Date: 30 October 2022

Place: Theatrum Mundi, 15 Clerkenwell Close

This workshop was organised as part of a sprint on the MA Cities programme at Central Saint Martin’s, London. It was led by John Bingham-Hall, Fani Kostourou, and Jonathan Packham. It formed part of the Voices from the City unit led by Theatrum Mundi.

For the first part of the session, Jonathan Packham introduced a range of approaches to scoring for voice within experimental music, including text and graphic scores by Cathy Berberian, Joanna Ward, and Cornelius Cardew. The participants collectively realised one of these scores – Environmental Dialogue by Pauline Oliveros – in the gardens of 15 Clerkenwell Close.

For the second part of the session, John Bingham-Hall and Fani Kostourou led a design workshop exploring ways to use these approaches to notation both to document and to imagine interactions of voice and space. Participants started by observing an interaction taking place in public and recording things like rhythm, texture, and dynamics of voice. Secondly, they created scores representing a situation they had been in themselves. Finally, they turned these techniques in a more speculative direction, designing a score for a dinner party as a way to explore how musical notations might be able to offer architecture new tools to design social situations.