Festival Dag in de Branding, The Hague, NL, 21 March 2025

forthcoming from Open Book Publishers

By reexamining the roots of the monochord in Greek metalwork – echoing Pythagoras’s chance encounter with a forge soundscape and his subsequent acoustic discoveries – this book propose an alternative regeneration of the monochord from the wreckage of contemporary capitalist industry. This new instrument, the chimeracord, derives from the waste of industrial instrument production and interrogates the extractive relationship between capitalism and material, ultimately proposing a concept of material agency that not only gives voice to its violent ontogeny, but uses that voice to generate new forms of relation and community.

The book begins by drawing on indigenous philosophies from North America to outline a sonic materialism rooted in “Place-thought” (Watts 2015). By examining the intricate and intimate relationships between the materials and the workshops in which they are built, Hylo Narrans will reveal complicated threads of agency that cut across space and time, incorporating the ontogenic journeys of the materials into the creative potential of the instruments themselves. However, in looking more closely at material complicity in these fabrication processes, attention also shifts away from the workshop and towards the places where these materials actually take shape in the world: the mines and foundries where raw ores are smelted and cast into copper, zinc, and eventually their alloy, brass. This book proceeds to explore how modern capitalism’s thirst for the most pure, uniform, and malleable materials has made extraction and manufacturing increasingly toxic. As these deceptively pure materials surround us in our lives and in our cities, I argue that the soundscapes we inhabit are filtered materially and acoustically by the industrial extractive processes that produce them.

In seeking alternatives to this story of extraction and toxicity, the book turns back to the materials themselves. The instruments at the heart of this study, chimeracords, are built from the refuse and rubbish of industrial production – from the cast off brass and copper that is deemed unworkable due, paradoxically, to impurities in their alloy introduced by capitalism’s other great thirst: for cheap, unregulated means of production. By corroding and fracturing, these materials rebel in their very molecular makeup, and in so doing evacuate from the pipeline of industrial production. The flaws that render them invisible to the onrushing maelstrom of industry also open up the potential for new forms of place-thought and sonic agency. The second half of this book seeks to listen to the voices of these materials, whose decay sows the seeds for new forms of material, sonic, and social relations. Drawing from Sylvia Wynter’s evocative philosophy of narration and autopoiesis, it examines parallels between the history of marronage and the alternative spaces opened up by these materials’ decay and resurgence, ultimately proposing a material hylo narrans to complement Wynter’s influential conception of humanity as homo narrans.

The chimeracord reimagines the monochord as a hybrid instrument bridging all major families of acoustic musical sound production (i.e. string, reed, brass, percussion). Centered around a single meter-long string mounted from top to bottom of the instrument, the chimeracord reimagines the traditional resonator box as an organological prism, refracting it through a brass chamber that opens into a multitude of other instrumental possibilities. These disparate, superposed modes of sound production converge and disperse through both the open bell of the brass resonating chamber as well as a pair of unique analog amplifiers that redirect and spatialize the sound.

Crafted from the detritus of industrial production, all of the materials in these instruments voice narratives of violent extraction, disciplinary refining, displacement, and commodification. Through their own material agency — as their unstable alloys percolate in unceasing resilience and resistance to these cooptations — the various components of these instruments converge and converse amongst themselves, shaping their own autopoietic narratives of fugitivity, reclamation, and resurgence.

Instrument Inventors Initiative, The Hague, NL, 9 September 2025

Industrial Mining Museum, Ida Madra Geopark, Balya, Turkey

(The Birthplace of Brass in the Western World)

private housecall, The Hague, Netherlands, 13 November 2023

as part of a series of performances designed to elude conventional concert formats

experimentation in the workshop: Attending to the String

demonstration: brass metalworking and material memory

Recent and Forthcoming Lectures and Presentations:

Funicity to Feedback: Listening in/as Lutherie

5 June 2025

International Orgelpark Symposium 2025

Orgelpark, Amsterdam (NL)

The Building Blocks of Urban Sound: Listening to Material Voices

7-10 May 2025

Uncommon Senses V: Sensing the Social, the Environmental, and Across the Arts and Sciences

Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Twisting the Instrument: Attuning Collective Narratives to Material Voices

23 September 2024

Music and Research Colloquium

Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz / Musik-Akademie Basel (CH)

Material Voices

27 May 2024

Sound Arguments (Orpheus Institute/Leiden University)

Studio LOOS, The Hague (NL)

(Re)Orientations in Brass

16 April 2024

Convergence: Seminar on (Re)Construction in Interdisciplinary Artistic Practices

Royal Conservatoire, Antwerp (BE)

Sounds of Extraction and Material Agency

24 March 2024

In the Making #4 (Leiden University)

West Den Haag, The Hague (NL)

Echoes of Material Marronage

25 September 2023

Sound Studies Center, Leiden University (NL)

Sounding Decay: Instruments, Craft, and Material Agency

12 May 2023

Instruments, Interfaces, and Infrastructures

Harvard University (USA)

As a craftsperson and instrument builder, I construct experimental instruments that liberate the foreclosed and excluded sounds that traditional craft omits. These invented, damaged, and repurposed creations present templates for how an instrument can hijack its own fabrication (Toksöz Fairbairn 2021; 2022). They reclaim their material and reveal how the disjointed spatiotemporal unfolding of instrument building can enable the emergence of fresh, unexpected sonic relationships. Following Alexander G. Weheliye’s call for “phonographic” practices that enact “thinking sound/sound thinking” (Weheliye 2005: 8), this research delves into the spaces where technology and culture mingle, coalescing around forms of human and more-than-human collective creativity. Embarking from this orientation, this project focuses on generating the conditions in which materials themselves can have a voice in our collective imaginaries, ultimately contributing to or even leading conversations about how we can adapt to the evolving cultural and ecological crises of our times. With this in mind, I approach sites of material refining, workshopping, production, and performance as critical sites of collective making and making-based research.

Following previous research that documented potential modes of  material agency in instrument construction and musical performance (Toksöz Fairbairn 2021; 2022; 2023; Craenen et al. 2022), this project continues to engage with these concerns by examining more closely how these material voices can be facilitated and incorporated into artistic practices. By restructuring musical engagement with the material ontogenies of instrumental sound, this research approaches both instrument building and the performance and installation of those instruments as modes of collective inquiry into the elusive confluences of materiality, utility, and interdependence (Ahmed 2019). This entails not only inviting materials into the creative process, but also actively cultivating the conditions under which their creativity can be embraced as not simply reactive but also generative. In her extensive theorization of the concept of orientation in Queer Phenomenology (2006), Sara Ahmed reminds us that the etymology of ‘queer’ lies in the concept to ‘twist.’ With that in mind, this research project proposes methodologies of craft that reorient our ears towards the twists that these materials themselves engender—corrosion, fracture, dislocation, and other forms of dynamic instability—as they provoke surprising new forms of ‘queered’ acoustic expression. By honing workshop practices that align themselves towards these unexpected twists, this project hopes to encourage new forms of orientation and interaction from myself as craftsperson and performer, as well as from workshop settings, artistic venues, and listening publics.

On a more fundamental level, this research seeks to welcome materials into the arenas of cultural creativity that cultivate communal responses to extraction, dispossession, and displacement (Wynter n.d.; 2003; 2008; 2015). Following Sylvia Wynter’s compelling elucidations of how cultural creativities and collective narratives nourish and sustain the conditions for cultural reinvention, revolt, and revolution, this project embraces experimental instrumentality as a laboratory not only for giving voice to materials, but also for teaching human artists, performers, and audiences how we might listen to and learn from them in other contexts as well. In reconceiving the workshop space as a “material site and narrative mode” (Moulton 2024: 271), this experimental instrument building methodology generates “plots” (Wynter 1971) of collective creativity that reinforce the conditions in which material concerns, histories, and imaginations can be actively incorporated into building collective human and more-than-human futures. By taking seriously the notion that materials have their own histories, stories, and alternative imaginations, these instruments propose ways in which those material voices can be amplified, attuned to, and embraced as collaborators in our communal cultural evolution.

In the Making #4 (Leiden University)

24 March 2024

West Den Haag, The Hague (NL)

with Nele Möller, Minji Kim, and Marcel Cobussen

Roundtable at 30:00

Lecture performance at 1:10:09