initiated under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the enforced isolation we have experienced. We name our actions “Tragic Experiments’. Using a variety of networking technologies we have improvised together from our homes in Belfast and North Tyneside, UK. Rather than attempt to simulate co-present improvisation, we have sought out musical, technical, performative and documentary practices which are specific to the circumstances we find ourselves in. Here, we describe how we formulated “Tragic Experiment” as an orienting concept, the various actions we have performed and how two festival performances developed out of our practice. We close with some speculative remarks concerning our extended ecology of improvisation in the plague years and how we are developing some philosophical orientations which may provide useful provocations for others.

Keywords: feedback, localism, materiality, performance ecology, networked improvisation, COVID-19, diffractive methodologies

This article shares the experiences of vocal ensemble HIVE Choir as it navigated the transition from in-person to online singing amidst social distancing measures imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The article describes the rapid shift to online collaboration: the reconfiguring of practice rituals, technological adaptation amongst a group with unequal resources, and evolving conceptions of presence and participation. Two main methods emerged in HIVE’s co-ordination of improvised network music for voice: (1) Real-time online performances and (2) Asynchronous remote recording collaborations. These include real-time online performances conducted over consumer web conferencing software and specialist audio streaming software, along with various layered ensemble and “exquisite corpse” style methods of asynchronous remote recording collaborations. These different methods present an opportunity to review the evolving nature of group engagement and participation through remote collaboration and raise questions about how these new working methods might be sustained or developed in the future.

Keywords: voice, ensemble, improvisation, network music

The following is a score and a portion of its corresponding documentation (ongoing). Taking inspiration from Alain Badiou’s description of the “disjunctive” mode of being in Logic of Worlds, the piece explores what a practice of “disjunct listening” might be. Its documentation includes short descriptions of everyday sonic situations (or worlds) of disjunction, scenes of disjunction; that is to say, descriptions open to the non-apparent, toward a kind of speculative silence. This aims to highlight and practice an affect of non-relationality without, on one hand, seeing it as a paralyzing endpoint and, on the other, resolving it as yet another redeployment of a “whole.” Documentations may or may not contain perceptible “disjunctions,” though the practice of this piece holds that these “inexistences” — which are kind of proliferating heterogeneities — run through any world, only contingently crossing into our perception.

Keywords: experimental music, listening, non-relation, Badiou, Meillassoux

Joanna Demers speaks of apocalypse as an “unveiling” — in the real world, we are only just finding out what an “apocalypse” might look like, and how it affects creative practice. I propose that as a composer/improviser, I am actively engaged in seeking out apocalypse. This article examines what I see as the inherently “apocalyptic” nature of the creative process, and situates it in the context of the pandemic through my own experience of its effects on my work. While living through the pandemic has had a debilitating effect on my ability to produce work, the apocalypse-seeking composer in me has always had an eye on channelling this bleakness into new ways of working, as I find myself slowly rediscovering my relationship with my practice.

Keywords: apocalypse, composition, process, improvisation, creative practice, drone

During the lock-downs necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, artists have been forced to reassess their practice. This paper presents interviews from five sonic artists in an attempt to document any changes made by artists in their practices, the practical and aesthetic reasons for these changes, and the lasting effects the artists believe these changes will have to their artistic practices. The artists noted that the impact to their activities has been significant and wide ranging during the lock-downs between March and December 2020. They mentioned their need to diversify their sets due to the potential of playing to the same online audience in the absence of live events. Many artists used the lock-downs to up-skill, and some have reassessed the meaning of their own practice to themselves or changed the direction of their practice as a result of the lock-downs. The discussions suggest long-term impacts resulting from a change in focus and aesthetic for some artists.

Keywords: lock-down, COVID-19, sonic art, sound art, artistic practice, online performance.

This diaristic essay describes adapting a new vocal work, Lawrence Kramer’s “The Convergence: Notes on the Plague Year 2020,” itself an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s poem on the Titanic’s sinking, for virtual premiere. As a singer already exploring ways in which classical musicians can de-center conventional, privileged practices, I am particularly interested in the asynchronous recording process between musicians who have never met. Transmediating elements of live vocal and piano music into a digital format also has the dual effect of flattening a performance space and at the same time foregrounding the fragmentary quality of Hardy’s poem. Paradoxically, the poem begins to sound more rather than less material, and the virus-isolated voice more vulnerable than slick. Editing the recorded layers, in addition to further transmediation through video and sound art, creates an ongoing, adaptive process that would not be possible in a recital hall.

Keywords; adaptation, performance practice, pandemic, transmediation, word and music studies