Materiality as a Creative Practice of Musical Instruments: Makers’ Perspectives

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Redhead, L. 2025. Materiality as a Creative Practice of Musical Instruments: Makers’ Perspectives. Journal of Sonic Studies, 28, ISSN 2212-6252 [Article]

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Official URL: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3774420/377...

Abstract or Description

This article and video essay discusses how contemporary artists might directly address some of the philosophical and political challenges of a material approach to instrumentality through creative practice. To do this, I present and discuss the practical approaches taken by musicians who create and collaborate with instruments as a central part of their work. I focus on the work of two musicians: Khabat Abas—an experimental and transgressive cellist, whose quasi-autobiographical approach to instrument design allows her to stage unheard social and geographical narratives as sonic interventions; and Sam Underwood—a sound artist and designer of acoustic and mechanical instruments who creates new sonic interfaces for both musicians and audiences. In examining their creative practice both as and with musical instruments, I examine how these artists navigate the agential and material aspects of the instruments and systems they create, in parallel with the conceptual ideas that they bring to and derive from such systems. In so doing, I consider material semiotic approaches (such as ANT) not as ‘flat’ ontologies but, after Campbell, as part of a variegated approach that can account for ‘political and ideological forms’ in improvisation and indeterminacy (2021: 416). Campbell suggests that ‘the constitution of problems must be understood as a creative and critical procedure’ (ibid: 420): here I highlight how this is possible through the practical approaches of artists whose work can be considered a philosophical as well as a practical/pragmatic response to the materials with which they are engaged. While Campbell argues for plurality of method, I consider this a heterogeneity that is re-articulated across moments of performance, composition, and instrument construction, therefore describing these creative practices as ones that can be described as ‘overcoming the possible limits of the improvisation-posthumanities conjunction’ (Campbell, 2021: 421).

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Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.22501/JSS.3774420