My interest in composition in the past two years focuses on exploring the possibility, flexibility, potential, and expressiveness of conduction and improvisation. The relationship between improvisation and composition makes me reconsider my compositional approach and my artist’s status.

Conduction, a unique system using the symbolic vocabulary of ideographic signs and gestures to create real-time composition, was created by Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris (1947- 2013). I review conduction as a real-time composition in terms of timbre, orchestration, and structure. My orchestral piece Between Clouds and Streams (2018) explores the relationships, including musical materials, dynamics, times, and interpretations between the inspiration from specific gestures in conduction, yunshui (clouds and streams) in Chinese landscape painting, and composition. It illustrates how I consider my own musical identity through culture and conduction, a new way of making music.

The second part of the dissertation emphasizes the application of improvised components, and my status transformation from composer to performer to collaborator by improvisation, through the comparison of my three pieces for electronics and solo instrument. It consists of the comparison of notation and collaboration in the three pieces including Blossom Singing for trumpet solo and fixed media (2019), To Wuhan: Weeping Eyes and Strong Tears for prepared piano solo and 8-channel live electronics (2020), and Sparks for percussion solo and 8-channel live electronics (2020).

This collection deals with two issues: the manner in which a listener perceives musical stimuli; and the sociological and environmental interactions which define one's identity. As music unfolds over a duration of time, listeners are in a state of constant inspection and perceptual organization. Relationships between musical dimensions are established based upon the manner in which listeners group stimuli. Awareness of these organizational tools allows a listener to attain a more engaging interaction with a musical discourse. In regards to our identities, we do not define ourselves but rather are defined by the environment in which we are exposed. In a sense, our identities are a composite

of influence. Such influence can shape who we are as artists, as is shown in the relation between visual artists and my own music of the last 4 years, or confines us to certain categorical labels, such as our ethnicities.

Evidence for the argument for, or proof that it happened, necessitates a selected vision of the past, a representation. Here, for your viewing pleasure, is that representation of one student's term and what possibly may have been accomplished in relation to his study of sound and musical identity (that of others as well as his own). Sound, which can be remembered, and even recorded, is dissected and analyzed, re-contextualized and organized, but not as would be done by a scientist, but what would be done by a conscientious observer, or that which we all must at some point be.

My interest in composition for the past three years has been exploring the possible expressions and articulations of space. The challenge of setting a task to musically unravel this fluid, abstract and interdisciplinary concept lies in the identification of what space means to me, and how such belief can be extended to the presentation of a musical composition that reflects my individual perspective.

I came to realise the space I seek is the ‘in-between’ connective medium that webs through a larger network of musical objects and events, rather than an empty box, a vacuum, a void to be filled with activities. In the two works I include in this dissertation - Six Legs and an Amphibious State of Mind, and Half-Open Beings, this medium is treated as a vibrating entity that generates and joins the musical material through time.

The musical space in my work can be further categorised into composition, social and physical spaces. The essence of this in-between vibration, in this context, is presented through a myriad of interconnected reverberations throughout the composition and performance of a musical work. It is considered as an acoustical phenomenon that weds composed sound and physical space into one experiential entity, and as an inter-personal, social resonance that, through interpreting and embodying the composed musical materials, resulted in the production of the desired musical intention.

My creative practice for the past eight years can be characterized as an exploration of poorly-understood trauma responses through the means and materials of electronic music. One of the more common adaptive responses to trauma is the dissociative subtype of post-traumatic stress disorder, characterized by episodes of depersonalization/derealization in which a profound disconnect between one’s body and reality is experienced. Through alliances with various articulations of the affective turn, information theory, and digital signal processing, I theorize depersonalization/derealization as a stalled state of incomplete transduction that creates lost bodies devoid of potentiality, incapable of sensing or making sense.
 Researchers in psychology and neurobiology often look to failures in information processing, encoding, storage, and retrieval as paradigms to inform research on memory loss and/or suppression and altered cognitive states associated with adaptive trauma responses. Given the importance of these same paradigms to the production of electronic music, it seems a natural medium for artistically interrogating the similarities between cognition and musicking, and hence a satisfying modality for reifying the virtual, locating the bodies lost in depersonalization/derealization, and completing processes of transduction through sound. In my work, I have developed a personal taxonomy of these electronically-mediated transduction paradigms involved in sounding, defined by the configurations of bodies, modes of interaction, and temporal dynamics that animate them. In this dissertation, I exemplify my engagement with three of these paradigms, acoustic transduction, simple electroacoustic transduction, and complex electroacoustic transduction, through the use of three compositions: sear, luscinia, and excision no.2: they didn’t know we were seeds.. By developing a framework for exploring trauma responses through the means and materials of electronic music, my praxis reifies and validates my experiences of depersonalization/derealization, creating space for evaluation, understanding, acceptance, and healing.


This dissertation focuses on two aspects that deeply rooted in my compositional thinking. The first idea discusses the artistic quality of brushstroke and its musical equivalence in compositions. In ink painting and calligraphy, a single line consists of a series of complicated movement carefully controlled by the calligrapher, forming a rich layering in one brush. In my observation, the idea of multi-dimensionality presented in a line is similar to the texture of heterophony where we experience different layers of simultaneous variation organized by the movement of a primary line. With the experience of calligraphy, it further leads to my interest of ink painting to the larger acoustic world of soundscape, which enables me to paint my sonic imaginary landscapes through embracing a wide variety of materials. The first chapter includes the analysis of brushstroke and two compositions of Lei Liang and Chou Wen-chung that employ the techniques of ink painting. I also discuss my work, Sparking (2020), for twelve instruments, to introduce how I discover the characteristics of heterophony in brushstroke, and how calligraphy relates to my musical experience of Nanguan. In this chapter, I choose Nanguan singing as an example to investigate its spectral component using Sonic Visualizer and demonstrate the ways with which I transform and manipulate the materials to represent the movement of brushstroke in sound. The second chapter introduces the theoretical background of soundscape and its practice in my composition. In Murray Schafer’s research, he categorizes various environmental sounds as keynote, soundmark, and signal, etc., based on their individuality, numerousness, and domination, in a physical space to provide an insight about how we perceive and interpret them, such as semantically, functionally, culturally, and historically. In this chapter, I take Schafer’s work as the theoretical basis to demonstrate my use of environmental sounds in my electroacoustic composition, Ocean Reverberation (2019). This piece is created using Audacity and Logic Pro. With the experience of brushstroke and soundscape, the third chapter focuses on my orchestra piece, Maci Lumah (2021), in which I combine these two aspects to form my artistic practice. The large structure of the piece is inspired by Schafer’s theoretical concept discussed in the second chapter, whereas the local details present my inspiration of heterophony from both brushstroke and natural environment. The last chapter concludes with the overview of my musical journey focusing on the philosophical question about line proposed by Chou Wen-chung and the artistic response about my compositional thinking in general.

This dissertation documents three compositions: Bless This Mess for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion, Wonderful Things for soprano, guitar and vibraphone, and Music is My Life for electric guitar and drum machine. Bless This Mess contrasts disjunct gestures to create ecstatic static textures that develop in musically eccentric manners. Wonderful Things consists of four movements that contain interrupting themes from the remaining three movements. Music is My Life uses heavy metal vocabularies, repetition and physically exhausting performance demands to create a work of ecstatic stasis.

The following Master's Thesis represents two years of study in Composition at the University of California, San Diego's Department of Music. The three works: Three Dances of Five Creatures, A Study and Reflection Upon the Present State of Existence of Which I Breathe In and Out and In, and Then I Knew 'Twas the Wind that Blew depict a few of the sonic spaces I explored. The pieces included are in chronological order. The first was composed for my second jury, and explores free dance form and narrative. The second engages phrasing, repetition and gradual expansion: meditation in time. The third investigates sonic density, and sound transformation.

My efforts in composition during the program have focused on the exploration of extended techniques, globalized contrast, gradual sound transformation, and both traditional and non-traditional sound worlds.

Sonic Engraving is a compositional approach I have developed inspired by the practices of music transcription in European music culture as well as the Japanese print-painting form Ukiyo-e.

Ukiyo-e features a meticulous fabrication process which inspired a similarly meticulous layering compositional method that I employ in my Sonic Engraving model.

In every Sonic Engraving work, I begin by selecting a source work from which I collect a set of numerical data that characterizes the sonic behavioral patterns that are important to that adapted work. These generated data then serve as musical seeds for my own, new work. The new work is fresh in sonic nuance, timbre, texture, and musical expression, yet maintains strong ties to the adapted musical work.

This compositional approach was developed and evolved throughout a series of Sonic Engraving works that I composed at UC San Diego, including, Fugue of Distances (2012-13), contrabass quintet, Stretch of Light (2013-14), and piano solo piece, The Celestial Threads (2017).

The general principles of this compositional model and integrating strategies that I discovered within each of these Sonic Engraving works are discussed. Musical examples, analysis, and illustrations accompany the article throughout, which is followed by the complete scores of the three Sonic Engraving pieces and my telematic symphonic work, The Moon in La Jolla (2015).

In this dissertation I present my composition Interviews for thirteen players. I explore the work’s intersection of process-based instrumental music, interview recordings, and song, focusing on the sixth movement, “An Amethyst Remembrance,” and the ninth movement, “Tableau III (Coda).”