A line alongside itself
(Acoustic composition submitted on CD)
- Submitting institution
-
City, University of London
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 861
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- A line alongside itself employs simple materials and processes to address complex acts of listening. The title relates to an ongoing interest in principles of self-similarity; principles that are teased out through the layering of near-identical strands of musical material, the displacements and distortion of these strands in time, and the propagation of small mutations in the material throughout the composite musical texture. The aim of these approaches is neither to hear the resulting music as a quasi-canon or as a textural mass, but, rather, to find an in-between of musical line and surface, where listening is suspended in an ambiguous, interstitial zone. Closely allied to these approaches is the use of microtonality and extensive repetition as means of distorting the listener's sense of scale, space, and time. These dimensions are key to bringing about an unstable surface effect; an effect which projects textural consistency, but which at the same time radiates a kind of unstable 'shimmering' quality through constant intrinsic motion. The aesthetic orientation behind the work is both materialist and minimalist. Key strategies for projecting musical materials and processes derive from well-known psychoacoustic phenomena, including the critical band, equal-power panning laws, and forms of semantic satiation that arise from extensive (even excessive) repetition of low-level events. It should be noted, however, that such strategies are employed not for the sake of staging an empirical demonstration of perceptual ‘effects’, but rather as the interacting components of an emergent musical form addressed to the embodied actuality of listening.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -