Weaving Sounds: Voice, Body, and Live Collage
Composition as Live Practice
With Samantha Simmons and guest Mariana Carvalho November 15, 22, December 6 and 13

Sundays

1-3pm ET

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Virtual
4 week course

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“...[the mouth is] a contact zone where language performs as a powerful agent...” — Brandon LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth

 

Led by sound artist Samantha Simmons with guest Mariana Carvalho, this 4-week course explores composition as a practice of listening, storytelling, and performance. We’ll ask how a sound world built in the studio can be carried into a room, a body, or a live set.

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Taking cues from Brandon LaBelle’s Lexicon of the Mouth, we’ll treat the mouth as a site of sound and story. Laughing, whispering, stuttering, reciting, sighing, and kissing are what LaBelle calls “micro-oralities,” and we’ll collect them like found sounds: recording, cutting, and layering them into collage. A whisper can become weather. A laugh can be stretched into a room. A recited phrase, looped and blurred, can turn into memory.

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The voice is the beginning. Alongside field recordings, objects, samples, and synthesis, we’ll build pieces that unfold gradually, like memory, weather systems, or film, and then shape them for performance. Composition is approached as a surrealist, dada-inflected, multi-layered practice.

This course is designed as a workshop for developing track ideas and live approaches. I often find it easier to compose when I begin with a story, image, memory, film reference, or sensation. We’ll ask questions such as: What changes when a sound passes through a material or a body? What moods emerge in a recording, and how can they be translated into sound, and then into a live gesture?

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Through listening sessions, discussion, and practical demonstrations in Ableton Live, participants will explore techniques including looping, sampling, resonators, and creative effects, along with approaches to arranging and performing a set live. Alongside technical skills, we will focus on developing a personal approach to composition, attentive listening, and presence in performance.

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Guest session: Mariana Carvalho- November 22

Mariana presents recent developments in her practice between sound art, experimental music, and performance, focusing on voice, listening, and the movement of sound between bodies and materials. She discusses me alimento de voces, a practice of collecting, ingesting, and exchanging voices, and its connections to sound poetry, mouth-to-mouth singing, and processing sound through materials. The session also touches on ideas of incorporation, transformation, and the relation between self and other, and on ways of listening that blur the boundary between inside and outside.

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Short reading will accompany each week. No reading is required to participate.

Weekly assignments encourage experimentation and play, ending in a final session where participants perform or share a live listening of their work and reflect on their process.

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Open to participants with a basic knowledge of Ableton Live. Sessions will be recorded and made available to participants.