Unruly Waves

Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff can RSVP on WesNest.

Professor of Music and Director of Graduate Studies Paula Matthusen and collaborators lead a year-long inquiry into “unruly waves” staring with a seminar this fall, and concluding with “moonbounce” related activities with Wesleyan’s Toneburst Laptop and Electronic Arts Ensemble in the spring 2025 semester.

Wesleyan students will engage in a host of exchanges around transmission arts, sonic ecosystems, and the performative and creative exploration of how the behavior of sound and waves both excite and generate friction with possibilities of communication and music making.

In the years preceding his passing, the late John Spencer Camp Professor of Music Emeritus Alvin Lucier (1931–2021) was working on “Moon Bounce” and “Silk,” two pieces which explored reflecting radio signals off the moon, audio transduction through instruments, and vibrations through spiderwebs. Lucier had approached Matthusen and several Wesleyan faculty to inquire about making a transmitter available on campus for Wesleyan students to “bounce sounds off the moon.” While this proved difficult to achieve in his lifetime, the creative energy and possibilities in Lucier’s pieces underscore much of what is being pursued here: the exploration of the human and non-human; vibration as communication, survival, and inquisitive possibility; the savoring of difference in surfaces (e.g., the moon) though reflection and touch; and the translations between how waves (airborne and electromagnetic) may be transduced and brought into contact with one another.

“Unruly Waves” will explore much of the theoretical and creative framework related to the creative activity for the moonbounce as well as much more broad questions about the sound, environment, place, and their histories. This will also be a space for initial testing related to the moonbounce.

In the spring 2025 semester, Wesleyan’s Toneburst Laptop and Electronic Arts Ensemble will further examine the creative possibilities of reflecting signals off the moon and transmission arts more broadly.

Presented by the Creative Campus Initiative and Professor of Music and Director of Graduate Studies Paula Matthusen as part of the courses MUSC 300 “Seminar for Music Majors” and MUSC 464 “Laptop Ensemble.”

The Creative Campus Initiative of the Center for the Arts supports cross-disciplinary collaborations that center the arts as a way of teaching, learning, and knowing at Wesleyan University.