Thinking through artistic research: evolving compositional practice pt. 3

Body knowledge as research foundation

Cold water immersion becomes a form of methodological surrender. Through it, I sought to dissolve the researcher/subject boundary that I’ve always experienced. When it came to consider writing this exegesis, I wondered how I would write with the distance required of researcher neutrality - until I figured out that would be impossible with such embodied research methodology. Though the project began as an objective inquiry into how contemporary composers were engaging with water in their music, it developed into a methodological practice that led me to develop a new body of creative work and foregrounded a new approach to my music composition. The vulnerabilities that I encountered as part of this daily practice created conditions to access non-anthropocentric knowledge and to hear voices that may have otherwise gone unheard. My own involuntary responses to extreme cold including breathing and heartbeat adjustments became data and source material. 

My repeated submergences revealed the porosity between myself and the watery environment. The patterns of light variations and tidal harmonic shifts were perceptible to me only through daily practice, creating a form of embodied archive of environmental variability. 

The hydrophone and other field recording devices extended my listening practice, but never sought to replace the bodily listening. The burps, moans, creaks, scrapes, clicks and pops of marine life became extensions of embodied listening, expanding what my ears and bones could perceive. Through this daily practice across seasons and variable conditions, my body became both instrument and archive, generating forms of knowledge that would fundamentally transform my understanding of music composition itself.

The implications for my compositional practice have been profound and challenged my previous compositional assumptions. By considering oceanic time and space, my practice has moved to be more expansive, focussed on minutiae of tone and timbre, and full of previously unheard voices. While early compositions focussed on melody and harmony as key indicators of watery subjects, the tonal colours, depth of texture and duration of the work became primary engagements. As boundaries dissolved as a results of my watery immersion, so too did the compositional structures and voices of my creative works.

This embodied practice of submergence has established a research foundation that fundamentally reimagines how contemporary composers might engage with water beyond subject matter or inspiration. Rather than approaching aquatic environments as external objects to be represented musically, cold water immersion reveals composition as a practice of material participation within water systems. The conditions for music-making that emerge through this methodology could not have been accessed through studio-based compositional practice alone. These include the dissolution of anthropocentric boundaries, the amplification of more-than-human voices, the synchronisation with oceanic temporalities, and the emotional connection that only comes with a reimagining of an ethical relationship between self and water. What began as an inquiry into contemporary compositional approaches to water has evolved into a demonstration that embodied environmental engagement can generate entirely new compositional paradigms. The folio of original compositions that comprise this research project presents this embodied knowledge as both methodological innovation and creative foundation, offering compositions that emerge from within rather than about the aquatic world of my direct encounter. 

Thinking through artistic research: evolving compositional practice pt. 2

Daily Practice and Seasonal Variations

This research project has emerged through a daily practice of listening. Listening with my ears certainly, but also with the entirety of my body, allowing mind and attention to wander freely at waters’ edge or while submerged in chilly Southern Tasmanian waters. This listening practice refuses the constraints of optimal conditions, embracing instead the full spectrum of seasonal and meteorological variations that shape embodied encounters.

Weather conditions become coparticipants in the methodological process rather than obstacles to overcome. On one particular morning at Kingston Beach, waves twice the size of my regular breaks demanded a complete recalibration of swimming technique. Where my strokes usually flowed with a predictable rhythm, these conditions required urgent adaptations. I gulped breaths in between the surges and altered my stroke cadence. My body negotiated with forces well beyond my control. The wind whipped sand directly into my numbed flesh as I struggled from water to shore, an unfamiliar stinging taking the place of the usual winter numbed flesh and imperceptible air temperature. Such moments reveal how weather doesn’t simply provide a backdrop for research but actively shapes the knowledge that emerges.

The communal dimension of this practice proves equally significant. Our swimming group maintains a ritual around shared thermoses of hot drinks, hot cheesy twists purchased from the nearby cafe, friendly loans of swimming gloves and booties and identical neoprene swim caps. Everyone understands that extended cold exposure can produce shaking, mild paralysis, or compromised decision-making capacity. No one drives immediately after swimming; we remain together, offering spare hand warmers, or plastic milk cartons filled with hot water as a makeshift hot shower, and we’re all vigilantly attentive to any sign that cold may have overwhelmed someone’s system. This collective care reveals how embodied research methodologies necessarily extend beyond individual experience into networks of mutual support and shared responsibility.

Certain environmental conditions demand methodological boundaries. If rainfall exceeds ten millimeters in any twenty four hour period, stormwater runoff transforms Kingston Beach’s typically clear blue water into murky brown channels. Even when not visible, this runoff may carry potentially harmful bacteria. This factor represents my singular non-negotiable constraint and is the one weather condition that overrides my commitment to daily practice. While some swimming companions find my rule overly cautious, it establishes necessary limits around acceptable risk within embodied research protocols.

Seasonal transitions create distinct methodological phases within the overall practice. General wisdom suggests limiting cold water immersion to minutes equivalent to water temperature (in degrees celsius), a guideline that has proven roughly accurate in my own practice. Yesterday’s dip in eight degree water was for roughly that duration, although summer sessions extend to thirty minutes or longer, sometimes leaving time for exploratory swims to nearby coves. These temporal variations aren’t simply practical adaptations but constitute different modes of embodied inquiry, each generating distinct forms of knowledge through the body’s negotiations with changing environmental conditions.

Acoustic properties of underwater listening with my naked ears remain consistent across seasons and regardless of temperature. Yet my body’s sensory apparatus transforms under extreme conditions and duration of encounter. Extreme cold creates heightened awareness, a sense of being fully present under stress, while the mildness of summer offers different pleasures of lingering warmth and unhurried emergence. These seasonal variations cultivate what might be understood as meteorological intimacy, a deep familiarity with place that emerges through sustained bodily engagement across a spectrum of environmental conditions. This practice of remaining present to water in all its seasonal manifestations becomes fundamental to understanding how embodied knowledge develops through sustained, weather-responsive attention to more-than-human environments.

Thinking through artistic research: Evolving compositional practice

The Practice: Cold Water Swimming as Research Methodology

Beginning in the Body

The shock of water at eight degrees against my skin becomes a methodology. Friday 25th July, Kingston Beach, Southern Tasmania, a few minutes after sunrise. My body enters the Derwent's winter embrace after weeks of absence, of sickness and lingering coughs, of forgetting what it means to be held by more-than-human rhythms. The weak liquid warmth of dawn light seeps across sand as I wade purposefully into water that bites, demands presence, that strips away everything but the immediate interaction between flesh and element.

This is where my research begins: not in the library or music studio, but in the liminal space where body meets water, where the technological apparatus of daily life dissolves into salt spray and the urgent need to keep moving before numbness sets in. The act of submersion itself — clothed or, on special occasions, naked — becomes epistemological practice. No wetsuits, please, ever! I need to feel the water pushing on my skin. When I do enter the water without barriers, these moments represent a complete shedding of technological mediations. They return me to a more primary mode of knowing through the body's engagement with elemental forces.

The water's bite against my torso, the miscalculated wave that hits me before readiness. These are not merely sensory experiences but methodological moments. They demand a kind of attention that cannot be delegated to devices or translated immediately into language. Twenty metres out, maybe fifty, I realise I am further from shore than anticipated, my fingers too numb to register their own function as they stroke through dark water. This moment of preemptive panic, of checking for sand beneath feet that cannot even feel, becomes crucial data: the recognition that embodied knowledge operates in registers unavailable to technological capture or recounting.

Each morning's encounter varies in intensity. Some days I arrive before dawn, when phosphorescence traces my footprints in wet sand and colors jet across the sky in pink and purple trajectories. I breathe in the salty air on those mornings and move up and down the beach. Other mornings demand only my listening: sitting at water's edge, tuning bodily systems to the water's changing rhythms without agenda or instruction. This attentive receptivity without agenda opens onto what posthumanist feminist scholar Astrida Neimanis might recognise as "posthuman feminist methodology." These are ways of knowing that emerge through sustained bodily engagement rather than analytical distance.

The acoustic dimensions of this practice sometimes extend beyond the water itself. On occasion, my violin accompanies me on these early morning encounters. As I improvise freely, the steel strings and old wooden body tend to respond to these morning encounters with long bows that slow and speed up within a single stroke, grainy sounds, and microtonal evolutions that resist conventional harmonic structures. Field recordings, when I bring the equipment, attempt to capture ambient textures, though when I listen back, they are inevitably flatter than the dimensional richness of lived experience. These sonic explorations serve not as core methodology but as peripheral ways of developing and documenting insights that emerge from the primary act of bodily submersion. The binaural headphone walks along the shore's edge, the hydrophone dropped into suitable spots; these technological extensions help articulate what the body learns in water, but they remain secondary to the fundamental practice of entering the sea.

This embodied practice grounds my research in recognition that knowledge emerges through sustained physical engagement with place and environment. The daily ritual of submersion, whether accompanied by listening exercises, musical response, or technological documentation, creates conditions for understanding that exceed the parameters of conventional inquiry. Yet it is the act of entering cold water itself that remains central: the body's negotiation with temperature, current, and depth that cannot be delegated to instruments or translated immediately into language. Here, at the water's edge, methodology becomes a practice of embodied attention; a commitment to knowing through rather than about the material world that holds us. This foundational practice of embodied submersion extends beyond singular encounters into a sustained methodology that embraces seasonal variation and weather extremes as essential research conditions.