UC San Diego

As we mature into the 21st century the world is experiencing increasing instability in environmental, geopolitical, economic and social realms. To support a more equitable and sustainable politics, feminist new materialist theorists have proposed constructs that reframe our engagement of nature, agency, political and social realms. They work to challenge nature/cultural and subject/object binaries to emphasize a distributed, pluralistic, impactful and interconnected world. However, they have an epistemic blind spot in that their theorizing lacks a diversity of the embedded and creative animation they advocate for. The following dissertation Resonance & Resemblance: Sound Perspectives of a Pluralistic World attends to this need. Through an interdisciplinary methodology this dissertation discusses my proposition that the phenomenon of resonance can be, and has been, engaged to theorize a diverse field of material agency and interconnectedness. It addresses my approach to a component of my research, which was conducted through artistic research practice with the composition Resonance & Resemblance (2017) commissioned by the Russel Wright Historical Foundation.

This dissertation also presents work from interlocutors Maryanne Amacher (1943 -2010), Pauline Oliveros (1932 - 2016), and Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon (b. 1982). Each of these electronic music composers have adopted resonance as a mode of creative engagement to know the materials they work with and their surrounding environment. I analyze the composite of my research through a critical framework that intersects feminist materialisms with agent-environment cognition theory. This intersection of theory progresses an intertextual reading that allows me to locate resonance as a cross-modal mode of interpersonal and intermaterial negotiations to render what I call resonant materialism, an embedded, sensual praxis that reframes issues of difference, material effect and accessibility without separation.