PhD overview
I am studying a PhD in composition under Rob Davidson at University of Queensland. Here’s the bones of it as of 8 months in. This is a loooooooooong post, so I have placed a cut after the introduction.
Music Composition & Perception: Folio of works & critical commentary.
Introduction
This project addresses the issue of perception in music composition. It is widely known that perception is an active and constructive process; we draw on all of our knowledge and experience to predict and organise sensory input, making decisions on what to ignore and what to take in, and what it means. The consequence of this understanding is that our human perceptual machinery influences our understanding of the world around, so to understand things in the world objectively, we must first understand the characteristics of the lens through which we see them.
We know then, that when a group of people listen to a piece of music together, they may all hear a slightly different piece. Recent research has asked the questions of what shapes these differences, how large the variations can be, how much is cultural and how much is universal, and some very surprising and interesting answers have been uncovered through this research.
In my project I plan to use this growing body of knowledge as a platform for enriching the discipline of music composition. I will be addressing the issues with a practical and aesthetic focus, and a bearing towards the simple but elusive goal of creating quality music. I do not aim to reach the current cutting edge of cognitive & psychological research, just as experimental researchers would not expect to be at the cutting edge of contemporary music making practice. Instead, I hope to draw on current theories in cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology to inform aspects of compositional practice.
The formal structure of the project will involve the composition and presentation of four bodies of creative work, each composed within a contrasting perceptual environment. These will be accompanied by a discussion of three main areas of theoretical interest: firstly the influence of visual input on musical perception; then the importance of expectations; and finally the concept of imagined sound or auditory imaging.
My own lens
In keeping with the claim that we must understand the characteristics of our own perceptual lens in order to understand the world objectively, I’d like to state a few salient characteristics of my own lens.
My compositional philosophies and theoretical frameworks are often drawn from art music, whereas my intuition is more often toward pop and rock idioms. This is perhaps a result of university education in composition juxtaposed against a largely rock-influenced upbringing and continued listening habit. In my composition this comes out in an obsession for elegant, unified structure and development, in contrast with a tendency toward simple tonal harmony and dominance of rhythm and timbre.
I have found in my listening practice that I am drawn towards the epic and the bold. Perhaps this is a lingering result of spending formative years singing emotive worship songs in churches. Despite moving away from that scene and developing a mild contempt for the calculated melodrama of some church music, I inexplicably still gravitate towards the grandiose and melodramatic. This has led me into a recent passion for genres such as math-rock, post-rock, and modern film soundtracks.
I am intrigued by music which is complex, but grown from simplicity. However, complexity which is simply complicated - i.e. mulitifaceted, inconsistent and confusing - I find unappealing. I am drawn in by complexity which has simple underlying rules, the kind of complexity found in fractal geometry, or in the natural world. In music, this often draws me to techniques such as polyrhythm and isorhythm, where a complex texture is woven from relatively simple component parts.
While the music I create for this project will explore the issue of perception discussed above, it is inevitable that these personal elements will heavily influence the works created, and my understanding of the theory.
Creative Works
The 4 bodies of work I will produce as part of this PhD are designed to encompass a range of different compositional environments. The hypothesis behind this is that musical elements will be perceived differently in each environment leading to differing compositional tendencies. They also encompass a variety of different modes of listening for the audience, addressing the effect of these environments on the listeners’ perception of the music.
1. A series of recorded works created by editing and re-arranging improvised performances.
I originally attempted this style of composition as part of my honours project at QUT, which culminated in the starting of the Mr. Maps project. The most interesting aspect perceptually is the fact that as a composer, you are looking at and manipulating little blocks of audio, rather than notes. In this way, elements of rhythm, timbre and especially envelope are foregrounded because these elements are clearly visible in the waveform. Harmony & melody however are largely invisible - looking at an audio waveform it can be difficult to see the difference between one note and a chord, or a percussive strike. I believe that this leads the composer to be very intuitive about harmony & melody, selecting these by feel rather than analysis. The rational mind instead is focused on rhythm and arrangement - these things are immediately visible and draw the most attention.
The nature of this type of work all but rules out the viability of performance. It is made possible by recording, and consumed as a recording. This means that the listener is in control of the listening environment and the passage of time. This has some important consequences which will be discussed further in the following paragraphs.
Below is an example of this style of composition taken from my honours thesis. Note the attention given to the macro overarching structure of the piece, the meticulously arranged rhythm, and the foregrounding of timbre, as opposed to the relatively static melody and harmony.
(You may also, if you wish, note the blatant but unintentional (I promise!) Ryuichi Sakamoto ripoff…)
http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F4934753Mr. Maps - This Mess is a Place (Lights ver.) by lofly recordings
1. Small ensemble work using conventional notation, to be performed in a traditional concert setting.
The paradigm of conventional Western notation has attracted plenty of bad press in the last century, in the climate of growing pluralism and a more holistic understanding of music. It is however, a mode of musical communication like any other, and can be exploited for its strengths and weaknesses like any other.
Melody and harmony are foregrounded here, closely followed by rhythm, though it is displayed in a less rational way than on a piano roll or audio grid. So thinking about dynamics, timbre, and feel comes less naturally when working with notation. However, there is a cultural norm that comes side-by-side with western notation, and this is the very well-defined roles of composer and performer. The luxury of working with instrumentalists who will play your music note-for-note is advantageous for any composer wishing to explore ideas in a very controlled way. There is a sacrifice made in feel and expressivity, but a gain made in the elegance and conceptual purity of the composition.
The other cultural advantage of this paradigm is the listening setting. In the environment of the traditional concert performance, the music is in control of the passing of time. A composer is free to develop their work slowly, to lead the listener through the composition as they see fit.
http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F11028550
Glacier Process by Chrisperren
3. A math-rock ensemble work to be developed through rehearsal and not notated at any point, and performed to a standing, noisy audience.
This work will perhaps be the only one which lacks a visual representation of time. In a sense the collaborative performer/composers may visualise pitch space as frets on the guitar or keys on a keyboard, but the strict horizontal timeline is gone. My hypothesis is that this creates a freedom of form and rhythm, as in the absence of clocks or timelines, humans experience time in a very subjective way. Sequences which may seem irrational when notated on a timeline, may seem perfectly rational when conceived without reference to metric measurements of time.
The constraints for this body of work are inspired by the growing niche genre of math-rock bands, which proceed intuitively in compositions, resulting often in compositions which are highly expressive, idiomatic to instruments, and complex in a way that is different from the complexity of classical art music. The difference is hard to quantify verbally but through the course of this project I hope to gain a sharper insight into this.
As an example of this is an all-time favourite band of mine called toe, who are perhaps at the more expressive and less mathematical end of the spectrum. What’s immediately evident in this clip is the importance of the interactions between the musicians as they perform. The elements are relatively simple and there is certainly nothing new about the harmony, but there seems to be a mysterious X-factor here in the chemistry between the musicians which makes it compelling.
4. A series of recorded works, written and recorded using contemporary methods such as piano roll sequencing and multi-sampling, to be listened to on headphones.
This is in a sense the control condition of the experiment. It may include combinations of other methods, but is ultimately about the ideas leading theprocess, rather than allowing the process to lead the ideas, which is what will occur with the other three bodies of work. I will place very few constraints on this, except that works will most likely be arranged on computer and presented as a recording.
The track below is a work in progress to be included in this set.
http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F5196022Sunrise Industry (WiP10-09-10) by Chrisperren
Theory
While the potential range of perception theories applicable to music composition could be endless, I have selected three which are of interest to this project to discuss in detail.
1. Influence of the visual environment on musical perception.
It has become clear in recent research that the human brain doesn’t process in a step-by-step serial fashion. When the ear recieves a signal, as soon as it begins to be processed upward through the hierarchy of the brain, signals from other parts of the brain are sent back down the chain, focusing and interpreting the input in a fluid and dynamic way. When you hear a bang accompanied by the sight of a closing door, various areas of your brain are collaborating to interpret this input at a pre-conscious level. This means that the sight of the door and the sound of the door are fused into one inseparable event before they even reach our awareness. A very real demonstration of this can be found on my post about the McGurk effect.
The practice of creating, performing, or appreciating music is almost always paired with a specific visual environment. The fact that this visual input has the power to change our understanding of a sound without our conscious awareness has important implications for composition.
Firstly the use of symbolic visual tools such as notation or editing timelines cannot be considered a neutral part of the compositional process. Our pre-conscious mind actively involves these visual elements in our processing and interpretation of the sound, therefore influencing the compositional decisions which are made.
In addition to this, a composer must understand what visual stimulus will accompany the sound for the listener, and how this will change what they hear.
2. Expectations
On a number of levels, our expectations play a pivotal role in the appreciation of music. On a cultural level, we are born into a musical context with a certain set of idioms and musical languages. On a smaller level, a stylistic norm of a particular genre may guide our expectations of the twists and turns of a piece of music. Beyond this, we may respond to smaller cues of rhythm or melody within a piece which shape our predictions of its next move. Finally, on a microscopic scale, timbre and sonic jitter can play with our more subliminal and subconscious expectations.
On all of these scales, a composer must consider a balance between familiarity and novelty - what the listener knows, and what they do not yet know. The spectrum between these two defines the space for musical playfulness. If something is entirely familiar, it may fail to move a listener, and if it is entirely novel, it may lie beyond a listener’s understanding of what music is, making it worthless to them.
On the larger cultural scale this is quite easy; if I am writing music for an audience with similar upbringings to me, then I can trust that my intuition that what is novel to me is also novel to them. As the scales grow smaller toward stylistic norms or singular events within a piece, one’s intuition becomes less accurate, and a more considered approach must be taken.
A very direct example at the level of musical events is the use of extreme syncopation as accompaniment to a melody. Imagine a simple melody accompanied by a simple, easy to follow rhythm. As a composer I may wish to invigorate this idea by heavily syncopating the rhythm that accompanies the melody, to the point that it almost barely ever touches the “1” of the bar. Because I have composed the melody and I am very familiar with it, interpreting the pulse in this is no difficulty for me. I may be tempted to begin the piece in this way, expecting my listeners to follow.
A composer who is wise to perception however, will understand that the listener will not perceive the melody as the composer does, they may feel the pulse on a completely different beat. If we want our listener to really enjoy the syncopation we have created, we need to introduce them to the melody first in a basic way, so that their minds can register its phrasing and where the beats fall within it. Once this established, introducing the wildly off-the-wall syncopation will not throw the listener off the beat, but instead will result in a playful manipulation of their expectations of musical events.
The example above seems obvious and simple, but it is the visible tip of what I believe to be an iceberg of composition tools that a composer can gain from an understanding of perception.
3. Imagined Sound or Auditory imaging
Auditory imaging is the sounds we can produce in our minds when no acoustic music is present. It may also be referred to as audiation or “the mind’s ear”, and it plays an important role in music.
Perhaps one of the most interesting findings to emerge from neuroscience in the last century is that when we imagine a scene, our brains are active in many of the same regions as when we are actually seeing that thing. This suggests that imagining a picture or a sound involves mentally simulating the act of actually seeing or hearing.
The research also suggest that the nature of imagination varies greatly between people, there are great differences in the vividness of people’s images and their ability to manipulate or control them.
Much of the research in the area has focused on visual perception, as it is easier to observe under experimental conditions. There work done in auditory imaging is relatively much smaller, and of this only a portion of it deals with music. However the anecdotal evidence of this goes back centuries, as composers have often discussed their ability to “hear” a new melody, and many have complained of having a “song on the brain.”
I think a better understanding of the nature of the auditory image can help composers understand the effectiveness of musical devices better. For a very simple example, consider the finding that it only seems possible to imagine one stream of sound. Perhaps in light of this one-track nature of musical processing, our understanding of polytonality may be altered somewhat. Instead of being able to truly perceive two different keys and absorb the tonal character of both simultaneously, perhaps we only ever perceive one to be the dominant tonality, and the other simultaneous key to be chromatically odd notes within the dominant tonal structure.
Polyrhythm comes into discussion here as well. I would suggest that whenever two polyrhythmic pulses are present, we cannot perceive both as hierarchically equal - we will hear one as the pulse, and the other as an interesting competing rhythm. Which one we percieve to be the pulse is largely determined by cultural factors.
Conclusion
I am currently positioned at the beginning of a long journey, and the exciting thing about this is the possibility for evolution and change. I plan to move forward on the basis of the ideas listed above, but I won’t be holding fast to them. It is my hope that the most significant ideas will emerge along on the journey.
It is my current hypothesis that perception theories - and in particular theories of visual/audio perception, expectations, and auditory imaging - have something useful to teach composers. However, as stated in the introduction, the goal here is effective music-making, so even if all of my theories fall flat, if quality music is achieved as a result, then the project is a success.