Kinda Hassan is a Paris-based composer and artist.
Her art has been shown at various festivals, museums and art galleries, including the Marseille Résonance Festival (MuCEM), Propagations (GMEM), Le Mans Sonore (Biennale du Mans), Cannes, Berlinale, Oberhausen, Jihlava, Transmediale, Mumok in Vienna, and other spaces in Europe, North America and the Middle East.
As part of her research and compositional practice, she builds electro-acoustic automated instruments. Hassan received a two Master’s degrees, in Fine Arts from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts and in Sound Design from the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Le Mans, and a Musical Studies Diploma in electroacoustic music composition from the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Départemental de Pantin. She has collaborated on numerous video, film and performance projects.
research
Abstract for the ongoing research project :
PERFORMATIVE SONIC AUTOMATA (PSA) Designing and performing automata as electroacoustic compositional practice
In this artistic research project, I will investigate the design and performance of performative sonic automata (PSA), automated instrument-machines I create and that produce digitally controlled mechanical sounds, captured by various types of microphones and digitally processed, while seeking to answer the two following interdependent questions: ‘How is knowledge from electroacoustic music used and adapted to inform and analyse the design and playability of electro-mechanical performative sonic automata (PSA)? How, in turn, can new knowledge produced in the process be applied to composing with and for PSA, and to the broader field of electroacoustic music’?
While much of the established theoretical framework for electroacoustic music addresses recording or synthesizer-based musical processes, this research seeks to explore how knowledge from the acousmatic music discipline can be approached through a different lens, allowing it to be translated and transformed to inform a new kind of music production anchored in physical reality: that of performative sonic automata. Through this inquiry, performative sonic automata become the physical embodiments of acousmatic music—a form that is, by definition, invisible. By doing so, this research will illuminate the disciplines of acousmatic music and music embodied by PSA, and potentially introduce new sites of application for their respective theoretical frameworks, producing new knowledge through their bridging process.
This project investigates the core parameters for designing and exploring the sound of electroacoustic musical automata, as well as methods for composing (with) them, in respect to specific acousmatic theories and practices. By analysing a corpus of existing works by others in dialogue with my own artistic practice, the research aims to discover new theories and notions, enriching the conceptual and compositional frameworks for musical automata and the broader electroacoustic music field.