Explorations in Sonic Creation: Feeling Elsewhere through Sincerely Queer Listening

Deflated and dishevelled after only two months of Covid-induced worldwide quarantine, I turned to music in search of recovery and renewal. Cultivating place on a bedroom floor replete with carpets and pillows, I sat with violin in hand, feeling my way through my mental library of learned compositions, expressions, articulations and techniques. Layering rosin-scented memories of various teachings and experiences—including some of the more unpleasant ones—I would bind my past to the present using a loop pedal. Improvising my way through various movements, I would rely on the rules of tonality that shape the collective orientations of our global pop music-listening bodies. Then, after some time, I would begin to decompose the rhythms and rhymes of sonic stability to explore new aesthetic possibilities. Splicing through the layers I had once built like a defence shield as a classically trained violinist, I continue to turn inward in search of something more sincere. Shedding the need for musical (self-)acceptance, I invite imperfection, inducing accidents that inevitably arise when a horse-hair bow meets a metal string fastened to a wooden paddle. I summon the glitches, background noise, electronic feedback and other parasitic interventions made by the music technologies at my fingertips. Sniffling through failure, I listen for a faint, faraway shimmer of promise.

In another time and place, I have begun to explore how sincerely queer listening in everyday sonic encounters opens access to new affective, sensorial and political possibilities. Sincerely queer listening is sensual yet subversive listening. It glides through and across multiple sensorial orientations, disrupting ocularcentric navigations, flexibly exploring the ways agency, experience and perception across the senses are collective and relational (Roy, 2022). Sincerely queer listening decomposes the rhythms and rhymes of ‘fixed listening’ (Robinson, 2020), however imperfectly, disobeying ‘preoccupations of authenticity by listening against […] dominant discourses’ (Balance, 2016, pp. 4–5) of being, belonging, temporality and identity. It activates and is activated by movement akin to what Omar Kasmani (2021, p. 163) calls ‘the cruising in queer zones of inter-subjective knowing that open up […] or become available in its wake through wispy registers of memory and intimacy’. Its movements breathe through / give breath to interstitial gaps in knowledge, turning sensorial disorientations to reorientations, or lingering in disorientation, giving voice to that which evinces the ‘something beyond control’ (Robinson, 2020, p. 16), through adaptation, disruption, resurgence and/or renewal.

Troubling fixed habits of scholarly writing that rely on looking outward, my attention turns to an inward elsewhere to understand how experiences of sincerely queer listening enable and are enabled by acts of sonic creation. While my primary concern is music, my understanding of sonic creation involves the everyday sounds, dances, movements, tastes, smells, feels and contexts that trigger and/or are triggered by generative processes of imaginative invention—in other words, music creation as sonic arrangement. As Kasmani (2017) explores, the sonic mise-en-scène—or the ‘heterogeneously constituted, always unfolding possibility of arrangement’—is always already ‘inflected in liaison with other sonic inputs’, stemming from the contexts within which they arise or come to pass. Place-based sonic arrangements steer and are steered by acts of listening in sometimes dramatically different ways, drifting in modulation according to the context to which they respond, enabling different aesthetic possibilities in agentive ways that in turn lead to the creation of new sonic arrangements, and so on. As a creative act, they rely on iterative routine, drawing on ideas through repetition (looping) to open up other layers of possibility, then tunnelling/splicing/cutting through these layers to create affects that lead you down other paths that trigger or are triggered by sensorial memories and other feelings. In this process, I often find myself drifting to wayward fields, decomposing and recomposing a typically additive compositional process to open previously unexplored spaces of listening.

One project I began drifting through eventually materialised into an ‘extended play’ entitled Arco (2021). The five-movement album teases linear storytelling by emphasising life’s cyclicity, opening unidirectional flows of narration to multiple directional movements that can be felt at once, in which the sensation of dénouement signals the beginning of a new story, rising action constitutes falling action of another kind, a climactic moment of release becomes fixed in liminal ‘holding pattern’ and an ‘exposition’ signals a return to the end. It also touches multiple times and places through sound, responding to the urban sonic landscape where it was recorded and mixed (Los Angeles), while also reaching into the past to other soundscapes (Mumbai and Paris) through sampled audio of my movements. Cruising disparate places, people and memories in my imagined world, the album’s movements leave sonic gestures unfinished, rough or unrecovered to open up possibilities of rediscovery.

In this process of sonic creation, sincerely queer listening explores acoustic sound using several tools and technologies of music reproduction, teasing transparency and clarity in a way that is neither ‘bound to authentication nor reproduced formally’ (Prasad and Roy, 2017, p. 196). ‘Glitch’ exposes the myth of transparency in music by ‘forcing the listener to consider the listening experience as one that is mediated by technology and environment’ (Brooks, 2015, p. 40). Underscoring imperfection, the cracks that appear on the surface of the music ‘foreground the act of listening as an assemblage of processes and objects and highlight the contextual nature of the listening event’ (ibid.). Sincerely queer listening extends glitch artists’ concerns ‘on the surface’ of music to the acts that emerge from underneath/below/behind to fill, in/form and disrupt music as a fixed category of knowledge. It distorts and decays the compositional process that signals musical authority and authenticity, moving through and engaging sonic arrangements of place across different sensorial encounters/registers. Offering a potential for recovery and renewal, it responds to and restores the sonic bodies, relations, ancestries, her/his/their-stories, lived experiences, memories, environments and cultures that inform them.

Drawing from precarious sources of inspiration, I offer some additional thoughts on a potential aesthetics of practice in/forming and being in/formed by sincerely queer listening. The following list is by no means determinative. Exhausted by various attempts at perfection and virtuosity, which are detailed elsewhere (Prasad and Roy, 2017), I lean into the fragmentations, f(r)ictions and failures of sonic creation. Cruising between moments of reflection and thought, the list lingers in some areas, cultivating intimacy in the details, while at times it thrusts forward or slips around, finding joy in movement:

Listening to/with/in Place: embracing/cultivating sounds, sights, smells, feelings and emotions from an environment and gathering different place-based tools, textures and timbres that trigger and/or are triggered by the act of sonic creation;

Locating Ancestral Resonances: doing the work to locate, listen through, honour, respond to and/or extend beyond the music her/his/their-stories and sources of your (and your collaborators’) ancestries, communities, families, cultures, languages, bodies and/or futures;

Exploring Intimacies in Collaboration: examining the character of your relationalities while creating intimacies, critical methodologies and non-toxic solidarities between those with whom you work, live and love (including your partners, friends, performers, co-composers, producers, listeners and itinerant passersby that may touch and be touched by your sonic arrangements);

Looping and Layering: playing with melodies, tonal harmonies, polyrhythms and rhythmic cycles like layering paint and colour, laying the foundations of rosin-scented memories that can be felt through a kind of acoustic haunting;

Splicing and Peeling: cutting through and uncovering layers of rhythm and harmony to create new/old melodic contours or rhythmic accents;

Decaying: playing with / reversing / slowing / speeding up / manipulating melodic or rhythmic parts/tracks in nonlinear temporality;

Permutating: drifting through / disrupting variations of note/pitch sequences through repetition, mirroring, inversion and a series of maths games;

Jamming Tonality: finding beauty in the collisions of notes/pitches, playing with the spaces/intervals between them by employing meends/gamaka/glissandos or non-derivative means, embracing overtones that may conflict with a sense of normative cohesion, playing with range and disrupting tonal scaffoldings that constitute and are constituted by musical modernity (Agawu, 2016);

Discovering the Shades of Notes: exploring the approach to a note from above or below, at the beginning or end, and understanding that the value and meaning of a note/pitch can be changed with the slightest inflection;

Inducing Accidents and Inviting Imperfection: searching for miraculous events that emerge from a space outside the realm of artistic intention;

Embracing Glitch: using tools and reproduction technologies from your environment(s) to respond to affective modes of failure, error, interference, disturbance, ‘impasse’ (Berlant, 2011), uncertainty, unknowingness, disorientation and otherwise ‘noise’ by reclaiming them as sites of resistance, resurgence and recuperation (Brooks, 2015).

Sincerely queer listening is a sort of feeling elsewhere that always already challenges the fabric of audible normativity (or normative audibility), especially for those whose sonic bodies are ‘not extended by the skin of the social’ (Ahmed, 2006, 2007, p. 161). Sincerely queer listening facilitates access to these elsewheres, lending sensual movement to stale stagnation, life to petrification and reinvention as a continual, iterative practice of adaptation, disruption, resurgence and renewal. For myself, these cruisings continue to take me beyond what is expected of me professionally or relationally, often beyond phenotypical belonging and beyond the ties that constrain one to any particular place and/or geographical, ideological, theoretical or conceptual territory. Still, these movements are contoured by the ties that bind me to place. I find myself listening below, underneath layers of soil, petrified organ tissue and bone, to access the unheard sonicities, whispers and muted echoes of my family’s queer matrilineal geneologies and anti-imperialist heritage. I find myself listening forward to the sounds, smells, tastes, residual thoughts, ideas, beliefs, movements, acoustic hauntings and premonitions that give life to our shared queer futures. Wandering through feelings that activate and are activated by sound, I reflect on how fragmented moments (much like those that pass through writing) of uncertainty, existentialism, failure and darkness, and/or experiences of liminality ordinarily felt as undesirable, are transformed into pleasure, power and abundant possibility.