Silicon, Carbon, and Music
This master’s thesis explores how musical agency is redistributed in compositions and performances that use technology. Rather than treating the performer, computer, or score as a neutral tool or as a sound-producing instrument, this thesis brings the composer, performer, computer, and score onto the same level. All of them become objects of mediation within a compositional condition, through which musical form emerges from interactions between these objects. This viewpoint is based on ideas of distributed agency and technological entanglement, which suggest that creative outcomes do not originate from a single authorial subject, but from a network of human and nonhuman agents. The thesis considers this through two of my own compositions, Enough? and Team CEO. Enough? is a purely acoustic ensemble piece whose material is selected through platform logic, renotated, vertically stacked, and downsampled. The “Q-frames” of this piece extend this process into the performance itself, with the musicians asked to operate at the threshold between sound production and its failure. Team CEO, however, uses real-time computer mediation: Flute is the only source of sound, and two MIDI keyboards take the flute’s signal, intercept it, multiply it, and redistribute it through a system written in Pure Data. Informed by these two works, the thesis argues that composition can be understood not as the production of a fixed musical object, but as the design of conditions in which form emerges through distributed agency, instability, and negotiation.
Silicon, Carbon, and Music
This text is shaped around the idea that composition creates a condition in which performer, score, instrument, and computer are never alone in the act of making music. The musical event itself is shaped through relations between bodies, machines, notation, and interfaces.
Silicon, Carbon, and Music, thinks through this entanglement: how musical agency moves between bodies, machines, notation, interfaces, and performance situations.
The text reflects on two of my works, Enough? and Team CEO, and proposes composition less as the making of a fixed object, and more as the design of conditions in which form can emerge, fail, shift, and reorganize itself.