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