2026 Theses Doctoral

Tuning the Body: Perception in Motion in Catherine Lamb’s Prisma Interius V and Pauline Oliveros’s Primordial Lift

Agosto, Camila

This dissertation examines listening as an embodied practice that dissolves boundaries between self and environment. Through analyses of Catherine Lamb’s Prisma Interius V, Pauline Oliveros’s Primordial Lift, and my own recent compositions, I demonstrate how these works situate listening as a somatic practice that reorganizes relationships between body, environment, and perception.

Chapter 1 analyzes Catherine Lamb’s Prisma Interius V, examining how she invites listeners into a sutured listening experience through her approach to harmony, form, timbral development, and her use of the Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer. Drawing on acoustic phenomenology, I explore how Lamb achieves this through composed threshold states where performed sound and environmental resonance become indistinguishable.

Chapter 2 focuses on Pauline Oliveros’s 2010 performance of Primordial Lift at ISSUE Project Room featuring Oliveros, Andrew Deutsch, Anne Bourne, Miguel Frasconi, David Grubbs, Jason Huang, and Suzanne Thorpe. Oliveros’s multi-modal listening practices activate embodied perception through durational improvisation, encouraging participants to engage somatically with their sonic environment and with each other as a communal and relational practice. Using performer testimony and auditory analysis, I explore how her approach dissolves distinctions between performer, listener, and acoustic space.

Chapter 3 presents a portfolio of my recent chamber works including Paracusia III. Descry, Where darkness swallows the sky from The Memory of Water Vol. II, and Light Leak II. by light, by shadow. Through spatialization, somatic performance practices, and the interplay of electronic and acoustic elements, I create permeable sonic environments that blur boundaries between interiority and external space.