Sonic experimentation, a term here used to loosely designate the experimental artistic shaping of sound, underpins the historical evolution of music while encompassing practices referenced as “sonic arts” that involve the crafting of sound in installations, environments, multimedia and digital platforms, as well as concert-type performance settings. This paper defines sonic experimentation as a practice informed and influenced by musical legacies in their engagement with materials as sound-producing bodies, and with processes including mathematics, acoustics, and psychoacoustics. These legacies form the embedded musical techniques and instrumental technologies studied by organologists, and the correlative social and cultural practices of their users studied by ethnomusicologists. I will discuss some of the ways musical legacies play into - or against - sonic experimentation, where transformations of material and human agency by computational systems further complexify the heterogenous regimes of our musical and sonic legacies.

Bio

Sally Jane Norman returned to Aotearoa in 2017 to direct the New Zealand School of Music–Te Kōkī, and since April 2024 is holder of the Denis Adam Chair in Music. Sally Jane remains Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex, where as Professor of Performance Technologies she was co-founding Co-Director of Sussex Humanities Lab. Before SHL, she was academic lead on Sussex’s £10M refurbishment of the Basil Spence-designed Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts; this academic/ infrastructure mission drew on her experience as founding Director of Culture Lab at Newcastle University (UK). Past roles include EU Research Associate at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe), Artistic Co-Director of the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (Amsterdam), Director of the Ecole européenne supérieure de l'image (EESI, Poitiers-Angoulême), and Scientific Coordinator of the Louvre's International Symposium on New Images and Museology.

BA and MA studies at Canterbury, New Zealand, were followed by performance studies research at the Institut d'études théâtrales, Paris III - Sorbonne nouvelle (Doctorat de 3e cycle supervised by Bernard Dort, Doctorat d’État ès Lettres et Sciences humaines supervised by Denis Bablet), and participation in summer schools with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, and John Cage. Her publications in English and French address performance history and emerging practices, art and technology, and transdisciplinary research. Commissioned reports include 'Culture and the New Media Technologies' for the Unesco Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policy for Development, and 'Transdisciplinarity and the Emergence of New Art Forms' for the French Ministry of Culture. As a Kiwi-French dual national, Sally Jane works with research organisations in Europe, Australasia, and North America, including the European Research Council and European Science Foundation. Doctoral examinations ensured in Australasia, United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Canada, frequently foreground practice-led arts research.