Composing abstractions? General musical behaviours in five new works for humans and computer

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.