Composing abstractions? General musical behaviours in five new works for humans and computer
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Date
12/01/2023Author
Walker, Jack
Metadata
Abstract
This written thesis supports a portfolio of composition work. This portfolio was
composed to study ‘music systems’ - things that I intentionally design in order to
make music happen in future. As a composer of works for computers and humans,
music technology is an inherent requirement of my practice. However, I have noticed a tendency to spend a lot of time working on the technological components of
these systems, but little time making music. It is easy to conflate the task of composing music with the process of using technology. I argue that this is a matter of
‘analytical framing’. A purely technological framing of what music is, and how it
can be worked on, is clearly reductive. To present experiment with different framings, I identify a set of systems that were used to compose my portfolio and ask
what they are made of. I produce technical, temporal, communicative, social and
ethical answers to this question; each of these new analytical framings respectively
unpacked in a specific chapter of this thesis. This reveals that my compositional
practice, as a total structure made manifest through the content of my portfolio,
can be framed as a complex music system in itself. Crucially, this system is populated by general musical behaviours that are consistent across multiple different
framings of what my practice is. My primary argument is that interesting things
happen when these abstract behaviours are identified, sorted and instantiated into
new works of music. As a contribution to contemporary music discourse, my portfolio documents a novel set of approaches to working with music and systems. From a
theoretical standpoint, my multi-framed definition of ‘music system’ helps sidestep
a commonly encountered problem in electronic music studies: an over-fixation on
technicity which elides social and cultural context. Moreover, this project helps ingrain a practice-orientated understanding of music systems design, by concluding
that music systems exist most significantly (i.e. most practically) as iterative, playful
and emergent processes of modulating sound perception through time.