Collaborative Dialogue in Cross-Disciplinary Sound and Design

Abstract

Context-based Composition yields the potential for new works by virtue of under explored interdisciplinary territory yet often questions regarding the relationship between practices, practitioners, and the philosophical underpinnings of interdisciplinary work are neglected. This paper seeks to briefly detail two interdisciplinary projects between practitioners working within the remits of music and design thereby grounding a discussion of the audio realisation of non-audio materials. Said grounding facilitates discussion of non-audio as audio with praxis within this remit interrogated, and particular attention given to philosophies pertaining to the existential underpinnings of each mode, and the subjective dialogue between music (as audio realisation) and its contextual object. In seeking to ground practices whereby contextual object begets musical realisation, sonification is discussed in terms of a quantifiable practice whereby semblic relations are achieved only through mathematical rigor sans aesthetic control, with methods for scaling of parameters when corporeal objects are realised discussed therein. Subsequently, sonification is differentiated from composition that is imbued with a greater aesthetic sensibility yet nonetheless corresponds to a non-audio object. Sculpture as differentiated from structure is examined and congruence is found between that relationship, and the relationship between music and sound with presence and absence as void, transparency, and silence posited as crucial within a dialogic interdisciplinary discussion of Context-based Composition.