Sonic Phantoms Compositional explorations of perceptual phantom patterns

I use the term ‘Sonic Phantoms’ to refer as a whole to a cohesive collection of sound compositions that I have developed over the past five years (2009-2014; fifty pieces, structured in four separate collections / series), dealing at a fundamental level with perceptual auditory illusions. For the creation of this compositional body of work, I have developed a syncretic approach that encompasses and coalesces all kinds of sources, materials, techniques and compositional tools: voices (real and synthetic), field recordings (involving wilderness expeditions worldwide), instrument manipulation (including novel ways of ‘preparation’), object amplification, improvisation and recording studio techniques. This manifests a sonic-based and perceptive-based understanding of the compositional work, as an implicitly proposed paradigm for any equivalent work in terms of its trans-technological, phenomena-based nature. By means of the collection of pieces created and the research and contextualisation presented, my work with ‘Sonic Phantoms’ aims at bringing into focus, shaping and defining a specific and dedicated compositional realm that considers auditory illusions as essential components of the work and not simply mere side effects. I play with sonic materials that are either naturally ambiguous or have been composed to attain this quality, in order to exploit the potential for apophenia to manifest, bringing with it the ‘phantasmatic’ presence. Both my compositions and research work integrate and synergise a considerable number of disparate musical traditions (Western and non-Western), techno-historical moments (from ancient / archaic to electronic / computer-age techniques), cultural frameworks (from ‘serious’ to ‘popular’), and fields of interest / expertise (from the psychological to the musical), into a personal and cohesive compositional whole. All these diverse elements are not simply mentioned or referenced, but have rather defined, structured and formed the resulting compositional work

Nature Sounds in Music Therapy: Applications in Adolescent Psychiatric Treatment

abstract: Music is often used to induce relaxation and encourage calm surroundings, but in a group psychiatric treatment environment creating such a space can be complicated by varying and conflicting music preferences. Although best practices in music therapy encourage use of preferred music in sessions, adolescents’ tastes can be so closely tied with their sense of identity that tension may arise between peers in a group setting. On an inpatient adolescent psychiatric unit this issue becomes compounded by additional factors such as inadequate communication skills and difficulties with self-regulation. Although one must be careful not to generalize or romanticize, current literature suggests specific nature sounds may have a calming effect across settings and cultural backgrounds. However, nature sound research done from the music therapy perspective is scarce, and thus evidence-based guidelines for the use of such sounds could prove useful in further exploration of their potential uses in music therapy interventions. This thesis explores the use of nature sounds as a part of music therapy treatment interventions, as well as on the behavioral health adolescent unit during daily routine where environmental sounds can be a problem. If successfully implemented in an acute psychiatric setting with adolescent patients, both during the therapy session and throughout the day, administered by the person receiving treatment and under the guidance of the music therapist, these interventions have the potential to decrease the number and severity of behavioral emergency codes, potentially leading to fewer instances of restraint, as well as more effective functioning after discharge from the inpatient setting.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Music Therapy 201

Patented Electric Guitar Pickups and the Creation of Modern Music Genres

This Essay provides an overview of how patents played a core role in developing world-changing musical genres. This may be surprising, as normally copyright law is associated with incentivizing advances in the creative arts. But as this Conference’s theme [The IP Platform: Supporting Invention and Inspiration] and presentations emphasize, the whole range of intellectual property (“IP”), especially when viewed as a platform, supports innovation across the spectrum of human ingenuity and creativity. This Essay is also intended to be read in conjunction with a viewing of the live-music demonstration of how pickups transformed popular music, delivered at the Conference and available at the Center for Protection of Intellectual Property’s YouTube channel. Part I of this Essay explores how the electric guitar pickup emerged out of the turn-of-the-century invention gold rush in sound amplification and reproduction by electromagnetic means. Part II then explains how limitations of this new technology, combined with limits of the tube amplification of the time, created the unusual tonal aspects of the electric guitar. It also considers how patents were crucial to creating incentives for professional manufacturers to enter into commercial production of sophisticated gear that most guitar players could not—or would rather not—build at home for themselves. Part III argues that this new sonic palette inspired not only rock and rollers, but also a wide range of musicians and artists to modify existing genres of music, as well as to create entirely new ones. In this way, the “bugs” or limitations of this new sonic technology turned into “features” that inspired and defined new musical genres. Part IV reveals a surprising twist: even as far more accurate and “natural” sounding amplification systems were developed for acoustic guitars in the late twentieth century, the electric guitar sound was so well entrenched as its own kind of instrument that today’s acoustic and electric guitars simply sit side by side as related-but-different instruments. Finally, the Conclusion sums up the role of the patent system in incentivizing the musical and technical geniuses who conceived and reduced to practice what would become not only a major new family of musical instruments, but which also led to important new musical genres. It also points out the happy, historical happenstance that the development of the electric guitar represents: if better—meaning more accurate—guitar amplification systems had been possible in the 1930s-50s, the distinctive growl and vocal tone of the electric guitar, as well as so many of the most popular new music genres of the twentieth century, may not have been created

MUSIC, BRAIN PLASTICITY AND THE RESILIENCE: THE PILLARS OF NEW RECEPTIVE THERAPY

This paper describes a new type of receptive music therapy which aims to build the patients’ psychological resilience by increasing the levels of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin in order to increase standard psychopharmacological treatment efficiency. Previous research concerning the musically induced production of the two neurotransmitters and a hormone is discussed and reviewed. Based upon the existent studies concerning the influence of music on dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin induction, a new design of specific music features for this purpose is proposed and elaborated upon. The music features are numerically described using Music Information Retrieval software in order to objectivise the otherwise intuitively chosen music elements such as event density (number of notes started in one second of time), tempo, harmonic rhythm (number of harmonies changes in one second), dynamics, key changes and roughness coefficient (level of sensory dissonance). Finally, the new concept of resilience enhancing therapy is proposed and defined using the music features described above

Neural Correlates of Music Listening: Does the Music Matter?

The last decades have seen a proliferation of music and brain studies, with a major focus on plastic changes as the outcome of continuous and prolonged engagement with music. Thanks to the advent of neuroaesthetics, research on music cognition has broadened its scope by considering the multifarious phenomenon of listening in all its forms, including incidental listening up to the skillful attentive listening of experts, and all its possible effects. These latter range from objective and sensorial effects directly linked to the acoustic features of the music to the subjectively affective and even transformational effects for the listener. Of special importance is the finding that neural activity in the reward circuit of the brain is a key component of a conscious listening experience. We propose that the connection between music and the reward system makes music listening a gate towards not only hedonia but also eudaimonia, namely a life well lived, full of meaning that aims at realizing one’s own “daimon” or true nature. It is argued, further, that music listening, even when conceptualized in this aesthetic and eudaimonic framework, remains a learnable skill that changes the way brain structures respond to sounds and how they interact with each other

Travelling Wave Control of Stringed Musical Instruments

PhDDespite the increasing sophistication of digital musical instruments, many performers, composer and listeners remain captivated by traditional acoustic instruments. Interest has grown in the past 2 decades in augmenting acoustic instruments with sensor and actuator technology and integrated digital signal processing, expanding the instrument’s capabilities while retaining its essential acoustic character. In this thesis we present a technique, travelling wave control, which allows active control of the vibrations of musical strings and yet has been little explored in the musical instrument literature to date. The thesis seeks to demonstrate that travelling wave control is capable of active damping and of modifying the timbre of a musical string in ways that go beyond those available through the more conventional modal control paradigm. However, we show that travelling wave control is highly sensitive to nonlinearity, which in practical settings can lead to harmonic distortion and even instability in the string response. To avoid these problems, we design and build a highly linear optical string displacement sensor, and investigate the use of piezoelectric stacks to actuate the termination point of a string. With these components we design and build a functioning travelling wave control system which is capable of damping the vibrations of a plucked string without adversely affecting its timbre. We go on to show that by deliberately adding nonlinearity into the control system, we are able to modify the timbre of the string in a natural way by affecting the evolution of the modal amplitudes. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the concept and lay the groundwork for future integration of travelling wave control into future actuated musical instruments

Malcom Braff's Approach to Rhythm for Improvisation: Definition, Analysis and Aesthetic

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MMUS. Johannesburg 2017In this study I have investigated Malcolm Braff’s rhythmic approach and particularly his application of this approach for improvisation and composition. The Brazilian born, partially West African raised, now European Braff is shown to be a product of jazz and freely improvised music of Europe, and equally, a product of church music, progressive rock of the 1970’s and the Western classical canon, with influences from West African traditional music and Indian classical music. Much of Braff’s motivation for his methods of creating music is spiritual and philosophical. I have interrogated his musical theories, many of which stem from his spiritual philosophies. Additionally this study describes the necessary settings, musical and otherwise, for the creation of Braff’s music. For the majority of this study Braff’s rhythmic approach and the application thereof have been scrutinized through current rhythm theory, particularly with regard to rhythmic cognition, in an effort to understand Braff’s theories and descriptions of practise in accordance with what is currently understood in the field of rhythm. Through careful consideration of Braff’s work through the lenses of rhythm theorists, London (2012), Iyer (2002, 2004) and Gordon (2009) in particular, by looking at Braff’s recordings and his explanations, I determined that his claims seem plausible, even probable. Furthermore his approach to training rhythmic audiation, advanced and otherwise, and for stretching the audiational connection between metric and tonal audiation also appear valid and useful for training musicians that wish to further their own abilities. In addition this research revealed that Braff’s approach seems to require audiation of a meter not currently defined as such in current theory. I have defined such meters as metric-bridges since they connect two generally unrelated meters, but act as a meter themselves. The metric-bridge phenomenon is a possible way to describe commonly described ‘swung eighths’ in jazz, altered triplets in West African music, or Brazilian sixteenths cognitively, practically and theoretically. The study investigates how Braff has utilized these metric-bridges in his own compositions and how he often improvises while audiating these meters. Since this kind of audiation is not clearly defined in current rhythm theory, I have proposed some additional considerations with regard to the audiation of these meters, in the hope of aiding further study. Lastly, this study investigates how Braff describes and utilizes the more advanced rhythmic devices in both his improvisations and compositions. These devices include the use of quintuplets, sextuplets, septuplets, specific Braffian rhythm patterns, rhythmic displacement, metric modulation, metric transfiguration, and musical algorithm.MC201

Interaction Design for Digital Musical Instruments

The thesis aims to elucidate the process of designing interactive systems for musical performance that combine software and hardware in an intuitive and elegant fashion. The original contribution to knowledge consists of: (1) a critical assessment of recent trends in digital musical instrument design, (2) a descriptive model of interaction design for the digital musician and (3) a highly customisable multi-touch performance system that was designed in accordance with the model. Digital musical instruments are composed of a separate control interface and a sound generation system that exchange information. When designing the way in which a digital musical instrument responds to the actions of a performer, we are creating a layer of interactive behaviour that is abstracted from the physical controls. Often, the structure of this layer depends heavily upon: 1. The accepted design conventions of the hardware in use 2. Established musical systems, acoustic or digital 3. The physical configuration of the hardware devices and the grouping of controls that such configuration suggests This thesis proposes an alternate way to approach the design of digital musical instrument behaviour – examining the implicit characteristics of its composite devices. When we separate the conversational ability of a particular sensor type from its hardware body, we can look in a new way at the actual communication tools at the heart of the device. We can subsequently combine these separate pieces using a series of generic interaction strategies in order to create rich interactive experiences that are not immediately obvious or directly inspired by the physical properties of the hardware. This research ultimately aims to enhance and clarify the existing toolkit of interaction design for the digital musician

The use of principles and techniques derived from meditation for the design and creation of co-participatory musical systems

For this thesis, a detailed study was undertaken to determine whether techniques derived from traditional meditation systems can be applied to co-participatory music systems in order to enhance their accessibility, interactivity, and experiential impact, In order to adequately address this subject, a number of investigative steps have been taken. First, a workable list of definitions for what meditation actually is was made by comparing the practices and philosophies of a number of traditional meditation forms. The conclusions derived from this stage of the discussion served to create a definitive blueprint for meditation and served as a theoretical foundation for the rest of the dissertation. The second stage was to see how these definitions manifest in the meditation form; of the modem world. This approach provided insight into how changed cultural perspectives exert a major influence on the effectiveness andlor appropriateness of certain traditional techniques. In addition to modern meditation practices, the definitions from chapter two were also examined from the perspective of modem science, another important aspect of modern culture. The observations from this chapter served as the basis for chapter four, in which the experiential, symbolic and conventional features of Western Art Music were examined. This was to provide some points of reference with which to consider the possibility of using meditation techniques to enhance the musical experience . In chapter five, an examination was made of a number of composers and artists and their relevant works who have devised methods by which some of the more restrictive aspects of West em Art Music can be overcome or bypassed, so as to gain access to the full potential of that musical experience . This stage of the discussion provided a practical framework with which to discuss the background, design and realization of my own wod. ~ connected to this research, collectively called the Wheel of Life project. One of the main aims of this creative project has been to subvert many of the anachronistic conventions of Western Art Music, particularly conventions such as performer/audience separation and overly rigid or ambiguous musical structures. By doing this, it is hoped th3t musical systems can be created that allow the participant to engage in a much more personally meaningful and actively creative experience