Live Electronic Ensemble Practice : Developing Tools and Strategies for Performance and Composition

Perkins, Ed (2018) Live Electronic Ensemble Practice : Developing Tools and Strategies for Performance and Composition. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This research is an auto-ethnographic study of a portfolio of compositions and performances in ensembles that took place across the UK and Europe between September 2008 and February 2014. This commentary analyses the work with a view to discerning useful strategies and approaches towards group work in the field of experimental electronic music. The study contains an account of the author’s own physical interface and its development over a period of ten years, including a wider analysis of some considerations for design and the development of a personal instrumental practice. Ensembles formed by the author are discussed with a focus on social psychology and self-organisation through the creation of unique roles and shifting group hierarchies, afforded by the possibilities and dislocations of technology. The commentary continues with an in-depth study of the development and performance of The Stream, a generative composition system that applies some of the interdependent behaviours and processes of self-organisation discovered through musical experimentation, to an agent-based societal model for real time score generation. The analysis shows that interdependent agents and social behaviours can be modelled in order to generate relationships which are comparable to those created through traditional methods of composition and improvisation. The study concludes that the possibilities afforded by technology to extend beyond the physical and social domain are most successfully implemented when they support, rather than inhibit the natural relationships and human physicality of those taking part. Therefore, when designing a generative composition system, the simulation of human relationships and their narratives may open up a new area of research in the generation of musical composition.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Music (former - to 2014)
Depositing User:	Jackie Webb
Date Deposited:	01 Aug 2018 15:30
Last Modified:	01 Aug 2018 15:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/67927
DOI:

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