Traversing Sonic Territories - Towards a Practice of Diffractive Listening (Discussion)

What happens when musicians who are improvising on acoustic instruments sample and exchange their sound libraries? How can such a transgression of sonic territories contribute to an expanded understanding of one’s own sonic identity? And could this b/lending of identities point to a more ambiguous yet vibrant field of intra-play? Taking off from these questions, Traversing Sonic Territories intends to challenge our idea of “a personal sound,” a widespread conception (particularly in acoustic improvised music), and therefore to investigate how a radicalized sharing of these “personal sounds” through contemporary sampling technology can contribute to an expansion of improvisational and imaginal horizons. Individual idiomatic approaches to one’s own instrument are thus provoked and questioned as we transgress the habitual boundaries for action possibilities and musical imagination. And yet, as we touch on these boundaries, we are quickly challenged by the liminalities of our own musical identity, including our physical disposition, instrumental in/capacities, mimetic patterning, aesthetic preferences and other un/conscious biases. As we engage in this boundary-crossing further questions arise: How can we develop a critical approach to listening that enables us to hear through the cracks and breaches of these boundaries? And could we engage in this process with others toward a practice of diffractive listening — by carefully listening for insights through one another? Concretely, we work from a duo of saxophone and piano, circulating the practice toward external collaborators, where the sharing process involves different approaches to audio sampling and mapping, embedding and embodying, listening and playing on each other’s sonic material. This extends to a point where authorship, origin and (sonic) identity is diffracted – b(l)ending the practice into an electro-acoustic field, where digital code contributes to, and disrupts, the acoustic logics and architecture of the instruments.