My compositional and research practice is organised around one umbrella question: What are the factors that engender a sense of ‘authentic’ experience in the technologically augmented, co-present concert after our habituation to mediatized culture?
This question is approached through three distinct research threads, each investigating the authenticity of concert experience from a different technical and artistic vantage point. All three are built on a shared compositional infrastructure — the gradual transformation of musical units within a hierarchical compositional model — which provides the technical means to control exactly how and when perceptual coherence is sustained, strained, or broken in a composition.
Gestalt-informed Composition
The gradual transformation of musical units within a hierarchical model — first formalised in my Sonology MA thesis (2011) — is not a fourth research strand but the technical substrate that makes all three threads artistically viable.
Satellite · Convergence · Contraction
Music with Digital Musical Instruments
What does the causal link between physical gesture and sonic result contribute to the audience’s sense of authentic concert experience, and how is that link sustained, extended, or lost across a DMI’s lifecycle?
Higher Order Gestalt Fromage · T-Stick ecosystem
Gameful Composition
How do rule-based game systems generate musical form, and what kind of authentic concert experience emerges from a performer navigating game objectives while simultaneously crafting an expressive performance?
Super Colliders · Super Colliders II · Springer monograph
Music on Ambiguous Reality
Under what conditions does an audience accept, productively inhabit, or reject a technologically constructed presence as authentic in the co-present concert?
Simulacra · Lost in Plain Sight · Breach of Contract