Select Electroacoustic & Immersive/Experimental Work
The Concordance of Nature: Elegy for a Solitary Sequoia - Collaboration with sculpture artist Marguerite Elliot, Summer 2024.
Liz Baxmeyer, Sound Artist: For Elegy for a Solitary Sequoia, Baxmeyer brings together poetry and sound to texturize and contextualize the liminal spaces between the tangible and imaginary: the voice of the sequoia traveling thousands of miles from its homeland; the sounds of the inner acoustics of trees, not usually audible to the naked ear; the atmospheres that hold these finite, endangered species, both below and above ground: all inhabitants of deep time; all connected by the same Earth.
Walking with Dryads: A Sonic Journey - Health Humanities Consortium, Spring 2024.
Abstract: In Walking with Dryads: A Sonic Journey, I will simulate natural experiences with sound to explore the importance of ecological landscapes for human healing. I intend to weave together environmental sounds with narratives of people’s climate-related experiences using stories, comments, or poems, as they apply to physical health and mental wellbeing.The Dryads of Ancient Greece were tree spirits brought to life by peoples’ need to connect intimately with the land.
In Walking with Dryads, I will include sound entities to represent these mythical beings, which will eventually, in the audio, become one with the human voices (perhaps stemming from them in the first place). In addition to human voices, this ‘sound story’ will include birdsong, forest ambiance, tree sounds, human sounds, and musical tones selected for their ability to affect the body and mind in positive ways. I shall include, as counternarrative, processed sound to represent human interventions in nature - for better or worse. Much of my research as both a lecturer and Ph.D. student revolves around bodily resonance and the therapeutic effects of music and sound. Aside from being a (hopefully) engaging piece to listen to, I wish to choose sounds with purpose for their research-supported rhetorical attributes.
As a mindful practice, the act of Deep or Quantam Listening has grown in importance in both the health and audio fields over recent years. Pauline Oliveras: musician, sound rhetorician, and composer, asserts that “Quantam Listening is listening to more than one reality at once…[it] is listening in as many ways as possible simultaneously – changing and being changed by the listening” (Oliveras, 2010). I propose that Quantam Listening is key, in my field, to deconstructing how we look at the environment in relation to our bodies to understand and find creative interventions for climate change and human health. In my audio art, I encourage multi-dimensional listening through creating space for multiple perspectives to offer the opportunity to experience the work in different ways and encourage unique, meaningful synthesis.
As a life-long composer, sound artist, lecturer, and story rhetorician, I am committed to creating opportunities for learning through healing. In my praxis, I often delve into the part sound takes in internal and external mental and bodily resonance and health. As a transdisciplinary lecturer of mainly premed students, I include audio assignments in all my classes, whether they be writing, research, music, or health professions courses, and have witnessed the multi-faceted benefits of offering opportunities for students to explore their own environmental or health-related anxiety and grief in unconventional ways. With this piece, I not only hope to create meaningful sound art, but want to offer an outlet and a form of catharsis for those who participate, either as storytellers or listeners. As theatrical practitioner Anne Bogart purports in her recent book, On Resonance (2021), “Resonant art awakens and casts light into the hidden realities of our lives and of our world…and does nothing less than challenge one’s own identity and assumptions about what it means to be human.” This is my goal with Walking with Dryads.
Earth Speak: An Immersive Audio PiecePresented at The Creative Psyche and Arts Based Research: A Transdisciplinary Conference -
June 2023.
Abstract: In Earth Speak, I delve into the rhetoric of the voice, and what happens when we lose and regain voice, both figuratively and physically. In January of 2022, my father--an actor, singer, writer, bird-lover, and my artistic mentor--became quadriplegic and permanently ventilator-dependent after an accident. He could not speak until he learned to use a Passy Muir Valve, a small speaking implement fitted to a tracheostomy tube to direct air to the vocal cords. As a daughter and sound designer, I became fascinated by, and concerned with exploring the human voice; what voice is and means, how it changes, and changes us. I take a trauma-contextualized approach to framing voice in multiple capacities and use that to comment artistically on the power and the challenges of regained speaking on mechanical ventilation.
As a sound designer, writer, composer, lecturer, and audio storyteller, I have always been enthralled with integrating themes of narrative medicine with my art to teach and reflect upon what it is to heal and move through. Using collected medical and environmental sounds, recorded original poetry, vocal narratives from my father, and composed music, I intend to create an audio world where vocal possibility and stark emotion are intertwined to explore the multi-faceted journey toward healing.
Audio Storytelling - "The Sleeping Pianist"
The following is an excerpt from one of my short stories for audio, "The Sleeping Pianist," as prepared for my MFA graduating reading, December 2022.
Select Recordings - Singer-Songwriter (as Liz Ryder). More recordings available at: lizrydermusic.com
Select Recordings - Sound Design/Theatrical Compositions (as Liz Ryder). More information available at: lizrydersound.com