The objective in this compositional research has been to create a portfolio of compositions with the goal of developing my musical language. This has been achieved through a portfolio that explores characterisation, transformation, dialogue, interaction, contrast and, latterly, timbre in the context of a teleological framework. Seven works are presented for a range of instrumental and vocal forces according to the opportunities taken throughout the research period. The majority of the works in the portfolio are under 10 minutes in duration and the final two cumulative works explore longer timeframes of c.15 and c.30 minutes respectively. The seven pieces are presented in the order of completion:1. Multiple Infection (2010) for clarinet, cello, percussion and piano.2. Contrasting Spectrum (2011) for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano.3. Splintering Factions (2012) for chamber orchestra.4. Chinese Whispers (2013) for violin and viola.5. Memoriam retinebimus (2014) for SATB choir and solo group (4 females and 2 males). 6. Sporos (2015) for string quartet.7. Relentless Continuum (2015-2016) for symphony orchestra. This portfolio also includes an analytical commentary in eight chapters prefaced with an opening section (part one) introducing the author and compositional research. This part also presents elements of the author's musical language including a short introduction of characterisation, teleology, transformation, dialogue, interaction, contrast and timbre with a brief discussion of notable influences that led to the implementation of these elements. Lastly, part two details the seven pieces of the portfolio in the form of musical commentaries over seven chapters, one piece being discussed in each chapter. The last chapter presents reflections and evaluations on the portfolio and future goals.

This thesis tracks my journey through eight creative works which employ a broad range of methodologies to map the dynamic life of lines and that focus on concepts of ephemerality, gestural tracing, grains and swarms of sound, and temporal independence. My original contribution to knowledge in composition is led by my personal relationship to sound as mediated through physical gesture in performance. Drawing upon the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold, I have worked with video as a medium for my own sketch processes and as a scoring platform. Video is used to capture and document qualities of motion that bring choreographic and multimodal thinking into my music, propagating divergent approaches to structuring and determining parameters. Through this I have developed ways of thinking compositionally through the visual medium and worked with micro and macro qualities in timbre and movement to achieve effects that I term 'dynamic stasis'. Central to my thinking is an expanded concept of the line as gestalts of sound, video, bodily and mechanical movement, with form arising from a meshwork of such lines. The line as represented in video and musical action contributes to the tendencies and behaviours of precisely notated sound and physical movements in my music, that are reflected in irregular divisions of time and frequent fluctuations of sound characteristics. My discussion of the visual and choreographic perspectives of my notation and multimodal ways of thinking about composition is contextualised with examples from composers such as Jennifer Walshe, Simon Steen- Andersen and Stefan Prins, and the video scoring systems of Cat Hope.

This thesis addresses the question of how socio-political differences and lived experiences of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity may be perceived to manifest in the making of sound arts and experimental musics with a specific focus upon works made by women. Drawing upon compositions, installations and artist-archives including works by Lina Džuverovic, Anne Hilde Neset, Cathy Lane, Emma Hedditch, Sonia Boyce, Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether, the research considers the different ways in which the category of “woman” has been historically silenced, erased, ignored and disqualified from and misrepresented within dominant historical sound and music histories. I then ask what representations of “woman” might have materialised within this relational paradigm that “privileges the perspective of an archetypal Western, white, and male subject” as the universal subject of sound (Rodgers 2010b: v)? In particular noise and silence are addressed as the assumed polar limits of sound arts and experimental musics combined with a reconsideration of the fundamental parameters of pitch, timbre and amplitude as sound’s dominant laws, norms and conventions. The analysis of how the artists addressed within the research have in turn used and critiqued historically dominant representations through their aesthetic practices aims to demonstrate the ways in which these artists have challenged, resisted or transformed sound art and experimental music practices in the historical present. This research aims to contribute new insights within the emerging field of feminist sound studies by connecting social and aesthetic processes in contemporary sound arts and experimental music practices within a discourse of feminist composition. Such a discourse seeks to contribute to the materialisation of alternative sound and music economies through the subtle calibration of compositional strategies that seek to displace dominant compositional processes intent upon regulating the noise of the social as a field of normalisation for the reproduction of the individual, self-sovereign and universally masculine subject of sound. Ultimately, what this research seeks to contribute is how to experience feminist composition as a social event.

Data-driven sequence models have long played a role in the analysis and generation of musical information. Such models are of interest in computational musicology, computer-aided music composition, and tools for music education among other applications. This dissertation beginswith an experiment tomodel sequences of musical pitch in melodies with a class of purely data-driven predictive models collectively known as Connectionist models. It was demonstrated that a set of six such models could performon par with, or better than state-of-the-art n-gram models previously evaluated in an identical setting. A new model known as the Recurrent Temporal Discriminative Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RTDRBM), was introduced in the process and found to outperform the rest of the models. A generalisation of this modelling task was also explored, and involved extending the set of musical features used as input by the models while still predicting pitch as before. The improvement in predictive performance which resulted from adding these new input features is encouraging for future work in this direction. Based on the above success of the RTDRBM, its application was extended to a non-musical sequence labelling task, namely Optical Character Recognition. This extension involved a modification to the model’s original prediction algorithm as a result of relaxing an assumption specific to the melody modelling task. The generalised model was evaluated on a benchmark dataset and compared against a set of 8 baseline models where it faired better than all of them. Furthermore, a theoretical extension to an existingmodel which was also employed in the above pitch prediction task - the Discriminative Restricted Boltzmann Machine (DRBM) - was proposed. This led to three new variants of the DRBM (which originally contained Logistic Sigmoid hidden layer activations), withHyperbolic Tangent, Binomial and Rectified Linear hidden layer activations respectively. The first two of these have been evaluated here on the benchmark MNIST dataset and shown to perform on par with the original DRBM.

Two compositional concerns are prevalent and interrelated in my recent music. The first is an interest in the use of predetermined decisions, and in many cases rule-based systems, to influence the organization of events in a piece. The orientation towards predetermined systems reflects a desire to avoid well-established musical tendencies, which is achieved to the extent that decisions are removed from moment-to-moment compositional activity, thereby evading perceptual intuition and factors of musical acculturation. The use of predetermined systems also reflects a concern for clarity of compositional intention, as processes tend to produce structurally coherent developments due to their gradual and systematic progression. The second characteristic that is prominent in my music is an interest in recurrent sectional forms, which not only divide time but also offer listeners additional opportunities to absorb the musical ideas explored in a piece. These two concerns, predetermined systems and sectional forms, are brought together through the use of interleaved structures, whereby developments with distinct identities are divided, into segments and alternated in succession. Interleaved structures are uniquely continuous; upon the return of each process, the development resumes from the point at which it was last suspended. Consequently, each segment represents just a portion of the whole, and the full development of each process is only revealed over the duration of the piece. When developments are transformed to the extent that their surface qualities are significantly altered then dynamic relationships are likely to arise between them as the piece unfolds. Interleaved structures suggest a shift in compositional concerns from the vertical to those that are oriented horizontally. In my own music this has resulted in a greater emphasis on the relationships between processes, and more specifically, on how those relationships evolve over the duration of the piece.

This PhD portfolio focuses on research across interactive computer music composition and live performance involving instrumental players and instrumental sounds. It examines methods of disjoining original connections between performers’ actions, the instrument as sound sources, and musical outcomes, and also methods of reconstructing new connections between them via electronic intermediation. At the same time, the portfolio of creative works presented in this study proposes multiple performing styles and explores innovative electroacoustic music as well as its context. Through this portfolio, the composer invites readers to her original sound world and individual musical concepts, which are informed by visually-related ideas such as imaginary views, colours, scenes of a story, and art paintings, alongside their associated titles.

This thesis is comprised of a portfolio of musical compositions with accompanying media and a written commentary. In each of the seven compositions, the timbral palettes of musical instruments have been expanded through unconventional physical manipulation. The written commentary presents, in detail, specific examples of how this has been achieved. Alongside descriptions of the work in question, select aspects of other composers' music that approach a similar aesthetic are also referred to. In addition, the fundamental role technology has played in the creation or realisation of certain pieces is addressed. Also included are descriptions of the various customised notational systems used throughout the portfolio. It is outlined how each of these systems has been constructed in a clear and practical manner and, where possible, has incorporated elements derived from the lingua franca in order to communicate the required information as efficiently as possible to the performers.

This research project consists of a portfolio of musical compositions and an accompanying commentary on these works. It was undertaken from the fall of 2009 to the summer of 2012. I am concerned in this project with developing a wide range of musical materials to serve as a pool of resources that I may draw upon when composing. I engage with these materials in a painterly fashion, repeatedly reworking them with respect to their physical reality much like a painter reshapes an image on canvas. I cultivate different emphases within materials ― such as the tac)lity of sound produc)on, superimposed rhythmic layers, and stasis ― to explore diverse musical functionalities. I interweave common source materials to create extensive networks of relationships within and across individual pieces. These relationships lead to composite and multipartite structures built from material inter references. Transferring materials into different contexts allows me to develop the same musical idea in multiple directions, leading to a diversity of forms and durations, from five-second solos isolating a specific gesture to twenty-plus minute pieces incorporating a range of instrumental groupings and material combinations. This diversity is most evident in An Incomplete Survey of the Act of Impingement, an extended project integrating a variety of materials, structures, and independent compositions into a composite whose interconnections allow for multiple programming possibilities. My understanding of such interconnection between heterogeneous elements is extended through resonance with the work of other artists and philosophers: for instance, Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's concept of the rhizome, Anthony Braxton's interwoven musical system, Ben Marcus's approach to organizing and categorizing his writings, and Matthew Ritchie's multimedia installations. The materials and methodologies cultivated in this project provide a foundation for future developments in my work.

Die durch Papier entstehenden Geräusche umgeben uns mehr, als uns vielleicht bewusst ist. Gleichzeitig erscheint das Material in seinen klanglichen Möglichkeiten limitiert, denn die mit Papier assoziierten Klänge sind an wenige Handlungen gebunden. Dabei ist Papier ein variantenreiches Material, mit dem sich viele und sehr unterschiedliche Klänge in verschiedenen Tonhöhen und Klangfärbungen erzeugen lassen. Das Material ist gerade deshalb so reizvoll, weil es für visuelle Gestaltung prädestiniert zu sein scheint. Das Umnutzen von Objekten und Materialien eröffnet jedoch neue kreative Möglichkeiten, indem der konventionelle Gebrauch durch die Verwendung gebrochen wird.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the relationship between place, identity and musical practice. The study is inspired by Malta’s history and culture. This work presents a portfolio of seven musical compositions with a written component that highlights the historical and socio-cultural issues that had a bearing on the works presented. A case study of the Maltese composer Charles Camilleri is also provided. Camilleri is both a great example of a composer for whom the articulation of national identity was a primary concern and a constant source of inspiration for the author of this thesis. The pieces presented here comprise compositions for chamber ensemble, works for orchestra and two electroacoustic pieces. These works were part of projects translated into performances and artistic installations. All of them have been carried out over the past six years and the majority have been developed through synergetic collaboration with other artists. The majority of the compositions have direct links with Maltese culture and the important events in its history. All the works presented in the portfolio are bound in separate volumes and reference is made to them in the critical commentary within the body of the thesis. A number of CDs and DVDs accompany this document with recordings and MIDI files of the selected compositions.