Explorations in Sonic Creation: Feeling Elsewhere through Sincerely Queer Listening

Abstract

Deflated and dishevelled after only two months of Covid-induced worldwide quarantine, I turned to music in search of recovery and renewal. Cultivating place on a bedroom floor replete with carpets and pillows, I sat with violin in hand, feeling my way through my mental library of learned compositions, expressions, articulations and techniques. Layering rosin-scented memories of various teachings and experiences—including some of the more unpleasant ones—I would bind my past to the present using a loop pedal. Improvising my way through various movements, I would rely on the rules of tonality that shape the collective orientations of our global pop music-listening bodies. Then, after some time, I would begin to decompose the rhythms and rhymes of sonic stability to explore new aesthetic possibilities. Splicing through the layers I had once built like a defence shield as a classically trained violinist, I continue to turn inward in search of something more sincere. Shedding the need for musical (self-)acceptance, I invite imperfection, inducing accidents that inevitably arise when a horse-hair bow meets a metal string fastened to a wooden paddle. I summon the glitches, background noise, electronic feedback and other parasitic interventions made by the music technologies at my fingertips. Sniffling through failure, I listen for a faint, faraway shimmer of promise.