I'm very excited to announce that my dear colleague Edisa Weeks and I will be in residence at PS 21 Chatham during the week of September 16th.

During our residency we will facilitate two workshops as part of the Movement Without Borders Series.

I look forward to getting out of the city for a bit and experimenting to make a my soundwalk and rhythm workshop a little bit different...  Learning from Edisa who is absolutely brilliant... and connecting with some new people!
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If you're near Hudson come move with us!

Thursday 9/19  6:00pm - 7:30pm
Saturday 9/21  10:30am - 12:00pm

For more information about PS21 and Movement Without Borders: 
https://ps21chatham.org/event/movement-without-borders/

For more information about Edisa Weeks:
https://www.deliriousdances.com

**There is a error on PS21's website mentioning Skeleton Architecture. Please note this is not an SA event**

There's nothing quite like the act and practice of teaching.

I am honored and excited to announce that this summer I've been selected by my department to teach my first stand alone course called "Music of New York."

The course is a six week intensive that meets Monday through Thursday for two hours each day. Half of my students are international students in their 3rd or 4th year in high school and the other half are seniors about to graduate from NYU.
The amount of stamina required for this course is incredible. The course is a challenge to teach, to put it mildly.  I am deeply grateful for this experience and have learned so much from doing my best to show up as "instructor" or as some of my students refer to me as, "professor."

We've had such an immense journey!

Some of the things we've done: We've read Adorno's seminal text "On Popular Music" and discussed the music of Tin Pan Alley, listened to Langston Hughes read his poem The Weary Blues accompanied by a Harlem Jazz ensemble, we've read the novel Just Kids by Patti Smith and then walked through Greenwhich Village and wrote a collaborative poem, we did a close listening of the song "America" from the musical West Side Story and discussed the destruction of San Juan Hill to create Lincoln Center, we experienced a Sound Bath as an immersive introduction to a current sonic culture in NYC, created our own Graphic Scores after learning about experimental music in the Downtown scene, learned about the beginning of the study of acoustics and its impact on architecture through the construction of Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall, went on a variety of Sound Walks, and visited the exhibition The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory, and Belonging at the Museum of Chinese in America and learned about Chinese and American Chinese composers and musicians in NYC.
In our final week we will focus on the writing process. From paper topic, to paper abstract, to first draft, to final draft we will discuss the terms "thesis statement," "argument," and "evidence," and conduct peer to peer paper editing.

This week is my last week teaching and I am looking forward to taking a break! This "break" will allow me time and space to continue working on my dissertation. I am on track to finish my first chapter by the end of September. I'll discuss this more in my next post.

I'm still looking for adequate part time work which is trickling in so I'm hoping to find a stable position in the upcoming weeks.

Some exciting news: my colleague and I have put together a panel and have been invited to present at the annual American Studies Association annual meeting in Honolulu, Hawai'i in November. ASA's theme this year is "Build as we fight" and we've chosen to call our panel "Cultivating Sonic Practice as Political Praxis."
I will write about the topic of my paper that I will  be presenting in my next post.

This summer has been a lot! No wonder I'm a little tired.  :0)

I'm honored and excited, with one drop of trepidation, to say that my colleagues have invited me to facilitate an end of the semester Soundbath. This event is open to the NYU community and we have space for a limited amount of guests who are not affiliated with NYU. If you'd like more details or want to come just send me note.
Also really excited to bring out a new instrument I got last summer. His name is Stephan and he was made in the Ukraine. 

I've been invited by Oral Historian Sady Sullivan to host this amazing group at my department for an evening of discussion and embodied practice around the topic of oral history, listening, healing, and radical empathy.  
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I'm preparing a short talk about academic theorizations of listening, archives, and how I understand listening to be a site of rich inquiry for research. I'll also talk a bit about my experience integrating therapeutic practice into academic work and we'll do a couple exercises to practice attunement, listening, and translation of experience into text. 

More information about Sady ->SS <- link embedded in white text
More information about The Workshop -> TWS <- link embedded in white text
​ The Workshop

My dear friend who is also an amazing artist, Pelenakeke Brown, has been selected by the Artists of Color Council at Movement Research to curate a series of dance works this April. She has selected Rodney Bell (Ngati Maniapoto), a leader in integrated dance from Aotearoa/New Zealand to present a work around her theme of body sovereignty. Katrina George is coming all the way from Aotearoa to dance/move/breathe life into this piece and I'm looking forward to working with her.
Pelenakeke has asked me to provide live sound for Rodney's piece and I am so happy to do it!

Please support this work by: 
coming to be a witness in person (for more info click here)
and/or
donating to this project (for more info click here) 

I have been looking forward to this residency for months! Megan has invited me to continue our exploration into the divine feminine, mediumship, movement, meditation, and improvised sound. I'm looking forward to going deeper into my improvisation practice and to see what she's been brewing up. Also super excited to work with and learn from Iele and Jennifer!
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​I heard there would be textile umbilical cords. Cool right?
There will be a works in progress showing at 4pm Saturday April 13th.

Here is the info blurb:

"Tick Mother Hawk
by Megan Byrne in collaboration with
Jennifer Kjos, Grace Osborne and Iele Paloumpis

Tick Mother Hawk is an offering for the Divine Feminine. Using a series of improvisational movement scores to explore and release energetic states, the performers aim to create "balanced bubbling regeneration" within themselves, the room and beyond. "

I couldn't get myself  to write much of anything this past winter season. In this culture and society I find myself in, what is normal and expected in relation to time (instant gratification, 24 hour availability, constant productivity) is not something I can expect of my own body or mind or spirit. I was sick for almost an entire month and while most of the time I could still teach and work anything beyond that felt impossible. Maybe I could have pushed myself harder but I didn't. 

I also found out that I wasn't selected for the humanities center fellowship so I won't have funding next year. I understand that this feeling of rejection is not personal or unusual and is a large part of being in academia but it makes it really difficult to keep going just to finish the degree. From conferences to funding this no is yet another no in  a long string of no over the past 2-3 years.

I find myself in a similar situation as this time last year.
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How will I finish? How will I support myself?
It's frustrating to try to do things differently but end up in the same spot.
I then find myself in a catch-22 bind... I want to finish my dissertation so I need to work to support myself but if I work too many hours I'm too tired to write and I won't finish. (OR) I work less hours so that I have time to write but then I don't make enough to cover all my expenses so then I'm stressed out and I cant write.
(OR) I leave now and find full time work and regret that I couldn't finish and become bitter?

I can't tell if this is a situation where I should dig in and keep trying or accept defeat.
What is the wise thing to do? Beyond ego gratification.
Maybe I just can't do it. Maybe I'm not smart enough. Maybe my ideas really aren't that interesting.
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I'm really tired of hearing no.
I've always been like this... I just have a hard time with "no."
I've gotten better now and I'm much more interested in cultivating compromise where everyone gets a portion of "yes" than a binary of "yes" and "no."

So I wonder... is there really a solution where I can work just enough hours to financially get by and still have enough time and energy to write? 

I have some time between now and June to figure it out but in this moment I'm not sure.

Before I begin I just wanted to acknowledge all the work that has gone into making this conference possible and thank the people and institutions like Charles University and NYU in Prague who have graciously hosted our group.
Also thank you Mike for imagining and planning this event into reality.
It’s been wonderful to hear all of your the presentations and I’m deeply grateful to be here.

I’m very aware that the title of my dissertation is vague and it’s deeply intentional because the crux of this project is really just a question, “How can one/we listen differently?” That being said this project is an experiment that uses a variety of modes of inquiry to cultivate a layered conversation around that core question.
So going backwards, the mode of inquiry that the final chapter of my dissertation focuses on is the somatic practice of soundwalks. Somatic practice is broad term that encompases a variety of techniques that focus on bodily and often internal bodily sensation. Some examples would be yoga, qigong, and taichi. I haven’t written the text or recorded the audio yet for this soundwalk but the intention is to curate a space and facilitate a specific listening experience that shifts the listener’s awareness toward self reflection of ancestry, historical awareness of the physical land they walk upon, and the conditions that made it possible for them to exist.
The soundwalk serves as an event to focus upon and tangibly engage with this question.
    The mode of inquiry that precedes that chapter is developing and offering a theoretical approach to support and engage with my core question and I haven’t found the exact terminology but what I’m developing is this notion of being an entanglement of flesh. This is informed by black feminist theorizations of the body (note 1), that challenge the discourse of embodiment (note 2) and Cartesian mind body dualism by simply pointing out that not all humans historically and contemporarily have had the opportunity to experience and achieve full human status. From this perspective the dehumanization through the process of slavery and racism and their after-lives renders those affected with having flesh and not a body in a western enlightenment sense. (note 3)
Flesh as a state of pre-body being is useful for my project in that it allows me to assert that thought, feeling, and memory can occur outside of the mind and have there be no conflict or paradox about it. It allows me to ask the question, for example, “what does your womb remember?” in the context of a soundwalk.  
My understanding of entanglement is that it’s a term used in quantum theory to describe the way that particles of energy/matter can come to interact with each other regardless of how far apart they are. Which was then picked up by feminist theorists from physics and now especially in new materialist feminist theory essentially saying, to my understanding, that nothing is inherently separate and all things are entangled and it’s through acts of perception that impose momentary conceptual separations that make it possible to create knowledge. (note 4)
Entanglement is important for my project because it articulates a particular way of being, that is being in direct relation to or having a sense of connectedness. The direction I take this in engages with Indigenous theorizations of time and space, which challenges Western conceptual confines of linear temporality or spatiality by asserting that people are connected to places and that the movement of time is more complex than moving forward into the future away from the past. (note 5)  
It allows me to ask the question, for example, “what does the history of this building sound like?” in the context of a soundwalk.  
So essentially Entanglements Of Flesh is a way of theorizing and making legible non western ways of being in the world. For example not only having an awareness but communicating with ancestors or taking the possibility seriously of a body or a building remembering.
In the context of my dissertation theorizing these ways of being gives concrete language to the types of sensual experiences I want to curate in my soundwalk.
All that being said, moving on to my first chapter which precedes the one I just discussed focuses on articulating a culturally informed foundational understanding of the sensual experience that this dissertation revolves around which is listening.
The mode of inquiry for my first chapter is a literature review on academic understandings and literature on listening. Listening is a huge subject and there is not one singular linear thread of discourse to trace. That being said term listening carries a wide variety of associations that differ among each discipline, from scientific understandings of how the human brain process sound in cognition studies, to psychology’s utilization of listening as a methodology of both research and counselling, to tacitly stated  yet culturally informed expectations of bodily regulation during Western art music performance in music studies, to how the sounds of the past are rendered in archival documents in sound studies. Sometimes these threads are in conversation with each other but often they’re not. To be clear my inquiry of listening is grounded primarily in Sound Studies’ approach to the topic of listening which pays special attention to so called extra-musical sound. So this is where I want to have my work make an intervention.
So what is listening according to Sound Studies? The literature tends to begin by distinguishing between Listening versus Hearing. In the text Keywords in Sound, the chapter on listening written by Tom Rice states that listening involves the allocation of attention or awareness. Then he expands upon this and states that listening implies subtle shifts in acoustical agency, which reference nuanced varieties of active-receptive and passive-receptive auditory attention.” (note 6)  
At the risk of oversimplifying, listening is essentially understood as active auditory attention while hearing is cast as being passive auditory attention. From this perspective   
I argue in my dissertation that listening serves a site for Sound Studies to establish key aspects of its own intellectual project. Some of these aspects are that A.) there is knowledge and information in sound itself, B.) there is an investment in the project of modernity especially considering protecting ideals of progress and universality of “the human” C.) that through listening especially analysis of culturally informed listening practices it’s possible as an outsider to engage with difference and otherness, in terms of research at least, in a manner that’s somehow more ethical and equitable than in the past.
Yet at same time there is a disciplinary awareness and questioning of eurocentric thinking leading scholars for example Jonathan Sterne, to ask how/if one can listen beyond one’s culturally and historically informed positionality and ways of understanding perception. Yet at the same time there is an adherence to the expectation that science will bridge this gap and save us of our differences by proving that we’re all the same instead of actually being receptive to other world views especially indigenous ways of being as being equally rigorous and of equal importance. (note 7)  I say all this to say that through this literature review there is a lot of information about how culturally we in West understand and value the body and the senses, and in the context of my work, listening. This helps me to understand the cultural point of departure when I ask, “What does it mean to listen?”
Lastly, in the second chapter I selfishly use a musical piece as a sound object (note 8) to discuss sonic depictions of intimacy through narratives of everyday experiences such as the act diary making. I engage with Josef Bohuslav Foerster’s piano piece Pages from my Diary/Listy z mého deníku.
In this chapter I argue that the intimacy of everyday experiences can be depicted in sound and music and that the process of subjectively perceiving narrative is generative when one wants to experiment with the possibilities of hearing something differently.

Some key difficulties with this project is that I personally value disorientation and not claiming to know or understand a thing in its entirety which goes against how traditional academic knowledge production is supposed to work. I’m also not invested in being completely legible by academic audiences because I’m more interested in being accessible to a mainstream audience.
So to conclude, my project on listening uses soundwalks to tangibly engage with the question “How can we listen differently?” The disorientation that occurs with my soundwalks creates a pathway and openness towards engaging with this idea of Entanglement of Flesh which theorizes a way of being that is self critical and self reflective. From this perspective listening can be a tool to create more intimacy in everyday moments that are seemingly not profound. This intimacy I believe has the potential to instigate or activate an internal shift that can impact the way one externally acts in the world and their perception of self and their position in the world. The end goal of my project is to create more connection and less conceptual distance between the self and other blur the boundaries of what constitutes the self.
This desire behind this blurring is connected with my understanding of “The Void” which is the other side of emptiness which is a fullness of potential. The potential to listen and further, to actually be different.

Notes:
1. Alexander Weheliye’s work Habeas Viscus, Hortense Spillers’ work Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe, and Read: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/683772/summary2. 
Read: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0966-8373.2005.00228.x

3. TBA (link broken at the moment)

4. Karen Barad Meeting the Universe Halfway & Elizabeth Grosz The Incorporeal

5.  Tevita O. Ka'ili  Marking Indigeneity (Ta Va theory of reality), Keith Basso Senses of Place, Peter Moana Nepia (Te Kore)  http://aut.researchgateway.ac.nz/handle/10292/5480
6. Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeny, eds. Keywords In Sound. Duke University Press, 2015: 100.

7. Some examples of these what I consider perceptual conflicts of reality are inherent in what happens internationally with resource extraction and land development. In the US some key examples would be Standing Rock and Mauna Kea and in Europe granting fishing and hunting permits on Saami land in Norway, Sweden, and Finland.

8. This is not to say that score analysis is obsolete. What I’m trying to do in this second chapter is start a conversation about auditory perception and perception of narrative that is not dependent on a score because ultimately the information I’m interested in exists but cannot be found in the score itself.Further: “Even in Ethnomusicology and musicology--two disciplines that might lay superior claim to sound and auditory perception as their very birthright--a new thinking seems to be taking hold, one that is increasingly drawing attention away from readings--of scores or meanings that are the result of acts of inscription--and focusing it on the materiality of musical communication, issues of sensuality, and the like.” (p.2) Hearing Cultures by Veit Erlmann (2004)

Some of my favorite memories from this trip are when we got to work with the students. In one of my workshops we practiced witnessing each other. It seems simple, stand in a circle and clap or stomp a beat while one person improvises a solo. 
Eventhough it's simple, it's powerful and deep. No matter how young and inexperienced someone may be... they still have a story and have something to say so when you take the time to witness (without critique, without comment, without judgement) something beautiful unfolds. The work is being done. 
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Many deep thanks to Clare Croft, Jennifer Harge, and all the faculty and staff in the Theater and Dance Departments!

The photos above are from the Hilma af Klint exhibition that is currently at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC. These are some of my favorites but really everything was amazing.
Referencing Klint's channeled commands via meditative trance, 
obey intuition // understand only in part 
the curator wrote something I found deeply striking,
"To obey intuition and not fully understand is, after all, for better or worse, what artists do."

Okay so where to begin?

I am living in New York again which has made life so much easier in regard to reading and writing for my dissertation. Of course I miss my family and friends back in LA but more and more it seems that New York is becoming my new home. The transition hasn't been easy but I've been building up my stamina and gratitude practice so I find myself at this beautiful balancing point finally embraced by buoyancy.

I am doing the NYC hustle/balancing act of working two part time jobs,  writing my dissertation, and trying to develop myself as an artist through my relationship with Skeleton Architecture.  
Oh, and indulging in rare moments of having a personal life.

As for work I am an assistant to a librarian in the audio and visual department at Bobst Library and I am also one of two house managers at Danspace Project.

As for my dissertation I have been reading and writing like crazy and yet still I am behind. The chapter I'm working on is a literature review on the topic of listening in Music and Sound Studies which serves as a nice point of departure for my project. Tracing this discourse and highlighting what is assumed and what is left out will help me make a clearer case for why my project "matters" in terms of the academy. 
I aiming to have a draft of my first chapter by late November/early December.  I'll write a follow up post in January or February about my findings and lingering questions.

Unfortunately, I wont be attending SEM or AMS this year. Real talk: I'm not on the market yet, I'm not presenting anything, and I don't have the spare $1,500+ to spend on conferences this year. Plus I have work on those days.
It all works out though and hopefully next year I'll be around.

As for developing myself as an artist.. I have been tasked to define my practice and how I would like that practice to be understood through language with a bit more clarity. I may not continue saying I am a "musician" or "sound artist" because those have very specific connotations that don't feel appropriate for what I'm working on...
So I'm still working this... 

I have some fun things planned in November and December:
I'll be at a residency in Detroit, doing a soundwalk, sound bath, and performance with Skeleton Architecture at Danspace Project, and a conference in Prague!

More details soon...
Ase Ase Ase.
So much bliss and gratitude.

I am so blessed and excited to be invited by my friend Sammay Dizon to share my updated embodied listening workshop,  (Re)member: restorative listening at this year's Urban X Indigenous to be held in Ohlone Territory/San Francisco (Yelamu) on Sunday June 17th from 12-1:30pm at SOMArts.

Here is the workshop description:
(Re)member: restorative listening is a somatic focused and process based workshop facilitated by Grace Osborne. Participants are invited to explore one of the provocations initiated by this year’s Urban X Indigenous gathering through the modality of listening. Through guided soundwalk and soundbath this workshop explores the question: How do we reclaim our belonging to our lands, to our ancestors, and to each other?
These two curated experiences create a safer space for participants to intimately engage with silence and vibration to develop practical and embodied tools to cultivate connection, sensitivity, and deeper awareness within themselves and with others.

*Please be aware that participants will be asked to turn off electrical devices, wear comfortable clothes to move in, and close toed supportive walking shoes.
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For more info on UxI: https://urbanxindigenous.wordpress.com/uxi-2018-unite-the-tribes/
For more info on Sammay Dizon: http://www.sammaydizon.com/about-her/