Publications

Kanga, Zubin; Mark Dyer, Caitlin Rowley, Jonathan Packham (2024). ‘Reflections on Cyborg Collaborations: Cross-Disciplinary Collaborative Practice in Technologically-Focused Contemporary Music’. TEMPO, Volume 78, Issue 308, pp. 55–69. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298223000967.

Creating new works combining live musicians with new technologies provides both opportunities and challenges. The Cyborg Soloists research project has commissioned and managed the creation of 46 new works of this type, assembling teams of composers, performers, researchers and technology partners from industry. The majority of these collaborations have been smooth-running and fruitful, but a few have demonstrated complications. This article critically evaluates collaborative methods and methodologies used in the project so far, presenting five case studies involving different types of collaborative work, and exploring the range of professional relationships, the need for different types of expertise within the team and the way technology can act as both a creative catalyst and a source of creative resistance. The conclusions are intended as a toolkit – pragmatic guidelines to inform future practice – and are aimed at artists, technological collaborators, and commissioners and organisations who facilitate these types of creative collaborations.

Kanga, Zubin; Mark Dyer, Caitlin Rowley, Jonathan Packham (eds.) (2024). ‘Technology and Contemporary Classical Music: Methodologies in Practice-Based Research’. National Centre for Research Methods Position Paper. https://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/id/eprint/4945.

This position paper provides a distillation of the NCRM Innovation Forum, ‘Technology and Contemporary Classical Music: Methodologies in Creative Practice Research’, hosted by Cyborg Soloists in June 2023. It features contributions from a variety of creative practitioner-researchers to debate the current state and future of technologically focused, practice-based research in contemporary classical music. The position paper is purposefully polyphonic and pluralistic. By collating a range of perspectives, experiences and expertise, the paper seeks to provoke and delineate a space for further questioning, inquiry, and response. The paper will be of interest to those working within creative practice research, particularly in relation to music, music technologists and those interested in research methodologies more broadly.

Packham, Jonathan (2023). ‘Towards a Spatial Understanding of Openness: Richard Sennett’s “Five Open Forms” and/in Music’. Leonardo, Volume 56, Issue 5, pp. 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02470.

This article offers a new strategy for cognising musical indeterminacy based on Richard Sennett’s ‘five open forms for the city’, an intrinsically spatial way of thinking about what is ‘open’, and how it is open. Sennett’s five forms (‘synchronicity’, ‘punctuatedness’, ‘porosity’, ‘incompleteness’ and ‘multiplicity’) are explored individually as they might impact our understanding of openness and/in music, illuminated by examples from contemporary experimental music.

Packham, Jonathan (2021). ‘Scoring the Journey: Listening to Claudia Molitor’s Sonorama’. TEMPO,  Volume 76, Issue 299, pp. 44–56. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298221000644.

Sonorama is a 2015 sonic artwork by Claudia Molitor, consisting of a number of audio files designed for listening on a train journey between London St Pancras and Margate, and a graphic score based on the composer's own ‘reading’ of this journey. This article analyses the relationship between the sonic and the spatial in the work, exploring how Molitor's site-specific composition interacts with its environment on multiple scales. By drawing on the strategy of ‘situated listening’ developed by Gascia Ouzounian, as well as urbanist language introduced by Richard Sennett, this article seeks to elucidate the relationship between a number of ‘nested’ spaces, present across varying realisations, and the political agenda that energises the work. Written in the midst of summer 2015's European refugee crisis, the work brings into sharp focus themes of British exceptionalism, immigration and inclusion.

Packham, Jonathan (2021). ‘Scoring Space in the Open Work and Portfolio of Original Compositions’. PhD thesis, University of Oxford.

The central focus of this thesis is the elucidation and application of a new analytical framework, connecting existing discourses on sound, space, and place in late twentieth and early twenty-first century “open form” music, and sound installation art. It builds especially on Richard Sennett’s urban understanding of openness, which helps to generate a model for the analysis of musical open form beyond only the relationship between the performer and the score. At the same time, it explores the role of space and place in music performance, interrogating the manner in which the environment shapes different realisations of indeterminate musics. Whereas many existing accounts of the spaces in and of music performance focus predominantly on the technical or locative elements of spatial sound, this dissertation is informed by contemporary spatial and urban theory as well as architectural studies in its more generative and expansive understanding of space. This thesis constructs space beyond tectonics, incorporating and acknowledging social, political, corporeal, architectural, and acoustic factors that inform and transform our experience of sound. Methodologically speaking, this thesis references interviews with the composers, performers and audience members of sonic artworks in combination with more conventional musicological analysis of audiovisual media, seeking to emphasise incidents and sentiments that don’t fit grander conceptual or composer-centric narratives but help to draw out a more everyday, lived experience of sound. Substantial analyses of Lin Chi-Wei’s ongoing participatory composition Tape Music and Claudia Molitor’s locative audio work Sonorama help to illustrate the value of this framework across two large case studies.

Packham, Jonathan (2020). ‘Scoring the Social Voice: Lin Chi-Wei’s Tape Music’. In &Beyond Collective, Theatrum Mundi (eds.), Crafting a Sonic Urbanism: the Political Voice II (London: Theatrum Mundi).

Lin Chi-Wei’s Tape Music is an experimental project in which its performers pass a musical score, written across a long piece of tape, amongst themselves as they respond to its vocal cues. New scores are produced for each iteration of the project with specific contexts and groups of participants in mind. The scoring of Tape Music is as much a process of revealing the social dynamics of its participants as it is of laying out a piece of music.

Selected Conference Presentations

11–13 September 2024 (forthcoming). ‘Beatrice Harrison’s Nightingale Broadcast at 100: Legacies and Conspiracies’. Paper given at RMA Conference.

14-16 June 2024 (forthcoming). ‘Cyborg Soloists: An Infrastructure for Sharing Approaches to Innovative Technologies in Contemporary Music’. Paper given at InMusic 2024.

16 Sept 2021. ‘Scoring the Journey: Listening to Space in Claudia Molitor’s Sonorama’. Paper given at the Royal Musical Association Annual Conference 2021, Newcastle University.

20 Feb 2021. ‘Porosity and the Anthropocene: Hearing Extinction in 21st Century Sound Art’. Paper given at Harvard Graduate Music Forum Conference To Begin Again: Music, Apocalypse, and Social Change. Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

13 Dec 2019. ‘Lin Chi-Wei’s Tape Music: Spatial Scoring, Voicing Identity’. Paper given at Theatrum Mundi’s Colloquium Crafting a Sonic Urbanism: the Political Voice, EHESS Campus Condorcet, Paris.

28 April 2018. ‘Nonlinear Reading in the Context of Several 360° Video Scores’. Poster Presentation at the Centre for New Music at Sheffield (CeNMas) Composers’ Conference, University of Sheffield.

2 March 2017. ‘look around you (2017): Performative Nonlinearity in the Context of a Virtual Reality Mobile Score’. Paper given at Van Mildert College MCR Research Forum, University of Durham.