Digital musical instruments pose a number of unique challenges for designers and performers. These issues stem primarily from the lack of innate physical connection between the performance interface and means of sound generation, for the latter is usually dematerialised. Thus, this relationship must instead be explicitly determined by the designer, and can be essentially any desired. However, many design issues and constraints remain poorly understood, from the nature of control to the provision of performer-instrument feedback. This practice-based research contends that while the digital and acoustic domains are so different as to be fundamentally incompatible, useful antecedents for digital musical instruments can be found in the histories of electronic music. Specifically, it argues that the live electronics of David Tudor are of particular prescience. His home-made circuits offer an electronic music paradigm quite antithetical to both the familiar keyboard interface and the electronic music studios that grew up in the years after World War II, and are seen to embody a number of aspirational qualities. These include performer-instrument interaction more akin to steering rather than fine control, the potential for musical outcomes that are unknown and unknowable in advance, and distinct instrumental character. This leads to the central contribution of this research; the development of a Tudor-inspired conceptual framework that can inform how digital musical instruments are designed, played, and evaluated. To enable more detailed and nuanced discussion, the framework is broken down into a series of sub-themes. These include both design issues such as nuance, plasticity and emergence, and human issues such as experience, expressiveness, skill, learning, and mastery. The notion of sketching in hardware and software is also developed in relation to the rapid iteration of multiple designs. Informed by this framework, seven new digital musical instruments are presented. These instruments are tested from two different perspectives, with the personal experiences of the author supplemented with data from a series of smallscale user studies. Particular emphasis is placed on how the instruments are played, the music they can produce, and their capacity to convey the musical intentions of the performer (i.e. their expressiveness). After the evaluation of the instruments, the Tudorian framework is revisited to form the basis of the conclusions. A number of modifications to the original framework are proposed, from the addition of a dialogical model of performerinstrument interaction, to the situation of digital musical instruments within a wider musical ecology. The thesis then closes with a suggestion of possibilities for future research.

This thesis uniquely explains the mechanical improvements which have occurred to the flute over the last 147 years. Theobald Boehm revolutionized the flute by changing many of its components culminating with the 1847 model flute. Since that time other improvements have been made which enhance the flute's capabilities in terms of pitch, tone, timbre, and simplification offingeringpassages. Among those improvements which are discussed in the following pages are the Dorus G-sharp key, the gizmo key, the Cooper scale, and The Brogger Mekanik as well as the makers behind the various improvements including Vincent Dorus, George Barrere, and Albert Cooper.

Despite the increasing sophistication of digital musical instruments, many performers, composer and listeners remain captivated by traditional acoustic instruments. Interest has grown in the past 2 decades in augmenting acoustic instruments with sensor and actuator technology and integrated digital signal processing, expanding the instrument's capabilities while retaining its essential acoustic character. In this thesis we present a technique, travelling wave control, which allows active control of the vibrations of musical strings and yet has been little explored in the musical instrument literature to date. The thesis seeks to demonstrate that travelling wave control is capable of active damping and of modifying the timbre of a musical string in ways that go beyond those available through the more conventional modal control paradigm. However, we show that travelling wave control is highly sensitive to nonlinearity, which in practical settings can lead to harmonic distortion and even instability in the string response. To avoid these problems, we design and build a highly linear optical string displacement sensor, and investigate the use of piezoelectric stacks to actuate the termination point of a string. With these components we design and build a functioning travelling wave control system which is capable of damping the vibrations of a plucked string without adversely affecting its timbre. We go on to show that by deliberately adding nonlinearity into the control system, we are able to modify the timbre of the string in a natural way by affecting the evolution of the modal amplitudes. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the concept and lay the groundwork for future integration of travelling wave control into future actuated musical instruments.

This dissertation consists of two parts: Convergence Lines, my twenty-four-minute composition for ten instruments and electronics, and this subsidiary essay. Convergence Lines was written in 2013 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Pynchon’s V. At the center of this discussion is my creative process in imagining a musical corollary to Pynchon’s fictional world: his large cast of vivid characters, far-flung settings, and disjointed sense of time. I also detail my attempt to fashion a formal parallel to the novel’s unorthodox structure of two independent strands of narrative that converge towards the end. I discuss the role of allusion in Pynchon’s work and in my own, and the various points of reference the music is meant to invoke. A second important topic is the role of electronics in the composition, presenting both a technical analysis of the tools employed and an aesthetic perspective, considering how the intrusion of non-acoustic sounds mirrors a central theme of V.: the gradual replacement of the animate by the inanimate. The thesis endeavors to explain from a composer’s perspective, and in an integrated, organic manner, the poetic, musical, and technical aspects behind my work.

The Ifugao is one of the well-studied indigenous peoples in the Philippines from the Cordillera Region in the northern Philippines. They have a characteristic music that has historically been differentiated from the majority of the population in the country who perform and listen to Western music. There are substantial ethnographic monographs about their society and their chants, but organological studies of their musical instruments have not been undertaken in any detail. This thesis examines a collection of Ifugao musical instruments archived between the early 20th century and the present to help understand changes and transformations of the group’s musical culture. The musical instruments were examined in various institutions in the Philippines and United States, and a typological analysis was conducted. Fieldwork was also conducted in the summer of 2010 to further investigate the presence or absence of these traditional musical instruments in current Ifugao culture. The materials were systematically measured and assessed based on the von Hornbostel and Sachs classification scheme with full recognition of its later revisions. Most of the musical instruments are no longer in use. The loss of skill in playing and making instruments has gone along with the marked decline of agriculture in the area and the rapid shift towards tourism and urbanization during the middle of the 20th century. Diversity, variations, and ingenuity in their creation declined considerably during this period and the remaining few musical instruments have been transformed into objects primarily designed for public performance or sale to tourists. Attempts to revive cultural heritage have had the paradoxical consequence of introducing non-traditional instruments, in coexistence with an altered image of the past. / published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

The systematic study of orchestral practice and instrumentation in the German Baroque Opera has until now been assigned a relatively insignificant place in biographies of specific composers, or in historical studies of particular centres. Many of these works, while presenting a valuable compilation of the instrumental methode of a particular composer, or of the adoption of his style to meet the conditions of performance which prevailed from one centre to another, do not however supply their readers with a chronogically exhaustive investigation of the role of the orchestra in the baroque theatre, nor of the contribution made by theatre orchestration of the general artistic development of orchestral music as a whole.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 349-366). Also available on microfiche.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2007. / "MUSI 690 (MA thesis), student no.: 0318437, supervisor: Elaine Dobson." Photocopy (Typescript). "July 2007." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-108). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Charles E. Brewer, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Program in Humanities. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 27, 2005). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1992. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [308]-350).