Artist Profile: ArtLab Artist-in-Residence Jessie Cox On Sound as a Way of Thinking

“When I walk down a street, I can’t help but hit a fence or signpost and listen to how it sounds,” said Jessie Cox, in an interview with the Crimson. Cox is an artist-in-residence with ArtLab, as well as composer, drummer, and assistant professor of music at Harvard University.

“And as a drummer, it became, or it is very obvious to me through that instrument, that that’s a spatial understanding, or understanding of my surrounding, my environment, as well as my body as well,” said Cox.

His style in music is unique, and sound has a very special meaning for him. It’s not about the distinct style, but about finding possibility in the familiar and unfamiliar, trying to understand his environment in a new way.

“But when I write music, writing music is like the same as asking questions and thinking through something, but I do it in sound,” said Cox about his approach.

His musical journey began at the age of three. Seeing her son’s enthusiastic banging on his surroundings, Cox’s mom sent him to a music school where he started learning rhythm and solfège. The first instrument he was connected to was, unsurprisingly, a drumset.

“I still remember seeing it for the first time. When I was, I think, five years old, I immediately was drawn to it,” said Cox. “And I remember I had my first instrument that I owned was actually a steel drum, a children’s size steel drum, because my father is from Tobago and Trinidad.”

From playing an old instrument, native to his roots, to living in the multilingual country of Switzerland, these versatile experiences shaped the musician’s attitude to music.

“Being in a household where multiple languages are spoken and translation is part of every family gathering — that actually is music. So when we make music, we have to translate all the time, like we translate between instruments, we translate between ways of listening, ways of sounding, and so forth,” said Cox.

Cox follows the sound in his creative process. He lets himself be guided by his surroundings, experimenting with objects from the street and professional instruments.

“I do mostly what we might call modifications of instruments,” said Cox. “I think it is because I’m really interested with [what] the instrument brings with it, not only the actual object, as well as its history, as well as its systemic, economic [components], and otherwise, [the] entanglement in whatever made that instrument possible, but also the way that people who play the instrument and who write for this instrument think in sound.”

His approach is that the world is an instrument. From a signpost to a tree, anything that can create rhythmic thumping could become a story in his compositions.

“So it opens for me a set of other ways to ask questions about the systems, networks, and materials and ways of being that we have or we ideate, and it proposes from a different way of approaching things,” said Cox.

Unconventional artists, like Sun Ra Arkestra and Maria Chavez, are significant influences for Cox. The extravagant Sun Ra Arkestra’s approach to music is a tool for philosophical thinking and research; on the other hand, Maria Chavez experiments with sound creation by rubbing broken vinyl records in a bag to produce special distinctive beats.

“For me, I feel like I should really be inspired by everybody and everything,” said Cox. “One of the most inspiring things that just came to mind is the fact that we could, or can, listen to sounds from Mars. You know, that blew my whole mind, my whole musical mind, out of its context.”

His students, too, get to experience these discoveries. As an assistant professor in the Harvard University Department of Music, Cox teaches a course called “Music, Technology, and Ecology: Re-imagine the World with Sound,” where the main goal of the class is “opening people’s minds.” His way of thinking about sound leaves students not only with knowledge of music, but also with an entirely new way of experiencing the world.

“I think, fundamentally, one of my wishes is that we can — together when we are in class — become more aware and rethink how we engage with the world through sound, and sound here can be not just sound as in frequency range, but anything that we do as musicians,” said Cox.

Outside of music, Cox practices bonsai, reading, and is interested in physics, but, as he admits, even in these activities composers cannot escape the world of sound.

“I was trying to have bonsai be a hobby of mine, but now I’m writing this piece where I use trees to modify sounds of instruments. So it feels very much not like a hobby,” said Cox.

Cox combines his three roles in his personality: composer, drummer, and assistant professor, all guided by sound and the environment in his creative endeavors. Childhood aspirations, a multilingual environment, and his connection to Trinidad and Tobago created a phenomenal artist who views sound as vision, thinking, and discovery.