Application:

Sounding Truths

CHASE Studentship

Summary

ID: CHASE-8877162344
Last submitted: 28 Jan 2022 08:46 AM (UTC)

Research proposal
Completed - 15 Mar 2022

CHASE application: Research proposal

1. Title of proposal

Sounding Truths: A case study of participant-composed documentary soundtracks among asylum seeking

communities in Lewisham

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2. Abstract

Please provide a brief abstract (c.200 words, and not more than 1,000 characters including spaces). This

should be a complete but concise description of the project that will allow a non-specialist reader to quickly

ascertain the purpose of your project. Most CHASE panelists will not be expert in your precise disciplinary

area.

Working with migrants in Lewisham, I will explore methodologies for distributed authorship within the

music of documentary film. Through improvisation and composition workshops, film and sound recording

exercises and interviews, this research will forge new ways for ‘non-musician’ participants to collectively

compose a musical score. The interdisciplinary creative output will be a 60-minute poetic film integrating

both participant testimony and music, and a workshop model for hybrid documentary storytelling within

community and educational settings. By exploring the parameters of a new ‘documentary hybrid’

(Ferrarini 2020) and building upon community music practice techniques, this research will challenge the

hierarchical norms of film-maker/participant, composer/performer and musician/non-musician

relationships, allowing for a polyphony of voices, to collectively explore the subject of migrancy through

subjective memory.

3. Description of proposal

Please provide a description of your research proposal of no more than 10,000 characters (including

spaces), under the following headings:

Introduction

Research background and question

Research methods

Schedule of work

Research environment

Please refer to the Guidance Notes for Applicants.

Introduction

From the tragic loss of 27 people in November’s channel crossing incident to the scarce number of

Ukrainian refugees granted UK visas today, the Nationality and Borders Bill serves to highlight a

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compassion gap in the UK when it comes to humanising asylum seekers. When speaking about migrant

experience there persists, Baker argues, a need to find ‘an alternative language with which to argue

against established institutional rhetoric’ (Baker 2020). This research examines what various

methodologies in music composition can offer to this alternative language, in affording creative agency

to those affected, subverting cliches within representation and distributing authorship across various

media.

Over the course of a multi-year partnership with Lewisham’s Action for Refugees and I Speak Music, this

documentary music-hybrid project will engage participants in collaborative sound and music creation

exercises that aim to expand their voices beyond the spoken account. This research explores how the

documentary soundtrack can be: 1) elevated within the genre to embrace a deepened form of

interdisciplinary storytelling, 2) redistributed so that the role of ‘composer’ is arrived at collectively

amongst participants, rather than being outsourced to an external party.

The interdisciplinary musical work will provide a site to interrogate and destabilise the hierarchical,

prescriptive role of the contemporary composer, while engaging community music practice as a place for

‘non-musicians’ to create music not merely as a therapeutic exercise, but as valuable artistic testimony.

Research background and question

How can music composition drive a new form of documentary enquiry, while helping to decentre its

authorship away from the singular objective gaze? This research explores how new and existing

compositional processes can make novel contributions to documentary by addressing issues of

participant agency and authorship, while elevating the importance of music within the form.

Music in documentary storytelling has functioned as naturalistic enhancement, an agentic creative voice

and subversive commentator (Rogers 2014). There are also examples of performative documentary

embracing elements of theatre (see Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, 2012). However, there are

scarce examples of participant-composed music.

In their efforts to dismantle elitist notions of authorship, composers have sought ways to distribute

agency: inviting cast members to improvise (Lander 2017) and incorporating various non-fictional media

in librettos, such as WhatsApp conversations (McCarthy 2020). However, when engaging with

contemporary subject matter, musically speaking, their attention is seldom directed at the people whose

stories they purport to portray.

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Representations of migrant experience at the hands of those looking from the outside often fall prey to

what Kurasawa describes as ‘humanitarian sentimentalism’ - the tropes he identifies as ‘Personification,

Massification, Rescue, and Care’ (Kurasawa 2013). Similarly, ‘community music’ projects regularly

prioritise optimistic messaging over free unscripted expression, aesthetics being dictated (and limited)

by the earnest imaginary of facilitators. Since music and sound have undisputed power in underscoring

events with subtlety, spontaneity and locality, compositional tools make up a hugely important part of

the creative arsenal when telling complex stories.

This research asks:

- How can a documentary-music hybrid facilitate opportunities for its subjects to differently articulate

their stories, and in what new ways can this music interact with the film’s subject matter?

- How can we further democratise the practice of filmmaking by not only recognising the importance and

interdependence of each autonomous discipline (participant, composer, narrator, performer) but also by

further blurring the lines between these disciplines?

- What improvisatory and composition practices for so-called ‘non-musicians’ can we develop and

disseminate that achieve increasing levels of musical sophistication and value beyond the ‘community

music’ sector?

- What are the barriers (logistical, economic, gender-related) for migrant communities to creative

expression, and how might desirable outcomes be modelled?

- How can DIY approaches to composition, invigorated by the pandemic, open the field for ‘non-

musicians’ to more readily explore the field?

The project responds to recent theoretical developments within transmedia storytelling such as ‘multi-

vocality’ and ‘collaborative authorship’ (Vernallis, Perrott & Rogers 2020), and ‘audiovisual polyphony’

(Korsgaard 2012). Employing ‘hybrid poetics in an ethnographic context’ (Ferrarini 2020), and

approaching musical creativity as a form of documentary inquiry offers an 'embodied, embedded,

enactive and extended' way to understand how 'interacting individuals and social groups bring forth

worlds of meaning through shared, embodied processes of dynamic interactivity’ (van der Schyff et al.

2018).

This project also embraces transdisciplinary experimentation and creative play as ‘powerful responses to

the issue of decolonisation of academic institutions’ (Mason and Stacey 2019), while presenting new

opportunities to understand documentary as an ‘inherently fluid, ‘unstable’ act of ‘performativity’ (Bruzzi

2006). It addresses issues surrounding the representation of trauma, using the poetic mode to counter

what Lanzmann calls the ‘absolute obscenity in the project of understanding’ (Haggith Newman 2005),

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using the ‘intuitive, embodied, tacit, imaginative, affective and sensory ways of knowing’ that can be

uniquely conveyed by participatory practice-based research methods (Bulley and Şahin 2021).

Research Methodology

Drawing on my experience as a soundtrack composer and music technology/improvisation teacher in

community settings, I will co-design a new replicable methodology for participant composed

documentary soundtracks within a local migrant community context.

The research methods will be developed in partnership with two key organisations: Action for Refugees

Lewisham and the I Speak Music programme (see PFR section). This network of practitioners and

researchers forms a strong, inherently self-reflexive community with which to co-design critical, sensitive

and adaptable models for creative collaboration, and ‘co-produced knowledge’ (Zamenopoulos and

Alexiou 2018), with rigorous systems of safeguarding and participant feedback evaluation to expand

upon, as well as statutory resources of psychological support for participants. A tenet of community

music practice is for participants to tell ‘their’ story rather than that of the facilitator (Higgins and

Willingham 2017), and hence this research will present a unique opportunity to extend community music

models of creative authorship into the discipline of documentary storytelling.

The composition techniques for ‘non-musicians’ will build on the work of various practitioners:

improvisation as a generative tool for opera (Denham 2016); string quartet composition for non-

musicians (Chacon 2020) gestural composition (soundpainting) techniques (Faria 2016); deep listening

practice (Oliveros 2005); and ‘availablism’ (Busby 2018). The documentary approach in terms of edit,

structure and aesthetic, will be shaped by the collective, iterative and improvisatory design processes of

the musical composition, furthering an exploration of poetic and participatory modes within documentary

practice.

The outputs of this research will be multifold:

- The development of an ethically informed/self-reflexive methodology for music creation, using

composition, improvisation, field recording, & digital audio production.

- A comprehensive evaluation survey integrating participant feedback on process /creative output.

- A workshop model for hybrid documentary storytelling within community/educational settings.

- A 60-minute film that integrates the testimony and musical output of participants, the material of which

may be reworked into various performative contexts at a later stage.

- A 60,000-word evaluation of process/stakeholder reception.

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As a composer, music director, filmmaker and educator, my professional background/network will be

uniquely beneficial to this research, with 15 years of creative exchange and interdisciplinary

collaboration informing my practice.

Schedule of Work

2021/2

Extensive reading/research of sound creation methodologies

Identify key participants and establish creative aims/co-design workshops.

Undertake practice research ethics review/clarify terms of intellectual property rights

2022/3

Film interviews/workshop sessions; edit segments to bring to participants for review on a regular basis

Co-design musical narrative, filming/recording additional material as needed

Keep a log of the process; submit surveys reflecting on the success of the outcomes at various stages,

adapting methodology accordingly

Finalise musical score; edit first cut of the film

2023/4

Second cut of the film edited and reviewed by participants; collate final survey

Rehearse, workshop/record additional elements of the score with instrumentalists

Edit final cut of the film; final write-up of research

Research Environment

Goldsmiths, as an institutional leader in interdisciplinary practices with strong ties to marginalised

communities, and non-western musical institutes such as the Afghanistan Music Unit, makes it the clear

choice for research of this nature. Dr Holly Rogers, as a leading researcher of transmedia studies and

sound in documentary film, is perfectly positioned to supervise research that bridges the intersection of

these exact fields. Dr Barley Norton is an invaluable asset as an active filmmaker and academic, who can

provide both practical & theoretical guidance on this project. Dr Daisy Asquith of the documentary dept

also has special expertise in hybrid documentary forms.

4. Bibliography

Please provide a bibliography of up to 20 items, in a standard format such as Harvard, listing any books

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and articles to which you refer in the proposal. This is indicative, not exhaustive (and is not included in the

character count).

Baker, Mona. 2020. ‘Rehumanizing the Migrant: The Translated Past as a Resource for

Refashioning the Contemporary Discourse of the (Radical) Left’. Palgrave

Communications 6 (1): 12. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0386-7.

Bruzzi, Stella. 2006. New Documentary. 2 edition. London ; New York: Routledge.

Bulley, James, and Özden Şahin. 2021 ‘Practice Research - Report 1: What Is Practice

Research? And Report 2: How Can Practice Research Be Shared?’ Practice Research

Advisory Group UK.

Busby, Lisa. 2018.‘Keynote Talk: Dr Lisa Busby | Centre for Practice Based Research in the

Arts’. 2018. 14 May 2018. https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/practiceresearch/keynote-talk-dr-

lisa-busby/.

Denham, Ellen Louise. 2016. ‘Improvisation as a Generative Tool For New OperaA: An

Exploration of Methods and Parameters’. University of Illinois, 71.

Faria, Bruno, and Lund University Malmö Faculty og Fin and Performing Arts. 2016. ‘

Exercising Musicianship Anew through Soundpainting: Speaking Music through Sound

Gestures’. Lund: Malmö Faculty og Fin and Performing Arts : Malmö Academy of Music :

Lund University.

Ferrarini, Lorenzo. 2020. ‘Documentary Hybrids’. In The Routledge International Handbook of

Ethnographic Film and Video, by Phillip Vannini, edited by Phillip Vannini, 1st ed., 164–72.

Other titles: International handbook of ethnographic film and video Description: Abingdon,

Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. |: Routledge.

https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429196997-18.

Haggith, Toby, and Joanna Newman. 2005. Holocaust and the Moving Image:

Representations in Film and Television Since 1933. Wallflower Press.

Higgins, Lee, and Lee Willingham. 2017. Engaging in Community Music: An Introduction. 1st

edition. New York ; London: Routledge.

Korsgaard, MathiasBonde. 2012. ‘Creation and Erasure: Music Video as a Signaletic Form of

Practice’. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 4 (1): 18151.

https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v4i0.18151.

Kurasawa, Fuyuki. 2013. ‘The Sentimentalist Paradox: On the Normative and Visual

Foundations of Humanitarianism’. Journal of Global Ethics 9 (2): 201–14.

https://doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2013.818461.

Lander, B. 2017. Coping Mechanisms: An Improvised Opera For Non-Improvising Opera

Singers.

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Mason, Natalie, and Cara Stacey. 2019. ‘Composing, Creative Play and the Ethical

Incomplete: Practice-Based Approaches in Ethnomusicology’, September.

McCarthy, Michael. 2020. ‘Michael McCarthy: Denis & Katya, Revolutionary Work from Music

Theatre Wales’. 2020. Art Scene in Wales (blog). 11 February 2020.

https://www.asiw.co.uk/my-own-words/michael-mccarthy-denis-katya-revolutionary-work-

from-music-theatre-wales.

Oliveros, Pauline. 2005. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. New York, NY: I.

Universe.

Oppenheimer, Joshua, Anonymous, and Christine Cynn. 2012. The Act of Killing.

Documentary, Biography, Crime, History. Final Cut for Real, Piraya Film A/S, Novaya

Zemlya.

Raven Chacon. 2020. ‘Portfolio’. Raven Chacon. 2020.

http://spiderwebsinthesky.com/portfolio/.

Rogers, Holly, ed. 2014. Music and Sound in Documentary Film. 1 edition. New York, NY ;

Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

———. 2020. ‘Sonic Elongation: Creative Audition in Documentary Film’. JCMS: Journal of

Cinema and Media Studies 59 (2): 88–113. https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2020.0004.

Schyff, Dylan van der, Andrea Schiavio, Ashley Walton, Valerio Velardo, and Anthony

Chemero. 2018. ‘Musical Creativity and the Embodied Mind: Exploring the Possibilities of

4E Cognition and Dynamical Systems Theory’. Music & Science 1 (January):

2059204318792319. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059204318792319.

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