Seeking Awareness of Our Selves and the Environment Through Vocal Improvisation in The Singing Field
Nicola Oddy · 2022
In this dissertation, I explore vocal improvisation as a practice of listening awareness.Stemming from my background as a vocalist, music therapist, and educator, I examine the use of the voice when singing in place as a way to change perceptions of the self and the environment.Building on Stephen Feld's theory of acoustemology, Nina Sun Eidsheim's discussion about voice and music as intermaterial practices, and R. Murray Schafer's theory of theatre of confluence, I consider how singing in place can be a way of knowing by listening to the intermateriality between our bodies and the places in which we sing.I explore these ideas through an improvisational performance practice that I call "environmental vocal exploration (EVE)."Through autoethnographic, ethnographic and research-creation methodologies, this dissertation revolves around a project entitled The Singing Field: A Performance of Environmental Vocal Exploration.This project required a summer-long commitment from five singers who joined me in six EVE performances in various locations.Through interviews, debriefs, and journal writing, the performers considered their experiences and shared their perspectives with me.We used vocal improvisation as our primary way to interact with different environments and with each other.To analyze our experiences, I developed the concepts of "environmental countertransference," "environmental vocalist," and "xeno-song."The Singing Field performances were filmed by Hasi Eldib of Carleton University and audio recorded by sound technician John Rosefield.In addition to providing audio-visual data for analysis, the resulting film, titled The Singing Field: A Performance of Environmental Vocal Exploration, is one of the three main outputs of this research-creation project, one being the performances themselves, another being the film, and the third being this dissertation.100310735_Oddy_N iii Through autoethnography, fieldwork, and analysis of data, I show that singing with listening awareness in place can create a relationship between self and place, leading to a new awareness and attunement to both.100310735_Oddy_N