An Interdisciplinary and Practice-Based Study of Digital Arts and Experimental Electronic Music Practices in Iran

The composition process began with a survey. An online questionnaire was sent to twenty electronic producers based in Iran, who were chosen at random. Participants only had to open the link of the online survey, fill in the form anonymously, and press submit. Within the form everyone was asked to respond to the following eight questions: 1- How long is your average daily usage of the internet? 2- For what purposes do you mostly use the internet? 3- What sound sources do you frequently draw from in your practice and how do you access those 4- What soft-ware/hardware are more frequently used in your practice and how did you learn to use those? 5- Have you ever been trained, outside your individual endeavours, to manipulate sound, to compose, and to work with the software/hardware you use in your practice? 6- How do you describe your work in terms of genre aesthetics, if at all? 7- Do you see a connection between using the internet and the development of your practice in any shape or form (explain)? SPIN and INTERFERENCE are composed in response to the survey answers and based on samples contributed by Sohrab Motabar and myself. These two pieces constituted my first attempt to map seemingly unrelated data in the context of medianthropy, through music. To that aim, all samples were randomly selected from a library of recordings that Sohrab and I had shared via Dropbox. Through the latter process a sound library for these two works was formed, which consisted of original recordings as well as samples extracted from two online sources: British Library and BBC archives. In SPIN, for instance, the orchestral string sounds that appear at 01:17 belong to a 1950s vinyl recording and is extracted from the British Library’s page on Soundcloud (unfortunately I cannot find the exact link for the relevant recording). The FM radio tuning sounds that appear at 02:43 belong to an archive of BBC recordings, which was officially released on April of 2018. The rest of the material in this piece are all original recordings. INTERFERENCE is, however, wholly based around five short samples that are introduced successively at the beginning of the piece until 00:12. These were extracted from Sohrab’s samples, which had been generated using code written by himself in SuperCollider . The distorted radiophonic voice that first appears at 01:01 was also extracted from the BBC archive.

The composition process began with a survey. An online questionnaire was sent to twenty electronic producers based in Iran, who were chosen at random. Participants only had to open the link of the online survey, fill in the form anonymously, and press submit. Within the form everyone was asked to respond to the following eight questions: 1- How long is your average daily usage of the internet? 2- For what purposes do you mostly use the internet? 3- What sound sources do you frequently draw from in your practice and how do you access those 4- What soft-ware/hardware are more frequently used in your practice and how did you learn to use those? 5- Have you ever been trained, outside your individual endeavours, to manipulate sound, to compose, and to work with the software/hardware you use in your practice? 6- How do you describe your work in terms of genre aesthetics, if at all? 7- Do you see a connection between using the internet and the development of your practice in any shape or form (explain)? SPIN and INTERFERENCE are composed based on samples contributed by Sohrab Motabar and myself. These two pieces constituted my first attempt to map seemingly unrelated data in the context of medianthropy, through music. To that aim, all samples were randomly selected from a library of recordings that Sohrab and I had shared via Dropbox. Through the latter process a sound library for these two works was formed, which consisted of original recordings as well as samples extracted from two online sources: British Library and BBC archives. In SPIN, for instance, the orchestral string sounds that appear at 01:17 belong to a 1950s vinyl recording and is extracted from the British Library’s page on Soundcloud (unfortunately I cannot find the exact link for the relevant recording). The FM radio tuning sounds that appear at 02:43 belong to an archive of BBC recordings, which was officially released on April of 2018. The rest of the material in this piece are all original recordings. INTERFERENCE is, however, wholly based around five short samples that are introduced successively at the beginning of the piece until 00:12. These were extracted from Sohrab’s samples, which had been generated using code written by himself in SuperCollider . The distorted radiophonic voice that first appears at 01:01 was also extracted from the BBC archive

The idea of this piece took shape when Kate Carr asked me on Facebook if I was interested in performing as part of an electronic music event that she was curating at IKLECTIK Art Lab in London. I have known Kate in person since 2016. I first found out about her involvement with EEMSI following the release of Birds of a Feather; an album by the Sanandaj-based field recordist and sound artist Porya Hatami and the Toronto-based producer and sound artist Michael Trommer. It was released through Kate’s own record label, Flaming Pines, in 2012. The set developed, spontaneously and organically, as a series of drone parts and a percussive passage. The sonic output can be described in terms of constantly moving clusters of electronically-generated glissandi of different kinds that interweave and complement each other while heading towards nowhere specific. To add more layers of ‘liveness’, two contact microphones were used on my modular system’s case during the show, which allowed me to amplify, further process, and play with the often undesired and supressed ‘noises’ resulting from physical contact between various parts of the system and my hands. These can be heard at the beginning of the recording as I start patching, for instance between 00:34 and 02:58, and towards the end as I begin unpatching to restore the system to its initial state, for instance between 13:27 and 15:10. I wanted to start the set with no prepatching, to return to a similar state in the end and, as such, to begin and end with the ‘noise’ of the ‘background’ and the patching process, while integrating, instead of trying to eliminate or supress, the usually unwanted sounds of the environment and of the performance ecosystem.

This paper discusses the potential of digital media and live interfaces in musical composition and performance for subverting exclusionary structures towards inclusion. Coming from backgrounds in electronic music and eth-nography, the authors present two case studies that investigate music making practices with live interfaces. These case studies explore the relation between musical experimentation and the use of digital media in catalysing new forms of practice that move beyond restrictive categorisations and limiting boundaries constructed as a result of historical, social, and political processes. While the cases are differentiated in their approach, they converge in their emphasis on the inclusive potential of the digital media.