Video summary

Best Practice in Artistic Research in Music Keynote - Professor Liza Lim

Main summary

Key takeaways

Educational

Main ideas, concepts, and lessons

  • Artistic research is a “mode of inquiry,” not just a way to prove disciplinary value

    • The talk responds to how artistic research has sometimes been treated as requiring “sleight of hand” to justify its worth.
    • It emphasizes instead that composing, performing, and listening can produce knowledge through practices that are embodied, relational, and experimentally contingent.

  • Validity/value of artistic research can be reconsidered by asking what it reveals about “knowing through doing”

    • Rather than asking “where does the value lie?”, the talk asks what the practices of composition and performance reveal about research in a broader epistemic sense.

  • Borgdorff’s foundational definitions (via key paired concepts)

    • Artistic research:
      1. Connects to perception/realism
      2. Involves “material thinking” / embodied knowledge, connected to non-conceptualism
      3. Is not only theory, but “thought”—linked to the unthought and contingency
    • The speaker uses these as a structure for giving concrete musical examples.

Methodology / instructional content (as presented through frameworks and examples)

1) Perception realism: enlarge sensory and cognitive perception through embodied practice

  • What “perception realism” means (as explained)

    • Sensory apparatus (seeing/hearing/touch/movement/etc.) is not isolated from the world.
    • Perception animates life: it supports responding, evolving, thriving.

  • Method: use tools/instruments/prostheses to extend perception

    • Body + mind operate as an integrated system rather than a bounded unit.
    • Prostheses (sticks, cars’ instruments, musical instruments) extend sensory access and reshape cognition.

  • Musical application

    • Performers must “coordinate/time” in a way that navigates the instrument’s terrain without “crashing.”
    • Music making is treated like a perceptual expansion: composing/playing/listening involves cross-modal and extended perception.

  • Concrete examples used

    • Bach Cello Suite No. 6 (Preludes/sections discussed)
      • Even “solo” performance requires internal polyphony-like coordination.
      • Mastery involves technical negotiation to maintain melodic coherence while implying harmony/counterpoint.
    • “Pressure” (Helmut Lachenmann)
      • Uses graphic/action notation to choreograph performer movements.
      • Extended technique becomes a way to surface embodied perception.

2) Material thinking + non-conceptual: knowledge is formed through embodied engagement, not detached theorizing

  • Core claim

    • Even when works are conceptually framed, their conceptual force is tightly bound to physical enactment.
    • Knowledge comes from thinking with, from, and through beings and things, not just about them.

  • Method: treat practice as transductive “joining forces” with knowledge

    • Knowledge can’t simply be transmitted to someone; it must be encountered/processed/enacted by bodies.
    • Skill is described as capacity (not just technique), and learning involves remaking knowledge through embodiment.

  • Extend to listeners/audiences

    • Listening is framed as bodily reception: listeners interpret/remake what they encounter, leading to knowledge.

  • Concrete examples used

    • Pressure (Lachenmann)
      • Gestural and haptic/kinetic priority; meaning emerges through movement and sound-production mechanics.
    • Works by John Rose and Hollis Taylor (Australian “mega-cello” / Great Fences context)
      • A stringed instrument scaled to the landscape: the environment becomes resonant body and “instrument logic.”
      • Classical traditions are “re-familiarized” by place and scale.

3) Unthought + contingency: artistic research enables speculative, playful, not-yet-real thinking

  • Core claim

    • Artistic research has crucial value in thinking things that don’t yet exist and exploring contingent logics.
    • It supports experimental play that can generate unexpected discoveries.

  • Method: pursue experimental play that can lead to major breakthroughs

    • Speculation and “mucking around” are presented as legitimate pathways to discovery.

  • Examples used

    • Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov
      • Sticky tape experiments leading to graphene.
    • Cage and thought experiments
      • Example of levitating a frog with magnets; references a playful speculative stance (and a line about “how do I know if she’s not playing with me” linked to Cage/Llosa-style ideas).

  • Philosophical framing

    • Timothy Morton (realist magic)
      • Art/study of art is tied to causality; the aesthetic is not “surface decoration” but part of how causality works.
      • Sciences are treated as a subcategory of the aesthetic due to interpretive relations.
    • Object-oriented ontology (implied)
      • Non-human entities also have frames/ways of “existing” that affect interpretation and action.

  • Personal methodology (speaker’s collaboration approach)

    • Not interested in a “performer provides tricks; composer uses them” model.
    • Instead aims for a blurring of roles where performer, instrument, presence, conversation, and materials co-act to create “tools of perception/thinking/feeling/imagination.”

4) Applied “best practice” through a concrete composition case: the “woodblock that sings”

  • Motif/instruction-like thread

    • Woodblock composition exercises (reduction of variables like rhythm) can become a pathway to deeper cross-modal thinking.

  • Speaker’s origin story

    • Early exercise: composing for woodblock + trumpet (given by Brian Brown as a challenge).
    • Later recurrent obsession: how to combine woodblock with sustained or “singing” instruments (violin/viola mentioned) and how woodblock can enter sustained/expressive roles.

  • Method used to transform the woodblock

    • Work with a percussion collaborator (Eugenia).
    • Ask and test: “Can the woodblock sing?”
    • Explore:
      • sustaining sounds
      • modulation methods via physical manipulation
      • treating the woodblock as having a “mouth”
      • using varied implements (bow, sticks, superball, etc.)

  • Introduce language/text as an additional cross-modal layer

    • A fragment of Eliot Weinberger (“an elemental thing”) about the stars.
    • Text is mapped into phonemic shaping controlled by opening/closing the woodblock mouth in the notation system.

  • Resulting work structure

    • The score includes:
      • action-style notation choreographing right/left-hand movements
      • symbols indicating mouth open/closed and relative movement over the resonant opening
      • a conceptual-musical mapping where language becomes physical gestural shaping

Overall takeaway

Artistic research is valuable because it:

  • Expands perception through embodied, extended sensory systems.
  • Generates knowledge through material thinking, including non-conceptual dimensions.
  • Enables contingent, speculative, playful thought, often producing unforeseen results.
  • Produces works whose meaning and beauty are inseparable from the energy and encounter embedded in their making—whether in looking at stars or asking a woodblock to speak/sing.

Speakers / sources featured

  • Liza Lim (Professor; primary speaker)
  • Neil (addressed at the start—likely a presenter or conference participant; full identity not provided in subtitles)
  • Richard Green (mentioned as the source of an “extra thought” about Sydney Cove)
  • Ashley (mentioned; context unclear due to subtitle errors)
  • Gustav Bergdorff / Borgdorff (appears in subtitles as “pink Bergdorf / bogged off”)
    • Borgdorff is cited as a key scholar of artistic research
  • Gregory Bateson
    • Source referenced: Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)
  • Andy Clark
    • Term referenced: “wide way” (likely intended as “extended/wider” cognition; used to explain distributed cognition)
  • Helmut Lachenmann
    • Work referenced: “Pression / Pressure” (published 1972 in the subtitles)
  • J.S. Bach
    • Work referenced: Cello Suite No. 6 (specific movement not fully clear)
  • John Rose and Hollis Taylor
    • Project referenced: Great Fences (Australia) (2002)
  • Tim Ingold
    • Source referenced via attribution to his phrasing on knowledge generated in interfaces of practice
  • Timothy Morton
    • Book referenced: realist magic (2015)
  • Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov
    • Sticky tape / graphene anecdote (2004)
  • John Cage
    • Mentioned via playful/experimental thought stance (cat/frog-with-magnets context)
  • Montero (subtitles: “Montero”; writer/philosopher referenced for thought experiments—identity uncertain due to subtitle errors)
  • Eliot Weinberger
    • Text referenced: “an elemental thing” (fragment used in the woodblock work)
  • Brian Brown
    • Mentioned as a jazz legend who gave an early composition exercise to the speaker
  • Eugene / Eugenia
    • Eugen(i)a appears as a percussion collaborator and artistic partner who performs the woodblock work (full name not fully clear in subtitles)

(Additionally, the subtitles mention YouTube as a context for performance videos, and “Speak Percussion / Speak Percussion Masterclass Series,” including high school students.)

Original video