Panoramic Sound Quilting
Matana Roberts and Process Thought
I’m really devoted to a certain sort of collagist aesthetic and I like what happens when all these sounds cross that are not necessarily completely related to each other. Then you listen back to them and it creates this whole other sonic palette. I call my, for lack of a better term, method of composition “panoramic soundquilting.” I’m definitely trying to quilt with all these different sounds and textures and it’s the only way I’ve been able to make sense of the different weaves which I’m trying to use within a historical narrative.
- Matana Roberts, as quoted in Robert Ham. "Matana Roberts on 'Panoramic Soundquilting,' Living on a Boat and Exploring the South." Paste Magazine, 13 Feb. 2015
Few of us can make quilts from tangible fabrics such as cotton, wool, or linen, but all of us are constantly stitching together quilts made of something less visible yet just as real—the voices we receive from the past. I, like you, am a quiltmaker. Our very lives, moment by moment, are an improvisational integration of inherited voices—our own and others, consonant and conflicting —woven together in ways that shape who we are and who we become. In this sense, we are always in the process of panoramic soundquilting, piecing together memories, cultural influences, and personal experiences into something new. These quilts are our own immediate experience in the here and now.
I borrow the idea of panoramic soundquilting from artist and musician Matana Roberts, whose layered compositions blend history, personal narrative, and improvisation. A saxophonist, composer, and conceptual artist, Roberts is best known for her Coin Coin project, an expansive, multi-chapter work that explores themes of ancestry, identity, and social history through a fusion of jazz, spoken word, folk traditions, and avant-garde experimentation.
The title Coin Coin references the historical figure Marie Thérèse Coincoin (1742–1816), a formerly enslaved woman of African descent in Louisiana who became a landowner, businesswoman, and matriarch of a free Creole community. Roberts draws upon Coincoin’s life story as a means of exploring lineage, resistance, and the complexities of Black history in America, weaving these themes into a musical and conceptual tapestry that defies genre and traditional linear narratives. You can listen to some of her music below.
Roberts' work is an audible enactment of what Alfred North Whitehead calls concrescence—the process by which diverse elements are gathered, synthesized, and transformed into a fresh expression of reality. Whitehead describes this as "the production of novel togetherness," saying that in this production: "The many become one and are increased by one."
The many are the past actual world in its disjunctive diversity. They form a panorama that is received into and reshaped by the present experience of a concrescing subject. In Roberts' music, the many that that become one in the musical collage of her making include:
- Spoken historical narratives – Echoes of ancestral voices, oral traditions, and political testimony.
- Improvised free jazz textures – Unscripted saxophone lines, percussive fragments, and collective interplay.
- Field recordings and soundscapes – Environmental sounds, archival audio, and found material.
- Choral and spiritual influences – Gospel, operatic chanting, and ritualized vocalizations.
These elements form a panorama—a diverse sonic inheritance that she quilts together into an integrated whole. But this process is not passive; it requires the active, creative agency of the musician. Unlike a pre-designed quilt that follows a fixed pattern, Roberts’ quilting is improvisational—an act of spontaneous self-creativity in which decisions about sound, silence, layering, and contrast are made in the moment. This improvisational nature is key to how the past becomes present in a fresh, unexpected way.
Theologies influenced by Whitehead can rightly find her work a metaphor for each person's life, and then extend the idea of panoramic soundquilting beyond human lives to the more-than-human world. All actualities, in their temporal unfolding, engage in the creative act of weaving complex unities out of the many influences they inherit from the past. Other animals, living cells, and even the cosmos itself—an unfolding Life in whose consciousness the universe takes shape—are all instances of quiltmaking. This larger Life, otherwise named God, is not external to the world but the living whole of the universe itself.
Whitehead speaks of this living whole as consequent nature of God. It as an ongoing process of weaving the many influences in the universe —the many voices—into a single, evolving experience. Moment by moment, the universe bequeaths itself to God as ancestors to be heard and woven into unity. The divine act of soundquilting is not one of rigid control but of love, seeking to create whatever beauty is possible in each passing moment. Just as Roberts stitches together sonic memories and cultural echoes—incorporating jazz, spoken word, field recordings, and noise—God, in the process view, quilts together the world’s experiences, holding both beauty and suffering, both melody and discord, in a way that allows each voice to retain its integrity while becoming part of a greater unfolding composition. In this sense, the divine is not an architect designing a static image from above but a deep listener, responding moment by moment to the world’s evolving song, shaping it into patterns of meaning without overriding its improvisational freedom.
There is a special value in a sonic metaphor as distinct from a visual metaphor when thinking about God’s relational nature. Visual metaphors often imply a fixed image—something already arranged, static, and seen from a distance. But sonic metaphors emphasize process, movement, and the way reality unfolds in time. Sound is immersive and participatory; it surrounds us, shapes us, and requires engagement.
Our personal soundquilts include cries of protest, echoes of trauma, the noise of uncertainty, and the raw sounds of suffering that do not immediately resolve into sweetness. And yet, even in this complexity, there is meaning—a recognition that to be fully present in the world is to embrace both the harmony and the discord.
In process thought, divine love does not erase the jagged edges of our experiences but receives them, holding space for them within a larger pattern of relational beauty. The divine act of quilting is not about forcing resolution but about honoring each voice, each vibration, and letting the fullness of life’s soundscape contribute to a composition that remains forever in process. In this holding and honoring, this remembering and quilting together, as is possible, there is love.