Transposing auralities : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

This exegesis seeks to investigate music’s capacity to and complicity in performing acts of acoustic violence, listening to the repercussions as they reverberate from the architectural, seep through the pores of the social, and emanate into the very fabric of the cultural. Through gestures of deconstruction and defamiliarisation, the works discussed serve as templates in considering how music’s hierarchical structures might be rearranged, recomposed, and reinterpreted to produce alternative listening experiences. Informed by a “non-cochlear” sonic sensibility, I endeavour to hear through modernity’s ear the continuum of sound as it oscillates across thresholds of disenchantment and re-enchantment, the scientific and the mythic, facilitating a discussion towards what a sonic agency might sound like.