She grows louder

Talbot, Samantha (2025) She grows louder. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

She Grows Louder (2019-24) proposes and defines ‘spontaneous song’ as a distinct methodology for song-making by asking the question “How can we harness spontaneity to perform, capture, produce, and release original songs?”. Spontaneous song as a methodology has its roots in religious practice through spirituals, gospel, and blues as a form of protest, but the term is reframed here to document and reflect my experience in the studio and beyond. With its conceptual anchor in Kristin Hersh’s The Future of Songwriting (2024), via autotheory and comparable practices, and through a personal, multimodal, and practice-based inquiry, spontaneous song is explored and foregrounded through the lens of desire, with the outcomes being the essential 34-track, three-hour concept album/artefact, Space Junk (2023), and associated, orbiting works. These pieces attempt to undo dominant epistemologies and conventions of popular music through subverting modes of production and embracing strategies of spontaneity to counter the homogeneity of algorithmic reproduction. The works are documented and disseminated through the nonconventional commentary 'out loud,’ published direct-to-reader on Substack as a personal and political testimony foregrounding and reflecting the spontaneous methodology. In the final stages, the project embraced, and went beyond, ‘wild research’ as a way of understanding the spontaneous methodology within a broader and related research context. I am the first to publish a PhD thesis on Substack, and in the unique way I have. Throughout the project, I addressed the lacuna in popular music research on songwriting practices, as relayed by songwriters, over scholars, especially that of women. By delving into this intense and voluminous body of work, and uncovering disparate materials, positionings and evocations by artistic intuitive practice in a spontaneous way, I disturbed the binaries between the artistic and academic, and forged new ways of knowing, researching and understanding in which the intimate and personal fold back onto the universal and culturally shared. Central to this inquiry is the assertion that this holds value as a social practice for exploring emotion and originating responsive affective material, for both the artist and the audience. Art is not an industry; it is that which saves us.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: M Music and Books on Music > M Music
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Culture and Creative Arts > Music
• Supervisor's Name: Harris, Professor Louise and Findlay-Walsh, Dr. Iain
• Date of Award: 2025
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2025-85297
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 08 Jul 2025 13:14
• Last Modified: 18 Sep 2025 15:51
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.85297
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85297

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