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.