Abby Aresty

Miscellaneous Electronic Bits uses sonic improvisation as a tool for critical inquiry into the physical properties of the materials from which synthesizers are (or could be) built. The duet is composed of three movements, each named after the physical characteristic(s) of a chosen substrate—which might include a solderless breadboard, paper, and fabric, for example—, and each evoking related musical qualities: rigid , smooth & flexible , and soft, warm, & fuzzy . Miscellaneous electronic bits are embedded, arranged, and laid out upon these substrates to create an interactive, tactile graphic musical score.

One performer navigates freely through the substrates, electronic components, and other collected materials through touch. The objects serve as both score and interface: the performer manipulates handcrafted synthesizers assembled atop or embedded within a substrate. They use components strewn across each substrate to assemble new instruments or to transform existing ones. Their interactions with the score change its visual structure and aesthetic as well as its sonic output.

A second performer is guided by the first. In response to their partner’s movements, they trace the visual contours of the work--interpreting and performing the implied graphic musical notation--using a curated collection of vintage modular synthesizers. The relationship between the musical duo is further informed by a series of cue cards, unveiled at random intervals throughout the work. These cards provide a variety of different instructions that shift the relationship between musical voices and interactions over time. Collectively, the performers explore the miscellaneous electronic bits and bobs of the score through sight, sound, and touch. They interpret, improvise, experiment, and ultimately listen for sonic remnants and audible traces of the electronic bits and physical materials from which the handcrafted synthesizers—and scores—are built. Find a score here. Find excerpts from the first realization of the piece, created in collaboration with Oberlin Synthesizer Ensemble members Drew Smith and Jack Hamill, here.

Across cultures, humans make, buy, find, share, or gift objects. While some objects are unique, mass production allows us to purchase indistinguishable objects to satisfy whims or fulfill needs. Over time, all objects take on new meanings as they remind us of moments, people, or places.

ArtiFACT is a collaborative exhibit in which visitors scan barcodes affixed to 3D printed object replicas to hear the story of each item, as told by the person to whom it belongs. ArtiFACT begins with workshops that pair communities across cultures to seed ArtiFACT exhibits with stories and objects. Participants bring a meaningful object to photograph and use 3D printers to create replicas in the form of lithophanes. They interview each other and record descriptions of their object’s physical appearance, its personal and cultural significance, and a related memory.

The ArtiFACT Team includes Abby Aresty, Abe Reshad, Larissa Fekete, Lucas Brecher, Helen He, and Maya McCollum. We have received generous support from Oberlin College and Conservatory from the Research and Development Committee as well as through the Oberlin College Language and Cultures grant. For more information and a video documenting the project, please visit the project website:

https://sites.google.com/view/artifact-project/home

Photos courtesy of Oberlin Conservatory Communications.

The sun will come out TIMARA! is a collaborative, mobile sound installation created by Abby Aresty and Oli Bentley, Aresty’s TECH 361 students, Oberlin’s Chorister’s Cantate ensemble, with special assistance from Maya McCollum. The project is composed entirely of sounds created collaboratively by TECH 361 and the Choristers using found objects and their own voices. The sun will come out TIMARA! was created for the Kaleidosonic Music Festival celebrating 50 years of electronic music at Oberlin College and Conservatory. Everybody loves a good TIMARA pun…this was ours for the evening!

The Crafting Sound Symposium was held on October 4 & 5, 2019 at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Oberlin, OH, and featured guest artists Afroditi Psarra, Jess Rowland, Asha Tamirisa ('10), and Jimmy Kuehnle, and local artists including Kyle Hartzell, Eli Stine, Abby Aresty, Rachel Gibson, Drew Smith, Dirk Roosenburg, Max Addae, and Max Kramer. The Crafting Sound Symposium was supported with generous funding from the Technology in Music and Related Arts Department, by the Center for Convergence (StudiOC) at Oberlin College, and by the Alumni Office at Oberlin College.

Tools are products of the societies that create them and are reflective of the gender and socio-political power structures inherent in these societies. In the Crafting Sound Symposium, we will turn a critical eye towards the technologies of sound. We will examine unspoken and unquestioned value systems inherent in these technologies. We will explore hands-on, lo-fi, DIY alternatives to traditional technologies, and consider how these alternatives might engage new audiences in creative sound-making practices.

The Crafting Sound Symposium was co-organized by Abby Aresty and Kyle Hartzell and is presented as part of the TIMARA 50th anniversary celebrations and the Reimagining Maker Culture(s) StudiOC Learning Community, taught in collaboration with Professor Amy Margaris.

More info is here.

Initially launched by Aresty in 2019, the Girls Electronic Arts Retreat (GEAR) is a 5-day day camp for 3rd to 5th grade girls that fosters curiosity, creativity, and confidence through playful, collaborative projects that integrate science, technology, engineering, arts, and math.

GEAR is housed in the newly renovated Technology in Music and Related Arts (TIMARA) studios at Oberlin Conservatory and co-sponsored by TIMARA, Oberlin Center for the Arts (OCA), and the Community Music School (CMS).

The pilot session of GEAR was made possible by generous funding from the Oberlin Conservatory Dean's office, the Oberlin College and Conservatory's grants office, the TIMARA Department at Oberlin Conservatory, the Bill Long Foundation, and OCA.

In Inkling (2019), I explore the raw materiality of found objects through the real-time creation of a graphic musical score. Objects are affixed to contact microphones, dipped in paint, and then moved across the surface of a blank piece of paper to create the score. This process is a meditation on the objects’ different sizes, shapes, and textures; the resulting score is an artifact of the gestural exploration of the physicality of these materials over time. Inkling is a score that almost anyone can play. It creates a hybrid, multimodal experience—a counterpoint of sight, sound, and touch—that repurposes the idea of graphic notation to invite playful, musical interactions that are available to lay people and to amateur and professional musicians alike. You can view one iteration of Inkling, performed by myself and percussionist and composer Rachel Gibson, here. Find the score, routing diagram, and performance notes here.

This minute-long electroacoustic composition was created for a recent memorial concert for my former teacher, Allan Schindler. The concert featured a series of minute-long stereo fixed media compositions by former students. My work blends sounds and excerpts from pieces I wrote from the time I studied with him (the earliest work included is from 2005) until 2018, to illustrate the long-lasting impact of his teaching on my creative practice.

Listen here.

To facilitate open dialogue around the experiences of women and non-binary individuals studying and teaching in cisman-dominated Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) fields, participants in the Crafting Sound: Hidden Voices workshop co-created a sound installation entitled What I Didn’t Say. Each participant built and decorated a collection of hexagonal cards that were arranged together as a single, collective paper quilt. Participants created one card with a written description of an event that they experienced in their field, and a second card which included an electromagnet they built out of copper tape and a small recording and playback module. Using this module, participants recorded responses to the prompt “When x, what I didn’t say was…” The paper quilt was presented in the Science Library at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. The project put the onus on installation visitors to seek out and actively listen to the experiences and thoughts of women and nonbinary individuals in STEAM fields: visitors were given equipment that allowed them to find and hear the participants’ recordings—entirely inaudible to the naked ear—transmitted through electromagnetic waves.

For the second project iteration, we worked with the Fab Lab at Lorain County Community College (LCCC) to present the workshop to teens involved in an after school program at LCCC.

This project was made possible by the generous support of the Research and Development committee at Oberlin College. Many thanks to research assistants Oli Bentley and Sophie Shalit and to volunteers and assistants including Alexandra Amaral, Leslie Lang, Lucas Brecher, Kayla Reagan, Marly Gonzales, and Tori Ervin. Thanks also to Jillian Scudder, Nicollette Mitchell, Alison Ricker, Peter Swendsen, Kristina Paabus, Rachel Smith, Daphne John, Ryan Corrigan, and Joan Perch, for supporting and/or collaborating on this project in a various ways.

You can read more about the project here. You can view a video about the project here.

Moments is a series of sonic vignettes exploring what it means to be fully present in each instant. The piece includes sonic materials ranging from field recordings of mosquitoes I collected at Joshua Tree National Park to recordings of my playful, improvisatory interactions with mundane household objects; these include, but are not limited to: a balloon, a rake, tracing paper, and aluminum foil.

Listen here.

A collaboration between artists Abby Aresty and Eden Marek, Branches are sound sculptures created locally from found organic materials. The sculptures are inspired by the relationship between sound and touch.

Arrangement is a piece for hydrophone, vase, water, prairie plants, computer, and listener. The hydrophone captures sounds created as participants arrange and rearrange prairie plants in a vase filled with water. Upon touching a copper wire at the base of the vase, sounds are arranged, in real time, into sonic textures, creating a multi-sensory counterpoint of sight, sound, and touch. When participants finish arrangements, the remaining sights and sounds reflect the nature of the interaction between listener and installation.

Active Listener is an automated listening treatment in which machines fulfill all listening roles, rendering the human listener superfluous. Two computers face each other. The first computer begins speaking the original text of the Wikipedia entry on active listening, while the second takes dictation. At the conclusion of the entry, the computers exchange roles. They continue to practice active listening skills, taking turns listening and speaking until the system inevitably breaks down.

To the end, they faithfully attempt to take dictation, even as all semantic meaning is lost. Active Listener explores the practice of active listening in a post-human context, one in which a repeated ‘mishearing’ of individual words leads to the decimation of the original text into gibberish and to the earnest exchange of semantic content that is increasingly devoid of semantic meaning.

This lack of meaning is of no concern to the machine listeners. On the other hand, it is central to the experience of the human observers, for whom the loss of meaning becomes the central experience of the work. The more that semantic meaning—or signal—is obscured by gibberish—meaningless text, or noise—the more interesting it is to listen: careful semantic listening by human observers, over time, is rewarded with an increasingly absurd and humorous text.

Documentation from soundwalks led at Grinnell’s Conard Environmental Research Area, a restored prairie area outside of Grinnell, Iowa. Soundwalks explored themes including harmonies created through the juxtaposition of diverse listener perspectives and soundwalking as a political act connecting across time and space. I have led soundwalks in Seattle, Washington, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Tempe, Arizona, and outside of Grinnell, Iowa, for groups as small as 10 and for groups of over 50 people.

THE LISTENER (2015)

The Listening Laboratory and Spa (LLaS) was a one-day listening event housed in my campus office. I developed this installation–built around a series of participatory works–to facilitate playful interactions across a broad range of listening modes. These works reflect the multifarious roles machines play in contemporary listening practices.

While the LLaS is primarily designed for human listeners, it is also a space for “listening” to humans. The lab runs a small subset of hidden treatments in conjunction with the more visible treatments, creating a reflexive machine listening experience wherein the human listener is listened to, or watched, by the machine.

For example, The Listener, this silent, two-minute film, documents every move of LLaS participants in a time-lapse video. (Visitors were alerted to the surveillance and signed a release before entering.)

Many thanks to artist Eden Marek, who contributed two treatments to the LLaS: the Wall of E.D.E.N. as well as her Prairie Arias scores. As you can see in the video, she also contributed significant time and effort in co-presenting the work. Thanks also to students from my sound art class who helped decorate my office and assisted in creating a brochure with treatment descriptions.

You can read more about the project here.

Paths II: The Music of Trees (2012) is a series of seven, multichannel sound installations that explore the layers and permutations of acoustic space in seven sites throughout Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum. Each installation creates a sonic dialogue with its acoustic and physical space. The striking forms of the trees and plants, as well as their relationship to the surrounding environments, provide a unique opportunity for the artistic and physical exploration of sound in space.

Read more about the project here.

Piercing the Veil of Kindness is an 11-minute concert work for a flutist—doubling on bass flute and piccolo—and fixed media. The title of the work comes from a newspaper review of one of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble’s performances in the summer of 2006. The critic was clearly put off by the performance as she declared the entire ensemble a bunch of “screaming banshees,” and specifically pointed her finger at the flutist, Daria Binkowski, for "piercing the veil of kindness” in the flute’s upper register.

This piece is a musical embodiment of that quotation. The live flute part contains primarily “traditional” music that is interrupted–or pierced–by the electronic score that is composed using recordings I gathered of extended techniques improvised on the bass and C flutes by Binkowski. Piercing the Veil of Kindness was commissioned by Binkowski through the Hanson Institute for American Music of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

Listen here.