Proof of Identity

Mo Zareei

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

About a decade ago, I made a piece of electronic music and titled it "Middle Eastern IDM" for a course assignment. After listening to it in class, my professor asked what was Middle Eastern about it. It was only a year after I had left Iran to study in the US, and I didn't know that I could say "I am. I made the piece". So I went back and superimposed a sample of Egyptian protest chants on top of the piece, to make it "sufficiently Middle Eastern". What prejudiced conservatism and performative liberalism share is gatekeeping practices that box one in a preconceived state of otherness. While the former overtly regards that otherness as inferior, the latter exoticises it through patronising paternalism. To me, it is especially troubling when exclusionary practices are driven by some form of "diversity/inclusion" agenda. If you don't fit the diversity box they've made for you, too bad. It's your fault for being "insufficiently diverse". "Poor thing, you've been colonised!", they tell you, as they claim ownership over a collection of frequencies, rhythms, tools, or techniques. When you look at who gets to decide if something's indigenous enough, you see how decolonisation itself has been colonised. When listening to this work, you can keep in mind that it was made by someone from Iran. But I should clarify that this piece has no intentional connections to the patterns of the Persian carpet or the poetry of Rumi. And those moments of "non-western" sonorities reflect the fact that the work has been developed using a custom-designed Max/MSP instrument that completely deconstructs a piece of traditional Iranian music and puts it through multi-layered transformational processes to produce entirely new timbral, temporal, and formal material. So in short, while this piece might not sound like the archetypical Iranian music, I assure you that it is Iranian enough.

Citation

Mo Zareei. 2022. Proof of Identity. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.21428/92fbeb44.2e34544f [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2022_music_26,
 abstract = {About a decade ago, I made a piece of electronic music and titled it "Middle Eastern IDM" for a course assignment. After listening to it in class, my professor asked what was Middle Eastern about it. It was only a year after I had left Iran to study in the US, and I didn't know that I could say "I am. I made the piece". So I went back and superimposed a sample of Egyptian protest chants on top of the piece, to make it "sufficiently Middle Eastern". What prejudiced conservatism and performative liberalism share is gatekeeping practices that box one in a preconceived state of otherness. While the former overtly regards that otherness as inferior, the latter exoticises it through patronising paternalism. To me, it is especially troubling when exclusionary practices are driven by some form of "diversity/inclusion" agenda. If you don't fit the diversity box they've made for you, too bad. It's your fault for being "insufficiently diverse". "Poor thing, you've been colonised!", they tell you, as they claim ownership over a collection of frequencies, rhythms, tools, or techniques. When you look at who gets to decide if something's indigenous enough, you see how decolonisation itself has been colonised. When listening to this work, you can keep in mind that it was made by someone from Iran. But I should clarify that this piece has no intentional connections to the patterns of the Persian carpet or the poetry of Rumi. And those moments of "non-western" sonorities reflect the fact that the work has been developed using a custom-designed Max/MSP instrument that completely deconstructs a piece of traditional Iranian music and puts it through multi-layered transformational processes to produce entirely new timbral, temporal, and formal material. So in short, while this piece might not sound like the archetypical Iranian music, I assure you that it is Iranian enough.},
 address = {Auckland, New Zealand},
 articleno = {26},
 author = {Mo Zareei},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.21428/92fbeb44.2e34544f},
 editor = {Raul Masu},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {jun},
 title = {Proof of Identity},
 track = {Music},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.21428/92fbeb44.2e34544f},
 year = {2022}
}