As a performer of firstly acoustic and latterly electronic and electro-instrumental music, I constantly seek to improve my mode of interaction with the digital realm: that is, to achieve a high level of sensitivity and expression. This thesis illustrates reasons why making use of haptic interfaces—which offer physical feedback and resistance to the performer—may be viewed as an important approach in addressing the shortcomings of some the standard systems used to mediate the performer’s engagement with various sorts of digital musical information. By examining the links between sound and touch, and the performer-instrument relationship, various new compositional and performance strategies start to emerge. I explore these through a portfolio of original musical works, which span the continuum of composition and improvisation, largely based around performance paradigms for piano and live electronics. I implement new haptic technologies, using vibrotactile feedback and resistant interfaces, as well as exploring more metaphorical connections between sound and touch. I demonstrate the impact that the research brings to the creative musical outcomes, along with the implications that these techniques have on the wider field of live electronic musical performance.

This thesis, and the accompanying portfolio of pieces, is concerned with investigating practical and theoretical meeting points between improvisation and composition. Such meeting points are evaluated alongside a consideration of ‘freedom’ in improvised music, for which a frame is drawn from George Lewis’s concepts of the ‘Afrological’ (placing emphasis on expression of the ‘self’) and ‘Eurological’ (in which the ‘self’ is explicitly avoided). It is suggested that a reconciliation of these two extremes might be found in a compositional ‘creative displacement’, which might change an improviser’s environment in unforeseen ways and thus stimulate explorations of expressive novelty. Three different compositional approaches to ‘creative displacement’ are investigated: through fixed notation, through electronic real-time notation, and through leadership in a workshop setting. In each case compositional experiments will be undertaken and documented, detailing the creation and realisation of the pieces included in the accompanying portfolio. A terminology for the theoretical consideration of these approaches will draw on theories of complex systems, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and various socio-musicological models such as those of Steven Feld and Charles Keil. Through an evaluation of the portfolio compositions in rehearsal and performance, this thesis will conclude that a reconciliation of Lewis’s ‘Afro’ and ‘Eurological’ can be found through the external application of limitations to improvisational creativity. Such constraints will be described as ‘creatively displacing’ if they provoke a performer towards an exploration of novel expressive approaches. In order to achieve this in practice, limitations must be carefully judged with regard to their degree of abstraction, the manner of their presentation and the nature of their notation; it will be suggested that the presence of a leader is vital in achieving this. These conclusions will lead to a questioning of conventional ideas of improvisation and leadership, and suggest a re-evaluation of indeterminacy within notation.

This thesis is part of the result from an explorative venture into understanding how saxophone multiphonics can be used as tools for improvisation and composition. The focus lies partly on how I found these sounds, personalized them and incorporated them into my artistic language, but more importantly, this is an attempt of thinking through art by letting the experience gained from making creative use of accidental occurrences affect future experience in an open-ended artistic process. This is done in two acts, solo-playing and duo-playing. With the solo-playing I listen for what these sounds suggest in themselves, and through this, create open compositions that are embracing their elusive nature. The duo-playing searches for sounds within sounds in a sonic map, constructed from a co-creative artistic process that allows us to zoom in on details, experience deep and spectral listening through vertical musical motion. Apart from the written words and the compositions, the artistic results consist of several recordings, presented and discussed throughout the text together with connected concepts and contexts revolving around saxophone multiphonics, composition and improvisation. / <p>Komposition: Sonic Map</p><p>Kompositörer: David Bennet &amp; Vilhelm Bromander </p><p>Medverkande: David Bennet, Saxofon. Vilhelm Bromander, Kontrabas </p><p>Konserten är inspelad och bifogas med det skriftliga arbetet. </p>