‘Matrices of Vision’ is the title of Abigail Toll’s upcoming debut release on French music label Shelter Press, which she composed during her Masters in Electroacoustic Composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm between 2019 and 2021. The piece is a sonic augmentation of a data set inspired by Tiara Roxanne’s revelatory inquiries into AI/data bias.
Toll expands her interest in psychoacoustics and materialist-inspired process, into a textural, durational and emotional response to the political mechanisms that surround us. Flutes, strings, vocals and electronic bass culminate in an intense, minimalist study of tuning and deep listening that unfolds as cacophony, meditation and upheaval.
In place of dominant western twelve-tone tuning, Toll applies just intonation (the harmonic series) in order to access a greater pitch continuum. She translates the data into frequencies that together make up the harmonic series to highlight data extraction, creative restrictions and bias that is transcribed through the Matrices of Vision graphic score. The score preserves the original data set which traces binary student demographics in Sweden’s education system across seven decades.
As the instruments move up and down the series, the lines of data are represented through sound and the piece takes on an embodied, emotional response to the information. What is heard is a refusal to comply to these so-called rational systems. What results, is a sonic narrative that unsettles accepted hierarchies by moving beyond their limitations, in what Roxanne describes as “a kind of flooding of listening and experiencing, from the body and the spaces that surround the body.
Klosterruine x KW’s Pogo Bar: Abigail Toll; ‘Matrices of Vision’ Ensemble Performance
6.7.2022 | Doors 20:00 CET | Starts 21:00 CET
Klosterruine | Klosterstrasse 73a in 10179 Berlin
