I completed my PhD in 2012 at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London, under the invaluable supervision of Mark D. Plumbley and Nick Bryan-Kinns. It was examined by Atau Tanaka and François Pachet.
My thesis explores how we can create interactive music experiences that let you be creatively involved in what you hear, but also draw you in to the composer’s musical world, maintaining the hypnotic connection we are familiar with from linear music. For me, interactive music experiences are at their best when they are a shared creation between composer and audience where music is something that happens with you rather than to you. In this way, composing interactive music is as much about musical actions as it is about sound. It requires you to move and to consider how your behaviour affects the environment around you.
Creating a captivating interactive music experience is challenging. How can we create a musical narrative and shape our audience’s experience without reducing their sense of creative freedom? Addressing this question has led me to examine musical structure and the perception of skill through perspectives rooted in information theory, social psychology and human-computer interaction. My thesis draws upon a number of fields and methodologies and considers composed instruments, interactive music systems, narrative structures within interactive art, the perception of agency within music and a brief analysis of conversational interaction.
I created a number of artworks as part of the PhD: the Serendiptichord, the Manhattan Rhythm Machine and finally IMPOSSIBLE ALONE, which encapsulated many of the ideas on narrative and agency that I had developed.
Transcripts of interviews referred to within the thesis may be found here.