Exploring the experience of chronic illness and disability through music for voice, saxophone, and synthesizer with wearable handmade controllers.
Patien(t/ce) is a work in progress that I started in 2023 after healing from three spine surgeries in two years. It is both a musical composition that explores my experience as a chronically ill and disabled person and a system of DIY electronics for controlling my synthesizer in performance. The timing of this work is intimately connected to my spine injuries and ongoing experience with several invisible illnesses following surgery—a dramatic turn from possessing seemingly unlimited ability to being severely limited by my body. A defining quality of being sick is that time stretches out, as long periods are spent unable to participate in the world. Being a patient quite literally requires patience. The slow process of knitting a garment or building a generative synthesizer patch while too sick to do anything else offers a meditative experience, during which I contemplate how I might express the experience through performance.
The music incorporates live and prerecorded spoken word text that is processed and controlled with biofeedback from wearable sensors and mixed with other synthesized sounds and live saxophone. I am exploring how writing words, then disrupting and recombining them, can express the feeling of living in a disabled body. I am interested in how durational performance breaks past surface-level engagement with music and prompts close listening and deep connection. My goal is to create a performance that is expressive, vulnerable, and ecstatic, leading to an experience of catharsis for the audience and for me.