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The aim of this research is to explore new creative outcomes of the use of emergent generative systems as material in audio and audiovisual experimental art. The portfolio includes the following compositions: Construction in Self, Construction in Zhuangzi and Construction in Kneading, the last two each comprising of three separate pieces. The mathematical systems used are the Lorenz dynamical system and the Mandelbox fractal. Through considering their potential for emergence, the aesthetic possibilities that generative systems offer in the context of experimental computational art are explored. The approach is initially investigated in the audio domain in CiS, a generative electronic music work. CiZ and CiK, the two main sets of works that comprise the portfolio, then explore the technique of “live audiovisualisation”: the simultaneous sonification and visualisation of the same source of data in real-time. Aesthetic considerations of the use of data as sound and moving image and their combination is discussed with reference to research into auditory displays, experimental film and perception. The techniques used include my approach of “self-similar sonification”: the presentation of data as audio at multiple time-scales, including at audio rate by means of non-standard synthesis or audification. All the works are implemented in the programming environment Max/MSP/Jitter.

The purpose of this commentary is to discuss the context and theoretical underpinnings that form the basis of my four publications, and how these works have made a meaningful contribution to the study of American socio-political discourse in general, and to the study of American historical music in particular. The study of American political history has principally focused on traditional primary and secondary sources for such inquiry: contemporary letters, journals and diaries, books, official documents, newspapers and other periodicals. One major primary source that has been largely overlooked is that of published music. Two factors have precipitated this oversight: historically, traditional musicology ignored popular music as having no scholarly legitimacy. Secondly, most repository institutions have ignored, or are unaware of, the historical context and relevance of socio-political sheet music, cataloging it as a one-dimensional artifact defined almost exclusively in musical terms such as “vocal,” “instrumental,” or “ballads,” and not for its historical context and non-musical relevance. Published music encompasses far more than just notation, structure and form; it illuminates a plethora of human activity far beyond the composer-listener archetype: performance, publishing, commercial enterprise, and socio-political context are only a few of these extra-musical facets of published music that can tell us not only about the composer and music itself, but also about the society in which it was created. It was the purpose of my four published works submitted herewith to begin to remedy these issues by illuminating a source of contemporary discourse that can shed a different light on history; a discourse oriented towards the popular masses rather than the educated elite. These four works broaden contemporary discourse in American history by providing historians with the knowledge of, and access to, this vast wealth of untapped resource material.

The submitted portfolio of work emerges from a focus on treating musicking bodies as compositional material. The work explores aspects of awkwardness in performance, slow motion movement, confrontation, simultaneous and multiple forms of intersubjective identity, public presentations of private activities, and dialogic relationships with performance. Because of these interests, and their grounding in performance, my practice has involved developing compositional approaches and strategies for working with documented forms of performance. The accompanying written commentary reflects on the findings of this investigation by focusing primarily on techniques of working with documents of performances. By considering Nicholas Cook’s notion of scores-as-scripts, by which musical scores are expanded from being isolated and autonomous texts of musical work to existing in relationship with instances of performance, I propose the notion of documents-as-scores. Reflecting on the capacity for documentation to transform representations and manifestations of performance, I suggest that chirographic and/or typographic representations of musical notation inscribed in the document-form of sheet music have the potential to function as documentation of performance. Expanding on this potential, and drawing from various definitions of the word “document,” I suggest that other document-forms such as audio/video files or human bodies can be musically inscribed to function as scores for performance. These scores are made of document-forms inscribed with information that I treat as material subject to compositional protocols of manipulation, which include protraction, expansion, situation, distortion, effacement, dislocation, isolation, and contextualization, among others. To narrow the scope of this research, I focus on ways in which musicking bodies are intellectually/physically engaged with, represented in, and embodiments of these documents-as-scores. Integrating examples from the portfolio, the commentary introduces the notion of documents-as-scores and proceeds to examine ways of working with different document-forms. In Chapter 1, physical and digital forms of notation are effaced to articulate facets of awkwardness and integrative destruction in music. In Chapter 2, distended, incomplete, and overlaid video and audio recordings are reflected in performance by looking and listening for representations and indices of physical action. In Chapter 3, humans/persons become formally constitutive embodied documents whose verbal, physical, and musical memories are situated within performative reading contexts.

This text is a commentary on the nature of my principle artistic preoccupations over a period of research-creation spanning 2011 and 2013. The works discussed cover, each in their own way, various approaches to sound composition linked to physical objects. In effect, the object proves to be a fundamental element at the heart of discourse, which, though anchored in sound, is often multi-disciplinary. The object here is thus taken apart in its affective, conceptual, performative, visual, as well as sonic properties. The first part of this text illustrates the nature of the relationship between the physical object and the works submitted for this doctoral thesis. It focuses on the journey of the works: from their genesis in the artist’s collections of objects to their life on stage where the objects are used as visual elements in a performative context. The second part is dedicated to the conceptual and aesthetic content of the works, from which flow the principal elements of their discourse. Here, the relationships between the work, the concept and the sonic material are established, which together make up their aesthetic.