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Research

selected pieces of academic research and scholarship

solo- and co-authored publications

Jessica Shand, “Timbral Transformations,” MIT M.S. Thesis (2024).
Abstract: From folk songs to festivals, cafes to concert halls, and religious rituals to recording studios, the flute has long had a shapeshifting, cross-cultural presence. This thesis leverages 21st-century technologies not only to explore and extend the timbral versatility of flutes, but also to underscore the performative, fluid, and ever-evolving nature of timbre more generally. At the core of the project is the creation of sequences of discrete sounds that interpolate between semantic categories and a collection of fixed media compositions based on those sequences, both of which consist entirely of flute sounds that have undergone varying degrees of electronic manipulation. By means of digital signal processing techniques, the flute wavers in and out of a multitude of sonic identities. Sometimes, it masquerades as another familiar object or interface (e.g., a ticking clock) or abstractly evokes a concept or phenomenon (e.g., a storm); at other times, it beckons toward the ethereal or ineffable, resisting indexical identification altogether. With source materials warped, layered, and splayed across the frequency spectrum, such concerns as “the real” and “the true” begin to move out of focus, making way for attention to embodied phenomenological experiences of sound. As this thesis positions compositional practice as a form of research, its outputs range from the conceptual to the creative and the computational. In addition to the music at its core, the project interfaces with gender studies in its original exposition on timbre and timbral identity, includes a rigorous set of experiments with human and machine listeners, and makes original applications of multimodal language models not before seen in musicology or music theory. A live performance incorporating each of these project vectors and an audience discussion following the event offer further opportunities for reflection and critique.

Nikhil Singh*, Manuel Cherep*, and Jessica Shand, “Creative Text-to-Audio Generation via Synthesizer Programming,” in NeurIPS Workshop on Machine Learning for Audio (2023).
Abstract: Sound designers have long harnessed the power of abstraction to distill and highlight the semantic essence of real-world auditory phenomena, akin to how simple sketches can vividly convey visual concepts. However, current neural audio synthesis methods lean heavily towards capturing acoustic realism. We introduce an open-source novel method centered on meaningful abstraction. Our approach takes a text prompt and iteratively refines the parameters of a virtual modular synthesizer to produce sounds with high semantic alignment, as predicted by a pretrained audio-language model. Our results underscore the distinctiveness of our method compared with both real recordings and state-of-the-art generative models.

Jessica Shand, “Artificial Creativity: Musically Improvising Computers and the Listening Subject,” in Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society & Society for Music Theory (2020).
Abstract: In this paper, I do not attempt to define an absolute idea of creativity; rather, I turn toward musically improvising computers to unpack notions of creativity within a very specific context (namely, 21st-century contemporary art music) using American composer Pauline Oliveros’s Expanded Instrument System (EIS) as a case study. I allow for a creativity that is co-determined by a non-human, machinic agency, temporarily setting aside Lovelace’s famous assumption that machines cannot be creative. In order to do this, I rely on the method of actor-network theory (ANT), which examines both human and non-human actors in terms of the natural and social networks of relations in which they exist and thereby assigns agency to all such actors. Through a close reading of the role of computer-improvisers in the music of Pauline Oliveros as performed by her close friend and collaborator, the flutist Claire Chase, I ask: how is creativity constructed in Oliveros’s context? How has software and hardware shaped and been shaped by that construction? As in this case study the notion of creativity is strictly tied to that of improvisation, I also question the relationship between the two. To conclude, I directly respond to recent developments in the theorization of the listening subject as put forth by musicologist Nina Eidsheim – namely, her proposal for a vibrational practice of listening in which “music is predominantly understood…as material and intermaterial vibration.” I argue that Eidsheim’s model breaks down in the face of computer temporalities that operate outside of, even beyond, the material here-and-now: indeed, any contemporary practice of listening must be pliable enough to capture the agency, however immaterial, of the listening machine.

Jessica Shand, “Patterns, Play, and Processes: Sounding Topological Graph Theory,” Harvard B.A. Thesis (2022).

other

Contributor, Systematic Suppression: Hungary’s Arts and Culture in Crisis (2022)

Overview: Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI) has published this report in the context of the existential crises facing artists and arts institutions in Hungary. Our aim is to draw attention to the nature of Hungary’s restrictions on artistic freedom, and influence stakeholders—both in Hungary and in the region—to take measures to thwart and reverse these dangerous and anti-democratic trends.