Research

Canine human musical entanglements

I am currently undertaking PhD at the University of Sydney, Sydney Conservatorium of music examining canine-human musical collaboration as a mechanism to question the human uniqueness of music. My supervisors are composer and ornithologist, Hollis Taylor and cultural and ethnomusicologist, Catherine Ingram.

I have a longstanding practice with my family dog, Mia, where I play clarinet and she sings (howls, yaps, barks, growls) in a way that responds and acknowledges me, just as I do her. In 2018 I completed an honours research project making recordings and analysing our musical practice while situating my work in the larger canon of zoömusicology. Zoömusicology, the musical study of animal sounds, is about dispelling the belief of animal simplicity, where all animal behaviour, outside of basic survival, is interpreted as a display of Darwinian fitness rather, trying to demonstrate that animal behaviour is just as complex and multi-dimensional as human behaviour. My research continues that work, aiming to reveal animals as aesthetically agentive beings whose individually nuanced behaviours respond to humans.

Composer, David Dunn writes of an aspirational way of composing that I strive for: “Rather than focusing upon the special talents of a composer at “expressing” self through a dramatic structure and highlighting their compositional training and skill at doing so, this is a tradition that is more interested in making a form of music that draws attention to the structure of auditory perception itself and/or issues of sound as an organizing factor in both human and non-human living systems. While it is convenient in this context to pose these paradigms as dichotomous in nature, it is readily apparent that the two can also be compatible." from “Acoustic Ecology and the Experimental Music Tradition” in New Music Box (2008).

Collaborations with Mia, the dog, Honey, the cat, cockatoos, black swans and frogs on Cammeraygal land. Originally premiered for Make It up club Online Series September 2020