Listening as Contemplation: A reflexive thematic analysis of listening to modular-based compositions

This paper and the live demonstration that accompanies it constitute part of a practice-based autoethnography that focuses on an engagement with modular synthesizers in the process of composing electronic music. Driven by the author’s meditation practice, this study examines how modular-based practices might embody, articulate, and promote contemplative insights, i.e., experiential understandings that arise through meditation. To develop effective approaches for working with this concept, the author employs the enquiry cycle of self-reflection: an iterative approach borrowed from action research, divided into stages of planning, acting, and reflecting on action (Haseman, 2010). This entails developing bespoke hardware and software configurations alongside musical sketches, recording performances of those sketches, and reflecting on the recordings before repeating the cycle. In this process, different methods for capturing data are used at different stages of the cycle, including text-based logs, patch diagrams and audio-visual journals. Based on autoethnographic data collected and analysed elsewhere, certain guiding principles for contemplative music making are established upon initiating the cycle. These include pattern-based repetition, gradual musical process, timbral transformation and a particular interest in spatial effects. These emphases are seen to reflect the Buddhist notion of emptiness, according to which all objects—both physical and imaginary—are empty of their own existence, products of a complex web of causes and conditions. Following these guidelines, the author suggests several modular-based tools and techniques. Sequencing, for one, is offered as a way of establishing patterns, whereas sequence operations and delay processes create permutations and a sense of polyphony through pattern-overlay. Working with the idea of space as material, the case of the Make Noise Erbe-Verb is examined due to its affordance of flexible voltage control over digital reverb parameters. Finally, the author examines working with the harmonic oscillator, a device that employs Pythagorean just intonation to create complex timbres. Showcasing his contemplative approach for working with modular synthesizers, the author performs a selection of works in progress using the suggested setup. Much like the practice of vipassana, where attention is directed towards the flux of bodily sensations, the resultant pieces promote a shift from goal-oriented, teleological forms of listening to a moment-to-moment observation of sound as changing phenomenon.