Profile
Project Title: Meta-Physical Modelling
Abstract: The narrative encased within this research is primarily focused upon the sounds of arbitrarily shaped drums - a sonically enriched, aesthetically curious, and wholly meta-physical family of instruments. Arbitrarily shaped drums were originally invented as a fictitious, mathematical construction, largely removed from any artistic or musical contexts. The research undertaken throughout this project thus serves to bring these meta-physical instruments into the cultural domain, and examine their timbral affordances through various different methodologies, employing an extensive approach that is diverse in its epistemic undertakings. From a technological standpoint, the main objective is to build a simulated and combinatorial impression of these instruments, so as to meaningfully create a sense of compositional, performative and aesthetic knowledge surrounding arbitrarily shaped drums. These efforts serve to create an epistemic perspective on the timbral qualities of these instruments, and ascertain how such an instrument can be digitally produced and employed with respect to their implicit and individual timbral differences. And, from a subjective standpoint, these instruments are also examined such that, of the technologies that serve to fulfil these epistemic means, what are their practical affordances, as understood by the ears that interpret them? This concern is metaphysical by nature, calling upon the inspection of artistic perspectives engendered through the musical affordances of these instruments. The answers to this latter question are ethereal and practice driven, so as to insight an understanding of an artist’s material concerns through the creation of art itself. In culmination, these objectives serve to embolden the aesthetic and epistemic understanding of arbitrarily shaped drums, a meta-physical instrument who’s sonic design may incur a new approach to the formulation of musical language and discourse.
Personal website: http://lewiswolstanholme.co.uk
C4DM theme affiliation(s): Augmented instruments