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It is my contention that the worlds of instrumental and electroacoustic music are essentially grounded in one basic reality – the physical properties of sound. If there is a divide, then it is based on compositional models and conventions. This is not to diminish the stylistic or technical differences between the two but rather to make the case for a focus on the core aspects of sound, in order to discover different ways of exploring various possible relationships between music for instrumental performer(s) and digital (electroacoustic) means. My thesis stems from the argument that every sound has its own spectromorphology– its own inner life governed by envelope, spectral content, energy and internal pulsation. This leads architecturally to considering the relationship of micro- to macro- phenomena and provides the essential foundations for all the compositions in this portfolio. Taking Pierre Schaeffer’s concept of the “sound object” as its starting point, my portfolio explores various forms of interaction between instrumental and electroacoustic techniques, methodologies and aesthetics, via a range of outcomes for fixed media, acoustic instruments, and combination of instruments with electroacoustic media.

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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.

And Drops of Rain Fall Like Tears is a composition for electroacoustic music with an optional ambient video component. The composition consists of a single movement electroacoustic work twenty-two minutes in duration. The piece creates an immersive sonic environment within the confines of a typical concert space, thereby recreating the powerful temper and subtle beauty of nature from different sonic perspectives. The paper is divided into four chapters, each discussing an element of the piece in detail. The introduction presents background information and compositional approach for the composition. Chapters 1 through 4 present detailed information related to the creation of both the electroacoustic music and video elements of the piece. Chapter 4 contains relevant information to the performance of the piece.

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The focus of the compositional approach presented in this folio is the sounding environment. The term sounding environment is used in this context to refer to the whole of our living experience in the world which we might register as relating to sound. It might include everything that is sounding, seemingly sounding, imagined sounding, remembered sounding, sensed as sounding, composed to sound. It includes thus the actual sound environment, all that is sensed or interpreted as sound and imaginary sounds. This dissertation accompanies the seven acousmatic and the two sound installation works included in the folio. It is divided into two parts. In the first part relevant ideas and theories both from the literature of electroacoustic music composition and soundscape composition are discussed while in the second the compositional approach to the sounding environment is presented as applied to the works.

According to Kierkegaard it is through our sense of hearing that we can make this journey within, “Gradually, then, hearing became my most cherished sense, for just as the voice is the disclosure of inwardness incommensurable with the exterior, so the ear is the instrument that apprehends this inwardness, hearing the sense by which it is appropriated.”[1] The music is an invitation to all participants to become wanderers. An invitation to step into the music and by doing that, stepping into one’s own imagination on a journey within. This is a double movement similar to what French philosopher Roland Barthes (1915–1980) described: a movement which bears forward and at the same time back to somewhere in oneself.[2] On another note, the Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923–1985) wrote, that “imagination is a world of potentialities that no single work will successfully enact.”[3] Experiences have the potentiality to cause profound changes within a person. In his book The Poetics of Space[4] the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) wrote that to imagine wandering in the desert is to change space, and as a consequence to change oneself; in his words, “for we do not change place. We change our nature.”[5]   [1] Kierkegaard, Søren, Either/Or: a fragment of life, Penguin, London, 1992, p. 3. [2] Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: reflections on photography, New edition, Vintage, London, 2000 [1980], p. 40. [3] Calvino, Italo & Brock, Geoffrey, Six memos for the next millennium, Penguin Classics, London, 2016,  p. 119. [4] Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, New edition., Penguin Classics, London, 2014[1994] [5] Ibid., p. 222.

This PhD in Music Composition is in the form of a written dissertation plus a series of electroacoustic music compositions on Audio CD. The thesis develops the “Segregation, Integration, Assimilation and Meaning” (SIAM) framework for the analysis of acousmatic musical works derived from research on auditory cognition. This framework is applied to a detailed analysis of Denis Smalley’s “Wind Chimes”. The dissertation finally asserts that the framework developed for the analysis of acousmatic music has been demonstrated to be effective and it discusses some implications for future research. (For complete abstract open document)