2021-2022 Research Alive Student Prize-winner, composer and doctoral candidate Chelsea Komschlies will give her presentation, "Crossmodal Correspondences in Composing and Listening to Music” this week. The Research Alive series aims to unveil what makes music so magical in the ears and minds of the listener through live performance and dialogue between researchers and musicians.
Chelsea explains her upcoming lecture-performance, "We often reach for crossmodal metaphor to describe music--it sounds warm, or velvety, or rough, spiky, jagged, smooth, glassy, or bright, etc. What if these metaphors were not as subjective as we might think, but had a scientific, neurological basis? This talk explains how music can actually encode visuals and other cross-sensory information in a consistent and shared way among people, based on the area of psychological research known as crossmodal correspondences. We'll listen to several examples of composers who have intuitively used them in their work, including Claude Debussy, Kaija Saariaho, and Will Stackpole, and the talk will conclude with a live performance by Clara Gerdes of my solo organ work, To Starboard, Star-Bound, which is meant to encode visuals in a cinematic way."
We connected with Chelsea over email to learn more about the project and what makes Schulich the place for her and her research.
What do you discover when you venture outside your field or area of research/expertise? What can be gained by venturing into the unknown with research?
This is the exciting thing about interdisciplinary research - finding connections between areas that have maybe had little or no contact with each other yet. Each of those fields may gain insights into new ways to answer old questions, or new questions to ask.
How did your Research Alive project come about?
Before two years ago I had never heard of this term "crossmodal correspondences." But I just had a hunch that much of the cross-sensory way I experience music and the world could not simply be only my own synesthesia, especially because so many of the same experiences seem to be shared. Then in 2020 I began a messy rabbit-hole dive through various psychology and neuroscience articles and eventually stumbled across this thing called the "kiki-bouba effect," which I'll mention in my talk, and from there, crossmodal correspondences. I saw so much potential for the fields of musical meaning and composition. Plus I finally had a scientific explanation for the way I had always composed.
What about Schulich enables/allows for study like this?
It really is the perfect place for those who want to pursue both a professional career in composition or another area plus pursue research interests. There's a vibrant culture for research creation in general here, especially in organizations like CIRMMT and the ACTOR Project, and a long history of cutting-edge research in music perception and cognition in Stephen McAdam's lab. We also offer two different types of doctoral composition degrees, both a DMus and a PhD, and the PhD, which I'm in, offers the opportunity to write a full-length dissertation that includes both original research and writing about one's own compositions. That's quite rare.
How does academia encourage/fuel musical motivation outside the concert venue?
Academia offers the exciting opportunity to answer questions about what lies behind the musical experience--how our brains process and understand it, and why it's so meaningful.
Research Alive | Crossmodal correspondences in composing and listening to music
March 16, 2022 at 5:00 pm
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Discover the Research Alive series
Chelsea Komschlies’ compositions spring from synesthetic imagery and crossmodal correspondences, and she aims to trigger the same in her listeners. Ms. Komschlies is a Ph.D. student of Jean Lesage at McGill University, where she was recently awarded the Andrew Svoboda Prize for Orchestral Composition, with a performance of the new work by Alexis Hauser and the McGill Symphony Orchestra coming in the fall of 2022. Upcoming performances also include a synesthetically-conceived work for the Bozzini Quartet commissioned by the ACTOR project to be performed at McGill in May. Ms. Komschlies previously studied with David Ludwig, Richard Danielpour, and Jennifer Higdon at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she won the Alfredo Casella Award for Composition, and with Daniel Kellogg and Carter Pann at CU-Boulder, where she was awarded the Thurston Manning Composition Award and Cecil Effinger Fellowship in Composition. Ms. Komschlies has been programmed by Alarm Will Sound, the Omaha Symphony, Choral Arts Philadelphia, and the Fifth House Ensemble, and by presenters such as Codes d’accèss (Montreal), Le Vivier (Montreal), CAMARADA (San Diego), the Philadelphia Bach Festival, the Boulanger Initiative, and Make Music Chicago. She has received fellowships from the the National Orchestral Institute, the Aspen Music Festival, where she was the first woman ever to win the Hermitage Prize, the Fontainebleau School where Nadia Boulanger once taught, the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, Copland House’s CULTIVATE, and several other festivals in the U.S. and abroad. Ms. Komschlies’ Ph.D. research finds applications for psychological research in crossmodal correspondences within the fields of music composition, meaning, and analysis.
Chelsea Komschlies' Personal Website
