The PhD investigates the creation of closeness and immediacy through composition, exploring the processes of capturing, processing and composing sound materials, their spatialisation both during production and performance, and the sound materials' contexts. It is suggested that closeness can be understood spatially, temporally and in addition as being familiar with sounds and musical languages; whereas immediacy adds the meaning of being involved at some level in the shaping or decoding of the meaning of sounds of a composition. In that sense closeness and immediacy together form entry-points for the listener to make him/her become engaged in the compositional narrative. Seven original acousmatic and mixed media works are presented in the portfolio. These are stone and metal, empty rooms, weave/unravel, skalna, pulses, beeps and triptych. The pieces rely on found sounds and their referential qualities, with both informing the compositional methodologies. They also borrow elements from soundscape composition, electronic music and film music. Over the development of the portfolio the inclusion of elements of other genres of music became a valuable source of inspiration and shaped the compositional methodology which lead to the development of a unique, personal style of composition. Three of the PhD’s compositions – pulses, beeps and triptych – investigate the musical opportunities of an acousmatic take on stems to improve the flexibility and perceived depth of spatialisation. The spatial layers of the compositions are split into parts of a soundfile. These parts can be mapped according to specific rules to the number of loudspeakers available. The portfolio pieces demonstrate that composing in spatial stems enhances spatial depth as close and distant sounds can be reproduced independently of each other on dedicated loudspeakers at the same time. The sounds of the distant loudspeakers merge with the acoustic properties of the performance space and therefore assist in making the composed spaces credible. In addition to the compositions, one original software tools are presented in the portfolio (PLib), as well as a substantial contribution to an existing tool (MANTIS Diffusion System). They aim to facilitate the production and performance of electroacoustic music. Their application and potential is briefly discussed in the commentary.

This portfolio of compositions investigates the adaptation of state-space models, frequently used in engineering control theory, to the electroacoustic composition context. These models are mathematical descriptions of physical systems that provide several variables representing the system’s behaviours. The composer adapts a set of state-space models of either abstract, mechanical or electrical systems to a music creation environment. She uses them in eight compositions: five mixed media multi-channel pieces and three mixed media pieces. In the portfolio, the composer investigates multiple ways of meaningfully mapping these system’s behaviours into music parameters. This is done either by exploring and creating timbre in synthetic sound, or by transforming existing sounds. The research also involves the process of incorporating state-space models as a real-time software tool using Max and SuperCollider. As real-time models offer several variables of continuous evolutions, the composer mapped them to different dimensions of sound simultaneously. The composer represented the model’s evolutions with either short/interrupted, long or indefinitely evolving sounds. The evolution implies changes in timbre, length and dynamic range. The composer creates gestures, textures and spaces based on the model’s behaviours. The composer explores how the model’s nature influences the musical language and the integration of these with other music sources such as recordings or musical instruments. As the models represent physical processes, the composer observes that the resulting sounds evolve in organic ways. Moreover, the composer not only sonifies the real-time models, but actually excites them to cause changes. The composer develops a compositional methodology which involves interacting with the models while observing/designing changes in sound. In that sense, the composer regards real-time state-space models as her own instruments to create music. The models are regarded as additional forces and as sound transforming agents in mixed media pieces. In fixed media pieces, the composer additionally exploits their linearity to create space through sound de-correlation.

Electroacoustic music is often regarded as not being sufficiently accessible to the general public because of its sound-based abstract quality and the complexity of its language. Live electronic music introduces the figure of the performer as a gestural bodily agent that re-enables our multimodal perception of sound and seems to alleviate the accessibility dilemma. However, live electronic music generally lacks the level of detail found in studio-based fixed media works, and it can hardly be transferred outside the concert hall situation (e.g. as a video recording) without losing most of its fresh, dynamic and unpredictable nature. Recent developments in 3D simulation environments and game audio technologies suggest that alternative approaches to music composition and distribution are possible, presenting an opportunity to address some of these issues. In particular, this Portfolio of Compositions proposes the use of real and virtual space as a new medium for the creation and organisation of sound events via computer-simulated audio-sources. In such a context, the role of the performer is sometimes assumed by the listener itself, through the operation of an interactive-adaptive system, or it is otherwise replaced by a set of automated but flexible procedures. Although all of these works are sonic centric in nature, they often present a visual component that reinforces the multimodal perception of meaningful musical structures, either as real space locations for sonic navigation (locative audio), or live visualisations of physically-informed gestural agents in 3D virtual environments. Consequently, this thesis draws on general game-audio concepts and terminology, such as procedural sound, non-linearity, and generative music; but it also embraces game development tools (game engines) as a new methodological and technological approach to electroacoustic music composition. In such context, space and the real-time generation, control, and manipulation of assets combine to play an important role in broadening the routes of musical expression and the accessibility of the musical language. The portfolio consists of six original compositions. Three of these works–Swirls, Alice - Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, and Alcazabilla–are interactive in nature and they required the creation of custom software solutions (e.g. SonicMaps) in order to deal with open-form musical structures. The last three pieces–Singularity, Apollonian Gasket, and Boids–are based on fractal or emergent behaviour models and algorithms, and they propose a non-interactive linear organisation of sound materials via real-time manipulation of non-conventional 3D virtual instruments. These original instrumental models exhibit strong spatial and kinematic qualities with an abstract and minimal visual representation, resulting in an extremely efficient way to build spatialisation patterns, texture, and musical gesture, while preserving the sonic-centric essence of the pieces.

This research project addresses the problem of scoring non-narrative film work. Deprived of a narrative content to follow, the composer faces the fundamental problem of deciding what other elements should be considered for establishing a meaningful relationship between the screened events and the music soundtrack. In order to mitigate the problem, this research project investigates the possibility of applying cross-modal principles to soundtrack composition, and systematically exploits the human ability to experience or interpret the information channeled through one sense modality in terms of another. After the Introduction which explains the research aims and methods, the thesis is structured into subsequent chapters. Chapter two considers cross-modal relationships in music and other expressive arts along with a brief consideration of Reception Theory and its relation to my work. Chapter three provides a set of four case studies of contemporary compositional approaches to non-narrative film. Chapter four demonstrates a new and systematic approach to soundtrack composition through a specially devised Table of Audio-Visual Correspondences, mapping parameters from one domain to another. This method is then applied in Chapter five in relation to a portfolio of original composed soundtracks. A detailed analysis is provided of each piece and the application of crossmodal logic to the scoring of non-narrative video is discussed and evaluated. Finally, Chapter six offers conclusions, recommendations, and outlines the scope for further research. An explanation is given of how work on this thesis has affected my own practice and compositional voice. A suggestion is also provided on how this thesis can benefit the wider film music academic and practitioner community.