Aural Transposition, Psychogeography and the Ephemeral World

Abstract

Aural transposition sits at a crossroads between being a tool for practice and creating work, and being a tool that illuminates aspects of another entity. In day-to-day music practice, transposition can be an age-old tool for learning material, or a multi-layered exploration of an object or place. Transposition can also be a means of recreating places, real or imagined, through the transposition of ghost traces back into sound. And the transposition of spaces onto other spaces is possible through multichannel sound arrays. The territory for re-imagining both sound and place lies in the impossible space between the sounding entity at hand and the instrument that transposes it. Just as in the dérive of psychogeography, the spaces between well-trod paths leads to a world beyond the banal. This exposition first situates these practices in psychogeography, and amongst other artists whose work utilizes various transposition, soundwalking or psychogeographical practices. It then discusses those aspects of my own artistic practice and work—across a spectrum of electroacoustic music, improvised violin work and collaborative composition for an ensemble of mechanical string instruments— that are centered around aural transposition as an act of psychogeography.