Resonant Simulacra: Building Artificially Intelligent Instruments, a Portfolio of Musical Compositions, and a Self-Analysis of a Cybernetic Workstream

Abstract

This dissertation curates eleven different musical projects, including three pieces of musical software and eight compositions. Each work was created between 2018 - 2024, during my time in the Music Composition PhD program at Harvard University. Much of the work presented in this portfolio is concerned with electroacoustic composition and the cybernetic relationships between performer and software instruments. More specifically, I attempt to analyze the digital instruments I have created in the past 5 years, the sound compositions I have realized using those instruments and the inherently circular feedback system of influence between software and sound. Stylistically, many of the compositions in this portfolio are densely textural and frequently imbued with dark imagery, phantasmagoria and a sense of visceral physicality. Threadline, finished in 2018/2019, initially introduces the concepts of textural density and organic growth and withdrawal of material. The compositional language originally touched upon in Threadline (2019), Cauterize (2018), and No Plume as a Trace (2019) is continually developed until the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in January of 2020. This dramatic, global shift in lifestyle had profound effects on my compositional voice which are reflected by the works Collision Domains (2020) and To Till or Cultivate (2021).

These works are markedly less organic and are shaped by my shift towards being a more interventionist composer. Once returning back to in-person academic life at Harvard in the Fall of 2021, I felt I had rejoined society as a changed artist. I was no longer interested in composing in my prior mode of setting up a kind of musical science experiment and letting it run its course over the duration of the composition, simply observing its movements and growth. Instead, the development of material became more controlled and intentional, as reflected in my post-pandemic works red, going through pinks, to white (2022) and Grey Velvet (2024). These works, also, saw for the first time an influence of musical styles outside of Noise, New-Classical Music, and Electroacoustic Art Music. My work as a DJ at the time, fascinated by Techno, Industrial, EBM, Acid House, began to filter into my compositional work and has since remained a point of artistic influence. My ever-shifting relationships to composition, production, and performance is explored in my forthcoming album for electroacoustic viola, Ephemerist (2024), to be released on Spanish label Protomaterial Records. This dissertation then concludes by looking toward my future as a composer, musician, instrument designer and developer, and details my efforts in starting an independent record label; Idolatrous Sound Research.