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"Anything made by man, no matter how many varieties it assumes, and how much of the superhuman it seems to contain, must reveal its secret to the close observer." Paul Hindemith (1942: 176). "Are you one of those guys who wants to put crutches under my ass?" Lonnie Johnson (Keil 1966: 35). It is the aim of this thesis to define a musical genre by showing how, in the realisation of an improvisation, two key elements - the physical layout of a musical instrument and human movement patterns - are combined to produce music. This thesis takes as a model the twelve bar blues form, and examines the above aspects in the output of two pioneering figures of the melodic improvised guitar: Lonnie Johnson and T-Bone Walker. The thesis is in divided in to three sections; the first, which considers context, is divided in to four topics. • Identification of the model - the twelve bar blues form, and an examination of the meaning of the model to black culture. • Consideration of the role of geography on the emergent style • The guitar design and development. • Identification of the pioneering figures of the genre. The second section, which is concerned with musical, physical and analytical aspects, surveys theories of scale, mode, blues scale and blue notes, and suggests that blues improvisation is inextricably linked to spatio-motor based patterning. A geographical layout of the guitar is presented to aid in the analytical process. The third section is analytical and attempts to identify the melodic 'characteristics of the blues guitar genre. A series of transcriptions were made of improvisations of early blues guitar soloists. These are analysed by reduction and expansion. The tones produced in the improvisations were reduced to a modal hierarchy of principal, secondary and incidental tones which are presented on a fretboard form of notation. The resulting mode is reduced to a scale which is compared to theoretical definitions of blues scale. This raw data is then expanded by considering the left hand gestural movement between tones. gestures are seen to be linked together to form cells. These are sub-grouped in to various types. Larger structures, motives, are then defined as comprising several cells. The location of the cells in the model is indicated. These are categorised in groups for each performer. Thus improvisation is presented as an interaction, which takes place in time and space, between left hand movement strategies of the performer and the surface of a musical instrument.

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The aim of the following investigation is two-fold. Firstly, the project takes as its focus the growing corpus of secondary literature written on the work of the French philosophers and theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose work has generated a great deal of interest in recent years and a proportionate amount of controversy. Much of this controversy can be attributed to simplifications and misunderstandings on the part of commentators who have in some instances neglected to approach Deleuze and Guattari with sufficent rigour and care, resulting in the perpetuation of so many misunderstandings regarding their work. Secondly, the project will seek to redress some of these misunderstandings by recourse to a pragmatic embodiment of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts and ideas through a case-study based on the life and work of the African-American jazz musician Miles Davis. In attempting to provide a new and challenging case as the basis for this investigation, the overriding aim is to assess the pragmatic remit of Deleuze and Guattari's thought, in terms of aesthetics, ethics and politics, whilst remaining sensitive to the potential limitations and dangers of their project.

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This research investigates the process of “opening out” spaces with sound as an approach to sonic arts practice, investigating the spaces that sounds articulate, reveal and imply in our encounter with them. It positions spatial aesthetics as a key consideration at each stage of the creative process and connects approaches to spatiality in sonic arts practices with contextual considerations drawn from, for example, phenomenological accounts of spatial and sonic experience, human geography, architecture and acoustic ecology. The portfolio consists of seven sonic artworks and two collaborative projects that each engage with these ideas from a different perspective, exploring a number of applications, contexts and outcomes in the investigation. This accompanying commentary discusses these works, providing an introduction to the portfolio followed by a discussion, in the subsequent chapters, of the practices explored and developed in the research process.

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