Unlearning Creativity
good evening
ladies and gentlemen my name is farah
muller
and my job is to make sense of things
people can’t see i’m also terrified of
speaking in public
so we’re just going to do a little
exercise if you could all please stand
while we’re doing this exercise i would
request you to suspend
all internal thought and try to focus
your awareness
on the towards the sounds that are
happening around you
all right everybody ready we’re going to
start by rubbing our palms together
and then we’re quickly going to snap our
finger
doesn’t that sound like the rain
we’re going to rub our thighs
we’re going to generate some heat again
with our palms and place that on our
eyes and
take a couple of deep breaths
all right you can take your seat now
so good evening ladies gentlemen
and kids it’s tough being a kid these
days
the amount of career options that you
have
while i was growing up i remember my
teacher asked me what i wanted to be
when i grew up and i told her that i
wanted to be a penguin
obviously that didn’t work out for me
very well
like most people i grew up listening to
a lot of music
my grandfather used to listen to a lot
of indian classical music
while my dad used to listen to a lot of
western classical music
and on the days when we were lucky they
would settle on a middle ground and make
us listen to whale sounds on the record
player
in you know i studied science in
university because that was the
line of thought that was the most
relatable
for me that was the most relatable for
me at that point
and yeah i’m getting nervous sorry
that was the most relatable to me and
while i was in the second year of my
master’s in geology
i started to realize that it wasn’t
providing me with the kind of creative
outlet that i needed so i decided that
i’m going to find that outlet
and i went on to study fine art it
sounds
very easy right now but it wasn’t as
easy
but it provided me with the opportunity
to explore
and find that creative outlet that i
needed
i went on to study fine art at cambridge
school of art
and that’s when i came across this man
called john cage
was basically my hero and he changed my
life he sort of brought me back to these
whale sounds that i grew up listening to
and he equipped me with the vocabulary
to
not only understand and comprehend it
but to express it in my own way
so when i say sound i don’t just
mean something i don’t just mean
music which is basically organized sound
i mean everything that vibrates
including
silence now the human ear has an
auditory spectrum
of 20 hertz to 20 000 kilohertz
everything above
and below that makes sound as well is
just not receptable by the ears so there
clearly is no such thing as silence
sound is a kind of energy and energy
is something scientists even today
baffle
to define and we go back time and again
to
what the greeks said about energy
basically it was something that was
at work can you imagine all the
advancements in technology and science
and we’re still stuck to define
something like that
the sound gets more interesting after
that it has no material of itself
it has no physical qualities of itself
but yet
it speaks about materiality
us it is our most primal means
of self-defense and we are always
immersed in it we have eyelids and no
early so we’re always immersed within
sound it is one of the first senses to
develop
even as early as three months old in
your mother’s womb
and is one of the last ones to pass when
we die
so this was the point of departure in my
research during my time
at cambridge when i came back
i found myself having
years of learning two very different
degrees
and no job category to fit in and even
more questions than i started off with
and it was a confusing time i was
a little lost and i was considered
jobless at that time
and it was during that time that i
realized that
i was a researcher not just by choice
but by default it made me happy to learn
new things and find out creative
and meaningful ways you know to apply
this research
and i so it’s and creativity is a
phenomenon
whereby something new and valuable is
created
creativity is also folding a paper plane
and to make it fly further creativity
sometimes
is also inventing a job category for
yourself when you don’t have one
so anyways i’m a creative researcher
and my research is about how sound
affects human subjectivity and a sonic
experience
over the years i my research has taken
different outlets and different forms
sometimes
it’s art installations in museums and
galleries
sometimes it’s writing for journals
sometimes it’s making a movie soundtrack
to sometimes it being making adaptive
devices
so i’m going to take you through a
couple of some of these outlets of
mad creativity that happen this is
vinsharton vinsharten is
basically just translates to a wind
window
this installation was made in the quaint
little village of kalga
kalga basically has no locals and it
its economy comprises of four hostels at
the time
and a lot of plastic waste is generated
as a byproduct of that
this is a kinetic insulation which means
that it interacts
with the wind the ambient wind intensity
and direction of the wind
activate the structure to produce a
sonic response
so what we did was we went around
collecting a thousand
used plastic used and discarded plastic
bottles
and we cut cleaned and shaped them and
we tuned
them to generate a sonic response
it is sort of a visual and architectural
response to it’s a metaphor for the
cycles of waste and consumption that’s
going on
everywhere around the world these days
so this is what it sounded like
[Music]
this is translate so this was a piece
that i did in oslo a few years ago it’s
basically
using the human voice as sonic graffiti
we’re going to pass around this piece in
a few baskets some of the volunteers
will be coming out with it
so basically the record so each code
is transcribed with a recording
which narrates the idea of
basically hold on the recordings and
narratives of people who have relocated
and they’re narrating their experience
of relocation via
landscape and sound
these codes weren’t placed in a gallery
these codes were basically distributed
all over the city of oslo on the trams
the buses the ferries
and while these codes narrated different
people’s stories of migration
they were migrating themselves and i
think the most happiest moment was
that when i found that a code traveled
until alaska i can track where these are
accessed by the way
so english was used as a standardizing
language
because it reveals and conceals people’s
identity as a language as a marker of
identity
so we’re going to have a listen to karan
shah there
where do i call home that’s the
interesting question
i’ve lived in about five different
countries across
three continents and
each one of those places i believe
has impacted me in a certain way
but at the same time i don’t know if i
can consider
any one of them home
the place that i live now i’ve lived
only
a year
so it’s probably the shortest amount of
time i’ve lived
in a place outside of my homeland
so i don’t think a year is long enough
for me to
to feel at home here i don’t feel not at
home i don’t feel rejected
i don’t feel like i don’t belong i just
don’t feel like
i’m home it’s not because i don’t think
i belong there
i just feel like i’ve outgrown it
thinking back i recently went back to
the country of my birth and lived there
for
two years two and a half years and it’s
probably the most
uncomfortable i’ve felt
the mo the place that is most not like
home for me
something a place that i had no real
connection to i’ve outgrown the cultures
well i could even say that i never even
adopted the culture in the first place
since i left when i was four years old
so it was it was very much a culture
shock going back
when i was 27 years old
and if you can’t call the place you’re
born home
where can you call home
coming a few years ahead
i came across this thing called sound
therapy that intrigued me
and sound therapy basically works on a
premise that
disease is an imbalance within your body
and
that you can use sound to tune your body
very much like a musical instrument
while i was researching about this and
while i was studying about it
i was told that it can cure cancer and
that was a very tall claim for someone
like me
and i needed some qualitative and
quantitative analysis
some facts and figures to prove that it
was right
i had the opportunity to do that and i
collaborated that
on this project with a colleague of mine
christian hofstadter
christian hof stutter is a brilliant man
basically what he does
is makes these eeg machines and you can
track your
brain activity while this is going on so
during the sessions we had models models
are people who had volunteered for the
study
and uh the models had fallen asleep so
they claimed
to have fallen in deep sleep but we
found out
that their brains were as active as you
know in the middle of the day
during the study we still have a lot of
data to unpack from this
and while we were working on it there
were these two directors who came up to
us and they were really interested in
the kind of research i was doing
and they were making it on asmr
asmr is basically auto sensory meridian
response
it is the feeling of pins and needles at
the back of your head when you listen to
a particular kind of sound or visual
stimulus
we ended up making the documentary
together and it
premiered at london film festival this
last year
also coming back to whether or not sound
therapy
causes uh cures cancer i still don’t
know but what i do know about it is that
if in this day and age if somebody can
relax for five minutes
it’s worth it so this encouraged me
to you know what more could be possible
with this sort of research and it sort
of brought me
to back to my friend’s school
shruti mori she runs somewhere
foundation in kulu himachal pradesh
tamfer foundation works towards building
an inclusive world for people with
diverse
abilities there are kids who come in
with autistic spectrum disorders
and cerebral palsy and they’re really
nurtured in this school
and i used to go there and visit her
time and again
and i started to wonder how i could
apply what i know
to help these kids in a way in a way i
don’t know if it’s still helping them
but i hope it does so i started making
these adaptive devices
using sound so everybody learns at a
different pace
and in their own way and learning
doesn’t only happen in a classroom or
doesn’t rely on a particular sense you
learn
via different you know different
receptors you can learn via sound you
can learn via touch you can learn via
days
so that’s how we generate our memories
and that’s how neuroplasticity comes
into place
basically so what i have done is i
basically just
took a blank of wood place all these
latches
now a lot of these kids it’s very
difficult for them to even you know
hold something or move something from
one point to the next
so this sort of keeps on training them
keeps their hands busy
and you know sort of helps them out
in making different connections and it
entrains their brain
couldn’t hold anything a few years
and this is himani this is another
device that i ended up making so this is
himani has no faculty of speech yet
she’s
older but we’re trying to get her to
play
and trying to make her to mimic the
sounds by the sense of touch
so this is her interacting with the
contraption that i came
so as you might have realized i work a
lot
with sensory overlaps and technological
overlaps now this installation
is basically a
immersive sensory simulating in
insulation basically what it does is it
picks up
sounds of people entering into this
space and
it simulates a visual response to it so
the tone and the intonation of your
voice
it makes the patterns change within the
structure and the volume
increases the brightness of the
structure
the idea was to generate a synesthetic
experience
and it is upside down
can we play this
[Music]
oh
[Music]
[Music]
crosstalk explores these sensory
overlaps and it speaks about
how harmony might not be present in our
environment
but is fabricated by our con by our
cognition
the meaning of sound is often invested
in the object that created it
and we put these objects together in
order to form
a narrative i’m still
very unsure about a lot of things but i
do know
two things for sure one is that the mind
is a beautiful thing whatever it thinks
it becomes
and the other is that you should never
ever underestimate the value of an idea
my name is farah mullah thank you for
[Applause]
listening