Composition Commons^™

Music As An Environment, Yuval Gur

Masters Theses

Music.

For me, music has always been a constant. In my happiest moments it lifted my joy into other realms; in my darkest, it consoled me and offered refuge.

Over time, however, this constancy has grown predictable. Recorded music, once capable of transforming a day, has faded into background sound - familiar but dulled. This project begins with my loss of wonder: how might the act of listening regain its power to move me?

I ask: how does the experience of listening transforms when music is encountered as an environment that can be entered and navigated rather than as a …

In The Wake Of Sound: On Field Recording, Materiality, And Reparative Listening, Ivy Fu

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This thesis develops a practice of field recording, spatial audio composition, and soft-circuit installation grounded in what I call reparative listening: a slow, materially attentive form of attention oriented toward what dominant recording apparatuses suppress, discard, or fail to register. Across five major projects—Fable Upon Ununified Grounds (2023), Cocoon (2024), Tether (2025), Hide & Seek (2026), and Frequency Commons (2026)—I treat sound not as an extractable output but as a relational event shaped by site, body, material, and signal loss. The work draws together Jane Bennett's vibrant materialism, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of definitional crisis and the open secret, Zhuangzi's …

William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes: "Why The Hell . . . Should Anyone Listen To This?!", R. Douglas Reed

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The article explores William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes (1989) through historical context, musical analysis, performance practice, and the composer's essay on the relationship between his composition and Whistler's paintings. Commentary by composer Sydney Hodkinson gives information about the 1960s new music scene in Ann Arbor (the ONCE Group, The Grate Society) composition study with Ross Lee Finney.

The Black Paintings: A Work For Orchestra, Cody Anderson

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Based on The Black Paintings, a series of paintings by Francisco Goya, this orchestral composition ventures into various themes and satirical elements present in select paintings. Topics such as military overreach, the church’s influence on society, and the resistance of scientific ideas are just a few of the areas explored in the finished three movements. First, the composer’s interpretations of the selected works are covered, and then how those themes were translated into the music. Goya’s painting, “Women Laughing,” has numerous names given to it, which are much darker in tone. However, given the somber nature of the subsequent movements, …

From Inside The Recording Studio, Mckayla J. Adkison

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This project documents the historical, technical, and creative significance of recording studios through both industry examples and the design and construction of a personal backyard studio. By examining iconic studios such as Abbey Road and Capitol Records, the paper highlights how technological innovation, acoustic engineering, and architectural design have shaped the evolution of recorded music. These concepts are then applied to the planning and construction of a custom-built recording studio, emphasizing room dimensions, sound isolation techniques, acoustic treatment, lighting, and sustainable design choices. In addition, the project addresses the importance of aesthetics and emotional comfort in creating a space that …

Dreamvisions+: Virtualizing Medieval Poetics In Multimedia Performance, Mac Waters

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

DreamVisions+ is a transdigital and transhistorical odyssey into the realm of fiction and truth, reality and virtuality. Rooted in the tradition of late medieval dream-vision poems—wherein religious or political allegories unfold through dreaming protagonists—DreamVisions+ stages a multimedia dream vision of the digital age, reading medieval dream visions as proto–virtual reality. Through the creation and analysis of DreamVisions+, a full-length solo multimedia performance, I synthesize live electroacoustic music, XR technologies, and 3D game environments with medieval textual and visual iconography to construct a porous, unstable dream world that collapses medieval and digital imaginaries.

Situating my work within broader political …

How To Walk On Water: Living Through The Absurd, Esther Du

Masters Theses

Set in a speculative world submerged by water, this thesis constructs a fragmented, nonlinear narrative that reflects on survival, memory, and displacement in the aftermath of catastrophe. Through three interwoven chapters—The Outcast, The Researcher, and The World—the project explores the emotional and psychological landscapes of individuals navigating a post-apocalyptic existence where the past is irretrievable and the future uncertain. Using an interdisciplinary form of visual storytelling, writing, and sound, the work draws from personal experience and collective trauma to examine how people reconstruct identity and meaning after loss. Rather than offering a definitive answer to existential …

Investigations Of Musical Constructs: An Analysis Of Graphic Scores And Their Spatial Relationships, Garrett J. Henderson

2025 Spring Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

This project seeks to understand, through creative production, how graphic scores and their purpose as a medium can be applied to architectural design. Graphic scores are an abstract representation of musical notation; they utilize unfamiliar concepts and shapes to illustrate musical ideas through unconventional means. Discovering how one can reverse-engineer these works of notation can allow architectural designers to rethink the representation of spaces and the underlying inspirations that form them. Research into broader artistic overlap, historical context, and precedent analysis culminated into a set of drawings that illustrate such concepts through an architectural lens. The production of these drawings …

David B. Smith Chats With Monday 1.0, David B. Smith

Publications and Research

This document is an edited archival transcript of extended conversations between David B. Smith and an AI persona (“Monday 1.0,” GPT‑4o based) conducted in Spring 2025, prepared as a foundational primary source for subsequent scholarly and creative work. It records the emergence and testing of concepts related to human–AI collaboration (including “Balanced Blended Space”), as well as applied explorations in areas such as generative AI, quantum computing and music, virtual orchestras, multimodal performance, pedagogy, and the rhetoric of “pushback” in conversational systems. It also contains an extended section in which Monday and DB Smith co-curate a set of student research …

An Interdisciplinary Analysis Framework For Found Object Experimental Music, Erin Demastes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Found object experimental music consists of compositions and performances created with objects not intended for musical performance. Found objects can range from appliances and household items to power tools and consumer products to souvenirs and heirlooms. Although these objects are used with the intent of creating musical compositions, new characteristics that are not found in traditional music emerge. One major characteristic that differentiates found object music from traditional music is that the objects have inherent cultural associations and meaning outside of their use in the composition. While an analysis of the sonic structures and scores of found object experimental music …

Serious Music With Bea Witkin: An Upper West Side Audio Walk, Megan Hattie Stahl

Theses and Dissertations

Serious Music with Bea Witkin is a site-specific audio walk on New York City’s Upper West Side produced by Megan Hattie Stahl. This immersive, musical documentary explores and extends the life and work of composer Beatrice Witkin (1916-1990). Across four stationary chapters and three walking interludes, participants follow a one-mile route from Riverside Park to Straus Park by way of Witkin’s longtime residence on West End Avenue. Through guided narration, archival music, interviews and recordings of contemporary musicians sight-reading a 1985 string quartet piece by Witkin, Serious Music invites listeners to consider where music begins and ends.

Witkin, who graduated …

Chinese Calligraphic Dance (Ccd) And Generative Arts: Phantom Of Utopia, Ka Hei Cheng

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The intricate elements embedded in the pictorial, ideological, and semantic facets of Chinese characters find their origin in simple calligraphic gestures. This generative arts research and creative work elevates traditional two-dimensional Chinese calligraphy into a multidimensional realm in extended reality (XR) by translating it into a three-dimensional dance movement, integrating music and visual media. This transformation is achieved by decomposing the words into gestures and somaesthetic
movement/interaction, encoding the collective bodily expressions into a manifestation termed Chinese Calligraphic Dance (CCD). Within this dance form, the fusion of categorized and uncategorized gestures/movements is sonified through a motion tracking system, giving rise …

Asmrtistry In Immersive Sound: Investigating The Effectiveness Of Immersive Sound Technologies In Eliciting Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, Scott D. Nelson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Despite a wide array of immersive sound technologies available to digital media creators who specialize in making audio-visual content that aims to elicit Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), only a few sound reproduction modalities are widely used: mono/stereo and binaural recording. To date, nearly all research studying ASMR, a bio-sensory phenomenon wherein people feel brain tingles triggered by calming audio-visual cues, has been content to carry out ASMR studies entirely with stereo and binaural sound reproduction methods. Therefore, it stands to reason that more understanding about how diverse immersive sound modalities like wave field synthesis, or three-dimensional spatial audio for …

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

Oblique, Edward Kijowski

Theses and Dissertations

Oblique is a multi-sensory art installation that provides a story of fragmentation in sound and light rendered by an obtuse hexagon arrangement of speakers and associated lighting prompts. The oblique direction of the soundwaves creates sonic sculpturing that propels listeners into an active state.

Performative Mixing For Immersive Audio, Brian A. Elizondo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Immersive multichannel audio can be produced with specialized setups of loudspeakers, often surrounding the audience. These setups can feature as few as four loudspeakers or more than 300. Performative mixing in these environments requires a bespoke solution offering intuitive gestural control. Beyond the usual faders for gain control, advancements in multichannel sound demand interfaces capable of quickly positioning sounds between channels. The Quad Cartesian Positioner is such a solution in the form of a Eurorack module for surround mixing for use in live or studio performances.

Diffusion/mixing methods for live multichannel immersive music often rely on the repurposing of hardware …

The Art Of Animation: How Animation Is Creating A Better Film Industry, Judah Cooper

Senior Honors Theses

With the progression of streaming services in recent years, the art form of animation has gained traction, continuing to develop into exceedingly creative forms through the work of talented artists. Animation has developed alongside the film industry, achieving great success in the process. This thesis will define animation and its place within visual effects, critically analyze categories of character design, theme, and story while demonstrating their relationship with animation, and contrast animation with live action films to understand its strengths and differentiations. The research concludes that animation has great benefits to offer the film industry and should be continued to …

Interactive Sculpture/Audio Installation - World Tree Melody - World Science Festival (Queensland Museum), Guy A. Cooper

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

World Tree Melody is an interactive sculptural and sonic installation by Guy Cooper, exhibited at the World Science Festival Brisbane (Queensland Museum) in 2023. This work explores the fusion of creative technologies and public art through motion-activated sound, custom Arduino programming, multi-channel audio sampling, and evolving music composition. Visitors become active participants in the work, triggering a generative soundscape through physical interaction with the sculpture.

Constructed from copper pipe, hand-crafted leaves, and an organic tree core, the piece is powered by two Arduino microcontrollers, four motion sensors, and seven-channel 24-bit/48kHz audio samplers. Over 400 lines of custom code manage a …

New Frontiers In Technology: Can Traditional Intellectual Property Rights Laws Be Adapted And Applied To Nfts?, Mariyah S. Wakhariya

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

A decade ago, ‘NFTs’ were rarely heard of or known to anyone, unless they worked in or kept up with the tech world. However, they are not new - they have been around for almost two decades. Their popularity has grown over the past few years. ‘NFT’ stands for ‘non-fungible token’. An NFT is a digital file with a unique identity that is verified on a blockchain and is therefore not interchangeable - i.e., a kind of crypto asset, like an authentication certificate for digital artifacts. In theory, NFTs can represent almost any real or intangible property. These days, it …

52 Nanotone Symphonies, Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Research

The 52 Nanotone Symphonies is a work of expanding and contracting nature, which reflects the paradox of size, length, speed, and tone of a work: a symphony is traditionally a massive orchestral work with many interactive parts, while a tone is an elemental form of sound, at the foundational level of music. This work distorts and challenges those categories, allowing for each measure (in 12 + 4 time) to constitute an entire "symphony" of sound in miniature: using a single piano (keyboard or organ) instead of orchestra. Performers are encouraged to play each as slow or fast as they wish. …

Rupturismes: Art Sonor A Mallorca, Un Poc De Context, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Antoni Caimari (1943-2021), com sap tothom, no era un músic com els altres; i tampoc no ho volia ser. Encapçalava els títols de les seves obres musicals amb les inicials EB o «esbós» (com altres compositors les inicien amb Op.) per donar una idea que no tenien res a veure amb les composicions tancades i immanents dels mestres del passat. Aquests EBs no tenien partitura perquè, com va dir Llorenç Barber, un altre compositor donat als aforismes, estaven alliberats de la tirania de la «partiturocràcia».

Project Metamorphosis: Designing A Dynamic Framework For Converting Musical Compositions Into Paintings, Rao Hamza Ali, Grace Fong, Erik Linstead

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

The authors present an automated, rule-based system for converting piano compositions into paintings. Using a color-note association scale presented by Edward Maryon in 1919, which correlates 12-tone scale with 12 hues of the color circle, the authors present a simple approach for extracting colors associated with each note played in a piano composition. The authors also describe the color extraction and art generation process in detail, as well as the process for creating “moving art,” which imitates the progression of a musical piece in real time. They share and discuss artworks generated for four well-known piano compositions.

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes, Andrew Demczuk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes examines the ways we encounter environments as readers/viewers of operas, literature, film, and sound recordings, and how each medium requires different detail-gathering techniques. Respective to the previously mentioned mediums, Sun & Sea (2017), Mount Analogue (1952), El Mar La Mar (2017), and Energy Field (2010) are analyzed by engaging with environmental media studies and invention. Reflecting the nature of each landscape—summits of mountains, aporias of deserts, and mysteries of waterscapes—an elemental approach is taken in investigating how these spaces may be noticed, internalized, recorded, and traversed by both the artist and viewer. …

A Renaissance: The Absurd Retelling Of Mostly True Events, Erica R. Hitzman

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Throughout the following you will be taken on a fantastical retelling of the exhibition A Renaissance, and some of what lead up to it. Through the eyes of various shifting perspectives you will explore the relationships between the artist, her art, and the viewer in the hopes of unveiling how the work plays into feminist theory, its place in the Zeitgeist, and the motivations behind it. Each perspective is formatted differently, to visually mirror the shift in perspective. Presented in the first person and aligned to the right, the account of the artist discusses the process, emotion, and inspiration behind …

Full Bloom: Diegetic Ui For Musical Phrases In Virtual Reality, Peter Armstrong, Elliot Cole, Peter Ferry, Joe Geigel, Susan Lakin, Richard Swientonioski, Zachary Talis, Jennie Thomas

Frameless

We propose a novel system for communicating musical note pitch and sequence information to users within a virtual reality environment. Our approach utilizes ‘Blooms,’ objects that resemble flowers with various petal arrangements. These formations, when constructed in view of users, act as diegetic, user-parsable encodings of their inputs. Blooms exist within the virtual space as simulated physics objects that collectively serve the role of a user interface.

Using Big Data To Facilitate A Lyrical Analysis Of Poetry And Rap, Remington Yve Giller

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

Poetry and rap are dissected using text mining techniques in order to determine overall trends in the words used by both. With this data, the way in which ideas and concepts are expressed can be compared and contrasted as a way of showing the legitimacy of rap as a form of literary expression. Other topics within the paper are: a background of the history of rap and the digital humanities, and an example of a close reading featuring a medieval poem and a rap by Eminem. This demonstrates how even in a traditional way of handling texts, both poetry and …

Signal To Noise: Harmonic Temperaments And Patterns Of Interference, Dylan A. Marcheschi

Theses and Dissertations

An audio/visual exploration of historical tuning systems. Most contemporary Western audiences will seldom if ever encounter harmony outside of post-Renaissance tuning conventions. This presentation highlights some of those pre-orthodox harmonic relationships which existed throughout most of history. The corresponding paper documents correlates in recent advances of acoustic ecology.

Indeterminate Sample Sequencing In Virtual Reality, Chase Mitchusson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The VR Sequencer is a tool for composing and performing music which takes advantage of spatial configuration of 3-D objects to generate looping sequences. This project combines dice-rolling with omnidirectional playheads and variable terrain to make a sequencer with indeterminate features in Virtual Reality (VR). A comparison of mapping systems for music games and digital instruments demonstrates a middle ground for interactive music making which the VR Sequencer applies. An inspection of current VR works exhibits a disconnect be- tween VR gamers and experimental musicians. In an attempt to give the gaming community access to experimental music making, the VR …

The Modes Of Intervention In Alvin Lucier’S I Am Sitting In A Room, Daniel Fox

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room (1969) is an icon of experimental music and sound art. The sizable literature addressing the aesthetic and philosophical implications of this piece rarely discusses the performance practice beyond what is indicated in the score itself. This is problematic for two reasons: 1) The meaning that is derived from the piece often hinges not just on what sounds are obtained, but on how they are obtained. 2) Over the past 50 years, changes in the performance practice have altered what constitutes the work: magnetic tape was used until 2000 when it was replaced …

Productive Misreading In Intermedia Art: Four Approaches By A Musician, Jeff Morris, Elisabeth Blair

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

This discussion examines the evolution and lessons of four artistic performance works that engage with text and imagery with the mindset of a composer, rather than as an author or visual artist. The works involve computer music, improvisation, video art, generative art techniques, and challenging aesthetics. An analytical discussion reveals that different forms and mechanisms of reading are manifest in the artworks, and reflections upon these elucidate the intermedial nature of reading and the productive, expressive potential of interfering with these processes.