Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology (ICIT)

Audience participation has appeared prominently as a critical response to spectatorship in various artistic fields since the second half of the twentieth century. In music, a variety of participatory approaches have been developed that provide the audience with varying degrees ofcreative agency. Each approach fosters certain relationships and communications among the participants, giving rise to a range of social dynamics and politics. The objective of this dissertation was, first, to develop a new approach that involved audience members interacting with a limited number of objects placed in a concert space to affect sonic characteristics and theperformance of an ensemble that consisted of featured musicians, and second, to analyze the social dynamics and politics such an approach gave rise to.

Literature and creative works in the fields of music, visual arts, and theater were used todevelop a method of viewing and assessing the politics of participation that was used to critique the creative portion of this dissertation that took the form of two concerts of interactive musictitled Space Within. The production of the concerts involved development of hardware and software to enable audience interaction and mediation between the participants and theensemble. Scenic, lighting and projection design also played important roles in facilitating these aspects.

Several members of the audience were interviewed following the concerts while others were asked to respond to a survey to understand how they perceived their roles in the concerts and their impression of the social dynamics the event fostered. While most of them felt that their presence was consequential in the sonic outcome, not all of them were certain how exactly theyaffected the outcome. I conclude that while the audience may not have “co-authored” the sounds heard during the event, the event was successful in drawing their attention to and persuading them to reconsider their roles in a musical context.

The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown brought much attention to live music making via the internet, amplifying the previously marginal fields of livestream concertizing and networked music performance. Drawing connections among recent publications, artists' creative strategies, and his own experiences, the author surveys questions about musical telepresence that arose in this process, including reflections on the nature of musical liveness in an increasingly digital industry, the creative potentials of networked music making, and the value of “thinking telematically” about cultural production and social change.

This dissertation enacts the dialogue between my creative work as an improviser-composer and my critical engagements with scholarship. Both creative and academic streams of my work have converged on core themes, which have accompanied me as I experiment with my practice as a composer and as an improviser on the mrudangam (South Indian drum): (1) queering rhythm and temporality in relation to ensemble dynamics and score-based practices; (2) imagining counterpoint to received socio-aesthetic hierarchies; and (3) the transformative possibilities in alternative mappings of the body in music— as related to perception, collectivity, and pleasure. Substantive creative responses to these themes have been, and continue to be reflected in the following projects: (1) two works — Of Agency and Abstraction and Apertures — written for RAJAS, an ensemble I lead, and which embodies a convergence of cross-cultural improvisational approaches; (2) a handful of commissions of through-composed music — for chamber ensemble, string quartet, and for myself as a multi-instrumentalist, respectively; and (3) a nascent, open-format compositional project titled Mangal, which invites interdisciplinary perspectives and possibilities into my musical palette and score design. Reflections and analyses are interspersed with excerpts of the creative works, engaging community-based discourses as well as an array of academic fields— spanning critical improvisation studies, queer of color critique, and performance studies— to comment on musical process and historical and contemporary resonances. In excavating the core themes above, I address my fluid positionality across musical/cultural contexts, my ongoing work with scores, iterative performances, and recordings within an unruly aesthetic network, and the challenges of tracing emergent possibilities with instrument, body, voice, and archival elements. The dissertation aims to spark novel networks of theory and praxis around my music and its social and philosophical undercurrents.

Music often conveys a sense of “gesture”, anevocation of motion and energy, which makes it dramatic, exciting, and expressive. One common challenge in the production of algorithmically-generated computer music is the question of how to imbue the sound with the excitement and vitality of liveperformance. In the case of interactive computer music, one has the additional challenge of programming the computer to interpret the expressive qualities of musicbeing performed in real time. This lecture presents an approach to automaticallyanalyzing and characterizing gesture in musical sound, as a way of improving a computer’s interaction with a human performer in a live improvisation. By describing music as patterns of changing parametric data, the computer can store and categorize descriptors of musical gestures. As an extension of that research, we can then consider how derivatives of that analysis data—the ways in which the data changes over time—characterize thegestural quality of a performance. In the algorithmic generation of music, control of those derivatives of change in musical parameters can improve the expressivepotential of computerized improvisation.

A lack of diversity among faculty and students in graduate programs that focus on music technology and computer music may unwittingly discourage participation by certain segments of the population, and thus may hinder the development of a potentially wide variety of ideas andaesthetics. Graduate student numbers of women and minorities in the field are proportionally low. In the absence of any concerted plan of action to diversify such programs, this state of affairs is not likely to change. What can be done to increase diversity among people succeedingin the academic fields of music technology, in the interest of hybrid vigor and social justice? By pursuing a conscientious policy of intentional inclusivity, some progress may be made toward rectifying imbalances, thus enhancing diversity of scholarship and creative work. This article makes an assessment of demographic imbalances and proposes some concrete steps facultymay be able to take toward improvement.

In this essay, I present a concept of ritualized performance as an ideal way to approach the telematic medium, arguing that many longstanding performance rituals share characteristics that can be exploited in networked performance. After delimiting a notion of ritual, I introduce three aspects of this performative mode that make it a valuable approach to networked environments: 1) democratization of the space (a concept I explore through Victor Turner’s ideas on liminality and communitas), including integrating audience participation as well as moving beyond single-author models, 2) hybridization of media, merging audio and visual technologies, and 3) interculturalism and collaboration across geographically-defined cultures and traditions. Many artists in the 20th century have explored these ideas to create alternative approaches to performance, and in this essay I argue that they can be extended in new ways within the telematic realm. Drawing on theoretical and philosophical writings by various

authors and three case studies by artists whose work is related to each of the aforementioned aspects of the mode I am studying, I situate these ideas in relation to my thesis capstone project, Spatia and seek to contribute to the body of scholarly reflection on performance ritual in the era of telepresence.

The author presents a concept of ritualized performance as an ideal way to approach the telematic medium, arguing that many longstanding performance rituals share characteristics that can be exploited in networked performance. The author situates these ideas in relation to his project Spatia, seeking to illustrate how the model of ritualized performance can be applied to the networked medium.

In the design of interactive computer music systems and the composition of interactive computer music, the tracking and analysis of musical "gestures" — characteristic motions discerned within musical attributes — provides a promising challenge. There are in fact ways that one can clearly and empirically define and identify "gesture" in musical content, often with conceptual models and tools similar to those used fortracking and identifying physical gestures. The analysis of musical gesture as "significant motion" can be applied to many aspects of music: melodic contour, notespeed and density, loudness, level of dissonance, etc. Gestures can be characterized by the shapes producedby measuring changes in these aspects, and the derivation of data about change, rate of change, etc. within a particular feature or set of features.

Computer evaluation of gesture may be divided into the tasks of measurement, segmentation, identification, andtaxonomy. What are the elements of musical gesture and how can a computer best discern them? How can a computer know when a gesture begins and ends? Howcan different, unforeseen gestures be compared and classified? Perhaps most significantly, how can a computer, once it has identified and characterized a gesture, attribute musical meaning to it? This research proposes criteria and groundwork for the tracking, measurement, and analysis of "gesture" in the musical content of sound structure, and the use of that analysisin interactive computer music.