On sonic identity, culturally situated listening, and the possibilities of artistic research.
Introduction: When a Compositional Question Becomes an Epistemological Problem
What makes a musical identity recognizable, even when the sounds through which it is expressed undergo substantial transformation?
This question lies at the heart of my doctoral research, which investigates the compositional transformation of musical materials historically and culturally associated with Northeastern Brazil. My work explores how sonority, technological mediation, memory, and listening participate in the emergence and transformation of recognizable musical configurations.
Initially, my research was primarily concerned with identifying and systematizing procedures of sonic transformation. I wanted to understand which musical characteristics might remain recognizable after being reorganized, displaced, or altered through composition and technology.
As my theoretical investigation developed, however, a more fundamental question emerged. Influenced particularly by Donna Haraway and Salomé Voegelin, I began to reconsider an assumption underlying the original problem: that recognizability could be understood as an intrinsic property of musical material.
A musical configuration does not necessarily carry its cultural identity as a fixed collection of sonic characteristics. Recognition also involves the listener’s experiences, expectations, memories, and relationship with particular musical practices.
This realization shifted the focus of my research. Rather than attempting to measure whether listeners recognize particular cultural references, I became interested in how compositional processes might create, modify, or destabilize the conditions of recognizability.
This shift also raised an epistemological question: what kind of knowledge can composition itself produce about these processes?
1. Composition as a Practice of Knowledge Production
One of the central premises of my research is that musical composition can function not only as an artistic activity but also as a method of inquiry.
This perspective is closely related to the field of artistic research, in which artistic practice participates directly in the formulation of questions, the exploration of possibilities, and the production of knowledge.
In The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research (2012), Henk Borgdorff discusses how artistic practice can generate forms of knowledge that are not necessarily reducible to verbal propositions. Artistic activity involves embodied, sensory, and experiential dimensions that may resist complete translation into conventional academic language.
This does not mean that artistic research can dispense with conceptual foundations or critical reflection. On the contrary, artistic practice acquires an investigative character when it is connected to explicit research questions and becomes open to contextualization, documentation, examination, and discussion.
In composition, this relationship is particularly interesting.
A composer frequently begins with an idea about how musical materials might interact. Through experimentation, certain relationships are confirmed, others become problematic, and unexpected possibilities emerge. Decisions concerning rhythm, articulation, texture, density, register, or temporal organization can generate new questions that were not apparent before the creative process began.
These operations do not necessarily follow a linear sequence. Nor are they always fully conscious or immediately verbalizable. Sometimes an idea only becomes intelligible through the act of composing, listening, revising, and comparing alternatives.
In this sense, composition is not simply the application of previously acquired knowledge. It can participate in the very process through which a problem is understood.
From Creative Decisions to Research
An important distinction must nevertheless be made: not every creative decision automatically constitutes research.
For compositional practice to contribute to academic knowledge, its investigative dimensions must be made explicit. This involves documenting relevant decisions and transformations, examining their consequences, and relating practical experiences to the conceptual questions guiding the investigation.
Scores, recordings, sketches, intermediate versions, and reflections on creative choices can all become valuable research materials. None of these documents, however, should be assumed to exhaust the knowledge involved in artistic experience.
For my research, composition offers a particularly productive environment in which to explore how musical configurations associated with specific cultural practices can emerge, change, and eventually become difficult to recognize.
Terra: A Compositional Experiment
An early example of this approach is Terra, a composition for solo piano developed within my research.
The piece begins with a fragmented musical gesture that undergoes gradual transformations until a configuration associated with baião, a musical practice strongly connected to Northeastern Brazil, emerges.
As the composition progresses, this configuration is subjected to further transformations and processes of disarticulation, eventually leading to the reappearance of elements from the initial gesture.
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The compositional question is not simply how to write something recognizable as baião, but how such a configuration emerges, which musical relationships sustain it, and what happens when those relationships are transformed.
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The process raises questions about continuity, memory, transformation, and recognizability that were not necessarily formulated before the composition began.
An analysis of the completed piece could describe its sonic relationships and transformations. Composition, however, also provides access to the exploration of alternatives, the confrontation of different solutions, and the emergence of problems during the work’s construction.
This is where I locate an important part of its investigative potential: not only in understanding the resulting musical object, but also in examining the processes, possibilities, decisions, and constraints involved in bringing it into existence.
There is, nevertheless, an essential limitation. Compositional experimentation may support hypotheses about recognizability, but it cannot, by itself, demonstrate how different listeners will actually perceive or recognize the resulting music.
My own listening experience is part of the investigation, but it cannot be treated as universal.
This limitation leads to another fundamental aspect of the research: the relationship between sonority, listening, and cultural recognition.
2. Sonority, Listening, and the Musical Object
Sonority as an Analytical Perspective
Investigating musical transformation requires concepts that allow us to describe and interpret how sonic configurations are organized.
In this respect, Didier Guigue’s work on sonority offers an important analytical perspective. Rather than approaching musical organization exclusively through traditionally privileged categories such as pitch, harmony, or thematic structure, this perspective also considers texture, density, register, intensity, articulation, and the temporal distribution of sonic events.
These dimensions are not merely secondary attributes of a musical structure. Their interactions participate in the constitution of musical experience itself.
Denis Smalley’s spectromorphology contributes another perspective by examining sonic phenomena through their spectral characteristics and temporal behaviors. It provides concepts for investigating how sonic configurations emerge, develop, transform, and disappear.
Although spectromorphology was developed particularly in relation to electroacoustic music, some of its concepts may also contribute to the investigation of compositional transformation in other contexts, provided that the particularities of the musical materials and practices are respected.
Together, these approaches offer analytical resources for examining the organization and transformation of sound.
Yet an important distinction remains.
Describing a rhythmic pattern, texture, or articulation does not necessarily explain why that configuration might be culturally meaningful to a listener.
A detailed account of sonic properties cannot, on its own, establish that a musical passage will be recognized as belonging to a particular cultural practice.
Sonority is therefore a necessary dimension of my research, but it is not sufficient to explain recognizability.
Listening as a Relationship
This limitation leads to the work of Salomé Voegelin, whose reflections on listening challenge the idea of sound as an object that can be fully understood independently of the person experiencing it.
From this perspective, listening is not merely the passive reception of information already contained within a sonic object. It is a contingent and participatory relationship through which the listener takes part in the constitution of what can be known.
For my research, this has significant consequences.
If listening is not neutral, then musical recognition cannot be explained exclusively through the characteristics of the material being heard.
Different listeners may establish different associations with the same sonic configuration because their memories, expectations, cultural experiences, and histories of listening are not identical.
A rhythmic gesture that evokes baião for one listener may produce a different association for someone whose musical experience has developed in another cultural context.
This does not make analytical description irrelevant. Rather, it reveals the limits of what analysis alone can establish.
There is a productive tension between these perspectives. Analytical approaches seek categories through which musical configurations can be described, compared, and interpreted. Voegelin’s work, by contrast, emphasizes the contingent and experiential dimensions of listening, questioning whether sonic experience can ever be fully represented through conceptual description.
I do not intend to eliminate this tension.
Instead, I consider it essential to preserve the distinction between what can be analytically described and what emerges through situated listening.
Recognizability as a Relational Problem
From these considerations, recognizability becomes a relational question involving sonic configurations, cultural practices, and listening experiences.
Musical materials historically associated with Northeastern Brazil may contain rhythmic, melodic, timbral, or performative characteristics that participate in processes of cultural identification.
Yet these characteristics do not necessarily constitute a fixed set of properties capable of guaranteeing recognition.
Their meanings are also shaped by the historical conditions in which musical practices emerge and circulate, and by the relationships that different people establish with them.
Technology is part of this problem.
Musical practices have never existed independently of instruments, performance techniques, recording and reproduction technologies, or the material conditions through which music is produced and circulated.
Consequently, technologically mediated composition should not be understood simply as the transformation of an originally unmediated musical material.
The question is how different forms of sonic production and organization can preserve, displace, or modify historically established relationships.
In this framework, I understand recognizability as a relational investigative category: neither an exclusively intrinsic property of musical material nor a phenomenon reducible to an individual listener’s subjective experience.
My interest lies in exploring the compositional and technological conditions that may support different relationships of recognition.
David Huron’s research on musical expectation, learning, and experience offers a promising direction for developing this question further. In particular, his work may help clarify how learned musical regularities participate in the formation of expectations and influence experiences of recognition.
3. Situated Knowledge and the Position of the Composer-Researcher
The relationship between musical analysis and listening also raises a broader epistemological question: from what position do we produce knowledge about music?
In Situated Knowledges (1988), Donna Haraway challenges the idea of objectivity as a neutral, universal perspective detached from the concrete conditions of the knowing subject.
Instead, she proposes an understanding of knowledge as situated, partial, and accountable.
This does not require abandoning objectivity. It requires recognizing the historical, cultural, and material conditions under which knowledge claims are produced, as well as their possibilities and limitations.
Fernando González Rey’s qualitative epistemology offers another relevant perspective through its understanding of knowledge as a constructive-interpretive process.
In this approach, knowledge does not result from the simple apprehension of a reality that exists entirely independently of the researcher. It involves theoretical construction and interpretation, in which the researcher actively participates.
Although Haraway and González Rey work within different theoretical traditions, their contributions help question a rigid separation between the observing subject and the object of investigation.
For my research, these considerations are especially important.
When I select musical materials associated with Northeastern Brazilian practices, I do not approach them from a culturally neutral position. My own musical experiences, references, listening habits, and compositional interests participate in how I identify, interpret, and transform those materials.
The categories through which I understand them are themselves historically and culturally situated.
Acknowledging this does not mean reducing the research to personal experience. It means making the assumptions underlying my decisions explicit and subjecting them to critical examination.
Between Particular Experience and Broader Knowledge
An additional challenge concerns the possibility of producing knowledge with broader relevance from particular artistic experiences.
Huron’s work on musical expectation, for instance, provides models for considering psychological processes that may participate in the experiences of different listeners.
However, it is necessary to distinguish potentially shared mechanisms of learning and expectation from the specific musical and cultural contents that people learn within particular historical contexts.
The existence of shared cognitive processes does not imply that all listeners develop identical musical expectations.
Likewise, acknowledging the situated character of knowledge does not automatically validate every interpretation produced from a particular position.
Interpretations still require argumentation, engagement with evidence, critical examination, and openness to revision.
My research therefore seeks to combine systematic investigation of musical configurations with an awareness of the situated and interpretive conditions under which that investigation takes place.
Composition provides an experimental environment for formulating and examining hypotheses. Analysis and theoretical reflection help interpret the results and establish the limits of what can reasonably be concluded.
These perspectives do not form a single homogeneous theoretical system. Their differences must remain visible rather than being dissolved into an artificial consensus.
4. Bringing the Perspectives Together
The epistemological foundations of my research emerge from the dialogue between several approaches, each contributing to a different dimension of the problem.
Henk Borgdorff provides a foundation for understanding artistic practice as a possible form of knowledge production.
Didier Guigue and Denis Smalley offer analytical resources for investigating the organization and transformation of sonic configurations.
Salomé Voegelin contributes a critical perspective on listening as a relational and experiential activity.
Donna Haraway and Fernando González Rey, from different theoretical positions, help me reflect on the situated character of knowledge, the role of interpretation, and the relationship between researcher and object.
David Huron’s investigations of musical learning and expectation offer a direction for further examining how acquired regularities may participate in experiences of recognition.
These perspectives are not interchangeable. Nor do I consider them components of a fully unified theoretical system.
Their value lies in the possibility of establishing a critical dialogue around a shared research problem.
At this stage, my epistemological position can be described through three interconnected commitments.
First, composition is an investigative practice. Creative activity participates in the formulation of problems, the exploration of alternatives, and the production of knowledge, rather than merely applying concepts established elsewhere.
Second, sonic organization and cultural recognizability must be distinguished. The analysis of musical configurations is essential, but the cultural meanings attributed to those configurations cannot be derived exclusively from their sonic properties.
Third, knowledge is situated and requires critical accountability. The position of the composer-researcher participates in the construction of the research object, while the resulting interpretations remain subject to documentation, argumentation, evidence, and revision.
Together, these commitments provide a framework for investigating how compositional and technological transformations may create, preserve, or destabilize conditions of musical recognizability.
They also establish important limits.
Compositional experimentation can reveal relationships, possibilities, and constraints within the creative process. It cannot independently establish how different listeners will recognize the resulting music.
Similarly, analytical description can identify musical characteristics without necessarily determining their cultural meanings.
Recognizing these limits is not a weakness of artistic research. It is part of defining what the research can legitimately claim to know.
5. An Epistemology Still in Development
The position outlined here is provisional.
Several questions remain open.
How can the knowledge emerging from compositional activity be documented and critically examined without reducing artistic experience to its written description?
How can we distinguish compositional possibilities of recognizability from actual experiences of recognition?
What historical and cultural conditions participate in the constitution of the musical materials under investigation?
How do memory, learning, expectation, and technological mediation interact in the transformation of culturally situated sonic configurations?
Addressing these questions will require continued engagement with music psychology, cultural studies, and studies of technology, while recognizing that concepts from different fields cannot always be transferred without tension or adaptation.
Most importantly, the research must remain responsive to the problems emerging from artistic practice itself.
I do not see the epistemological foundations of my work as a definitive theoretical structure established before composition begins. Rather, I understand them as a developing position that must continually be confronted with the experiences, questions, and unexpected possibilities arising from the creative process.
Perhaps this is one of the most meaningful implications of understanding composition as research: the act of making music may transform not only the material being investigated, but also the assumptions through which the investigation was initially conceived.
References and Theoretical Perspectives
The following authors and works inform the discussion presented here:
- Henk Borgdorff — The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research (2012).
- Donna Haraway — Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (1988).
- Didier Guigue — Research on sonority and the analysis of musical organization.
- Denis Smalley — Research on spectromorphology and the temporal behavior of sound.
- Salomé Voegelin — Philosophical investigations of listening and sonic experience.
- Fernando González Rey — Qualitative epistemology and the constructive-interpretive production of knowledge.
- David Huron — Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (2006).
This essay was adapted from a text developed as part of my doctoral studies. It presents an evolving epistemological position rather than a completed theoretical framework.
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