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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …

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. …

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.

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.

Mobile Music Development Tools For Creative Coders, Daniel Stuart Holmes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project is a body of work that facilitates the creation of musical mobile artworks. The project includes a code toolkit that enhances and simplifies the development of mobile music iOS applications, a flexible notation system designed for mobile musical interactions, and example apps and scored compositions to demonstrate the toolkit and notation system.

The code library is designed to simplify the technical aspect of user-centered design and development with a more direct connection between concept and deliverable. This sim- plification addresses learning problems (such as motivation, self-efficacy, and self-perceived understanding) by bridging the gap between idea and functional prototype …

My Eyes Due See, Johannes J. Barfield

Theses and Dissertations

My Eyes Due See is a multidimensional examination of the “black experience” in America. The installation is composed of a single-channel video, a music composition that utilizes music samples and live instrumentation, and sculptures made up of car parts and broomsedge grass. Each of these elements arranged in space share a nuanced and complicated view of blackness through the lens of a black man decoding personal history and American history simultaneously. Autonomy is the overarching theme throughout the work as it pertains to race, identity, urban and rural environments, and the relationship between generational trauma and nostalgia.

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

Music From The Harpsichord House, Julie Zhu

Theses and Dissertations

Music from the Harpsichord House is an installation and series of concerts that exists in the binary of in and out of performance. During a concert, the harpsichordist is hidden inside the house and his face is live-projected outside. Fifteen new musical compositions were commissioned for the harpsichord house.

Looking Through The Glass: An Album Of Original Music And Accompanying Artist Book, Sam Genualdi

Lawrence University Honors Projects

“Looking Through the Glass” is a 12 track, 38-minute long album of original songs accompanied by a hand-bound artist book. The book houses the CD as a well as an accordion-structure text block of original prints. The content and form of the work draw upon the experiences of the author to create a unique and personal take on memory as a human experience. Sam Genualdi composed and produced all of the music as well as created all of the art.

Something Wicked This Way Comes: Scoring Hamline University's Production Of "Macbeth", Andrew Brady

Departmental Honors Projects

This project represents a practical investigation into using original underscore in the modern theatrical experience. Over 40 minutes of cinematic, orchestral underscore were composed by the author specifically for Hamline University Theatre Department’s 2014 production of Macbeth. Using electronic scoring methods and digital playback strategies, the music was “performed” with variable timing that was able to directly match the performance of the actor’s for each show. The accompanying written musicological analysis explores the score’s uses of themes, spotting strategies, and integration of the show’s artistic concept. The analysis, in conjunction with the recorded score, demonstrates a cohesive effort to …

Mouth's Cradle Presents: Wisdom Teeth, Kevin Hegedus

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

[See attached document for abstract]

Correspondences And Complementarity In Visual Music, Bill Alves

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

Visual music is an art form that implies intermodal connections between the senses but which has historically often failed to identify aesthetically satisfying correspondences. Artistic success does not automatically emerge in one medium when its elemental characteristics are mapped to those of an existing work from another medium. I offer examples from my own abstract animations with music, which draw upon John Whitney's concept of complementarity, a more intuitive correspondence at a higher level of aesthetic qualities, that of stasis and dynamism or tension and resolution.