UC San Diego

My creative practice for the past eight years can be characterized as an exploration of poorly-understood trauma responses through the means and materials of electronic music. One of the more common adaptive responses to trauma is the dissociative subtype of post-traumatic stress disorder, characterized by episodes of depersonalization/derealization in which a profound disconnect between one’s body and reality is experienced. Through alliances with various articulations of the affective turn, information theory, and digital signal processing, I theorize depersonalization/derealization as a stalled state of incomplete transduction that creates lost bodies devoid of potentiality, incapable of sensing or making sense.
 Researchers in psychology and neurobiology often look to failures in information processing, encoding, storage, and retrieval as paradigms to inform research on memory loss and/or suppression and altered cognitive states associated with adaptive trauma responses. Given the importance of these same paradigms to the production of electronic music, it seems a natural medium for artistically interrogating the similarities between cognition and musicking, and hence a satisfying modality for reifying the virtual, locating the bodies lost in depersonalization/derealization, and completing processes of transduction through sound. In my work, I have developed a personal taxonomy of these electronically-mediated transduction paradigms involved in sounding, defined by the configurations of bodies, modes of interaction, and temporal dynamics that animate them. In this dissertation, I exemplify my engagement with three of these paradigms, acoustic transduction, simple electroacoustic transduction, and complex electroacoustic transduction, through the use of three compositions: sear, luscinia, and excision no.2: they didn’t know we were seeds.. By developing a framework for exploring trauma responses through the means and materials of electronic music, my praxis reifies and validates my experiences of depersonalization/derealization, creating space for evaluation, understanding, acceptance, and healing.