The Listening Body:
Sound and the Sensory Apprehension of Movement
By
Gemma Crowe
BA Dance with distinction, University of Calgary, 2013
Digital Film Production Certificate, Langara College, 2013

A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF FINE ART

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2022

© Gemma Crowe, 2022

1

Abstract
Through the Master of Fine Arts program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design
my work has focused on the mediated moving body as my research investigates the
concept of embodiment for joy, self-awareness, and self-reflexivity. Art is an ideal vehicle to
explore different ways of knowing, beyond cognition, by encouraging feeling through
aesthetic affect. I came into the MFA program with professional experience in film and
videography and a background in the performing arts, which influences how I approach an
audience of viewers and listeners. A significant development to my practice has been the
use of sound as material, working with its illusory potential, and depicting the presence of
the moving body through experimental processes and makeshift sound installations. My
thesis research is driven by a desire to understand, through experience; sensory
perception, embodiment, the palpability of human presence through sound, and how to
apprehend features of the world by listening and generating a felt sense of the physical
body in space.

2

Introduction

6

Positionality Statement

8

Artistic Influences

11

Susan Kozel and Telematic Dreaming

11

La Monte Young and Dream House

13

jamilah malika abu-bakare and listen to Black women

16

Core Concepts

20

Sound Perceived as a Moving Material Form

20

Sound Shadows

21

Embodiment for Change

22

Audible Kinesthetic Empathy

22

Reflection in the Absence of Live-ness

25

Artistic Research and Works Created

27

Breathing Room: Using Space as a Time-Based Medium

27

Hearing and Site within Spatial Sound Installation How Do You Here Me?

30

360 Degree Sound Shadows in the Presence in my Absence

32

Methodology

35

Practice-Based, Embodied Research

35

Improvisation as Method

35

The Art of Perception

37

The Necessity of Technology

39

Projecting into the Virtual

39

Thesis Exhibition

41

Movement Study

41

Installation

42

The Sonic Presence

45

Conclusion

49

Works Cited

52

Bibliography

54

Appendix
Appendix I: Research Methods + Observations

58

Appendix II: Project Motion-Motion: reuniting sound and visual

65

3

Media List
Fig. 1: Susan Kozel, Telematic Dreaming, 1994. Mixed media performance.
Fig. 2: Susan Kozel, Telematic Dreaming, 1994. Mixed media performance.
Fig. 3: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Dream House, 275 Church Street, NYC 1993.
Fig. 4: jamilah malika abu bakare, listen to Black women. Sound Art. Video Excerpt.
Fig. 5: Gemma Crowe, Binaural Spatialization. Sound Excerpt.
Fig. 6: Gemma Crowe, Sound Shadows. Sound Excerpt.
Fig. 7: Gemma Crowe, Breathing Room, 2021. Yard Space Gallery. Video Documentation
Fig. 8: Gemma Crowe, Breathing Room, 2021. Yard Space Gallery. Installation View.
Fig. 9: Gemma Crowe, How Do You Here Me? 2021. Documentation. Sound Excerpt.
Fig. 10: Gemma Crowe, the Presence in my Absence 2021. Documentation. Video Excerpt.
Fig. 11: Gemma Crowe, the Presence in my Absence 2021. Installation View
Fig. 12: Gemma Crowe, the Presence in my Absence 2021. Sound Excerpt.
Fig. 13: Gemma Crowe, Making Room for Resonance, 2022. Process Documentation.
Fig. 14: Gemma Crowe, Making Room for Resonance, 2022. Process Documentation.
Fig. 15: Gemma Crowe, Making Room for Resonance, 2022. Sound Installation.
Fig. 16: Gemma Crowe, Making Room for Resonance, 2022. Sound Installation. RBC Media Gallery

Fig. 17: Gemma Crowe, Making Room for Resonance, 2022. Ambisonic Recording.
Fig. 18: Gemma Crowe, Making Room for Resonance, 2022. Binaural Recording.
Fig. 19: Gemma Crowe, Motion-Motion, 2021. Multimedia. Installation Documentation Video
Fig. 20: Gemma Crowe, Motion-Motion, 2021. Multimedia. Installation Documentation Video
Fig. 21: Gemma Crowe, Motion-Motion, 2021. Multimedia. Installation Documentation.
Fig. 22: Gemma Crowe, Motion-Motion, 2021. Multimedia. Installation Documentation.

4

Acknowledgements
I feel incredibly fortunate to participate in this program at this time with the people
who have made my MFA a transformative experience. It was Justin Langlois who set the
tone for an education which goes beyond the institution and my fellow MFA candidates and
I took up this message. I have learned so much from the lives and practices of my cohort
and truly appreciate the collective agreement to shared learning. The greater community at
Emily Carr University of Art + Design has also been instrumental in developing my practice
and my curiosities. My supervisor Maria Lantin has been my guide throughout this
program, encouraging the best from me and for me. Maria’s commitment to my artistic
growth and thesis development is unparalleled by any mentorship I have experienced. She
has brought so much wisdom to my practice and more opportunities for learning than I
could have imagined for myself. For this I am a better artist and better person. I am grateful
as well for the enthusiasm Peter Bussigel showed in my experimentation with sound, at a
time when the ideas were raw. His early encouragement instilled the confidence to pursue
areas of research which felt out of reach. I am thrilled to have had the chance to share my
work in-person with Andrea Spaziani, this made for an insightful and generative discussion
in my thesis defense. I look forward to maintaining relationships with my thesis committee
for years to come.
I owe a huge thank you to Yang Hong and Josh Stephenson for their help in realising
the final instalment of my thesis project. Thank you as well to Sean Arden, Jamie Hilder,
Jacqueline Turner, and Annie Briard for inspiring growth in new areas of artistic
development and to the team at Media Resources for fulfilling every one of my equipment
needs and enabling endless experimentation.
Thank you finally to my parents for encouraging me to dive deep into what I am
truly excited about, to feel safe in uncertainty and to wonder. The MFA process has been
unpredictable, perplexing, and truly wonderful and I am so grateful for this time and space.

5

Introduction
My work aims to create a novel sensory experience where sound, image, and
movement converge. My immersive installations feature spatial sound and projected
imagery for an embodied experience of the work through multi-sensory stimulation and by
generating an awareness of the body in space through proprioception. In bridging the
disciplines of sound, video, and dance I integrate the conventions of these media and
engage in cross-disciplinary improvisation to generate new bodily knowledge. With
research into perception and embodiment the experience of my work is that of listening to
see, seeing to feel, and feeling to hear. It is through movement that I create a physical
presence out of the immaterial.
The subject of my work is the body, which is materially absent save for the resonant
sensation of its physical presence in sound and imagery. My embodied improvisation
produces sound and projections which may be familiar to the body in abstraction. This
process invites the audience to situate within the work, allowing individual perspective and
lived experience to temper the work in the absence of visual representation. I have taken
this time to consider my artistic responsibility in working with the body as subject and the
implications of accessing perception on a corporeal level.
I address perception through synesthetic experiences with sound, video, and dance.
The sound focuses on vibrational experience and spatial composition, as they relate to the
body. The work is not meant to be considered music in the sense of a harmonious relational
arrangement. Video is used as a means of recording movement that is then projected as
abstract moving image or light. I use the term movement rather than dance to highlight its
transference onto different media. Dance is a discipline which explores codified movement,
interpretation, and improvisation as the site of expression and performative
communication. The work described in this thesis uses movement to generate ideas,
facilitate sensation, and bring attention to the present moment. I create movement with
sound and light and incite a sensation of dancing in an audiencing body; the work
represents the effects of dance but not the act of dance itself.

6

I begin this document with a positionality statement that outlines the path that
brought me to this particular juncture of practices. I acknowledge that the way I am
working is based on my lived experience and a desire to reach audiences individually and
intimately, and to invite them to feel and think differently. I then provide context for my
work from artistic influences: Susan Kozel, La Monte Young, and jamilah malika abu bakare,
whose practices are important in redefining the mediums they work with. A summary of
the fundamental concepts underlying my current practice follows, where I chart my
conceptual development through select projects. The theories that support my explorations
are outlined in the Methodology section and illustrate how I conduct my research and in
turn, process the results through time-based installations. Then, with a close read of my
thesis exhibition installation I situate the results of my exploration within an immersive
installation. I conclude this thesis support document by considering how my thesis
research will inform my evolving independent practice.

7

Positionality Statement
Mine is an evolving multi-sensory practice based on embodiment. It is a practice
that makes me feel most connected to myself and to others. Movement, for me, is an act of
self-knowing. I aim to make this accessible by focusing on the bodily experience. My artistic
research explores movement and cognition through embodiment as a means of
encouraging new understanding and self-awareness. I feel it most pertinent to explore my
findings through immersive installation, and see this research as urgent and necessary
considering the prevalence of individualism, distrust in difference, and the ubiquity of
unaddressed issues perpetuated by a screen-centred world. This work has the capacity to
enhance empathic knowledge by creating a chance to feel, differently, together.
My dance training began as the sole task of looking like someone else as my early
training was heavily mimetic. I was keenly observant and I emulated with a precision that I
was praised for, but this was a decidedly outside-in process. My sense of self eroded as I
opted to see myself through the eyes of others. I spent my adolescence in front of a mirror,
working hard to be allowed more dance by way of more training. I attended a performing
arts high school then performed with a pre-professional company and completed an
undergraduate degree in dance. This was the crux of it: I would have moments of blissful
exertion and self-affirming physicality and then correct myself in the mirror. Dance
training routinely established that I wasn’t the arbiter of what was right for my body, and
that I had to assess myself from an outside perspective. To cite French psychoanalyst,
Jacques Lacan’s “Mirror Stage,” this was the epitome of the “ideal I,” being outside of what
felt like me. I am thankful that my undergraduate degree in dance fostered artistry over
commercial virtuosity. I discovered improvisation as composition and contemplation and
was able to find agency in my moving body. Improvised movement felt a lot like dreaminterpretation; I didn’t know where anything came from but I knew it was a part of me, and
it felt like magic. I learned to be present and I started feeling instead of looking. Anytime I
get too focused on seeing myself from the outside I remind myself to feel my body. Looking
for approval is the slippery slope of vision for me.

8

I have made it a practice to improvise in all disciplines, which is how I have arrived
at the use of new technology, workflows, and materials. As a result, my practice spans
several disciplines and diverges within the conventions of filmmaking, sound design, and
dance. A dance practice doesn’t typically develop into a media practice, but these
technologies have become a tool with which I extend my body, sensing and moving beyond
my corporeal limitations.
Working as a filmmaker I distil an intimate perspective from my awareness of the
bodies involved: mine, the subject on screen, and the future audience. As an insider to the
world of performance, I use my access to refocus the attention on other aspects of a moving
body: not virtuosity but choice-making and visceral contemplation. With my camera I
commit to capturing the perspective of being situated in the action, and my physical
engagement can be felt by the audience as I run, lean-in, lunge, and steadily track a moving
and unpredictable body. It was in filmmaking that I first realised the effect of kinesthetic
empathy; that an audience is moved when witnessing movement.
Branching from vision, I focused my early thesis research on perception which led
me to abstractions of the body and of movement–one where visual representation wouldn’t
distract from or distort the experience. I aimed to remove the condition of analysis in my
work and found that sonic stimulus disarmed my analytical eye so that I could receive
other profound sensory information. This is what led me to work with sound.
Within an academic context, the fragility of the visual is highlighted through optical
illusions, visual bias, and the disproportionate value of sight over our other senses. I have
learned that one way of seeing defines only one way of living, and that the inability to see,
as in represent, a way of life which deviates from the norm is a matter of life and death. As
Research Assistant with the Critical Literacies project, I began to unpack the hierarchy of
language, recognizing it as simply one form of intelligence. I drew parallels between the
power of the written word and the ways that education divides people. So often language is
our only voice and so seldom is visual representation unequivocal.
9

Work without pressure to determine exactly what is to be seen or heard, as is the case with
abstract art, facilitates a heightened awareness that makes sensation more available.
Sound, like video, can offer an experience that we may never be able to enact physically by
envisioning it, or in the case of sound: by imagining it. Later in my research the term for
this experience would be to “virtualize.” Physical embodiment is not reserved for the
moving able-body. It is this point that most demonstrates my enthusiasm for creating work
for the senses: perception of sensation and actual physical sensation have the same impact
on the body. For example, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a sensory
practice where audio recordings, sometimes paired with video, depict actions which are
recorded from the audiences’ perspective, to create the sensation of live action. ASMR
artists creates a physical sense of intimacy in the absence of proximity. A certain
percentage of the population experiences physical sensations of tingling and chills when
listening to ASMR. In music studies, this effect is referred to as “musical frisson” and is
known to affect skin conductance and the release of dopamine (Lochte).
Appealing to the senses is my way of offering an experience that is beyond visual
representation, one that is individual but shared. In creating awareness through physical
attunement, I endeavour to regulate systems out of balance – the systems within me and
those that govern our bodies. My work offers a chance to access alternative states through
embodiment: shifting how you feel in a particular setting. Inhabiting the body in a new way
can empower us to live differently within conditions that we can’t control. Acting as an
empathetic intermediary, I hope that I can create spaces that we share, where we can
understand beyond our own circumstances.

10

Artistic Influences
I am regularly encountering new influences as I allow new elements of my practice to emerge.
As such, this is a selection of current artists and works who have influenced recent projects. I
tend towards artists who are approaching a medium differently, or seem to be asking
questions similar to my own about the audience experience. Susan Kozel, La Monte Young,
and jamilah malika abu bakare are three artists who inspire me to explore new methods and
philosophies for perceptual work.

Susan Kozel and Telematic Dreaming

Fig. 1: Susan Kozel, Telematic Dreaming, 1994. Mixed media performance. Used by permission of Paul Sermon

Susan Kozel is a contemporary phenomenologist and professor of Philosophy, Dance
and Media Technologies at the School of Art and Communication at Malmö University in
Sweden. Kozel grounds larger philosophical questions about media and perception in a
study of the dancing body. Kozel’s most salient research considers embodiment,
improvisation, and the concept of the virtual, which has helped to contextualise my process
11

based on my dance background. As I experiment in new media I have been encouraged by
parallels between my observations and Susan Kozel’s published research. I take this to be
exciting coincidences produced by two embodied practices integrating technology with a
choreographic mindset. I am thrilled to be led down lines of thinking similar to Kozel, years
later.
Kozel writes about materiality within virtual spaces as she recounts her experience
performing in Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming as part of the 1994 I + the Other: dignity
for all, reflections on humanity contemporary art in central Amsterdam exhibition.
Telematic Dreaming is a projected performance in which Kozel’s physical body is filmed offsite, then projected, in real time, into a gallery space, creating the illusion of an interactive
performance, once removed. The performance takes place on the surface of a bed. An
exhibition-bed identical to the one the real Susan Kozel is performing upon was installed in
the gallery beneath the beam of her projected image. The action upon the exhibition-bed is
recorded and displayed on three video screens above and on either side of Kozel’s offsite
bed-stage. The effect is one of a two-dimensional dance performance occurring on a bed,
where audiences are encouraged to join Kozel’s image. Kozel, in-turn, improvises with the
audience members by responding to the view on her monitors.

Fig. 2: Susan Kozel, Telematic Dreaming, 1994. Mixed media performance. Used by permission of Paul Sermon

12

The Telematic Dreaming exhibit lasted four weeks. The entire length of the exhibit
was recorded, as were all of the rehearsals in which Kozel proposed ideas to her future self
to review. Not only was this a lengthy hyper-reflective exercise, it is also examining
physical presence and the sense of touch in virtual space. Kozel explains
This piece is significant for revealing, in an accessible way, that basic human
qualities such as touch, trust, vulnerability, pain, and embodiment are not lost when
people engage with each other through technologies: we just need an appropriate
methodological framework in order to see and validate this” (Kozel 89)
Kozel details the accounts of audience members who were deeply affected by the piece and
its intimate exchanges, agreeing that the experience was incredibly physical and sensual,
despite being mediated and physically removed. Telematic Dreaming helps to demonstrate
a different kind of interaction, a curated encounter in which the absence of the live
encounter leaves room for a more poetic relationship. It also affirmed my theory that the
suggestion of sensation might actually be palpable in a different way.

La Monte Young and Dream House

La Monte Young today is deemed a “minimal composer” but his work challenged the
popular conception of music during the fluxus art movement. Consisting mostly of longheld tones and drones, his then compositions now resemble contemporary sound art and
installation. Young, a prolific musician, regarded music as something to stay with, to steep
in, and dedicated his practice to the exacting science of sound waves and refining auditory
perception. Young explains that the tones in Trio for Strings were “suspended in air to allow
examination and contemplation” and his famous work Well-Tuned Piano is just over five
and a half hours long, effectively defamiliarizing each note through a durational
performance (Tannenbaum).

13

With his wife Marian Zazeela, La Monte Young created a sound and light installation
called Dream House. In its various iterations, Dream House exists as a room or space, filled
with rich pink light, outfitted with speakers producing slightly varied sine-wave tones.
Positioned meticulously throughout the room, the speakers create unusual sound wave
interactions, which reverberate based on the position of the listener. Using a special
synthesiser, the sine-waves are only microtonal variations of each other, meaning they do
not harmonise typically. Being so close in tonal range causes a “beating” effect, which
creates a bouncing of sound or an additional vibrating tone changing in intensity based on
how, and where, a person moves through the installation. The unconventional spatial
harmonising is the main feature of the work, where audience members hear the interacting
of sound waves and sense the implication of their own movement through space.

https://www.melafoundation.org/dream02.htm
Fig. 3: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Dream House, 275 Church Street, New York 1993. Installation.
Figure removed due to copyright restrictions. The information removed is a snapshot of the Dream House
installation featured on the MELA Foundation Website. The image includes an empty room filled with purple
lighting, light sculptures, and three vertical windows.

Making the immaterial perceptible is what makes Dream House relevant still today.
The concept composition is revealed through participation. Young invites the audience to
engage differently. Attuned to the sensation of sound waves and the length of time spent
with a renewed perception of sound, he makes work for the body in a way that I admire.
Using sound as material, I want to bring awareness to the body and allow for a reflective
state during a time-based concept. Instead of the audience moving through my
installations, I want to create sounds that depict movement, sometimes creating the
sensation of self-motion and other times inviting a kinesthetic projection of movement
onto the source of sound. I ask people to slow down to sense the environment and in turn,
their own body.

14

Young studied North Indian music, a melodic system and tradition that believes in
healing frequencies. The depth of his consideration of a few select tones marks a paradigm
shift. People would spend hours in Dream House, using it to meditate, seeking
transcendence within the immersive installation. I maintain that the physical experience of
sound situates the listener in a profound way. Centering each audience member as the
subject of my work recognizes individual perspectives and allows a transition to a more
open-minded, receptive state. Dream House makes evident the unseen transmittance in
space and between people which is affected by our actions, calling for a more conscientious
engagement with the world.
I look to the simplicity in the design of Dream House where the complexity of the
concept lies in the act of listening. Over the years, and as technology advances, the same
basic concept remains integral. There is no way to adapt the sound wave interaction
virtually or for headphones. It is necessitated by space and the moving body.

15

jamilah malika abu-bakare and listen to Black women
Also working with sound, jamilah malika abu-bakare demonstrates a transparent
relationship to technology that favours the message over mystique. Her interdisciplinary
practice prioritises care and community, centering the lives and bodies of black women
(bakare). bakare’s interdisciplinary practice prioritises listening over looking as she seeks
justice through art-making. I was introduced to bakare’s work at Emily Carr’s Resonance
speaker series, in front of two large black screens which read “sound as freedom,” the title
of her lecture. Exploring the physiological effects of sound on the body, I’ve come to
understand that knowing how to feel good allows for a certain type of freedom. Selfknowing is a step towards the ability to be, and do, whatever brings joy and pleasure.
bakare’s practice resonates with me on several levels; the way she considers
representation and collective healing through art-making, and her approach to working
with technology.
In this talk, bakare spoke of the gate-keeping of technology not only by sex, race, and
class but of the developing art forms themselves, indicating that the expectation for highlevel production and innovation only narrows the scope of voices represented. It’s the
inclusivity of her practice, which includes anti-oppression as well as an emerging-artist
initiative that truly beckons other makers. What makes bakare’s work accessible is its
forthright form, similar to La Monte Young. The provisional use of technology, purely for
recording and playback, places more importance on the act of listening than demonstrating
mastery or technique. bakare goes as far as to say that the low-tech and low-fidelity of both
her sound and video works help to underline the priorities of her practice demonstrating a
refusal of the commodification of media practices.
abu-bakare’s work makes way for others through an initiative called Aural Alterities,
which resources underrepresented emerging sound artists. jamilah malika abu-bakare
supports the successes of female-identifying Black artists through collaboration as they
unite around the shared experience of representation. The joy and camaraderie that can be
felt – and generated – in shared moments makes me curious about how pleasure can be
16

taken up through different senses, and transferred between people by modes of
communication that we are not consciously aware of.
jamilah malika abu-bakare’s interdisciplinary practice directly confronts visibility
and representation. Listen to Black Women (again) is a video comprised only of sound. The
audience must stare at a black screen while a collage of spoken sounds assembles
sensorially, feeding back on itself, reordering, and layering. “To be black enough” repeats in
stereo, moving from right to left until it is met with “just as I am.” These words hang in the
air with a renewed resistance. I wonder, what is Black enough? What does “just as I am”
look like? We aren’t allowed such conclusions. A cacophony of the line “to be addressed and
recognized and appreciated and respected” then tumbles out over itself again and again.
This time the words overlap as if to signify the accumulation of these requests unmet. In
this piece, to listen to Black women is to oblige.

https://vimeo.com/530585670
Fig. 4: jamilah malika abu bakare, listen to Black women. Sound Art. Video Excerpt.

Figure removed due to copyright restrictions. The information removed is a video excerpt of listen to Black
women, a sound file played as a video showing only a black screen.

My exploration of sound has always been based in personal discovery. Early in my
research I determined that sight, as the sense that the majority of the population relies on
most, has more to do with perception and the significance of information retrieved than it
does with the function of our eyes. jamilah malika abu-bakare seems to share the same
conviction that the visual is mired in commerce, patriarchy, and colonial values. The real
issue of the representation of bodies for me is a focus on the “other” that negates selfreflection and I trace this problem back to the prevalence of ocularcentrism in our society.
The act of looking is an inherently external exercise: it focuses on that which is outside of
the self. Focusing on a lived experience is where self-reflexivity begins and the embodiment
of sound enables this. The same way the listener is freed from a visually prescriptive

17

experience, bakare insists the maker is freed from objectification. The research I do on the
body can be seen as a metaphor for collective healing. While my work doesn’t directly
address issues of race, I am working against judgement based on difference in perspectives.
I honour the individual body as it grounds my explorations in personal experience.
bakare gives words dimension in space and time in the same way La Monte Young
insisted we contemplate individual tones: in order to feel their weight. Letting voices exist
outside the context of identity, steeped in subtext, the sucking of teeth, deep-sighs and
candid disclosures hold more significance as a steady, repeating tempo of discourse than
performed on their own. Unlike music which creates harmonies, the listener can identify
the individual parts that make up Listen to Black Women (again).
Refusing illusion, I seek transparency when working with sound and technology
because I respect the diversity of perspectives within the audience. The work exists within
each audience member, not outside of them. This is also what drew me to sound in the first
place: the undeniably personal experience. What I appreciate most about the works of
Susan Kozel, La Monte Young, and jamilah malika abu bakare is their ability to include the
audience experience into the work, in different ways.

18

~
To clarify the relationship between my artistic influences, research, and methodology the next
section introduces concepts that have been core to my thesis research.

Research Methods + Observations are included in Appendix I

19

Core Concepts
Sound Perceived as a Moving Material Form
I am working with sound as a moving material form. As part of the practice-based
research component of this thesis, I have discovered two ways to make the movement of
sound perceptible: through recording a single, static sound source while wearing in-ear
binaural microphones as I move my body around the sound, and through the creation of
Sound Shadows. I aim to create the perception of movement in space around the body or
the sensation of self-motion. Both of these techniques encourage the listener to perceive
sound and space with proprioception (the perceptual sense that situates the body), which
in turn activates the body through kinesthetic empathy. By refining my aesthetic
capabilities with sound, I am practising theories of embodiment through auditory
manipulation and mediated sensation.

https://soundcloud.com/user-694749249/embodied-spatialization?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Fig. 5: Gemma Crowe, Binaural Spatialization. Sound Excerpt.

20

In a lecture on multisensory self-motion perception in Virtual Reality, Behrang
Keshavarz, assistant professor of psychology at Ryerson University, discusses the concept
of vection which creates “the sensation of self-motion in the absence of actual motion,” and
specifically notes that although vection is typically experienced through the visual sense,
there is potential for auditory vection (Behrang).
As I physically inhabit the recording of sound defined by all the expression and
constraints of a human body, I am producing a specific corporeal intention which I hope
lands in the body of the listener as a more nuanced experience than what could be
developed through spatial sound editing. I am proposing that in depicting dynamic material
form, sound can potentially reanimate the moving body in space. The aesthetic specificity
of movement and sound holds the potential for auditory creations as performance and a
felt sense of bodies remanifested in space. How does the body recognize movement and
how can I convincingly recreate an event for the auditory senses?

Sound Shadows
I create Sound Shadows with a source blocking technique that uses the audible
interference produced by my moving body partially obstructing the reception of sound by a
recording device. This is akin to the way a body produces a shadow as it blocks light from a
surface. The sound shadows are most audible as the sound waves are eclipsed by the body.
The conjecture is that during playback the sound shadows could perceptually rematerialize
the moving physical form that was blocking the sound during recording.

https://youtu.be/pyKKuELR5q0
Fig. 6: Gemma Crowe, Sound Shadows. Sound Excerpt.

21

Embodiment for Change

Embodiment has been part of my artistic practice for some time. I grew up taking
music lessons until I began dance training, where I studied an embodied musicality. The
soundscapes in my film work express what I could not capture on camera. Because hearing
allows for simultaneous activity, we can consume sound with different levels of
engagement; our bodies can be in any orientation to the source and we can be in almost
any physical or mental state and continue to listen. This allows us to connect our personal
experience with what we are hearing. This connection is aided by the fact that the
immaterial nature of recorded sound requires an imaginative engagement.
In the essay Meaning-making and Embodied Cognition in Doing Research in Sound
Design, Stephen Roddy and Brian Bridges discuss how embodiment shapes cognitive
functions like meaning-making. They write that “the meanings which we are concerned
with in sound design are created at the intersection between multiple modes of perception
and interaction” (33). I encourage meaning-making rather than interpretation of a
predetermined meaning by engaging perception throughout the body and its multiple
senses.
The embodiment of sound is most clearly demonstrated through vibration, and that
of bass tones in particular, which are usually felt more powerfully than they are heard.
Religious traditions or healing rituals that participate in music, singing, chanting, or sound
use the affective qualities of vibration as a means of transcendence and worship. Outside of
faith practices people commonly use music to change their state of mind. Binaural music is
an emerging genre designed for headphones and uses the separate audio tracks in each ear
to achieve “brainwave synchronisation” or “entrainment” which synchronises brainwave
frequencies with the music to achieve a state of relaxation or focus. These diverse sound
applications demonstrate more than a listening relationship.
Embodiment – treating something outside of ourselves as if it were our own – is the
reason I create work. Sharing Breath: Decolonizing Pedagogy is a collection of essays
22

demonstrating the importance of embodiment for community, healing, self-reflexivity, and
social change. Randelle Nixon and Katie MacDonald in the essay “Being Moved to Action,”
support the importance in feeling by assuring that they, “like many others, argue that
rational thought does not occur through a repression or domination of our affective
responses, rather; what we understand to be rational relies and draws on our bodily
feelings and knowledge.” Sharing Breath: Decolonizing Pedagogy is an account of selfknowing as a political act and empowering standpoint, and situatedness as a means of
ethical engagement with difference. My artistic research seeks to allow each audience
member’s unique perspective. Democratising experience in this way leads to a more
refined and sensitive account and can encourage change on different levels.

23

Audible Kinesthetic Empathy
Karen Wood’s theory of kinesthetic empathy was the starting point of my research.
Wood claims that watching movement spurs a visceral, kinesthetic response. The bodies of
people who watch movement react as if they are performing the same movement (Wood).
Barbara Tversky, a professor of psychology at Stanford University who has developed
significant research on movement, cognition, and spatial thinking, builds on this with her
investigation of mirror neurons and entrainment, stating that “body-to-body
communication is more direct than word-to-word.” (112) The sensation of physical
engagement from the perception of movement is an important consideration in my work.
For example, as a filmmaker moving alongside dancers and capturing their moment-tomoment decision making, I strive to give audiences a chance to feel what it is like to be in
that moment.
Barbara Tversky’s research on spatial thinking in her book Mind in Motion sparked
the idea that kinesthetic empathy might be the key to embodied cognition engaged through
the perception of movement. Tversky claims that “action molds perception” (23) and that
“spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought” (163), which is essential to activities
such as problem solving, creation, knowledge production, and the conceiving of
possibilities. I wondered; if watching movement creates reciprocal activity in mirror
neurons, then perhaps tracking the movement of sound through space might also create a
kinesthetic reaction. For example, when I create a binaural audio track that seems to circle
around the listener’s head, the body is affected as if something really is flying around them.
This is how I can start to offer the experience of movement without the listener having to
execute it. Imagine being able to feel something without physically experiencing it. In that
case, embodiment is a kind of visceral empathy.

24

Reflection in the Absence of Live-ness
Performance researcher Philip Auslander has conducted extensive research into the
concept of “live-ness” which has helped me to clarify the role of recorded material.
Auslander deems anything that is mechanically amplified to be mediated, and therefore not
live. He notes an obsession with intimacy in the zoomed-in, blown-up representations of
television personalities and live performers, effectively making us feel as though we might
be able to attain what we want instantaneously and without real-life effort. I agree that
screens and representations of intimacy pervade most of our lives and generate a
superficial sense of knowing, however; observing others encourages empathy through
which we may understand each other by learning about ourselves. Inciting an empathic
response is an effective marketing strategy, it can be manipulative and addicting, but
bringing things into closer-view can also enable a perspective which we may not have
access to, for reasons beyond our control.
Beyond providing access, mediated live-ness provides new ground for
interpretation. What could be gained by allowing the audience to build a relationship with
sound and imagery that isn’t quite so fleeting? I am interested in presence and how the
current moment can be affected by a layering of events – through the use of recorded audio
or visual material. Having studied live performance, I have a deep appreciation for its
ephemerality but the act of gathering in space and spending time remains in my work. I
now work without a sense of immediacy, staying with the sensation distilled in the removal
of live-ness. It is Philip Auslander’s rigorous analysis that highlights the aspects of live-ness
that are most important to my current work.
My departure from live-ness allows me to explore virtual experience and
telepresence; enabling a connection to another place, or time, to influence the current
experience. For the purpose of a philosophical approach, virtual then means to invite
possibilities which lie outside of the immediate physical reality.

25

~
This research encourages me to further explore sound and perception within multimedia
installations. In the section that follows I will briefly describe the projects which I have
developed through artistic research.

26

Artistic Research and Works Created
Breathing Room: Using Space as a Time-Based Medium
Following discussions and research into embodied process, the abstraction of
physiological process, and the fragility of vision, I created Breathing Room – a time-based
installation featuring sound and video projections which represent breath and the act of
sharing. Breathing Room was further developed as part of Yard Space Gallery’s Fall
exhibition. I first questioned the representation of the human body with this work. I
considered how it inevitably tinges experience: at best signalling belonging (from the
familiarity of my image) and at worst equating my body and my identity with a template
for the experience. I wondered how the interpretation of a white female subject was
inhibiting an individual felt-sense. What if there was no ideal “I” reflected back?

https://youtu.be/TCUp0m1Xxvs
Fig. 7: Gemma Crowe, Breathing Room, 2021. Yard Space Gallery. Video Documentation

27

Installing Breathing Room in the vacant basement suite of Yard Space Gallery I was
able to express the abundance of immaterial presence in this work by projecting video onto
windows and reflective surfaces where they could expand in space. This work features two
videos of abstracted data representing the breath between words in an audio recording of
myself speaking. A soundtrack of just the breath between these words is heard along with
individual piano notes sequenced between the rooms, moving autonomously through the
basement. A video cropped to reveal only my arms intermittently extending out from my
chest, towards the audience, fills the basement living room space. This was the movement
enacted while recording the spoken audio; personal thoughts, recorded with the intention
to share with the audience without ever uttering a word.
The projected imagery communicated through what was withheld. An arm
outstretched and unmet proposed a dissonance in the room while the moving images
which scrolled with data sustained an infinite cycle. I wondered how audiences would
experience everything that was presented, but not physically present, and how much
removal might actually encourage the audience to project something of their own into the
space. This was a step towards understanding the impact of mediated live-ness through
abstract performance elements.
The research behind Breathing Room explored breathwork and its physiological
effects on the body. I was interested in how the consistent breath soundtrack would
produce an empathetic response. Speaking is an extended process of exhalation and breath
in the space between sentiments, where what we say lands and we prepare ourselves to
share. What happens to us physically when we share our stories? How does this affect
space? This work was the beginning of my exploration into the affective potential of the
kinesphere.

28

Fig. 8: Gemma Crowe, Breathing Room, 2021. Yard Space Gallery. Installation Documentation

29

Hearing and Site within Spatial Sound Installation How Do You Here Me?
To hear something is to encounter it physically, but to see something is to be
removed from it, at a distance. How Do You Here Me? explores the physical presence of
sound and offers a felt sense of proximity where it does not exist materially. The work was
produced during a month-long residency at Lobe Studio in Vancouver, one of three spatial
sound studios in the world using 4DSOUND technology. The sophisticated sound system
and spatialization capabilities fostered an intensive study of sound, space, and sensation in
an effort to appreciate and refine a sensitivity to the tangible world of vibrations. The final
product was a 50-minute spatial sound installation with four distinct movements which
make use of the illusory potential of sound to create new spaces and places to ponder.
Although How Do You Here Me? featured significant musical sections, it was not
meant to be experienced as music but as an installation accessed through auditory cues.
One section which played 20 minutes of recorded humming would consistently blur and
distort my estimation of time and physical orientation. In a questionnaire sent to audiences
following each showcase of the work, audiences shared that they felt relaxed yet
invigorated and this point in the piece conjured memories and visuals. The humming
converged and diverged slowly in space, harmonising at times, beating at others. The sound
began to feel like terrain and I wonder if the act of humming was internalised while
listening. The consistent vibration in the humming, both encouraged a release of tension
but also communicated a sense of intimacy in the recognition of human voice, gentle and at
close range.
In Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, Marc Leman discusses the
difference between the first person (cerebral) and second person (corporeal) musical
articulation (77). My work does not address musical elements as they relate to musical
theory but rather as they relate to corporeal articulation. Leman goes on to determine that
corporeal intentionality is based on a relationship between action and perception which
turns the physical energies of music into an imaginary world of objects having
qualities, valences, goals, and intentions, and vice versa. [...] The essence of
30

corporeal intentionality is the articulation of moving sonic forms, with the
emphasis on movement in relation to behavioural resonances of the human
body (84).
By creating sound objects and then designating their pathways and movement
quality at Lobe Studio I began to feel the effect of spatial sound on my body. The physical
sensations almost redefined live-ness as I felt vibration as an embodied action, producing a
temporary, tangible effect, in the moment. Leman remarks on this bodily response to sound
stimulus by specifying that “music is not another human subject, but it provides ‘moving
sonic forms’ which, through corporeal articulations, are associated with our actions. In that
sense, music can be considered a virtual social agent whose actions can be emulated” (92).
Reproducing physical presence requires an ability to discern certain bodily
qualities, such as; the approach to movement. With special attention paid to how the sound
was moving, using the doppler effect and convolution resonance I worked to choreograph
dynamic movement of sound. My experience at Lobe left me wondering by what other
means embodied experiences could be shared, and made communal.

https://soundcloud.com/user-694749249/how-do-you-here-me-excerpt?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Fig. 9: Gemma Crowe, How Do You Here Me? 2021. 4DSOUND. Binaural Recording: Sound Excerpt

31

360 Degree Sound Shadows in the Presence in my Absence
My immersive spatial sound installation the Presence in my Absence uses white noise
as sonic, spatialized, perceptible material. The white noise acts as a physical structure to
block out other sounds and to help engage the physical sensation of sound. The white noise
I use has evolved from the sound of my own breath recorded and looped–to create a higher
frequency blue-noise–and is spatialized using five Genelec Speakers. the Presence in my
Absence was installed in a dark room with five speakers on stands surrounding the
audience. Layers of breath circulated through the speakers in the room, accumulating to a
long, sustained exhale, output evenly throughout the space.
Instead of hearing white noise we feel it and blue-noise creates the sensation of
pressure in the ears, which is most noticeable when it is momentarily absent in one spot.
Moving my body through the space during the recording process I created sound shadows
by momentarily blocking the blue-noise between the speaker and the microphone. Sound
periodically drops out of each of the speakers in the installation, re-enacting the movement
producing the sound shadows. Audience members recall an initial confusion, questioning
what they were hearing (or not hearing). The sequencing of the sound shadows across the
speakers in the room is intended to indicate my moving physical form, similar to what
would be felt if my tangible body was moving in the room, passing in front of the speakers
and blocking the sound.
The creation of 360-degree sound shadows involved setting up five identical
microphones in a circle, surrounding five outward-facing speakers in the centre that were
playing back the blue-noise towards the microphones. I moved my body around the circle,
improvising with pathways and approaching each microphone with the intention of
reaching my future audience. Through this process I both sensed and created the shift in
sonic pressure, responding to, and experimenting with the dynamics of different
movements and approaches. I performed my movements as if the recording equipment
were my audience, creating an audible performance for them as they tracked the shadows
my body left in the consistent sound. The setup is simply reverse engineering the

32

experience: what acts as playback in the recording process becomes the audience
perspective; the structures recording sound are producing sound in the final piece.

https://youtu.be/0mQppez0Ogo
Fig. 10: Gemma Crowe, the Presence in my Absence 2021. Process Documentation. Video Excerpt.

In Sound Theory, Sound Practice Rick Altman addresses the failure of language to
differentiate the quality of sound – the naming of sound is based on its production rather
than its consumption (19). I think this limits our evaluation of sonic experience. In a class
critique of the Presence in my Absence my classmates had difficulty articulating their
experience without the words to describe the change in sound and only the potential
implications of what had transpired: they had lost hearing in one ear, something had gone
wrong in one speaker, or that something was blocking the sound. Altman explains that
“through the ear's ability to sense not only pressure but the rate of changes in pressure as
well, we are able to measure even minute differences in the sound envelope” (21). This
project positions the scenario which caused the original interference as the explanation for
the experienced disturbance. It is the bodily experience of audible interference in sound

33

shadows that affirms my exploration of embodiment as an important element of sound
reception, because many of us can sense shifts in sound better than we can qualify them.

Fig. 11: Gemma Crowe, the Presence in my Absence 2021. Installation View

https://soundcloud.com/user-694749249/the-presence-in-my-absense?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Fig. 12: Gemma Crowe, the Presence in my Absence 2021. Sound Excerpt.

34

Methodology
Technology
↓
Improvisation ⇾ Movement ⇾ Perception ⇾ Embodiment
↑
Virtual
My methodology incorporates my body into the research and the making. I use
recording and playback technology to encourage reflection, by making the audience aware
of their own perception. My process is cyclical but evolving as I create through reflection:
layering recorded material using the medium of sound, video, and movement. I am
developing my work in the perceptual realm and my research methodology puts myself
and the audience in the same position, encouraging an awareness of our bodily state. In this
section I explain how I use movement and improvisation to create embodiment as I study
perception, I also outline how technology supports the experience of my work, and how the
concept of the virtual might help to articulate my sound experimentation.

Practice-Based, Embodied Research
Shifting much of my focus to sound research, I engaged in a range of exploratory
activities and sound experiments. The techniques I use involve analogue-adjacent activities
which make use of my moving body to physically manipulate and record sound for a nearly
acousmatic presentation.
I began by trying to translate the sensation of spinning to the listener by placing
their perspective, the Roland 26 recording device, in the seat of a spinning office chair with
a set of stereo speakers playing a “chimes” sample nearby. I then discovered the doppler
effect and its effect on the perception of speed as well as the location of sound by moving a
35

sound source towards and away from my ear, then a recording device. I found the doppler
effect to be particularly responsive to a change in the quality of my movement. I listened
live through headphones connected to the recording device and found that I could vary the
pitch with a subtle increase or decrease in speed and at certain points in space. Refining the
specific pitch modulation I desired was an act of precise movement that I reproduced
through muscle memory rather than adjusting based on auditory feedback. I use different
sounds and musical samples throughout these trials and found that certain tones and
harmonies compounded the effect. The aesthetic and cultural associations with major and
minor chords made certain movements more sinister and others, playful.
I was also fascinated by the change in sound as I travelled from place to place. I
learned that a technique called Convolution Resonance works with resonating sound waves
to create realistic sound environments. I was taken by how the architecture I moved
through while recording could be felt in the recordings in such a way that I could describe
the feel of the space, even if I couldn’t properly locate it. This informed my exploration of
ASMR techniques and how I might intensify the experience by using binaural microphones.
I arrived at sound shadows and spatial sound for motion-perception (using binaural
and ambisonic microphones as well as Lobe’s 4DSOUND system) as the most compelling
research concepts. Through these activities I realised that sound is an indicator of
movement and can depict the conditions of movement. While I arrived at these discoveries
through hours of exploration, my findings are affirmed through musicologist Eric F.
Clarke’s articulations about the effects of sound in Ways of Seeing: An Ecological Approach
to the Perception of Musical Meaning. Clarke describes how the affect of music can be drawn
from the terms of its performance: factors such as force, speed, and intention of the
musician, among many other factors. “Changing patterns of attack point, timbre, dynamic,
and pitch have the capacity to specify motion in a virtual space—in the same way that the
continuous spatial displacements of visual edges, points of light, swirls and textures in
computer animation do” (73). Clarke also cites research on the relationship between the
vestibular organs, responsible for balance and orienting the body in space, and sound
stimulus in depicting movement through hearing.
36

Improvisation as Method
I consider improvising to be knowledge generation, so when I dance, create sound,
and capture movement on video I am enacting a synthesis of research from an embodied
understanding. Improvising is a willingness to participate without preparation, to act
intuitively. I use movement improvisation as knowledge generation and apply this to my
sound research. Susan Kozel describes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “pre-reflection” and
“hyper-reflection” as bodily experiences. I think of my process as pre-reflective and the
experience of my work as hyper-reflective (which includes my own experience of the
work). Improvised movement and sound emerges as non-virtuosic in a pre-reflective state.
I suspend judgement by thinking through my body, becoming aware of my actions after
they occur and continuously acting before I have a chance to reflect. I am always surprised
during improvisation but I cannot focus on any one moment or the process comes to a halt
and the momentum is lost. Analysis is the antithesis of this kind of development. Recording
improvisation is the only way to repeat it. Layering it is the only way to develop it. This
allows me to manipulate and redistribute liveness. Immersive engagement of the senses
allows for the momentary abandonment of engrained patterns of thought. In order to distil
experience, I obscure perception, starting with my own.

The Art of Perception
Realising the effect that sound can have on the perception of movement in the space
around us confirmed sound as the main material of my exploration. I know there is
potential for greater sensitivity, and therefore understanding, in the way we absorb
information from the world around us. I examine affect by initiating physiological effects on
the body through hearing and vision and I used time-based approaches to sustain the act of
perceiving. Kinesthetic empathy and embodiment are concepts which ground my work in
perception via the body.
Susan Kozel describes phenomenology from the perspective of an artist and
researcher who works with dance and technology. In her book Closer: Performance,
37

Technologies, Phenomenology, Kozel highlights the importance of lived experience and
reflection in phenomenology, which
is inclusive of a variety of experiences and not bound to a narrow and
abstracted notion of truth; that it provides scope for the many dimensions of
what we are as human beings to contribute to the expansion of knowledge and
creation of cultural artifacts. (5)
The reason I aim to engage the senses and portray movement is because it makes us think
differently. Remember, action molds perception (Tversky 23). I hope to offer the audience a
new state of mind.
I am working from the idea that recordings can function the same way memories do,
framing the experience. As I edit, I am observing and reconsidering, then reordering,
decontextualizing, abstracting and reframing. This is how I break down the information,
making it imperceptible as a whole, so that it may be taken up differently through the
senses.
The concept of “putting thought into the world,” which Barbara Tversky suggests we
do using language, gesture and graphics, “allowing us to transcend the here and now”
supports the notion that recorded experiences enable a type of experiential dialogue with
each reproduction and reception and that this is a means of knowledge production (186).
Recordings offer a state of removal from an immediate event, which welcomes
interpretation, reflection, and a moment to shift from external, to a more internal sense of
awareness. The difference in the way I am working with sound is that the audience must
track perceived action: listening for the changing location of an invisible moving sound
source requires a heightened sensitivity. Making sense of something through a
collaboration of the other senses focuses attention on our relationship to the sound. I am
calling this kinesthetic projection.

38

The sound and imagery I create are often ambiguous, recognizable by the senses but
resisting definition. In abstraction we create our own meaning–much the same way that we
note pathways and patterns in space by simply tracking movement. It is this state that
allows a different kind of engagement. Acknowledging that a prescriptive encounter will
incite conditioned reactivity, my research investigates the repatterning of perception for a
change in physical state.

The Necessity of Technology
It is important to note that my work is not generated by technology though it is
recorded and played back using various software and equipment. The recording process is
essential in communicating nuanced work that could only be produced by and read by a
body. Presenting my work using audio technology is the point where the research is
embodied by others. Many people are starting to realise that our daily media affects us
deeply. I use technology specifically as a way-in through channels already affectively seared
into us; however, I aim to highlight the knowledge in our bodies rather than implanting a
message of my own. The technologies I work with are connective, enabling communication
from one body to another, and serve as an ever-changing mode of creation through which I
may conceive of novel experiences.

Projecting into the Virtual
Considering perception through phenomenology and using technology as a tool, I
have begun to explore the notion of “virtual” through mediated live-ness. This is helping to
deepen my understanding of the way I create and how I carry out my positionality as an
artist. I worked with 360 video during the summer semester, using a virtual reality camera
with dance company All Bodies Dance Project. This experience evoked the words of
Canadian philosopher Brian Massumi and Australian philosopher and feminist theorist

39

Elizabeth Grosz who provide a new perspective on what I consider to be a virtual
experience. Grosz writes:
The virtual encompasses much more than the technological: indeed, it is the
condition of the possibility of technology. It is the very condition of life, and
historical development, the very milieu of technological development. (12)
When I use spatial sound to carve an auditory understanding of the kinesphere
surrounding our bodies, I highlight a type of virtual experience within space using
technology. In Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi further explains the role of the body
in the development of the virtual:
Since the virtual is unlivable even as it happens, it can be thought of as a form
of superlinear abstraction that does not obey the law of the excluded middle,
that is organised differently but is inseparable from the concrete activity and
expressivity of the body. The body is as immediately abstract as it is
concrete; its activity and expressivity extend, as on their underside, into an
incorporeal, yet perfectly real, dimension to pressing potential. (30)

Grosz and Massumi both speak of potential and possibility in the concept of the
virtual. I think we accept virtual realities most willingly through video and sound
because they are experiences that can easily be layered onto our current reality. I
am excited about understanding the virtual as the realm of potential, and as a space
we can perceptually inhabit a different, simultaneous reality. I house my research
and the audiences’ experience in layered, virtual space. This space is immaterial and
relates closely to body of the audience; it is meant to be sensed within their own
kinesphere and within the structure of a physical installation space. It is perceived
as additional to the immediate tangible environment. To imagine through listening
is to virtualize

40

Thesis Exhibition
Making Room for Resonance: a space for sonic illusion and sensation
Exploring Spatial-Tactile Sounds in a Gallery Setting
The final semester of my MFA has been dedicated to exploring the temporal
dimension of sound and movement through spatial and tactile sound experiments. I have
begun to truly understand that I am choreographing sound and that this composition style
deals with arrangements in time and space. As such, the term “Embodied Sonic Design” has
emerged as an apt description of my artistic process both in the creation of sound and the
experience of it.

Movement Study
Having developed an understanding of how the movement of sound creates an
embodied experience, I felt it necessary to chart exactly which movements and what
sounds specifically reveal themselves together in a significant and satisfying way. For this
project I am moving sound using tactile reproductions of sound, contact microphone
recordings, and a spatial drawing technique. The most audio-kinesthetically discernable
movement was derived through consistent repetition and were motions that could be
transposed between different body parts or understood as whole-body movement. It is
important that the movements were short, repeatable actions in order to be more
accessible to bodies with different patterns of mobility and hearing ability. Jumping,
swaying, swinging, shaking, and approaching and departing – either from the sound source
or the recording device, at varied speeds – were movements that translated through sound.
Once repetition of the same movement was established, specific characters of the
movement and variations in quality were revealed. The static shapes I created with my
body were not as interesting because they relied on an understanding of how the space was
visually composed. Consistently re-establishing the shaping of my body through movement,
however, enabled a better understanding of the state of my body and how it was relating to
the space.

41

With a keen awareness of my bodily state while moving, I was careful to determine
what I hoped would transfer to another body, empathetically. The movements I chose
made me feel invigorated but in control. The repetition allowed me to recognize how sound
was shaped by movement, and encouraged a flow state. I was pleased to be able to lose
track of the execution of the movement in favour of feeling it in my body and noticing the
changes in the sound. This state of simple physical engagement encourages the exploration
of pleasure, leaving room for adjustments and self-determining the degree of development
and duration. These movements made me feel open and receptive and I suspect that this
level of autonomy can be sensed. In sharing this movement, I am inviting participation of
mirror neurons, or kinesthetic projection. Kinesthetic projection considers the feeling and
the bodily implications of that movement, not its representative qualities or its
performative merit. The movement I am working with here can be described as “nonmatrixed representation” which Philip Auslander defines as a performance “in which the
performer does not embody a fictional character but ‘merely carries out certain actions”
(32). To a certain extent, this movement is defamiliarized as the significance is not in
auditory readability but through sensory relatability.

Installation
Making Room for Resonance was installed in Emily Carr’s RBC Media Gallery, a
separate gallery space within the main concourse of the Michael O’Brian Exhibition
Commons on the second floor of the building. Removed physically, to contain the acoustic
arena (Meelberg 12) the enclosed space designates a more intimate experience. The space
feels at once close, yet expansive. The light-colored carpeting extends to each wall and
supports three rectangular boxes which seem to be floating above dim, warm lighting. This
light highlights the fibres of the carpet in a way that resembles sand and gently illuminates
the features of the room – enough to orient without bringing in visual expectations.
Artistic research for Making Room for Resonance developed through the fabrication
of a series of sonic surfaces and resonant sound structures. The installation features four
42

wall panels, five square feet each, installed as one large panel and three rectangular
wooden seats. Fixed to the projection wall of the gallery, normally displaying video, the
wall panels occupy the focal point of the small gallery space by design. By directing
audiences’ attention and orienting towards this wall I offer an invitation to listen, in order
to see. The wall panels are outfitted with audio transducers concealed behind the surfaces,
beckoning investigation. These devices vibrate the surface of the wall to amplify sound,
effectively creating a speaker out of each surface.
I use this ability to spread out
the projection of sound to emphasise
the movement of each sound across
the surface. Choreographing the
movement of the sound between
each of the transducers further
animates the sound as it moves
across the wooden surface which
stretches ten feet wide and ten feet
tall. The movement of the sound
emulates the movement of my body
throughout the experiments: gliding
gently back and fourth, swinging,
jumping, shaking. The movement is
virtualized on a large scale across the
length of the facade, created by the
wall panels and out in the space
through the rectangular sound
structures.

Fig. 13: Gemma Crowe, Making Room for Resonance, 2022. Sound Installation. Process Documentation

43

Fig. 14: Gemma Crowe, Making Room for Resonance, 2022. Sound Installation. Process Documentation

The sound work begins with recorded breathing, occurring at the height of my head,
moving slowly side to side, pausing momentarily with anticipation of what is to come. The
sound of fingertips grazing the surface materialise, disembodied but occurring at distinct
locations across the wall panels. This contact, preserved as sonic expression, is the gesture
which consistently anchors the body as both the sounding vehicle and mode of reception.
Upon entering, an audience member may immediately detect a scratching sound. The
consequent embodied understanding of this act is the premise for the work: knowing
through the production of audible movement. The breathing sounds become louder and are
drawn out to become one long sustained exhale, matching the sound frequency of bluenoise. The breathing, blue-noise and humming traces the surface, expanding the perceptual
arena eventually filling the wall before seeping out into the space where the rectangular
structures, made of the same birch plywood, soak it up: absorbing the blue-noise as a heavy
pink-noise. These structures are outfitted with tactile bass-shakers which rumble

44

sequentially as the sound makes its way around the room and back up the wall. This
motion perpetuates throughout the 20 minute immersive installation, which loops
indeterminably. The invitation to sit or lie on the rectangular structures allows for a deeper
encounter with the movement of sound as the bodies of audience absorb excess vibration.
The people in the room, their positions and location, affect the expression of sound
throughout the space. Sonic gestures travel through the resonant sound structures, across
the surface of the wall and ring out, reflecting into areas of the room with no capacity for
sound production.
My bodily presence is most distinctly conveyed by moments of recorded physical
contact, using a highly sensitive contact microphone to capture the impact which is in-turn
reproduced upon the same surface it was created. I perform gentle brushes on the wall
which increase to sweeps, taps, and resolve in full body restful contact, leaning against the
wall. I found a comforting familiarity in this sound as it resembles the sounds heard while
in a state of rest, allowing the body and a turned head to yield into the floor.

The Sonic Presence
I am imbuing sound with movement qualities. All of these sounds are produced
using my body and are meant to connect with the audience through spatial awareness as
well as through a bodily understanding of the conditions of the soundwaves.
My artistic research with sound has been the most profound exploration of spatial
thinking and how I make sense of the world through movement. My research examines
proprioceptive perception and the way human bodies interpret the world through the
senses. I’m asking the audience to feel movement through listening. The choice to use only
sound that comes from my body is another level of embodied sonic design. As I edit the
sounds I am tuning and composing variances with a virtual panner, affecting the sound in
the same way movement does.

45

Fig. 15: Gemma Crowe, Making Room for Resonance, 2022. Sound Installation. RBC Media Gallery. Photo by Michael Love

Fig. 16: Gemma Crowe, Making Room for Resonance, 2022. Sound Installation. RBC Media Gallery

46

In Sound Theory, Sound Practice Rick Altman discusses film sound demonstrating
aspects of recorded sound and the semiotics of sound perception. Altman clarifies the role
of recorded sound as a representation of a sound event rather than considering it a
reproduction of the sound, which not only must be established by the location of the sound
reception – the same way a camera lens has a particular perspective – but also by the
conditions of the recording of the event. This is where my work becomes a bodily narrative.
The way we are used to receiving recorded sound puts us at the centre of the experience
where we each experience a universal, singular perspective. This installation uses space to
facilitate different perspectives which are determined by individual bodies, sensory
capacities, spatial orientation, and timing throughout the duration of the piece.
Ultimately, I am exemplifying an internal, felt experience. This is in an effort not only
to be witnessed, but to share something as it is felt. This could one day be presented as
dance, with intricate movement patterns mapped onto different surfaces, apparatuses, and
spatial schemes. This would require a much more sophisticated capture but I am interested
in the idea of how much movement can be tracked simultaneously and at what point the
motion amalgamates, amounting potentially to an entirely different form. Can movement
be heard in the way a harmony of tones becomes one sound, as a chorus of action?
I had planned to make this piece shorter, one that would express all ideas within the
timeframe most gallery patrons remain in a space, effectively summarising the ideas in a
display rather than offering the experience. The sense of embodiment requires time to take
hold and develops alongside 20 minutes of my recorded, intentional and ataractic
breathing. The freedom to enter and exit the room means that each sound produced is an
invitation to learn more but on the audiences’ terms. The work was available on-loop for
ten consecutive days and I have received many comments about audience members
returning to the work several times and wishing they could stay in the space for longer. The
experience of the work in the space has been described as activating and engaging but
relaxing and it seems it was a place for many to seek refuge from the day’s events. Had I
succumbed to the pressure of a shorter, more accessible expression of these ideas I’m not
sure the impact would have been as significant and the desire to pull audiences' attention

47

along a narrative progression fell away with this understanding. I am curious to see how
this work affects an audience within a different building, would the stress-reducing
experience be replaced by an invigorated one? Outside of an institution would we be able
to experience something deeper than a juxtaposition to the immediate external
environment? I look forward to exploring the effects of different circumstances on the work
and its reception.

https://soundcloud.com/user-694749249/making-room-for-resonance-ambisonic-recording?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Fig. 17: Gemma Crowe, Making Room for Resonance, 2022. Sound Installation. Ambisonic Recording.

https://soundcloud.com/user-694749249/making-room-for-resonance-binaural?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Fig. 18: Gemma Crowe, Making Room for Resonance, 2022. Sound Installation. Binaural Recording.

48

Conclusion
I still seek to better understand the degree to which spatial sound affects different
audience members and how their individual experiences might relate, but the pursuit of
these answers offers new examples of sensory engagement and perception to the current
research on embodiment and the senses. As I began to slant towards more philosophical
research, I credit a more open contemplation to the process which my mind and body have
undergone in situating, acknowledging, and sensitising my own perception. I truly believe
we can live beyond our immediate condition–the here and now of our bodies–whether it is
the freedom to feel or the wisdom to know beyond ourselves.
It is no surprise that these thoughts have emerged during a period of study that is
completely undertaken amidst a global pandemic, a time when our here-and-now is
threatening, and our body-to-body connections have failed to provide support and solace.
This is also a time in my life and artistic development when I am considering the meaning
of connection, and what is held in the space between people and things, geographically and
temporally.
I have undergone such major shifts in this program, specifically in the mediums I
work with. These shifts have helped me to identify the defining elements of my artistic
practice, the ideas and beliefs that will always be part of how and why I create. In
expressing my positionality I see that the variations in the ways I work come from the same
exploration and research. I have begun to consider the concept of the virtual as a way to
describe the experience of my work and intend to explore how understanding the term
“virtual” might help articulate the layers of my current, and evolving practice.
This document has been a chance to clarify and formalise the work and the
contemplation over the course of the program. What is most compelling to me about the
process of thesis writing is that it is another exercise in translating an experience, to be
understood in another way, this time through words. The reverse engineering of my art
practice, to be taken up literally, and through analysis, has been generative and
49

illuminating, again feeding back into the making of the work. The irony of this process is
that as much as I prioritise another way of being, sensing and embodied, the linguistic
cognitive process is also fertile ground to develop ideas especially from sources outside of
myself, as in traditional research. I cannot express how much the availability of community
here at Emily Carr, and the richness of conversation that transpires, contributes to the
synthesising of ideas between the tasks of reading, writing, formal research, and research
with material exploration and creative flow. Conversation is definitely a form of hyperreflection. Suffice it to say that a focus on other ways of knowing is simply my way of
bringing balance to a world that I believe is suffering from its reliance on visual assurance
and the written word as the only respectable measure of intellect. A sensorium is an escape
from rules we did not make, yet must adhere to. I offer my sound and video installations as
a refuge where new thoughts and ideas can take shape.
I find myself asking what will come of this new and experimental way of working?
What does this look like as an independent practice? I’ve benefited greatly from resources
provided by Emily Carr in the form of mentorship, equipment, time, space, practice, and
have felt the full effect of a supportive and engaged community of artists and thinkers. How
does this work continue? What resources, tangible and immaterial, will I need for further
exploration of sound, light and video as a virtual corporeality? I suspect that the next phase
of development will involve refining the installation of sound experiences and testing these
theories in different spaces and communities. In recent residency applications I state my
interest in providing a workshop or demonstration of concepts as way of engaging in
dialogue with audience members to gain insight on the reception of my work. I look
forward to expanding my research on audience perception in my role as New Works XR
Program Manager, a position that has been secured through a MITACS grant and the
Basically Good Media Lab at Emily Carr. Continuing to specifically engage with virtual
experiences as artistic expression will be an opportunity to consider the artist-audience
relationship on a larger scale.
To continue this research might mean to work in yet another media discipline,
where consistently renegotiating the terms of a new medium stands in for the embodiment
50

of even more ways of sensing and being, together. I trust that everything I still want to try,
everything I am still excited to discuss, read up on, and dream about are the harbingers of
work yet to be realised.

51

Works Cited
Abu bakare, jamilah malika. “Listen to Black women.” https://vimeo.com/530585670
Arning, Bill and Jones, A. Caroline. Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and
Contemporary Art. MIT Press, 2006.
Altman, Rick. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York, Routledge, 1992.
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. 2nd ed, Abingdon,
Routledge, 2008.
Batacharya, Sheila and Wong, Yuk-Lin Renita. Sharing Breath: Embodied Learning and
Decolonization. AU Press, 2018.
Clarke, Eric, F. Ways Of Seeing: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical
Meaning. New York, Oxford University press, 2005.
"Dream House" MELA Foundation. 2021, https://www.melafoundation.org/dream02.htm
Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture From the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. MIT
Press, 2001.
Ingold, Tim. “Noise Sound Silence” Co-hosted by the Environmental Humanities
Research Centre and Music Research Centre (MRC). March, 2018. Bath Spa
University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISwmepMf02k Accessed July 5, 2021.

Leman, Marc. Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology. MIT Press, 2008.
Malika abu-bakare, jamilah. “Aural Alterities.” Resonance Speaker Series, Sept. 2021, Emily

52

Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC Canada.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University
Press, 2002.
Keshavarz, Behrang. “Multisensory self-motion perception in VR.” The Perception of
Self in VR. Emerging Media Lab, UBC. May 2021. Address.
Kozel, Susan. Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. MIT Press, 2007.
Lochte, Bryson C et al. “An fMRI investigation of the neural correlates underlying the
autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR).” BioImpacts: BI vol. 8,4 (2018):
295-304. doi:10.15171/bi.2018.32
On Listening. Aural Alterities. 2021, https://www.auralalterities.com/on-listening.
Accessed 20 Oct. 2021
Roddy, Stephen and Bridges, Brian. “Meaning-making and Embodied Cognition in Sound
Design Research.” Doing Research in Sound Design. 1st Edition, 2021, pp. 21-36.
Tversky, Barbara. Mind in Motion. New York, Hachette Book Group, inc., 2019.
Sermon, Paul. Telematic Dreaming. 1994, Closer: Performance, Technologies,
Phenomenology. Written by Susan Kozel, MIT Press, 2007, p. 94. Written by Susan
Kozel.

Wood, Karen. “Audience as Community: Corporeal Knowledge and Empathetic Viewing.”
The International Journal of Screendance, May 2015,
https://screendancejournal.org/article/view/4518/3878. Accessed November 18 2020.

53

Bibliography
A. David Milner and Melvyn A. Goodale the Visual Brain in Action. Oxford Psychology
Series, 2006.
Ahern, Mal. “performance/performativity.” The Chicago School of Media Theory, January
2013,
https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/performanceperformativity/.
Accessed November 7 2020.
Brown, Adrienne Maree. Pleasure Activism. AK Press, 2019.
Barratt EL, Davis NJ. 2015. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR): a flow-like mental
state. PeerJ 3:e851 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.851
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.
MIT Press, 1990.
Dana, Deb. The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. W. W. Norton &
Company, 2018.
Federici, Silvia. Beyond The Periphery of The Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body
in Contemporary Capitalism. Oakland, PM Press, 2020.
Filimowicz, Michael. Doing Research in Sound Design. 1st ed., Focal Press, 2021,
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429356360.
Firincioğ, Semih. “Notes on the Performing Arts.”
https://performideas.com/2021/06/30/introduction/. September 27, 2021.
Graziano, S.A. Michael Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience.
54

W. W. Norton Company, 2019.
Kloetzel, Melanie and Smith, Phil. Covert: A Handbook. 30 Movement Meditations for Resisting
Invasion. Triarchy Press, 2021.
“listen to Black women (again)” Pop Montreal. 2021,
https://popmontreal.com/events/listen-to- black-women-again. Accessed 20 Oct.
2021
Martin, Lesley. Aesthetics. University of Chicago, 2013.
MELA Foundation. 2021, https://www.melafoundation.org/dream02.html
Morris, Thomas. A Popular Outline of Perspective or Graphic Projection. BiblioBazaar,
2008.
Hausegger, Thomas, et al. “Peripheral Vision in Martial Arts Experts: The Cost-Dependent
Anchoring of Gaze.” Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, vol. 41, no. 3, June 2019,
pp. 137–146. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1123/jsep.2018-0091.

Herndon, Julie. “Embodied Composition: Composing the Body with Sound.” Leonardo, Feb.
2022, pp. 170–74, https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02137.
Hansen, Lone Koefoed, and Susan Kozel. “Embodied Imagination: A Hybrid Method of
Designing for Intimacy.” Digital Creativity, vol. 18, no. 4, Routledge, Dec. 2007, pp.
207–20. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, doi:10.1080/14626260701743200.
Hooks, Bell. “The Oppositional Gaze.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, South
End Press, 1993, pp. 115-31.

55

Kovacevich, Alexsandra, and David Huron. “Two Studies of Autonomous Sensory
Meridian Response (ASMR): The Relationship between ASMR and Music-Induced
Frisson.” Empirical Musicology Review, vol. 13, no. 1/2, Jan. 2018, pp. 39–63.
Academic Search Complete.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg, Crossing
Press, 1984.
Roger P.G. van Gompel, et al. Eye Movements A Window on Mind and Brian. Amsterdam,
Elsevier, 2007.
Sachs, Matthew E., et al. “Brain Connectivity Reflects Human Aesthetic Responses to
Music.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, vol. 11, no. 6, June 2016, pp. 884–91,
doi:10.1093/scan/nsw009.
Schiphorst, Thecla. “Body Matters: The Palpability of Invisible Computing.” Leonardo, vol.
42, no. 3, MIT Press, June 2009, pp. 225–30. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.1162/leon.2009.42.3.225.
Schiphorst, Thecla. “Soft(N): Toward a Somaesthetics of Touch.” CHI ’09 Extended Abstracts
on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 2009, pp. 2427–38. ACM Digital Library,
https://doi.org/10.1145/1520340.1520345.
Tannenbaum, Rob. “Minimalist Composer La Monte Young on His Life and Immeasurable
Influence.” Vulture, 2 July. 2015.
https://www.vulture.com/2015/06/la-monte-young-dream-house.html.
Accessed 20 October 2021.
Turnbull, Adam, et al. “Reductions in Task Positive Neural Systems Occur with the
Passage of Time and Are Associated with Changes in Ongoing Thought.” Scientific
Reports, vol. 10, no. 1, June 2020, pp. 1–10. EBSCOhost,
56

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-66698-z.
Vishmidt, Marina. “The Two Reproductions in (Feminist) Art and Theory since the 1970s.”
Third Text, vol. 31, no. 1, Jan. 2017, pp. 49–66. DOI.org (Crossref),
doi:10.1080/09528822.2017.1364331.

57

Appendix I
Research Methods + Observations
Questions

Materials
+ Setup

Activities

How does
sound affect
the body?

-Ableton
Live

Research into:

-MIDI
keyboard

Observations

-Emotional responses
result from cultural and
-Music theory: chord personal associations
progressions with
with certain sounds and
specific emotional
harmonies. I labelled the
associations
chord progressions I liked
-Solfeggio
combined with certain
Frequencies
instruments based on
-Autonomous
their emotional
Sensory Meridian
resonance. Things like
Response (ASMR)
“mysterious ring” or
-Musical Frisson
“vintage sad”
-Binaural music, bilateral stimulation,
-Duration changed the
and EMDR
effect. The longer notes
were held the more
-Experimented with deeply I felt their effect. A
tones, drones, and
sense of anticipation for
instruments on
development also grew
ableton live and
with extended duration.
sampled with
different chord
-Long held low tones
progressions, and
made me feel dizzy but
different duration
calm

Conclusion/ Results
-There is a huge difference
between the expectations of
music and sound.
-Sound can perhaps be a
more subconscious
experience because of how I
was set up to relate to it,
almost like a setting rather
than a composition
- A minimal sound
experience became more
visceral and sounds that
referenced music, through
harmonising or an
indication of an overall
composition, inspired a
more cerebral or emotional
reaction.
-The musical experience was
easier to put words to where
and the minimal sound was
harder to quantify

-Drones made me feel
focused and creative
How does
sound
resonate on
the body/skin?

-Lobe
Spatial
Sound
Studio
-Ableton

-I experimented
with different notes
and instruments and
where they were
resonating in my
body

-I could feel higher tones
in my head
-The most intense
sensations were ableton
live’s electronically

-With powerful sound
playback the effects of the
instruments can be felt more
distinctly in different parts
of my body

58

live
-4DSOUND

generated rolling cymbals,
as a crescendo, which I
felt on the top of my scalp
and in my sinuses. When
the cymbals stopped my
mind felt particularly
quiet and I felt tired
-electronically generated
violin notes were felt in
my throat and chest

-There are parts of the body
where certain sounds
resonate more noticeably
-The lower the note the
lower and deeper I felt the
sound. As notes went higher,
they were felt higher on my
body and more superficial

-I felt xylophone and bells
in my teeth
-All bass sounds were
distinct on my feet and in
my pelvis
Affecting the
body with
ASMR sounds

-Two Shure
SM58
microphon
es on
stands
pointing
opposite
directions
-Card
board
sound
“barrier”
placed
between
them

-I recorded different
sounds moving
between the
microphones
-I also spoke softly:
reading my own
writings, recounting
my event, I also
whispered
-I altered my
position and
distance from the
microphone to see if
proximity increased
the effect

-The microphones were
not very sensitive so the
crispness of how my
hands were handling
objects like crinkling
paper was not conveyed. I
have listened to a lot of
ASMR so I knew how it
could sound.

-The clarity of sounds as
well as their orientation to
the body created the
sensation of proximity.

This was especially effective
with speaking because of my
familiarity with the sound of
the human voice at close
range. The breaths between
-Grazing the microphone
words, whistling “S’s” and
created the same sound
the sound of me swallowing
that I would hear if the
represented a recognisable
headphones were touched experience that I could feel
while I was wearing them. in my body even though I
This was very effective.
knew there wasn’t actually
anyone speaking into my
ears. I was even affected by
my own voice, knowing
what sounds were coming
next!
-I researched what
microphones ASMR artists
used to record their work
and discovered binaural
microphones

59

How does
movement
alter sound?

-Stereo
speakers
-Recording
device

-Moving the
recording device
closer and farther
from the speakers at
varied speeds

-The quality of the
approaching and
departing movement of
the recording device and
sound source changed the
pitch of the sound

I discovered that the way
sound frequency changes
based on the movement of
the sound source is called
the doppler affect. The
speed and quality of the
movement seem to “bend”
sound frequency in different
ways.

Can sound
create the
sensation of
self-motion?

-2 sets of
stereo
speakers
-2
recording
devices
-Office
swivel
chair

-Sitting in the chair
holding the
recording device
pointed ahead of me.
Spinning slowly,
then spinning
quickly. One set of
speakers facing the
chair, stationary.

-I felt the sensation of
spinning, but only slightly
and I felt it more in my
head.

-Recording sound while
moving was an exciting area
of research and I tested
many different music
samples and sounds with
this set up

-Only one recording
device, facing
forward but the two
stereo speakers on
either side of the
chair, facing in.
-Two recording
devices, pointing in
opposite directions,
on either side

How does the
environment
of the

-In-ear
binaural
microphon

-I wore the in-ear
binaural
microphones as I

-I didn’t feel like I was
moving with the two
speakers on either side of
me but I did feel
disoriented and
overwhelmed. I couldn’t
track the sound in space
as easily when there were
two sources which grew
louder and clearer at the
same time but faded in
different directions.
-I listened to each
recording separately from
the two recording devices
pointed outwards and it
was significantly more
effective in producing a
sensation of the sound
source passing by my ear
and I could send the
spinning action. Although
it felt more like the sound
was circling rather than it
felt like I was spinning.
-I recorded only the
atmosphere of these
spaces but the sounds of

-The idea of moving the
recording device initiated
many more movement
experiences while the
discovery of orienting the
recording device in the same
direction my ears would be
receiving sound led me to
try more movement while
wearing in-ear binaural
microphones.

-The recording environment
shapes the sounds that
occur within them

60

recording
affect the
sound
produced?

es
-Various
environme
nts

walked my
neighbourhood,
through my building,
in hallways,
stairwells, an
elevator and more
intimate spaces like
my car, kitchen and
bedroom. I walked
through different
architecture, public
settings, wide open
fields, playgrounds,
and on sidewalks
lining busy and
residential streets.

my footsteps were an
incidental sound that I
didn’t expect to be so
prominent upon my
review. The way the
sound of my footsteps
changed gave me the idea
to see how projecting
sound into different
spaces would change their
effect

-I wondered if I could
understand the
environment of recording
and could I also sense the
experience of my body
moving through these
spaces?
-I was also really interested
in the way sound changed as
I walked by parked cars
along the sidewalk. As I
walked, I didn’t notice
perhaps because the
temporary muffling of street
sounds and amplifying of
side walk sounds made
sense with the world around
me. Listening to this shift
afterwards created the
physical sensation of a large
form (the car) next to me,
“appearing” as the street
sounds muffled at almost
regular intervals as I
walked.
-Reliving this event through
sound was much more
profound than it was in the
moment and I wondered
how something “obvious”
must be understood
differently through sound
and other senses.

How is
movement
within a
specific
environment
perceived
through
sound?

-In-ear
binaural
microphon
es
-Stereo
speakers

-I set up a pair of
stereo speakers
playing a short
sample (“vintage
Sad”) at the end of
the hallway in my
home and wore inear binaural

-I used the doppler effect
and source-blocking to
illustrate the scene:
moving down a long
corridor, past openings
into different rooms. The
creaking floor beneath me
was an added bonus

-I’m finding that sound
quality says a lot about the
conditions of the recording;
where and how it took place.
The more literal the scene
the easier it is to illustrate
through sound

61

microphones as I
walked down the
hallway towards the
sound and walked
backwards, slowly
moving away from
the sound.
How is
movement
perceived
through
binaural
recordings?

-In-ear
binaural
microphon
es
-Stereo
speakers

-I placed the
speakers side by
side, playing an “airy
drone” sample. The
speakers remained
in a static position
representing a fixed
point in space in the
soundproof
recording studio.
-I moved around the
speakers, spinning,
tilting my head side
to side, and folding
forward, bowing my
head in front of the
speakers

How does
source
-blocking
affect sound
reception

-Stereo
speakers
-Recording
device

-Setting up the
speakers on one side
of the recording
studio and the
recording device on
the other I moved
between the two.
-I experimented

-Listening to the
recording sounded as if
this fixed point were
moving, and not my body.
In fact, the fixed point
seemed to be travelling in
the space immediately
around my body in 360
degrees of space
-This was very exciting to
discover. I spent a lot of
time exploring
movements and head
positions that would
delineate the pathway of
what now felt more like
an object than sound.

-I could definitely hear the
interference my body
caused between the
speakers and the
recording device, which
was similarly allconsuming the closer I
was positioned to both
the speakers and the

-In-ear binaural
microphones are able to
record the individual sonic
experience of the left and
right ear. As I was moving,
this meant that the
proximity to the source of
sound was different in each
ear and thus produced a
different sound.
-The sound in the separate
channels mimics the sound
at a particular distance and
angle experienced during
recording
Understanding how the
doppler effect and source
blocking change the quality
of sound helps me to
understand why it seems
like the sound is moving
through the 360 degrees of
space around my body - but
it doesn’t break the illusion
for me
I coined this source-blocking
technique “Sound Shadows”
because of the way it mimics
audibly, the experience of
shadows created when light
is partially blocked.
The absence of higher
frequencies convincingly

62

with moving close to
the speakers and
close to the
recording device,
then travelling
between the two
slowly, quickly, and
on a zig-zagging
pathway. I made
sharp fast
movements with my
body and slower,
more intricate
shapes – all while
imagining what
would create the
most distinct
shadows if I were
using light.

Can the
movement of
sound

-Thin
plywood
surface

recording device.

indicates a physical
interference blocking the
-I discovered optimal
reception of sound from the
zones were between ¼
source. This is similar to the
and ¾ of the distance
effect of a notch filter, a
between the two devices
technique which I later used
and the most effective
to try to create sounds
movements created a
shadows through editing
distinct contrast between software. The effect works
the sound passing directly but doesn’t create the same
from the speakers to the
complexity that the moving
recording device and
body does. It sounds like
sound that was fully
something moving between
blocked by my body. This the sound source and its
was achieved by simply
reception, but doesn’t
walking a path
indicate how and what is
perpendicular to the
passing, or where it came
direction the sound
from and where it is headed.
travelled from the
I’ve learned that shape and
speakers to the recording direction of the sound
device. I was effectively
shadows are less important,
crossing the flow of sound however, than how the
and disturbing it and this shadows in interfering. For
was audible.
example, quickly, with
hesitation, shaking,
-Movements that were
swooping and approaching
more easily discernible
and departing (perceived as
using this source-blocking growing and shrinking)
technique were motions
which kept with the idea
-The most effective Sound
of high contrast, and
Shadows require consistent,
played, audibly, with the
higher frequency sounds
idea of white space on a
which create the contrast
page. So, waving my arms, between blocked and
folding forward or
unimpeded sound reception.
crouching, and wholeI have found white noise and
body movement which
blue noise to be the most
left enough space for the
useful for the purpose of
sound to pass unimpeded depicting the moving body
around my body made the through sound shadows.
most distinct effect.

-Using a
-I am tracking the sound I
multichannel panner hear moving with my
plug-in in Ableton
eyes, but not directly, It is

The movement of sound,
changes its quality
according to the doppler

63

illustrate
action on a 2dimensional
surface?

-Audio
transducer
s adhered
to the back
of the
surface in
play

live I designated
which transducers
would play sound,
using the sequencing
of sound to create
the illusion of sound
moving across a 2dimensional surface

like a peripheral sensing
of where sound is on the
surface. It’s referencing
where the sound was and
where it is now that
allows me to deduce that
a line or a curved pathway
has been made by the
sound.

affect and therefore is
technically a different
sound. By choreographing
the movement of sound, I
am creating compositions
based on the suggestions of
movement through
sequencing and micro-tonal
variations which related to
the quality and speed of
movement.

64

Appendix II
Project Motion-Motion: reuniting sound and visual

https://youtu.be/ddw5sAugPTM
Fig. 19: Gemma Crowe, Motion-Motion, 2021. Multimedia. Installation Documentation: Entrance

The audience enters a dark room with a sliver of light which splits the darkness at
the centre of the room. Standing at the edge of the room you can see the light gently drift up
and down the wall and back and forth across the floor. There is just enough light to beckon,
and as the audience enters, they are met with a consistent and distinct, but
indistinguishable sound. A cord is illuminated, skimming the floor, crossing the beam of
light where a pair of headphones lie casting a long shadow. Blinking into the darkness the
audience might be straining to feel into the senses to try to map the new environment. The
sound, now recognized as intentional, also comes from the floor. With this understanding
comes a keen awareness of the body in this space, and a sense of vulnerability to
obstructions at ground level necessitates a careful maneuvering through the room. The
soundtrack, which at this point resembles static, is subtle and familiar as it comes and goes.
65

By moving further into the space and putting on the headphones, the listener is positioned
within the beam of light, which now draws up the body and back down to retreat across the
room. With the headphones on, it’s as if the sound seeps into the ears of the listener for a
brief moment and then draws back again as it fades out of the headphone track and grows
louder in the speakers. The timing of these two separate tracks creates the illusion that the
sound is travelling back and fourth. The headphones act as a barrier which the sound
passes through to create an intimate, internalized performance. At this point the audience
might be tracking the light while trying to confirm the location of the sound. They might be
sensing the immaterial motion in the space. As they attune to the environment, the
audience may begin to feel involved, implicated. They might even recognize the
triangulation that their body completes in space between the light and the floor, the
speakers and headphones.
This project was inspired by Tim Ingold’s lecture Noise Sound Silence, in which he
brings attention to the senses and stimulus, positing their independent generation.
Proposing that the receipt of light and sound might actually be generated in our heads,
Ingold grounds his theory in the case of individuals experiencing sound and light in the
absence of such stimulus.
The static sound is a type of white noise which I use as material, tempering the
space. Created from an equal measure of all perceptible frequencies, white noise pads the
environment of the listener from veritable sonic events and punctuating sounds. I use
volume as a marker for distance. Unlike the ability to shut our eyes, we cannot control the
intake of sound, so we use proximity, making sound a determiner of space. By this very
method, I am offering layers to the auditory space in hopes that the audience may start to
make a distinction between their own body (internal state) and their surroundings. It is my
intention that, enveloped in a solitary experience of sound while wearing the headphones,
sharing the experience of sound in close proximity with others helps to define, with sound,
the degrees of separation between the mind, as an internal thought process, and the shared
environment.

66

https://youtu.be/tOJOSKh5RvY
Fig. 20: Gemma Crowe, Motion-Motion, 2021. Multimedia. Installation Documentation: Listener Perspective

In the development of the sound track for Motion-Motion I recorded my own
extended exhale with a contact mic, then looped it in its most steady moment, for seven
minutes of sustained sound. This mediation of my breath resembles waves crashing, and I
am emulating the recycling of this consistent sound. Along with white noise, there is also
“pink noise”, “brown noise” and “blue noise”–mimicking, with frequency, the levels of the
color spectrum1. The slightly higher frequency of my exhale to nestled-in nicely with the
other sounds present in the installation–the whirring of the projector, the rumble of trucks
passing on Great Northern Way, and the buzz of a campus full of fluorescent lights. This
audibly blue-noise soundscape serves to gently lift the focus from the incidental noise floor
to an intentional composition.
Ingold notes of the experience of light and sound, that
1

Each sonic hue had a slightly different distribution of volume and intensity. Blue-noise has more
pronounced higher frequencies and pink noise has louder bass tones.

67

an impervious boundary separates mind and world and mediates our
exchanges between them and that boundary is the body, including its
sensory organs, and the touch sensitive envelope of the skin. [...] Light and
sound are neither in here or out there... the very experience of light or of
sound is one in which the boundary is dissolved.
In considering this boundary, I intend the light and sound in Motion-Motion to permeate the
borders of the body in a way that the audience might take note of.
The blue-noise soundtrack in Motion-Motion was animated by an embodied
technique that I have developed, that spatializes sound using the movement of my body.
The looped blue-noise was played back through a speaker acting as a single source of
sound. I then recorded this single point of sound in space using in-ear binaural
microphones. While wearing the microphones I moved my body in space, actively
recording the blue-noise track in different positions around my moving body. I moved
towards and away from the speakers paying attention to how my weight swayed. I moved
through circles, spirals and figure-eights created by my body. The result is a binaural audio
track which features the blue-noise moving autonomously in space, reanimating the sound
around the body of the listener.
The development of the moving, projected light echoes the embodied process which
spatialized the sound in Motion-Motion. I recorded this same movement standing between
a source of light and the camera, inverting the colors and increasing the contrast. The result
is a shadow made of light swaying and swooping across the screen. When the video is
projected, it creates light which also moves throughout the room as if it had a physical
form.
The sense of boundaries permeated is produced through the use of two separate
tracks playing the same binaural blue-noise. One plays through the headphones and one
plays through the speakers. The headphones and speakers take turns transmitting the
blue-noise fading in and out at a rate similar to a cycle of breath or waves breaking and

68

withdrawing. The effect is an auditory illusion of the blue-noise track moving back and
forth between the speakers and the headphones. Entering the room, the listener might hear
the sound coming through the speakers, or they may encounter the effect of the light first
and find the headphones placed at the intersection of the action. Putting on the headphones
and finding the sound here, just as it disappears, results in much of the volume from the
speakers being blocked by the headphones. The headphones create the final level of
impasse.
The entire installation is a culmination of several layers of development, actions that
may not be recognized but contribute to a more specific uptake of the work. Motion-Motion,
and everything it encompasses, runs on a synchronized loop. The effect is the opposite of a
performance, where the events transpiring in the space are independent of any audience.
This places the choice to enter, to stay and to exit on the audience. A natural hesitancy in
darkness and an unwillingness to spend time are inherent conditions of the installation.
This room, sequestered from the rest of the activity in the building, is also a bid for an
intimate and grounding moment. The speakers and the projector placed on the floor means
that, relative to the high ceilings, the work is happening low to the ground. As the light from
the projector grazes the slickness of the floor it reflects and disperses some of the light
upward, creating a more three-dimensional sense of the moving form of light. I have a
particular affection for the floor and find that when called to acknowledge the foundation
beneath my feet I become more aware of my body and of the conditions around my being
here and something settles a little. The experience is relatively ambiguous and the
invitation isn’t entirely prescriptive. With this I hope to create a space where the audience
engages with the work through self-reflection and sensation and takes the chance to be
with themselves and embody the perceptible motion.
Proprioception negotiates the boundary of the body as it encounters the
surrounding space. By bringing attention to the bodily boundary, what is ours and what is
other is temporarily bridged and, perhaps for a moment, we can leave our immediate
bodily circumstance. Motion-Motion works with the immaterial, activated by darkness. The
provisional nature of the setup–speakers, headphones, and a projector on the floor, laid
69

bare–can overlooked in the dark as attention is directed inwards, rather than to deceive the
audience. While the light is an invitation to participate and situate within the installation, it
also gently illuminates the equipment. Revealing the source of light and sound allows their
effect to take precedence, so that the audience might be curious about how they are
experiencing the work rather than how it is being produced.

Fig. 21 + 22: Gemma Crowe, Motion-Motion, 2021. Multimedia. Installation Documentation.

70