In 2013, I completed trans-disciplinary and practice-led PhD research into the writer Gertrude Stein and one of her text called Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother. I paired this with research into sound, and a notion of love she pointed me to in language. My outcomes are as follows.
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* A thesis tilted Soundage: a Practice-led Approach to Gertrude Stein, Sound and Generative Language, available here … https://eprints.qut.edu.au/63361/1/Majena_Mafe_Thesis.pdf

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Keywords in Thesis
Sound; Soundage; Sound in language; Sounded-language; Sound theory; Gertrude Stein; Listening; Third-ear; Language; Discourse analysis; Content analysis; Literary canon; Event; Meaning/unmeaning; Sound thinking; Non-cochlea; Delire; Non(sense); Jouissance; Love; Matrixial Borderspace; Bracha Ettinger; Luce Irigaray; Feminist theory; Psychoanalysis; Sonic Poetics; Ventriloquism; Digital animation; Digital opera; Fictocriticism; Inter-disciplinarity; Digital; Sonic arts; Practice-led research.
 
Abstract of Thesis
In this practice-led research project I work to show how a re-reading and a particular form of listening to the sound-riddled nature of Gertrude Stein’s work, Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother, presents us with a contemporary theory of sound in language. This theory, though in its infancy, is a particular enjambment of sounded language that presents itself as an event, engaged with meaning, with its own inherent voice. It displays a propensity through engagement with the ‘other’ to erupt into love. In this thesis these qualities are reverberated further through the work of Seth Kim-Cohen’s notion of the non-cochlear, Simon Jarvis’s notion of musical thinking, Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s notion of délire or nonsense, Luce Irigaray’s notion of jouissant love and the Bracha Ettinger’s notion of the generative matrixial border space. This reading then is simultaneously paired with my own work of scoring and creating a digital opera from Stein’s work, thereby testing and performing Stein’s theory. In this I show how a re-reading and re- listening to Stein’s work can be significant to feminist ethical language frames, contemporary philosophy, sonic art theory and digital language frames.
 
Further significance of this study is that when the reverberation of Stein’s engagements with language through sound can be listened to, a pattern emerges, one that encouragingly problematizes subjectivity and interweaves genres/methods and means, creating a new frame for sound in language, one with its own voice that I call soundage.
 
* A large digitally animated ‘opera’ pictures of which follow. Titled Soundage a Digital Opera(tion) is a large scale digital work presented as 19 screens with digitally animated ventriloquist dummies singing the theory of sound called ‘soundage’ that I have taken from Gertrude Stein’s text Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother. This work and the PhD research and thesis that supported the work was presented at The Block, QUT, Brisbane Australiain 2013.
 
 * And a hardbound book titled Soundage: an appendix. This text is available online for perusing and or purchasing. It contains images, scores from the opera and my workings with Stein’s text. https://www.blurb.com/b/3275379-soundage-an-appendix