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Thesis Info

LABS ID
00576
Thesis Title
Microsound, spectra, and objectivity: tracing memetics in organised sound
Author
Vincent Giles
2nd Author
3rd Author
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Year
2016
Number of Pages
152 + Creative Works
University
University of Melbourne
Thesis Supervisor
Dr Peter Roger Alsop
Supervisor e-mail
ralsop AT unimelb.edu.au
Other Supervisor(s)
Dr Alistair Riddell
Language(s) of Thesis
English
Department / Discipline
Victorian College of the Arts
Copyright Ownership
Languages Familiar to Author
English
URL where full thesis can be found
minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/handle/11343/122081
Keywords
memes; memetics; music composition; philosophy of organised sound; philosophy of intention and reception; organised sound; sonic art
Abstract: 200-500 words
This dissertation proposes a novel memetic framework and creative methodology to probe the mechanism underpinning the transmission of a composer’s intention to an audience, contending that cultural replicators – memes – drive our understanding of a composer’s intention. It is hypothesized that memes catalyse the creation of artefacts which, in turn, act as instigators for memetic replication in brains. Additionally, it is hypothesized that microsound – sound at the edge of perception – may play a key role as memetic instigator. Thinking about these hypotheses and how they might be interrogated through works of organized sound (music, sonic art), yields creative deployment of microsound in primarily scored works. This creative process allows the researcher to arrive at a deeper understanding of memetics and to formalize the conceptual memetic framework and hypotheses described herein. In this way, theory and practice become interlocked in the search for evidence of memes in the creation of works of organized sound, and the role memes play in an audience’s ability to (re)construct the intention of a composer. The scope of this methodology facilitated the creation of a large quantity of creative works throughout candidature, of which four notated/semi-notated musical compositions and one piece of software (made in MaxMSP) are included in the final thesis, with the other related works are included in the appendices and accompanying media. Mozart Variations is an open, graphical score for any number of musicians that assisted in formalising the small- meme stance; silver as a catalyst in organic reactions takes the meme as a metaphor, using existing data structures (a silver atom bonded with a carbon atom) as the source to be ‘read’, akin to genetic replication, and is for solo baroque violin; End to Reattain for violin and electronics is a structured improvisation that plays with microsound and its perceptual bases; It needs a big ‘ow’ sound; ow-nd... ground! for solo low woodwind attempts to trace the lineages of microsound (and by implication, memes) across multiple iterations of music, by ‘tracing’ composer Evan Johnson’s Ground and creating a variation piece that retains key structural information but is otherwise thoroughly transformed, and; Spectral Domain Microsound Amplification Software (SDMAS) is a software prototype to amplify those sounds in a frequency spectrum that are generally inaudible, and was deployed in pieces that are listed in the appendices. All works include a score and recording, or the software, as appropriate.