Intercultural creativity in electroacoustic music: Integrating Indian music cultural sound emblems into new works.

Incorporating culturally unfamiliar sound into one's own creative output has been an increasingly popular activity among electroacoustic music composers over the last few years; yet work of this nature is difficult to develop without being accused of appropriation or exploitation, and even of indulging in a contemporary version of musical exoticism, with its overtones of nineteenth-century colonialism.
This project will explore the inclusion of cultural-specific sound in new electroacoustic music works (composition using technology to explore, create and perform sounds) by working collaboratively with Indian musicians and UK audiences for Indian music. Unlike traditional note-based instrumental music, which may engage with exotic musics through evocation, electroacoustic music can express exotic sound quotations literally, via audio sampling.
This research will examine the process of collecting and incorporating Indian cultural sounds originating from Indian musical instruments into two new electroacoustic music compositions. The project, coordinated and supported by Milapfest (the UK's National Indian Arts Trust) based at Liverpool Hope University, will enable interaction with world-renowned musicians to establish a unique collaborative experience investigating the perceptions and understanding of cultural sound (that is, sound experienced as culturally specific). Practice-led research (composition work) will question the openness of the electroacoustic music sound world through the borrowing of sounds from a culture different to my own cultural background and experience, and will be documented in the form of an online research blog and presented more formally in a new journal article. The musical output, testing a variety of methodologies, techniques and tools to disguise or emphasise cultural manifestation in electroacoustic music creation will build upon a discourse concerning the benefits, implications and issues of cultural sound use. Through these outputs, this research aims to address a current lack of contextual documentation on the now-frequent act of incorporating culturally unfamiliar sound into creative output.
Public concert presentation of the new works will unite the usually separate worlds of Indian music and electroacoustic music, while audience perspectives will collate public reception of exotic sound via interviews and questionnaires. Research dissemination at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) and Electronic Music Studies Network conference (EMS) will encourage further scholarly interest in, and consideration of, creative uses of cultural sound, while exposing aspects of Indian music to a research field traditionally unacquainted with these practices.
Further to this, creating an online sound archive from the Indian musical instrument recordings will establish a freely-accessible education and research resource appearing within Milapfest's online portal. Commissioning new electroacoustic music works making use of the sound archive will continue the research's influence and impact beyond the project's funded duration.

The research project proposes a unique collaboration between Liverpool Hope University and Milapfest (the UK's National Indian Arts Development Trust), currently based within the £6.5million newly developed Capstone building for music and creative practice. Establishing a two-way link between these two organisations and drawing upon Milapfest's non-academic expertise in Indian music will provide a number of long-term impacts, within and beyond the project's funded lifetime:
(a) Increasing public engagement with the cultural sonic emblem: As an established practitioner of electroacoustic music, I have received over 120 performances both nationally and internationally. Accessing new audiences through Milapfest's performance platforms and my own international connections will facilitate greater and more diverse dissemination. Utilising performance opportunities at the Capstone theatre (Liverpool Hope), seating audiences sizes up to 280, will encourage local community members to consider the manifestation of traditional Indian music in new media. Milapfest's current monthly concert series 'Music for the Mind and Soul' attracts maximum capacity audiences from a wide range of communities including Indian, non-Indian musicians, academics, non-academics, and local community members from the Liverpool area. Hybridising the usually separate sound worlds of electroacoustic music and traditional Indian music will educate audiences in new and unknown musical activity from both cultural spheres achieving cultural enrichment.
(b) International and national partnerships: Working directly with Indian music performers will entail cross-fertilisation of knowledge. Compositional work with world-renowned performers Roopa Panesar (Sitar), Dr Rajeeb Chakraborty (Sarod) and Kousic Sen (Tabla) will forge international links between the University and global performance networks. International performances and research presentations will be pursued in India beyond the project's funded lifetime as a means of monitoring cross-cultural engagement and reception issues.
(c) Encouraging the electroacoustic music community to think differently about cultural sound emblems: Journal publications outlining the research project and resulting methodologies, concepts and cultural engagement will present new approaches, techniques and compositional styles within new literature to contextualise the practice-led research. Paper and music presentation at the annual Electronic Music Studies Network conference (EMS) and International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) will reach international audience members. Regularly updated research blogs will ensure the most current research and findings are available for both academic and public readers.
(d) Wider impact: An online archive of Indian music sound and music will be established, contributing to an extensive and unrivaled sound library for scholarly research, compositional application and creative practice. This resource will enable the collaboration between Liverpool Hope and Milapfest to commission works from international composers wishing to make use of this archived resource and knowledge base. This will create opportunities for local and international composers of electroacoustic music to develop new works in response to this rich and under-explored cultural resource. New works produced from this venture will be produced and released on Milapfest's current CD label. The sound archive will additionally feature as an educational resource within Milapfest's online Indian music portal, benefiting school groups across the UK and India. This online information portal will widen exposure of Indian music instruments and will draw attention to Liverpool Hope University's activity in electroacoustic music practices and Indian music research.