Åčçëñtß

Richy Carey

doi:10.2218/airea.5043

Abstract

In 2018 I was appointed to the position of Glasgow’s first UNESCO City of Music artist-in-residence. Over the course of a year I worked with numerous community groups and choirs across the city to collaboratively devise and realise a new choral/film work, titled Åčçëñtß, which was performed by an audience of over three hundred and fifty people at its premiere at the Glasgow Royal Concert Halls in 2019. Åčçëñtß explores accents as a sonorous social matter – staccatos and lilts, patterns of difference in our voices, as sonic markers of place and community – sounds that I have come to understand as resonating between our individual and collective identities. This paper presents some of the thoery orientating my compositional praxis, speaking nearby a reflective account of some of the compositional considerations and processes undertaken through the project. Through it I explore Karen Barad’s methodology of diffractive thought, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notion of speaking nearby within the interval, Pauline Oliveros’ practice of Deep Listening, thinking towards how these might meet through my praxis to come close to Timothy Corrigan’s Refractive Cinema. Åčçëñtß speaks to the complexity of authorship and agency in distributed, collaborative composition and the motive relationships between sound and image, spectacle and spectator – between the individual and the communal.

Highlights

Composing in the sound-image I work on the premise that sound film, the audiovisual, or what I will refer to from here on as the sound-image, is an inherently collaborative performance: a matter performed through sound, text and image, its makers, the object(s) of their investigation, the instruments of mediation and the audience
Thinking of the sound-image in this way still allows for, if not relies upon, individuated critical readings of ways sound and image might behave; culturally, politically and epistemologically, as different ontological realms, and allows locating them within a relational “field” (Eco 1989; Barad 2007) or “meshwork” (Ingold 2007; Morton 2013), which relies upon difference in the performance of its whole
Though my research into the agential vibrancy at play within the sound-image has taken me down numerous avenues, one which has remained a constant refrain has been a consideration of the role that language plays in the composition of the sound-image; with words, irreducible in their relation to concept in a Wittgensteinian sense (Wittgenstein 1953), being the apparatus most readily employed in the practical construction of a common conception

Summary

Richy Carey a

In 2018 I was appointed to the position of Glasgow’s first UNESCO City of Music artist-in-residence. This way of thinking, with a view towards making and writing with film sound, a position that is not about ownership or authority, that seeks a poly-vocality in trying to make space for plurality, is one I am still working towards, but is one which offers me a form to articulate my understanding of the role that distributed composition might play in the collaborative construction of the sound-image Trinh extends this indirect language towards thinking about what it is to use “speech-text” to articulate the filmic, “words as words cannot speak for or be subordinate to the image. I created a spoken word version of the instructions which played in synchrony with the film and could be listened to through Bluetooth headphones as a way of ensuring those with visual impairments, or for whom written English is a barrier, were still welcome to take part

Diffractive Cinema

Conclusions