Field Notes (2025)
The field far exceeds any metric or taxonomic scope; the textural detail within any sample will always overwhelm complete analysis. Field Notes (2025) explores how a small aggregate of sonorities—a set of notes, stacked and sequenced, split and spliced—refuses simple (re)presentation. The ensemble interacts with layered electronics assembled from prior recordings, each a partial rendering of necessarily inadequate notation. Together they form a sketch through which the field—this field—in all its inexhaustibility, might be felt.
An Archive of Touch (2024)
An Archive of Touch (2024) is inspired by the notion that the phenomenon, perception, and materiality of sound is only a shorthand for touch. Sound is touch at a distance—a cognitive effect tracing presence, movement, and friction through spacetime—and as with touch, sound is inherently reflexive and reciprocal; to hear is to be heard. This multichannel installation explores the threshold between sonic and tactile perception, instrumentalizing the tangibility of microphones, speakers, and their capacity for transduction as well as diffusion to reconceptualize sound as an embodied archive.
sound letters for wet ink (2021)
Sound Letters for Wet Ink is written with and for Erin Lesser on flute, Josh Modney on violin, and Mariel Roberts on cello. The trio first improvised with an initial eight 30-second audiovisual prompts, collages crafted from my sample library.
Those improvisations were recorded and then combined in various ways to create dozens of new prompts. Over three weeks, the ensemble improvised with one another iteratively on these prompts, developing a recording database, samples from which this fixed media piece is formed. Although the performers never improvised at the same time, the synchronization effects achieved–as well as the gestural correlations–were remarkable. In particularly special moments, it seemed as though the person who had recorded the week before was responding in real time to the person improvising at that moment. This piece, which is the first in a series of Sound X pieces, approaches composition as a form of community organizing, in which my I curate and facilitate an endless chain of musical collaborators, all asynchronously improvising with one another.
tower for greg stuart (2022)
tower for greg stuart (2022) is an amplified meditation on failure and virtuosity, improvisation and control. Over the course of the piece, Stuart uses found instruments—dried leaves, sticks and stones—to build a tower as high as he can until it falls.
sound ribbons for vicki ray (2021)
Sound Ribbons for Vicki Ray (2022) combines live improvisation for piano with a fixed electronics part featuring pre-recorded, processed, and re-arranged improvisations by the pianist from June 2022. Together, the live and pre-recorded improvisations entangle in dreamlike, practice-room-corridor chaos. The June improvisations were digitally transcribed and re-orchestrated for a chorus of five sampled pianos spanning four centuries from the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards in Ithaca, New York. Each piano’s unique temperament and timbral color combine and collide to offer new meanings and expressivities to Vicki’s playing. The piece is graphically notated with timings and abstract mnemonic symbols that enable synchronization as well as spontaneity. For more information on my research project with the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, here is a link to my research profile on their website.
send_silence (2020)
send_silence (2020) is a collaborative work featuring almost a hundred ambient field recordings of silence(s) sent by friends from around the world. The piece might also be approached as an undisciplined, multi-site anti-performance of John Cage’s silent piece. Many of the explanations accompanying the recordings I received included thoughts on silence as an aspect of isolation during the pandemic. The collaged reassembly of these isolated recordings—all of which attempt but never attain the impossibility of silence—celebrates how even the most ordinary, ubiquitous sounds can inspire meaningful connections between us.
for laura (2021) & for emily (2020)
(5-minute excerpt)
for laura (2021) presents eighteen alternating samples – (nine per large loudspeaker, around two-to-eight minutes each) –- cycling at random over the course of three days. The sound materials were developed from two seven-minute guided improvisations on A-string cello harmonics, performed by Laura Cetilia. I divided these two improvisations into eighteen separate samples and improvised with simple speed/pitched transpositions (0.125x, 0.25x, etc.) for each to form the materials you hear. The large Mackie loudspeakers, together with the stairwell’s height and surface reflectivity, supports the large frequency range, and especially the low frequencies that result from the improvised transpositions, at an unusually low volume.
for emily (2020), devised a year before, with Emily Call on violin, was my first experiment with creating a drone developed from layered transpositions of minimal sonic materials.
joshua biggs 