Program Abstracts

Accessing Site, Mediating Sonic Environments: Mediation, Disability, and Embodiment in Site-Specific Environmental Sound Art
Kate Galloway

Site-specific environmental sound art is often celebrated as accessible musicking alternatives to exclusionary institutional performance and exhibition spaces. They are idealistically framed as experiences of art in the world around us that dissolve the boundaries between audience and artwork and those that distinguish between art forms. Site-specific environmental sound art, however, is exclusionary in the its own way, requiring the viewer/listener to seek out the location and often inviting modes of normalized ableist engagement and assumed able-bodiedness that doesn’t account for diverse bodies and multisensory listening. This is particularly the case for environmental sound art that is situated in remote locations and where the artist/composer actively resists audiovisual documentation and mediation (e.g., videos, games, apps, podcasts) for those with access barriers. Sound art installations and performances like these are embedded with issues of access and there is a need for immersive and affective multimedia alternatives. Environmental sound art is far too concerned with ableist notions of embodied, actual world encounters with environmental sound and music that respond to specific places, environmental issues, and diverse lived, embodied experiences of place. These are exclusive experiences that assume privilege, access, and mobility.

Drawing from varied examples of accessible and inaccessible mediating modes of environmental sound art experience, this presentation thinks through the roles sound art, sonic environments, multisensory listening, and technologies of mediation and access play in shaping and challenging many aspects of disability as a reparative act to shift site-specific sound art narratives to account for the embodied knowledge of diverse viewers/listeners.

Disability Epistemologies and Documentary Uncertainty: Sound and Loss in Alison O'Daniel's The Tuba Thieves
Emma Ben Ayoun

Alison O’Daniel’s ongoing film project The Tuba Thieves (2012-present) is a hybrid, complex work that takes a real-life string of tuba thefts from Los Angeles high schools in 2011 as the basis for an exploration of sound, hearing, and loss. The film is at once expansive, collaborative, and deeply personal. In a 2018 interview for BOMB Magazine, O’Daniel described her work thus: “I’m specifically inspired by the experience of being hard of hearing and how much of my life has felt just outside comprehension. I wanted to…acknowledge and honor that reality and also introduce the experience to a hearing audience so that they conceptually and physically have to reconcile with missing information as a productive method for encountering stories…I don’t want this project to be 100% accessible to anyone.”

The Tuba Thieves traffics largely in “missing information”—speculative histories, counter-narratives, and open endings. O’Daniel stages a reenactment of the inaugural performance of John Cage’s 4’33”; she “tunes into” the frequencies of potted plants. Throughout, she engages with the possibilities and limits of closed captioning and live performance. Although O’Daniel is committed to dismantling conventional hierarchies of accessibility, she is at least as interested in challenging the concept of access itself. Her open-ended, insistently partial work reframes the “lack” associated with sensory disability in an ableist world as a site of potential, play, and communication. In this paper, I read The Tuba Thieves through the lens of documentary and disability theory to consider the knowledges and absences provoked by cinematic sound.

Soundscapes of the Shielding
Holly Norcop & Harry Jukes

How can we work with people most vulnerable from co-vid 19 as organisations, musicians, creatives, and individuals? Creative producer Holly Norcop and sound artist Harry Jukes were commissioned by B-arts to research methodologies to explore participatory sound art practice in a socially distanced world. Elderly individuals who were still shielding were invited to send in sounds recoded on their devices or posted dictaphones of what care sounded like to them each day (e.g. the kettle, cleaning each bottle, speaking with a neighbour.) These sounds from each house formed a collective 'backing track'; which was accompanied by extracts of interviews made with isolated people on their experiences of lockdown. The aim was to provide each person with a sense of belonging to a broader shared experience.

The talk will cover the different aspects of learning made by exploring participatory music development with a small group of disabled and older people most affected by co-vid 19. Ranging from: practical considerations during outreach, music editing approaches too non-music material and common themes amongst isolating and disabled participants exploring the theme of care in lockdown.

Disability Justice as Scholarly Practice: A Crip Ethnography of Disabled Performing Artists
Elizabeth McLain

To address access issues in the performing arts, I argue we must “crip” musicology by embracing the principles of Disability Justice and prioritizing leadership of politically disabled scholars and artists. The ADA improved access for audiences, but disabled performing artists struggle to reach the spotlight. During covid19, disabled-led spaces have pioneered radical access, from the Disability Justice Culture Club’s model of mutual aid to the Crip Camp Virtual Experience reaching thousands. Together, disabled people often experience what Mia Mingus calls “access intimacy,” a connection between individuals who understand each other’s bodyminds and access needs. Practically and ethically, solutions must come from the wisdom of those most impacted.

As the first stage of an ethnography of access in the performing arts, this paper models interdependence by amplifying voices of disabled performing artists to support their work towards collective access and liberation. Leroy Moore of Sins Invalid and Krip-Hop Nation demonstrates the imperative of cross-movement organizing in his decades-long activism against police brutality and ableism. Gaelynn Lea Tressler, NPR’s 2016 Tiny Desk Contest winner, refuses to book inaccessible venues and asks not-yet-disabled artists to do the same. Lastly, Kalyn Heffernan of the band Wheelchair Sports Camp fights for human rights in indie performance spaces and ran Denver’s first queer-crip mayoral campaign. Access is not simply allowing disabled folks onto the stage, but must involve letting us lead and shape the work. We must recognize that disability culture is original, relevant, transformative—and our practice must be transformed within musicology to realize Disability Justice.

Amoeba Listening
Petra Kuppers

In this short meditative taster workshop, we will listen to sounds we are making with our own breath, in our own home, while being comfortable on a mat on the floor (or in a similar comfortable position for yourself and your particular bodymind). Our practice is informed by Pauline Oliveros' deep listening work, by Continuum Movement, and by Olimpias disability culture practices. We will use our breath to channel sounds through our body, paying attention to the images and sensations that come up. I use this practice as the basis for movement/writing workshops in Turtle Disco, a disability-led somatic writing studio in Ypsilanti, Michigan. This work is a self- and communal-care resource for creativity, rhythmic attunement, and low-key dropping in, a good way to support ourselves for living as disabled people in a discriminatory world.

Autism, Improvisation and COVID-19: (Re)negotiating Autistic Sensory Regulation Practices During the Pandemic
Erin Felepchuk

In my paper, I will examine autistic improvisation during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on how autistic people have re-negotiated sensory regulation practices such as stimming and fidgeting within the newly imposed environmental barrier of the pandemic. The term stimming, refers to the repetitive practices in which autistic people engage for the purposes of self-expression or sensory or emotional regulation. As an autistic person, I stim to mediate overwhelming sensory landscapes; autistic people often use the medium of stimming, frequently with the help of technologies such as music and stim toys or tools, to mediate between their inner world and outer environments that may over/underwhelm them. I argue that this mediating response is a kind of lived improvisation.

Discourses about improvisation have been pervasive during the COVID-19 pandemic: citizens have described government pandemic responses as “terrible. . . It’s improvisation,” and thousands of news articles utilize the phrase “forced to improvise,” in reference to aspects of the COVID-19 response. The pandemic has forced the general public to improvise in ways autistic people do every day. Drawing on primary source news media materials and social media posts related to improvisation and autistic experience, I begin to ask how autistic expressions of sensory difference are re-articulated within the context of this pandemic. I ask: how have autistic communities re-mediated and re-negotiated their relationship to this new normal through stimming? How have autistic people been excluded from biomedical and public health discourses and media representations? How has autistic improvisatory practice shifted in the face of the pandemic?

SPIN-ing around: Music Reimagined in Melbourne’s Deaf Arts
Alex Hedt

“We live in such an audio-dominant world,” laments Melbourne-based Deaf dancer and choreographer Anna Seymour. Members of Melbourne’s fledgling Deaf Arts community look for ways to challenge this status quo in their creative practices. The very term “Deaf Arts” (DEAF A-R-T-S in Australian Sign Language, or Auslan) presupposes a primarily cultural-linguistic framing of Deafness and Deaf culture, steeped in sign language practices. Indeed, Deaf theatre, dance, visual vernacular performances and other interdisciplinary works draw on a rich history of sign language literature and performance to combat audist assumptions and showcase Auslan’s creative potential. Local Deaf Arts practitioners centre these linguistic attributes in their discourse. Increasingly, however, they seek to collaborate with hearing sound artists, experimenting with sound, vibration and touch through heavily manipulated soundtracks.

Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Deaf performances in Melbourne, this paper examines how these distinctive soundscapes contribute to the ongoing campaign against phonocentric norms. I consider how employing electronically-realised music might both reflect and reject Deaf cultural values. Seymour’s works SPIN and Skin serve as case studies in how such soundtracks transcend the cultural-linguistic dimension, approximating the physicality of deafness for majority-hearing audiences. Functioning as all-encompassing sensory experiences, rather than as standalone musical works, these works subvert both social and sonic hierarchies. In doing so, I suggest, these soundtracks combat not only the exclusion perpetuated by hearing people, but also that effected by sign-centred definitions of Deafness. Offering a much-needed “third space”, works like Seymour’s invite new understandings of d/Deafness and music.

Strategic Reactions: Creators with Disabilities and the Performance of Listening on Yo
Byrd McDaniel

In popular music reaction videos, creators on YouTube play a music video or music recording, and they react in real time in order to indicate how they feel about the music upon first hearing it. These videos represent staged representations of listening, which rely on gestures, exclamations, and many expressions of affect to communicate how music feels in and with the body. All people listen with their bodies. Disability scholars and activists have been some of the foremost advocates for emphasizing the role of the body in media consumption, highlighting how bodily differences influence reception. Popular music reaction videos enable creators with disabilities to emphasize how listening can involve a complex interplay between many parts of the body, including ears, limbs, eyes, breath, props, assistive devices, imaginations, and many forms of embodied knowledges. My paper draws upon my ethnographic work on creators with disabilities on YouTube who make reaction videos.

Building on the interdisciplinary field of disability studies as it appears in musicology, ethnomusicology, and media studies, I consider what is at stake in videos that frame listening as their explicit subject. I argue that these creators with disabilities challenge dominant ideas of listening that emphasize intellectual engagement over affect, audist frameworks of ear-based listening, and the body as a universally uniform vessel for listening. Instead, these creators assert bodily difference and disability in particular as an affirmatively claimed asset to one’s experience of listening.

Silence Is Not Always Golden: A Poetic Revolution

As a Black woman who's hard of hearing, I learned that silence is not always golden. I had dreams to accomplish and there were barriers for me to overcome as the world wasn't ready for a person like me. In order to break through barriers, I had to speak up for change and show up. I watched my mother fight to get me quality education as I was too advanced and needed to be challenged. From her, I learned that I had to fight for my rights and dreams. My poems speak for the different challenges I faced as an educated woman in the professional workforce and in everyday life. No one wakes up to become an activist; they are born to do it based on the social injustice they've experienced and they make so much noise that you will notice them. That's me since I'm hardly quiet and I choose to fight back by using my words. This time, the world will be ready for me.

Hearing Voices: Operatic Madness in the Age of Schizophrenia
Diana Wu

Mad scenes have been a prominent feature of the operatic canon since its inception in the early 1600s. These scenes bring contemporaneous understandings of madness into conversation with historical understandings preserved in centuries-old theatrical traditions. This is particularly true of twentieth-century mad scenes, which increasingly feature auditory hallucinations as a key component of the performance of madness. This rising importance of auditory hallucinations reflects the concurrent adoption of schizophrenia by the psychiatric community and subsequently by popular culture, while also placing schizophrenia in dialogue with centuries-old understandings of the disembodied voice as supernatural or divine. Schizophrenia was first defined at the turn of the century, and obtained medical and cultural prominence beginning in the 1930s. By midcentury, the schizophrenic woman had “become as central a cultural figure for the twentieth century as the hysteric was for the nineteenth.” (Showalter 1985). Existing models of operatic madness, focused as they are on operas composed before 1910, have generally understood madness in terms of hysteria. Twentieth-century mad opera demands a new model that reflects its negotiation between operatic traditions and the modern medical paradigm.

My paper will examine Argento’s Miss Havisham’s Fire, Britten’s Curlew River (1964), and Menotti’s The Medium (1946) to demonstrate mid-twentieth-century tensions between psychiatric and supernatural interpretations of disembodied voices. I thereby propose a new, historically sensitive framework for twentieth-century mad operas that accounts both for the operatic tradition to which they contribute, and the contemporaneous medical and popular culture in which their composers and librettists lived and worked.

Cripping The Gorillaz: Radical Interpretations of Intellectual Disability and Madness
SK Sabada

This paper examines the world of digital British band, the Gorillaz. Aside from the platitudes this band has made by demonstrating the possibility in the combination of visual art and music to make performance accessible to a wide array of audiences, this band has also done significant work in terms of challenging what it means to authentically represent people labeled with intellectual disabilities and psychiatric diagnoses. This paper zeroes in on the lore provided in the autobiography, Rise of the Ogre (Browne, 2006), which details the history and subsequent formation of the Gorillaz through documenting the lives of each band member. In particular I seek to provide an analysis of the representation of intellectual disability and madness of the frontman, 2-D. Performatively, 2-D is endowed with the capacity to embrace the complexity of being intellectually disabled and mad. Since the band’s inception, we have played witness to 2-D’s evolution, from the abuse he experiences at the hands of his bandmate and caregiver, Murdoc, to his experiences with addiction and madness, and ultimately leading up to his creation of the band’s 2018 album, The Now Now, this depiction of being intellectually disabled and mad has allowed for a complexity that rarely gets explored due to ableism and sanism. Although 2-D and the Gorillaz will never be perfect, what is important here, is the possibilities that this band has given for representing disabled and mad experiences authentically through music and visual art.

Listening Cures: Acousmatic Sound in Ridiculusmus's "The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland"
Matthew Tomkinson

In this presentation, I will examine a play about which many dubious claims have been made: "The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland" (2014) by Jon Haynes and David Woods of the company Ridiculusmus. The play’s official write-up describes “an audience split in two experiencing auditory hallucinations.” Along the same lines, reviewers such as Laura Barnett have said that the show “replicates the experience of having an auditory hallucination.” The play features a dividing wall that separates the stage into two sides, with the audience sitting on one side and hearing voices from beyond the wall. Another write-up on the company’s website says that this “innovative staging offers visitors a unique and three-dimensional insight into what it is to be psychotic.” In this presentation, I will consider the rhetoric of experiencing madness through sound, focusing on the aforementioned metaphor of “replication.”

As Brian Kane writes in Sound Unseen, “One central, replicated feature of acousmatic listening appears to be that under-determination of the sonic source encourages imaginative supplementation.” Kane adds that acousmatic listening – cutting off sounds from their visual sources – has often been used to give audiences a sense of the transcendental, including a sense of interiority. On this point, I question the tendency of critics to downplay the metaphoricity of acousmatic listening in service of a fantasy of intersubjectivity. Moreover, the idea that sharing a facsimile of auditory hallucinations can convey the experience of psychosis fails to locate mental illness beyond the mind.

What are the consequences, then, of forgetting the “as if” of affective experiences? Or can we ignore such disavowals for the sake of the greater good: identification, empathy, understanding? The acousmatic staging of this play reminds us that all listening involves an element of desire. For this reason, Kane calls the Pythagorean veil (the ancient Greek philosopher is rumored to have lectured behind one) a “screen of fetishism.” I consider this screen as a sound object, asking how it mediates and fetishizes madness. For this online presentation, I hope to include a performative element whereby I present the paper acousmatically (heard but not seen, perhaps hidden behind a partition). In doing so, I'd like to create a playfully critical / critically playful sense of multiple levels of meditation.

How professional musicians pursue their activities during the pandemic
Diane Kolin

This comparative study is part of a larger research project examining the life of professional musicians, conductors, or composers with a disability since the first documented case studies of musicians dealing with a handicap.

The present article concerns the challenges facing three disabled professional musicians during the global pandemic and describes in detail the mediation strategies they have developed during the lockdown period imposed by COVID-19 to continue their work, despite their disability. Each of them is usually active with a very busy schedule. Each is from a different age group. Each presents a unique disability, though all are physical in nature.

The study explores the necessity of teamwork and collaboration to pursue musical activities, the choices made in their use of new technologies, and what issues they faced with tools that are sometimes incompatible with their infirmity.

Guidelines are also given based on these experiences.

Connecting: An Autoethnographic Account of Disability and Telehealth Music Therapy Provision
Kaitlin Shelton

Many disabled people have heard about and/or worked to raise consciousness of the impact of virtual meetings during the Covid-19 pandemic on disabled children and adults. As disabled children are falling through the cracks while schools consider reopening plans, many disabled people are dealing with new forms of medical treatment through a computer, and a significant portion of the disability community is left out entirely due to a lack of access to technology caused by poverty and under-employment, these issues are in dire need of attention and mitigating action.

However, there is one group of disabled people that have not received much conversation in the larger dialogue of telehealth and zoom meetings. In this presentation, a disabled Board-Certified Music Therapist will present findings from journal entries and supervision notes written from late March through June 2020. Insights on the impact disability has had on their provision of telehealth music therapy services to disabled clients, sometimes with conflicting access needs, will be discussed.

These autoethnographic findings are now part of a paper that I am hoping to submit to the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy on music therapy delivery using technology. I had noted these findings because there are relatively few disabled people in music therapy as professionals and literature about disabled professionals is scarce, but now pending the review process I have found a home for the writing that makes sense.

Time in Between Spaces
Isolte Avila and The SignDance Collective

In Between Spaces is a live show combining image, music, dance-theatre and spoken word poetry to create a unique experience for an audience. The performance centres on four characters who perambulate in a world outside of time, exploring the limen between the digital world and reality. Are they human or digital echoes electronically seared into our minds?

An artistic investigation of identity in the age of transient digital glitches as real-life experiences become tangled within digital interactions, the work explores whether humans can exist and communicate in two spaces at once and at what price. Co-created by the Signdance Collective and Austrian performance company Transmitter Performance (with 73 Degree Films, Wycombe Arts Centre, writer-dramaturg Pedro De Senna, movement director Kate Lawrence, spoken word poet Lionel Macauley, composer Richard Pollock, and director Ozan Gokmen), the project breaks new ground for combining music, movement, signtheatre, dance and film.

The SignDance Collective will start with two excerpts from our production of Carthage Cartagena by Caridad Svich to demonstrate how signdance theatre works. They will speak and then we will share excerpts from In Between Spaces. After this they will speak again and then take questions.

"This Is Me": A Musical Video Clip Mediating Interactions and Representation in Pandemic Times
Caroline Blumer

As all music programs were moved online during the pandemic, enormous challenges have been posed to inclusive music programs aiming to produce meaningful virtual interactions; particularly, for those engaging individuals with disabilities. Garrisi and Johanssen (2020) argue that new technologies and digital media may promote the self-empowerment of "excluded and silenced bodies" (p. 8). However, they may also reinforce stigmatizing views of disability (Worrell, 2018). Thus, it is critical that technology uses serve to inclusion and to represent people with disabilities in their full lived experiences (Ellis, 2015).

Dreams Come True is an inclusive music program for people of all ages and abilities in London, ON. Traditionally, participants sing, dance, and explore music within meaningful face-to-face interactions culminating in a Showcase Concert. This Spring-Summer season was run entirely online. "This Is Me" ( Pasek & Paul, 2017) has been the group anthem for years and was chosen for a video clip performance to promote interactions among participants and between participants and their audience in the absence of a final live concert.

To Devito (2018, p.3), the ability to participate actively in a musical set is being redefined in positive ways through technological mediation. Technology can break down barriers and create imaginative opportunities for interactions, access and representativity dis/abled bodies and voices. This presentation aims to portray how this video clip production was used to foster and mediate performance and meaningful interactions in this group and; point out what contributions this initiative may offer regarding inclusion and representation of individuals with disabilities.

A Special Fanfare: Music and Representation at the Exceptional Parents and Friends Association (APAE) Tangará da Serra in Brazil
Pablo V. Marquine

In 2005, the first presentation of the Brazilian Fanfarra Superação worked as a locus for re-signification and representation for the Tangará da Serra’s disabled community. Organized by the Brazilian pedagogue Maria Oliveira (1980) at the state representative Exceptional Parents and Friends Association (Associação de Pais e Amigos dos Excepcionais, APAE), this music group provided new pedagogical outcomes through music-making. Created in 1954, in Rio de Janeiro, the APAE Brazil is a national organization towards the disabled individuals, with state and federal institutions. Later, by following Schopler and Reichler’s TEACCH methodology, it became the most representative association to support individuals with disabilities in the country. However, besides the invaluable developments of this organization, it still faces economic and cultural hardship towards the common society.

I argue that the Fanfarra Superação challenged the ongoing view of disability, which worked as a dialogical mediator with the society, and became an important factor to de-stigmatize individual limitations. The group became an ordinary presence at the city’s celebrations, achieving recognition as cultural representatives. I examine here how the participants developed musicality and a sense of identity (cf. Linton and Blake Howe, Et al.). By using interviews, performance video recordings, and a discussion about music pedagogy, I will analyze here the impact of this group on the society, and how it became a strong social representant—later, with its interruption due to the COVID-19. By re-signifying the perspective of the society upon an individual’s limitations, the Fanfarra strengthened the disable community sense for advocacy, support, and representation.

Towards decolonial disability studies: Engaging theory and praxis from the Global South

Despite the emergence of disability studies in the global South over the last decade, efforts to theorize disability from the periphery have been extremely challenging (Goodley & Swartz, 2016). What spaces exist to engage people with disabilities in the global South? How can we decolonize existing power structures and create spaces for Southern disability theories and praxis? In this presentation, I reflect on my collaborative project, Transforming Disability Knowledge, Research, and Activism to ponder peripheral disability studies - a body of knowledge that builds on Southern spaces, discourses, and epistemologies. I argue that critical engagement with intellectual projects in the South is necessary for rethinking, reimagining, and reframing knowledge about disability that has been marginalized, excluded, or erased by colonial and imperialist powers. This conversation will create a decolonial space that opens up the questions of access, representation, and empowerment of diverse disability experiences in the South.