Csm - Emerging Contexts

Emerging Contexts is an experimental podcast that continues to rewrite the answer to “how to have nothing to say, but saying it anyway”.

Emerging Contexts

Music as a communication design outcome can provide the same, if not a superior level of expression that visuality offers within the discipline. The underused nature of music in design is a missed opportunity for delivering complex multifaceted messages of understanding to the receiver, due to the sonic medium’s non-passive nature. As a means of exploring this, and to analyse the potential of music as a design channel, this project is developed out of three overarching strands:

• Music as non-semantic language
• Theory of creative processes and creativity mechanisation
• Context, aleatoricism and indeterminacy

Emerging Contexts is an experimental podcast format that seeks to function as a non-literal representation of Central Saint Martins, through 5-minute weekly episodes of diverse trajectories.

Inspired by the methodology discussed in David Byrne’s How Music Works of lyric creation through the impulsive singing of unplanned words on music, the format applies automatic writing principles - the ability to subconsciously produce content- to radio broadcast. Thus, Emerging Contexts is born as a podcast series about creative processes; a neutral container for procedural experimentations of sound, dialogue and music.

This experimental development was possible alongside a collective of Central Saint Martins students who were committed to the uncertainty and potential of de-contextualisation. Through the recording of conversation, quotes and moments that were then transformed into a new meaning, the process of sampling became critical in the larger mechanism of re-contextualisation.

With the aim of being hosted on the new-born UAL independent radio Arts Live, in addition to widespread distribution via digital publication onto podcast libraries, the stories of Granary Building live on through this sonic casing. Emerging Contexts continues to rewrite an answer to “how to have nothing to say, but saying it anyway”.