Publications

Packham, Jonathan (2026). ‘A Thing in the Weave of Things: SONAMB’s NEURAL MATERIALS and Sonic Materialism in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’. Organised Sound. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771826101137.

NEURAL MATERIALS (2024) is a live AV show created by SONAMB (Vicky Clarke). The project represents a collaboration between Vicky Clarke, visual artist Sean Clarke, and industry partner Bela, a company specialising in hardware with interactive sensors for music-making. The AV show utilises a new performance system incorporating a hybrid set-up in combination with both a sound sculpture and the output of a machine learning model trained on a ‘post-industrial’ sonic dataset. The dataset renders in sound Manchester’s industrial past and present through field recordings of cotton mills, the canal network and the electromagnetic resonances of a newly gentrified city centre. This article analyses NEURAL MATERIALS as musical composition, live AV show and a demonstration of creative audio-generative AI, linking the work to scholarly and compositional legacies of Sonic Materialism and musique concrète. By combining documentation analysis and performance analysis, I interrogate how sound’s indexical properties are transformed via machine learning (ML) processes, questioning whether machines are able to evoke a sense of space or heritage. Ultimately, I contend that such audio-generative systems have the capacity to reshape our perception of industrial histories, technologies and future sonic realities, indexing sociohistorical cues that are reactivated at the point of listening.

Kanga, Zubin, and Jonathan Packham (2026). ‘Cyborg Soloists: An Infrastructure for Sharing Approaches to Innovative Technologies in Contemporary Music’. In Innovation in Music: Current Research Perspectives. Taylor & Francis, pp. 163–175.

Cyborg Soloists is a UKRI-funded Future Leaders Fellowship project led by Dr Zubin Kanga. Our previous research has mostly evaluated approaches to technological innovation in contemporary music within single collaborative works, but we are now analysing connections between these diverse new works. This chapter explores the larger challenges facing a project of this type: how to design projects that improve the design of new instruments and technological tools, how to innovate new approaches to composition and performance utilising these technologies, and how to negotiate the wider disseminative infrastructures relevant to our industry partners. This chapter takes as its focus two technologies whose research infrastructures and contexts are quite different: the MiMU Gloves and Vochlea’s Dubler 2. Our aim is not to present these examples as representative of Cyborg Soloists in its entirety, but rather to demonstrate the breadth of the project and to showcase particular issues that have arisen. Evaluating works by Neil Luck, Zubin Kanga, and Rylan Gleave that employ the MiMU Gloves demonstrates how Cyborg Soloists as a research infrastructure has facilitated the production of innovative artistic work alongside facilitating new technological developments by companies like MiMU. Evaluating a commission by Jessie Marino using Dubler 2—a voice-to-MIDI interface—demonstrates how we have sought to negotiate, accommodate, and integrate industry partner Vochlea’s multifaceted commercial and compositional interests alongside our own research agenda. Finally, we reflect on broader infrastructural considerations pertaining to future Cyborg Soloists collaborations with a widening network of artists, arts organisations, research centres, charities and industry partners.

Packham, Jonathan (2025). ‘The Three-Dimensional Open Work: Reimagining Indeterminacy through 360° Virtual Reality Scores.’ Performance Research, Volume 29, Issue 6, pp. 124–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2024.2537585.

This article concerns musical performance using scores viewed in virtual reality (VR) headsets. It explains the technological basis for VR headset scores, evaluates their affordances as a performance tool, and demonstrates their relevance to ongoing critical discourses surrounding the performing body, indeterminacy, openness and notation and technologically-facilitated performance. It demonstrates the notational implementation of VR technologies, analysing how virtual score infrastructures might invite embodied engagement with the score, make visible performer decision-making in the context of structurally indeterminate scores, and stage a new and complex relationship between score, performer and audience. These particular affordances are evaluated in the context of both the adaptation of existing music, appraising a new 360° version of Christian Wolff's seminal open score Edges (1968) as well as its role in the creation of new compositions, such as the multidirectional, dynamic score for the author's own work SECRET ANIMALS (2018). The article assesses the impact of such a technology on performers; what might it feel like – to borrow Karen A. Franck's words – to 'occupy [the score] with [our] entire body' (‘When I enter virtual reality, what body will I leave behind?’, Architectural Design 118: 20–3, 1995). How might these scores build on, alter, or deconstruct conventional performer–audience behaviours? And what impact could implementation of this technology have on both existing open scores and newly created works? Musicologists have often asked: what kind of space is a score? With VR, perhaps a more appropriate question is: what kind of score is a space?

Packham, Jonathan (2024). ‘Séance and Technology: Intermundane Communication as a Methodology for Contemporary Music’. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Volume 20, Issue 3, pp. 464–483. https://doi.org/10.1080/14794713.2024.2412507.

This article examines compositions that stage communion with spirits via technological means. Through analysis of four works it proposes ‘séancing’ as both a framework for interpreting performances of technologically-focused contemporary music, and as a credible methodology for new music composition. In Francesca Fargion’s Louise, gently falling (2023), Vochlea’s Dubler 2 conjures a spectral vocalist that energises both rehearsal and performance. In Laurence Osborn’s Counterfeits (Siminică) (2023), Augmented Instruments Lab’s TouchKeys help stage a theatrical séance that blurs intermundane boundaries. Nwando Ebizie uses Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) to explore questions of sapience, pedagogy, and possession in I Will Fix Myself (Just Circles) (2022). Zubin Kanga’s Metamemory (2023) makes use of PriSM SampleRNN to blur distinctions between real recorded performances and techno-hallucinogenic fictions.

Packham, Jonathan (2024). ‘Towards a Spatial Understanding of Openness: Richard Sennett’s “Five Open Forms” and/in Music’. Leonardo, Volume 57, No. 5, pp. 560–565. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02470.

This article offers a new strategy for cognising musical indeterminacy based on Richard Sennett’s ‘five open forms for the city’, an intrinsically spatial way of thinking about what is ‘open’, and how it is open. Sennett’s five forms (‘synchronicity’, ‘punctuatedness’, ‘porosity’, ‘incompleteness’ and ‘multiplicity’) are explored individually as they might impact our understanding of openness and/in music, illuminated by examples from contemporary experimental music.

Kanga, Zubin; Mark Dyer, Caitlin Rowley, Jonathan Packham (2024). ‘Reflections on Cyborg Collaborations: Cross-Disciplinary Collaborative Practice in Technologically-Focused Contemporary Music’. TEMPO, Volume 78, Issue 308, pp. 55–69. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298223000967.

Creating new works combining live musicians with new technologies provides both opportunities and challenges. The Cyborg Soloists research project has commissioned and managed the creation of 46 new works of this type, assembling teams of composers, performers, researchers and technology partners from industry. The majority of these collaborations have been smooth-running and fruitful, but a few have demonstrated complications. This article critically evaluates collaborative methods and methodologies used in the project so far, presenting five case studies involving different types of collaborative work, and exploring the range of professional relationships, the need for different types of expertise within the team and the way technology can act as both a creative catalyst and a source of creative resistance. The conclusions are intended as a toolkit – pragmatic guidelines to inform future practice – and are aimed at artists, technological collaborators, and commissioners and organisations who facilitate these types of creative collaborations.

Kanga, Zubin; Mark Dyer, Caitlin Rowley, Jonathan Packham (eds.) (2024). ‘Technology and Contemporary Classical Music: Methodologies in Practice-Based Research’. National Centre for Research Methods Position Paper. https://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/id/eprint/4945.

This position paper provides a distillation of the NCRM Innovation Forum, ‘Technology and Contemporary Classical Music: Methodologies in Creative Practice Research’, hosted by Cyborg Soloists in June 2023. It features contributions from a variety of creative practitioner-researchers to debate the current state and future of technologically focused, practice-based research in contemporary classical music. The position paper is purposefully polyphonic and pluralistic. By collating a range of perspectives, experiences and expertise, the paper seeks to provoke and delineate a space for further questioning, inquiry, and response. The paper will be of interest to those working within creative practice research, particularly in relation to music, music technologists and those interested in research methodologies more broadly.

Packham, Jonathan (2021). ‘Scoring the Journey: Listening to Claudia Molitor’s Sonorama’. TEMPO,  Volume 76, Issue 299, pp. 44–56. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298221000644.

Sonorama is a 2015 sonic artwork by Claudia Molitor, consisting of a number of audio files designed for listening on a train journey between London St Pancras and Margate, and a graphic score based on the composer's own ‘reading’ of this journey. This article analyses the relationship between the sonic and the spatial in the work, exploring how Molitor's site-specific composition interacts with its environment on multiple scales. By drawing on the strategy of ‘situated listening’ developed by Gascia Ouzounian, as well as urbanist language introduced by Richard Sennett, this article seeks to elucidate the relationship between a number of ‘nested’ spaces, present across varying realisations, and the political agenda that energises the work. Written in the midst of summer 2015's European refugee crisis, the work brings into sharp focus themes of British exceptionalism, immigration and inclusion.

Packham, Jonathan (2021). ‘Scoring Space in the Open Work and Portfolio of Original Compositions’. PhD thesis, University of Oxford.

The central focus of this thesis is the elucidation and application of a new analytical framework, connecting existing discourses on sound, space, and place in late twentieth and early twenty-first century “open form” music, and sound installation art. It builds especially on Richard Sennett’s urban understanding of openness, which helps to generate a model for the analysis of musical open form beyond only the relationship between the performer and the score. At the same time, it explores the role of space and place in music performance, interrogating the manner in which the environment shapes different realisations of indeterminate musics. Whereas many existing accounts of the spaces in and of music performance focus predominantly on the technical or locative elements of spatial sound, this dissertation is informed by contemporary spatial and urban theory as well as architectural studies in its more generative and expansive understanding of space. This thesis constructs space beyond tectonics, incorporating and acknowledging social, political, corporeal, architectural, and acoustic factors that inform and transform our experience of sound. Methodologically speaking, this thesis references interviews with the composers, performers and audience members of sonic artworks in combination with more conventional musicological analysis of audiovisual media, seeking to emphasise incidents and sentiments that don’t fit grander conceptual or composer-centric narratives but help to draw out a more everyday, lived experience of sound. Substantial analyses of Lin Chi-Wei’s ongoing participatory composition Tape Music and Claudia Molitor’s locative audio work Sonorama help to illustrate the value of this framework across two large case studies.

Packham, Jonathan (2020). ‘Scoring the Social Voice: Lin Chi-Wei’s Tape Music’. In Crafting a Sonic Urbanism: the Political Voice II (London: Theatrum Mundi).

Lin Chi-Wei’s Tape Music is an experimental project in which its performers pass a musical score, written across a long piece of tape, amongst themselves as they respond to its vocal cues. New scores are produced for each iteration of the project with specific contexts and groups of participants in mind. The scoring of Tape Music is as much a process of revealing the social dynamics of its participants as it is of laying out a piece of music.

Selected Conference Presentations

11–13 September 2024. ‘Beatrice Harrison’s Nightingale Broadcast at 100: Legacies and Conspiracies’. Paper given at RMA Conference.

14-16 June 2024. ‘Cyborg Soloists: An Infrastructure for Sharing Approaches to Innovative Technologies in Contemporary Music’. Paper given at InMusic 2024.

16 Sept 2021. ‘Scoring the Journey: Listening to Space in Claudia Molitor’s Sonorama’. Paper given at the Royal Musical Association Annual Conference 2021, Newcastle University.

20 Feb 2021. ‘Porosity and the Anthropocene: Hearing Extinction in 21st Century Sound Art’. Paper given at Harvard Graduate Music Forum Conference To Begin Again: Music, Apocalypse, and Social Change. Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

13 Dec 2019. ‘Lin Chi-Wei’s Tape Music: Spatial Scoring, Voicing Identity’. Paper given at Theatrum Mundi’s Colloquium Crafting a Sonic Urbanism: the Political Voice, EHESS Campus Condorcet, Paris.

28 April 2018. ‘Nonlinear Reading in the Context of Several 360° Video Scores’. Poster Presentation at the Centre for New Music at Sheffield (CeNMas) Composers’ Conference, University of Sheffield.

2 March 2017. ‘look around you (2017): Performative Nonlinearity in the Context of a Virtual Reality Mobile Score’. Paper given at Van Mildert College MCR Research Forum, University of Durham.