DYSPHONIA is a music and dance work, for violin soloist with a live chamber orchestra, including multiple laptops and a custom-built gesture detection system worn by a dancer. The piece was choreographed by Professor Charlotte Adams of the University of Iowa Dance Department and premiered at the Faculty Graduate Dance Concerts in February of 2015. This piece is inspired by ongoing research into computer programming, gesture and music-making, artificial intelligence (AI), and creative algorithms. While the actual algorithms I developed for use in this piece are far from sentient, it is my hope that this piece may bring about discussion and further interest in creative AI. In our initial discussions, choreographer Charlotte Adams and I discovered that we both have witnessed a large number of people buying into immersive technologies without questioning the total cost to their well being, without questioning whether the technology has a positive impact on their lives, and without an understanding regarding the complex changes being wrought in our society due to the mass adoption of such technologies. Thus we designed this piece around the technology itself, so that the union between the dancer and the prosthesis is brought about by the movement and action that takes place in the piece. The intent was to create a scene where the audience suddenly becomes aware that something new is happening, namely that the dancer’s glove has started to make noise and there is a new connection made between the music and the dance.

Premise and Objectives In our increasingly technology driven society, the impact of technology touches nearly every aspect of our lives in some form or another. This has been acutely felt within the world of percussion, with electroacoustic works representing perhaps the most rapidly expanding area of concert percussion over the last twenty years. Electroacoustic music couples electronic technology with traditional acoustic instruments and/or performance practices. Broadly, this paper outlines a systematic approach to teaching electroacoustic performance practice, based on elements found in a cross-section of percussion literature. In using such an approach, not only does each student become more capable of dealing with this growing body of literature, but also the process of educating these students becomes more efficient for the teacher. As a result, delivery becomes more effectively standardized, and resources can be shared more efficiently among multiple students who may be studying different types of electroacoustic repertoire. Method To organize this exploration, three main genres of electroacoustic repertoire for percussion are compared: prerecorded soundscape, live processing, and electronic pieces. This comparison illuminates the tools and techniques that are relevant to each type of repertoire and reflects not only the narrower focus of electroacoustic percussion, but also the broader goals of applied percussion instruction in the context of a “total” percussion program. Each classification is explored by addressing its critical elements using prime examples from the relevant standard repertoire. For the first classification of works, tape pieces, the project includes discussion on signal flow, balancing electronic and acoustic sound sources, an introduction to digital audio workstations (DAWs), and monitoring techniques. Two primary examples of the repertoire are used to contribute to this discussion; Javier Alvarez’s Temazcal for maracas and tape, and Brian Blume’s Strands of Time. Live processing works present increased challenges with concepts, including sound reinforcement, recording production, how to edit and creatively manipulate sound both in post-production and live, and detailed concepts of signal flow, often including MIDI protocol. To explore the concepts specifically relevant to live processed works, Nigel Westlake’s classic work, Fabian Theory, for amplified marimba and three toms, is offered. Electronic works give students further opportunity to explore MIDI mapping, patch and parameter changes using both hardware and software, and sometimes sound design. In this context, there is a brief exploration of Steve Reich’s Violin Phase. Finally, an exploration of Hans Werner Henze’s, Prison Song demonstrates how all of this technology and technique can come together in combination works. The work requires live sound reinforcement, pre-recorded soundscapes, separate monitoring, live processing, and live MIDI controllers. The paper closes with a brief summary of extra pedagogical considerations, including resource management, pedagogical philosophy, and further implications. Conclusion By examining the logical steps of pedagogically developing through the different broad categories of electroacoustic music, with an emphasis on its reflection of broader liberal values and critical applied analysis, it is believed that this research could yield a model for a more thoughtful approach for applied percussion teachers.

The combination of solo percussion with live electronics is one of the newest genres of music today. An outgrowth of the instrument and fixed media genre, live electronic music combines a musician on stage performing with a computer or other technology performing real-time processes. This document is a collection of five works scored for percussion and the computer program Max intended for the collegiate level. In addition, there are explanations and schematics of the patches to help the performer learn how to use Max. This document could serve as supplemental material for an undergraduate percussion curriculum to help students gain experience performing with live electronics. Most students in university music departments are not exposed to technology unless they seek it out themselves. This may cause many student instrumentalists to be hesitant to play works with technology. However, as performing with electronics becomes more common, music students without this experience are at a disadvantage. Basic knowledge of audio equipment, having experience using a microphone, sound recording, and other technical know-how is essential to becoming a successful performer in a contemporary setting. Being able to perform with electronics creates new opportunities for repertoire, collaboration, and performance. Many universities are starting new programs dedicated to interdisciplinary studies such as digital humanities. These collaborative efforts bring together musicians, dancers, writers, visual artists, computer scientists, and others to create new work. Music students who have some background in performing and working with electronics could be a part of these collaborative efforts and help produce compelling, original work.

Master of Music / The use of error by composers as a means of adding colour to a musical text has a long history, but the device is ultimately ineffective. Material whose significance is its incongruity is incorporated by recontextualization, and in time, becomes familiar and unremarkable. ‘Glitch’ is a stylistic mannerism within electroacoustic composition that emerged in the late 1990s. Glitch, or ‘microsound’, as it is known in an academic context, observes the conventions of music concrète, drawing on material sampled from the real world, and fashioning this into sonic narratives. Its signature is the ‘sound of failure’, sonorities characteristic of electronic devices malfunctioning or mis-used: clicks, crackles, distortions, fractured digital files. Glitch/microsound has already diminished from a movement to a mannerism, but its legacy is a refreshment of our palette of sonorities, and an interrogation of the very act of listening. This essay is short examination of the use (and nature) of noise a musical ingredient and the significance of glitch/microsound for electroacoustic composers. It concludes that this ‘style’ is little more than a nuance, and that its advent and advocacy were less to do with a new musical movement, than with a new generation of electronic composers attempting to distinguish itself.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once declared: “the human voice is the organ of the soul.” As a powerful signifier, with deep links to human presence, the voice can indicate psychological, emotional and physical states. In the works of contemporary Canadian electroacoustic composers Christian Calon, Robert Normandeau, Tanya Tagaq, Barry Truax, and Hildegard Westerkamp, the mutability of the recorded voice initiates an aesthetic process that constructs this human presence and expresses the composer’s own preoccupation with the body, namely the ageing, social, and erotic (homosexual and heterosexual) body. Through an application of research on electroacoustics, studio technology, gender, sexuality, linguistics, epistemology, and human physiology, I examine how specific works incorporate and modify the voice, and thus construct or conceal its physical origin (i.e., the body); I consider how composers variously highlight, re-construct, or even disentangle the expressive and communicative associations between the voice and the body. Rather than summarize numerous electroacoustic works, this dissertation focuses on the aesthetic, technological, and expressive elements of a small number of contemporary Canadian electroacoustic works. I first examine Normandeau’s Onomatopoeias cycle as an artistic exploration of the ageing process that considers both emotional and physical aspects specific to certain developmental stages, including childhood, adolescence, and old age, all with a lens of ironic nostalgia. Next I explore social and sensuous relationships, the unseen interactions between bodies as heard through the recorded voices in Barry Truax’s homoerotic Song of Songs (1992) and Tanya Tagaq’s two studio albums, Sinaa (2005) and Auk/Blood (2008). Finally, I consider how the voice is employed as a vehicle for storytelling and constructing identity in Christian Calon’s Minuit (1989) and Hildegard Westerkamp’s Für Dich – For You (2005) and MotherVoiceTalk (2008). The works are varied, but from the young girl in Éclats de voix (the first work in Normandeau’s Onomatopoeias cycle [1991-2009]) to the grown child and her elderly mother in MotherVoiceTalk, they find a link in human experience.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once declared: “the human voice is the organ of the soul.” As a powerful signifier, with deep links to human presence, the voice can indicate psychological, emotional and physical states. In the works of contemporary Canadian electroacoustic composers Christian Calon, Robert Normandeau, Tanya Tagaq, Barry Truax, and Hildegard Westerkamp, the mutability of the recorded voice initiates an aesthetic process that constructs this human presence and expresses the composer’s own preoccupation with the body, namely the ageing, social, and erotic (homosexual and heterosexual) body. Through an application of research on electroacoustics, studio technology, gender, sexuality, linguistics, epistemology, and human physiology, I examine how specific works incorporate and modify the voice, and thus construct or conceal its physical origin (i.e., the body); I consider how composers variously highlight, re-construct, or even disentangle the expressive and communicative associations between the voice and the body. Rather than summarize numerous electroacoustic works, this dissertation focuses on the aesthetic, technological, and expressive elements of a small number of contemporary Canadian electroacoustic works. I first examine Normandeau’s Onomatopoeias cycle as an artistic exploration of the ageing process that considers both emotional and physical aspects specific to certain developmental stages, including childhood, adolescence, and old age, all with a lens of ironic nostalgia. Next I explore social and sensuous relationships, the unseen interactions between bodies as heard through the recorded voices in Barry Truax’s homoerotic Song of Songs (1992) and Tanya Tagaq’s two studio albums, Sinaa (2005) and Auk/Blood (2008). Finally, I consider how the voice is employed as a vehicle for storytelling and constructing identity in Christian Calon’s Minuit (1989) and Hildegard Westerkamp’s Für Dich – For You (2005) and MotherVoiceTalk (2008). The works are varied, but from the young girl in Éclats de voix (the first work in Normandeau’s Onomatopoeias cycle [1991-2009]) to the grown child and her elderly mother in MotherVoiceTalk, they find a link in human experience.

I offer this dissertation as a survey and a story: a survey of my work across the field of sonic art and a story of my progressive compulsion toward sound that conveys touch. This haptic sensibility sharpens from Susurrus (2006) through Soma (2012), manifesting in a fixation on the impact of sound on bodies and the impact of bodies on sound. Both the visceral sensation of hearing and the manner in which movement imprints onto acoustic phenomena concern me. My musical forms are conceived not as abstract arrangements of objects (or notes) but as complex physical confrontations that produce audible byproducts. I compose primarily with chaotic spectra, mixing raw noise from found objects with extended instrumental techniques. These timbres front an acoustic wildness intentionally abated in conventional instrumental practice. And yet, the precision of classical instruments opens avenues of transformation closed to unmediated noise. Virtuosity and crudeness face-off in my work, circling an aesthetic region between embellishment and fact, between sound as a carrier of aesthetic intent and sound as a subsidiary effect of action. The ten works presented in this portfolio include eight compositions scored for a range of ensembles, from soloist to orchestra, with and without electronics, as well as two interactive multimedia installations. Dramatic links between physical movement and musical form arise across this output. In my installations, I posit causal relationships between visible stimuli (spinning strings, spatial structures, moving bodies) and resultant sounds. In my electroacoustic works, I attend to the implied weight of spatialized sound – as though a gesture’s trajectory through arrayed speakers were informed by gravity. In my acoustic music, I bring the muscular strain behind instrumental technique to the perceptual fore. My professional activities shift regularly between concert music and installation art and between acoustic and electroacoustic contexts. Passing between these genres stretches the boundaries of my creative practice and forces me to consistently reframe notions of ritual and form. Within each platform, I aim to stage visceral aesthetic encounters that, as Francis Bacon once hoped for his paint, bypass the brain and go directly to the nervous system. / Music

The purpose of this study is to reveal the evolutionary and revolutionary aspects of using computers to word- and tone-paint in choral-electroacoustic (CEA) works. An extended account is made of word- and tone-painting's history in selected works from the Renaissance through the Twentieth Century to establish their use as a choral music tradition, followed by an examination of three recent CEA works: Scott Wyatt's A Time of Being, Scott Miller's Dies Sanctificatus, and Reginald Bain's When I Consider the Heavens. In all instances, word- and tone-painting are identified and assigned meaning utilizing Irving Godt's "Systematic Classification of Semantic Text Influences." A chapter outlining the challenges of programming CEA works is included, along with suggestions for how conductors can meet those challenges. In addition to Godt's "Classification," a brief history of the development of computers as a musical resource and information regarding Reginald Bain's work appear in the appendices.Among the results of this study are: a confirmation of word- and tone-painting as a vital, continuing tradition in choral music; a clarification of the distinctions and overlap between word-painting, tone-painting, and rhetoric; an affirmation of Irving Godt's classification system's usefulness; and an identification of the computer's capabilities that make the machine's use evolutionary and revolutionary. The computer's most revolutionary capability is its virtually limitless ability to create, shape, and manipulate sound. As the examination of the three CEA works in this study illustrates, the computer's revolutionary potential has only begun to be utilized, and the possibilities of creating compositionally mature CEA works only begun to be realized.

The folio of compositions and critical commentary documents a major practice-led research project that was carried out from 2003-09 on the topic of ‘electroacoustic music with moving images’. The written report analyses and expands on the creative works by supplying detailed information concerning the ‘process’ of composing for the genre, and the ‘language’ of audiovisual media pairing. Sixteen extracts of creative work featuring specific qualities of language are also provided as a means of focussing discussion points. The folio of compositions is comprised of four creative works: Shifting Ground (2005), Mouth Piece (2008), Abide With Me (2009), and Eyepiece (2009), which present a one-hour audiovisual programme. The series was premiered in a special concert Seeing With Ears: Video Works By John Coulter as part of the proceedings of the New Zealand Electroacoustic Music Symposium (NZEMS) 2-4 September 2009, School of Music, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Part 1 of the thesis seeks to illuminate a general process of creative practice that is relevant to all forms of studio-based composition. Three frameworks are examined: those that contain singular creative tasks, those that contain multiple tasks, and those that contain multiple creative projects. A 3-tiered model of reflective practice is then offered, and procedures common to all electroacoustic composers are discussed. The action research paradigm is then presented, followed by domain-specific guidelines for undertaking research. Key differences between ‘composing’ and ‘researching’ are examined, and principles of conducting practice and research simultaneously are submitted. For those working in studio-based settings, the study provides a model, and a vocabulary for discussing his/her creative process, as well as procedural guidelines for contributing to expert domain knowledge through practice-led research. Part 2 of the thesis directly addresses a common paradox faced by composers working with sounds and moving images. On one hand, audiovisual materials appear to offer the possibility of complementing one another - of forming a highly effective means of communicating artistic ideas, and on the other, they appear to carry the risk of detracting from one another – of deforming the musical language that he/she has worked so hard to create. The study seeks to transcend this paradox through the identification of audiovisual materials that function in different ways. Examples of creative work are offered to illustrate more general points of language, a model for classifying media pairs is put forward, and practical methods of audiovisual composition are proposed. The narrow findings of the study offer a vocabulary for discussing the functionality of audiovisual materials, detailed methods of media pairing and techniques of parametric alignment, while the wider findings extend to associated domains such as live electronic music, and hyper-instrument design. In summary, the study recognises both creative works and written works as knowledge-bearing documents. Succinctly stated, the essential research findings are presented and supported by both phenomenological and nominal means - through aspects of creative works that make themselves apparent during the listening process, and through retrospective logical enquiry.

Master of Music / The use of error by composers as a means of adding colour to a musical text has a long history, but the device is ultimately ineffective. Material whose significance is its incongruity is incorporated by recontextualization, and in time, becomes familiar and unremarkable. ‘Glitch’ is a stylistic mannerism within electroacoustic composition that emerged in the late 1990s. Glitch, or ‘microsound’, as it is known in an academic context, observes the conventions of music concrète, drawing on material sampled from the real world, and fashioning this into sonic narratives. Its signature is the ‘sound of failure’, sonorities characteristic of electronic devices malfunctioning or mis-used: clicks, crackles, distortions, fractured digital files. Glitch/microsound has already diminished from a movement to a mannerism, but its legacy is a refreshment of our palette of sonorities, and an interrogation of the very act of listening. This essay is short examination of the use (and nature) of noise a musical ingredient and the significance of glitch/microsound for electroacoustic composers. It concludes that this ‘style’ is little more than a nuance, and that its advent and advocacy were less to do with a new musical movement, than with a new generation of electronic composers attempting to distinguish itself.