Ethnographically Informed Design For Improvised Electro-Acoustic Music

This dissertation is concerned with the improvisation of electro-acoustic music from musicological, aesthetic, practical and technical design standpoints. Detailed ethnographic descriptions of the author’s performance experience are offered alongside accounts of software applications which have been developed to support the improvisation of electroacoustic music. A CD accompanies the submission. Chapter 1 examines various positions regarding improvisation in the musicological literature and the writings of various composers and critics. It is argued that we should resist any theoretical opposition of improvisation to composition and follow an ethnographic turn whereby we treat ‘improvisation’ as a member category and examine its significance in the hands of those who use the notion. A variety of the world’s musics are considered from this standpoint including an examination of recent musicological work on jazz. Chapter 2 opens by presenting electro-acoustic music as indigenously a ‘machine music’ and develops with an extended ethnographic treatment of the author’s concert experience as an improvisor in this idiom. Special consideration is given of observable variations in forms of technical interactivity, social interaction and musical material which exist across the various documented performances. A number of well-known theorisations of electro-acoustic music are discussed on the basis of this analysis. An aesthetic specific to improvised electro-acoustic music is formulated in terms of exhibiting the variable relations people can have to technologies and each other in a machine world. Chapter 3 turns to questions of technical design drawing from the ethnographic findings and the proposed machine music aesthetic. An ‘against the grain’ research agenda is proposed followed by five demonstrator applications which have been used in performance by the author. Three improvisations are discussed for their effectiveness in pursuing aesthetic goals and for what they reveal about the usability of the demonstrators. A variety of strategies for future work is discussed.