Towards a Response-Able Electroacoustic Composition Practice: In Search of Sympoietic Multivalence

Abstract

This paper proposes a relational model for electroacoustic composition practice. In the model, relationality focuses on perspectives of response-ability of the composer with more-than-human agents, within an entangled sympoietic musical space. Here, the response-practices are built on acts of listening that entail, aural analysis and embodied practice with material objects. Within the scope of this paper, more-than-human agents are narrowed down to only recorded sounds (fixed media sound files) and physical material objects. In investigating such response-able compositional practices, the model follows Post-humanist and New-materialist strands focusing on various concepts proposed by Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. And in doing so, it aims to re-figure some of the conventional discourses about the concepts of poietic agency, and of multivalence within the composition practice.