Tom Macfadyen

The Student Collaboration Society began as a creative experiment between a small group of students at the Conservatoire. Tom arranged several collaborative sessions in the spring of 2022 to observe what happens when students from different creative backgrounds come together to improvise and generate ideas. The results were interesting and surprising, igniting a sense of curiosity in all of those involved.

A drama student would recite a poem, which would be supported by a live improvised musical accompaniment – which, in turn, would affect how the poem was read. Others would engage in improvised movement, drawing attention to the body and the form of those in the room, leading to different ways of thinking about space. These feedback loops were rich and inspiring, sparking new ideas in everyone attending.

Tom brought a series of prompts to each session, which acted as starting points for the collaboration and discussion. The prompts involved different media and applied to multiple disciplines, such as graphic notation, text scores, films, drawings, objects, instruments, and elements within the space. Tom also encouraged participants to bring along their own ideas and prompts.

Initially, the society intended to generate new interdisciplinary works, but it has since shifted focus to structures and processes. The society’s ambition is to develop a community of students who are interested in coming together and exploring innovative ways of working with each other. To Tom, this felt like a more worthwhile long-term goal with a potentially longer-lasting influence on the creative practices that are forming at RCS.

The Student Collaboration Society is committed to providing a safe space for people with different access requirements to comfortably express themselves and explore new ideas without the fear of being judged. They encourage attending students to be mindful of differing experiences and creative values and highlight the importance of seeking consent when engaging in creative collaboration.

This focus on the social aspects and the ethics of collaboration has also informed Tom’s own practice as a composer and improviser, particularly in his use of live electronics. During workshops, Tom would process sounds from microphones in the room on his laptop using a custom-built Max/MSP patch, which he controls with his iPad. The laptop becomes both an instrument and an environment through which Tom explores how human performers interact with computers in improvisation – and the questions around performativity, authorship, agency, and influence that arise when improvising with technology.

The society has received a lot of constructive feedback from its attendees, gaining insight into the kinds of ideas and mediums people are interested in exploring and the resources needed to collaborate. Going forward, they plan to reach out to more students from non-musical disciplines and organise more opportunities to perform in front of audiences.