Over the course of my Master’s degree in Music Composition at the University of Florida, I have explored the voice, body, and technology within my four works: Vox, In an Artist’s Studio, Moon Dark World, and Lux. By exploring the concepts of cybernetic feedback loops, posthumanism, identity, durational performance, and the body as source material, I have been able to gain a comprehensive understanding of how I engage with these elements within my compositions, but first, it is important to delve into each of these concepts and examine their relevance.

       My introduction to cybernetics was through the works of Pauline Oliveros, namely her Sonic Meditations. On my first day attending the Walden Creative Musicians Retreat in the summer of 2023, we all gathered together to have a group choir rehearsal. We were told, however, that the choir director would not be able to make it to the rehearsal in time, and there in a group of over fifty people ages eighteen to ninety, we started learning and performing Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Mediations. Over the course of the entire retreat, we performed many of her works, exploring the various ways to listen and hear sound as a group. Not only was I able to participate and learn her music, but I was also taught about her compositional process in terms of her work with electronic music, and there I was introduced to the idea of cybernetics. Cybernetics is the “...study of circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems.” Cybernetics came to fruition through military science and was coined by the mathematician Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics and feedback loops have been used by many post-war experimental composers, like John Cage, Alvin Lucier, and, of course, Pauline Oliveros. Cybernetics can decenter the human within the process of performance or composition, which made it so impactful for me as a composer. I was already interested in this idea of the decentering of the human within my compositions, mainly through the technique of aleatory, but to understand the theory and interpretations made by others, I wanted to apply these ideas to my own works in a more intentional and principled way.

       In a recent interview and Instagram post made by Brian Eno and the Instagram page hardart.collective, Eno discusses the idea of individualism, genius, and community within art history and coins the term ‘Scenius,’ taking into consideration the genius of a community rather than one sole person. The composer or artist is not more important or more intelligent than the performer, machine, or listener. Every aspect is just as important and key in the process of the creation of music. This idea of decentering the human leads into the discussion of the posthuman. Posthumanism came as a reaction to the concept of humanism, an Enlightenment-era philosophical movement that elevates the human. But if we are to say that humans can be elevated and individualistic, it has the possibility to create and maintain unjust hierarchies. 

“…Posthumanism stands for the instability, or mutability, of the ‘external’ difference between the human of humanism and its various others in the pre-or nonhuman posthumanism inherits antihumanism’s critique of the Enlightenment subject, which includes the historical remainders of humanism's racializing and gendered ‘internal’ differentiations of the human.”

In posthumanism, there are no clear boundaries between the human, technology, or nature. I attempt to reflect the fragility of these boundaries through my works with the voice, body, and technology.

       In Brian Eno’s book  “A Year with Swollen Appendices,” Eno discusses his reasons for creating ambient music. “I want to make a kind of music that prepares you for dying—that doesn’t get all bright and cheerful and pretend you’re not a little apprehensive, but which makes you say to yourself, ‘Actually, it’s not that big a deal if I die.’” My approach to duration in music is through my experience in listening to and creating ambient music. In the VICE Article “The World Is Ending, but at Least There’s Ambient Music,” Joyce Colin defines ambient music. “Ambient music, as a form, is all about anticipation; the gradual shifts between notes and slowly unfolding textures mean it is a genre of delayed gratification.” The focus on textural changes rather than typical chord progressions or forms that we typically see in classical Western music is appealing, and as a composer, performer, and listener, I find that focusing on texture and timbre as a structural compositional consideration for my music is more gratifying. Due to this difference in intentions of my compositions, the approach to listening must also be viewed differently, and this can be discussed through the idea of durational performance. 

       A focus on durational performance allows for engaged listening over longer time scales and a difference in perceived time scales. The pacing of structural sonic events (or lack thereof) impacts how the listener embodies changes in the music over time, meaning that both gradual and shorter changes in the timbre and texture of a work will change the overall perception of a work’s length. The actual physicality of performing these works is also taken into consideration when discussing durational performance. In my works with the voice, I frequently make use of straight-tone singing. This stems from my personal experiences and preferences, as I prefer to sing straight-tone when possible, as that is the type of singing I have the most training and experience in. Straight-tone singing is a strenuous technique that is difficult to sustain for long periods of time, and the physicality of singing straight-tone within these works adds a layer of perceived time scales and duration within the music, as the longer I or others sing straight-tone, the more chances there are to hear that tiredness of the voice. The use of notation, or lack of traditional Western classical notation, also reflects the idea of duration within performance, as my scores (or lack of scores) reflect the flexible duration of performances of the pieces within this paper.  

        My approach to creating, listening, and performing these works necessitates a discussion of embodied sonic cognition. By addressing the importance of the body within my music, ideas of labor, gender, sexuality, background, etc., have to be taken into consideration, unlike in many classical Western music works, which focus on the score as an authoritative text as opposed to a score (or lack of) that can invite fluidity.

       Engaging the body and voice with technology can embrace different ways of defining and locating bodies in the source materials. Different source materials become bodies themselves by engaging the body through performance with various control surfaces, including physical objects such as light sources. Or, the body can be noticed through obscuring or deconstructing the source material, turning the deconstruction into new source material itself in the form of procedure or conceptual motivation. The use of non-lexical vocalizations by fragmenting poetry into phonemes and the electronic manipulation of them also highlights artifacts inherent in the use of the human body as an instrument. Using speech synthesis and voice technology as source material brings in the idea of the posthuman, juxtaposing my embodied singing with non-bodied voices playing. I am interested in the decentering of the human in posthumanism, yet interested in the individual body in performance, which creates a tension between these two concepts that I view as generative for my music rather than limiting. 

       Having never composed a piece for solo voice and live electronics, In an Artist’s Studio was my first step into this particular world of composition. Previously, I had explored the voice and live electronics in group improvisation settings, utilizing harmonizer and granular synthesis patches within MaxMSP as my instrument. This blurring and manipulation of the voice with electronics was intriguing to me, and I wanted to find a way to explicitly explore this relationship of the voice and electronics. Christina Rossetti's poem 'In an Artist's Studio' delves into the ideas of the objectification of women in art. 

“One face looks out from all his canvases,

One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:

We found her hidden just behind those screens,

That mirror gave back all her loveliness.

A queen in opal or in ruby dress,

A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,

A saint, an angel — every canvas means

The same one meaning, neither more or less.

He feeds upon her face by day and night,

And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,

Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:

Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;

Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;

Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.”

       This relationship of the woman's manipulated image through the artist's lens gave an interesting opportunity to explore how to attempt to replicate these ideas of manipulation in the voice and the information it provides to the listener. From the timbre to the diction to the range, we can engage with  many preconceived notions about someone's background. The same idea can apply to the appearance of someone, and when this appearance is manipulated in favor of someone's ideals, will we notice it? In this piece, it is apparent that we notice it, just like how we notice it in Rossetti's poem. The displacement and blurring of the voice and sound source through granular synthesis help achieve this, and through these effects, a loss of source material is created. 

       In “The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies,” vocal activity is defined as “...always connected with the process of feedback through self-monitoring and social monitoring.” My piece Vox, an open work for vocalists with indeterminate voice types, was inspired by John Cage and his vocal works Ear for EAR and Four2. With Vox, the use of indeterminacy and aleatory is used with the goal of group listening, which is inspired by Pauline Oliveros. Through my use of notation inspired by John Cage’s work Four2, I hope to create a group vocal work that is accessible for multiple types of voices as well as any number of voices. The score itself is atypical of a Western choral score, with the form, length, and even placement of typical voice parts like soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, being changed to force the ideas of listening and feedback loops. Through this, I use notation as technology and a way to create this group feedback loop. Through the construction of the score, each participating member in the performance of this piece must be constantly listening, reacting, and adjusting to the sounds being produced in order for the piece to continue and move forward as a composition. The various choices made by a single individual can drastically change the overall outcome of the piece, meaning that active listening and adjustments are needed to create a resemblance to the pacing and order of events in the score through processing and reaction to the sounds being produced. In the creation of this piece, I workshopped and performed Vox 1, 2, and another work titled A Syllable with the University of Florida Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. For the first rehearsal, I took inspiration from one of Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations, ‘One Word’, and asked that we approach my music through these various lenses. The various interpretations I used are as follows: 

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“1. Slowly and gradually begin to voice the word/syllable by allowing each tiny part of it to sound extremely prolonged. Repeat for a long time before continuing to the next cell. 

2. As above, increase the speed of each repetition as gradually as possible. Continue beyond the normal pronunciation of the word until repetitions are as fast as possible. Repeat for a long time before continuing to the next cell. 

3. Same as variation two, but when the top speed has been reached and maintained, reverse the process by looking down again as gradually as possible until the original utterance returns. Repeat for a long time before continuing to the next cell.”

 

       This process of exploration and communal efforts within the creation of this piece calls back to Brian Eno’s idea of Scenius, but rather than call myself and my peers sceniuses, I want to use this term to focus on the importance of group exploration and collaboration that took place with the creation of this piece. The process of durational performance, the idea of the body, is not just explored by me as the composer but as a group with Vox. The performance of the piece becomes a feedback loop within ourselves performing the piece but also as a collective to create the sonic product, leading to the idea of posthumanism, where there are no clear boundaries through the intentional decentering of hierarchies within traditional scores and processes of creation of sound. 

       Similar to my piece Vox, Moon Dark World was able to come to fruition due to my time attending the Walden Creative Musicians Retreat in the summer of 2023, as it was here where I was introduced to analog synthesizer instrument building. This interest in instrument building continued into the fall, as I took an independent study on instrument building, where Moon Dark World was created. Moon Dark World is an electronics piece controlled by hand-built light sensors connected to an Arduino, which is connected to Max, where the amplitudes of various sounds and transformations of sounds are controlled via lights. Due to the sensitivity of each of the light sensor cables, when performing the piece, I have to make very minute changes in my movement in order to create a gradual transformation in the sounds. This process of constant movements, listening, and reacting turns the performance of this piece into its own cybernetic feedback loop with my body, lights, light sensor cables, and my Max patch. During my first performance of Moon Dark World at the Performing Media Festival in South Bend, Indiana, audience members came up to talk to me after the performance, asking how the piece was performed and what my role was in the performance of this piece. Attempting to answer this question brought me back to the tension between my ideas of the posthuman and the embodiment of myself within my performance of this work. However, there are other ideas of embodiment within this work besides my own. For example, The title of this piece is taken from a poem by Paul Cameron Brown:

“The trees

are forming hands

to cloak the sky with pillow whispers,

until the soft equilibrium

behind laughing eyes

departs down the moon dark world.”

       This poem connects to the idea of physicality through its descriptions, using the imagery of the body to connect to the notions of nature. By using this poem as an inspiration, it becomes a body in itself within this work, just like how my body, the lights, and light sensors all become bodies as source material in Moon Dark World. I relate these various ways of embodying to the music itself, creating a relationship through the lights with the use of a buzzing lightbulb sound as a type of foundation to be heard at the very start and end of the piece. Through the lack of traditional classical Western notation in this piece, the progression of the material is time-based and relies on listening and reacting to the material within the set time scale of the piece. Through my small physical movements with the lights and the small constant changes within the sonic material, the duration of the piece allows for longer scales of listening.

       Lux is a piece for solo voice and live electronics inspired by György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna and his use of micropolyphony within this work. To create a multilayered texture similar to Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, I use delay loops, transpositions of those delay loops, granular synthesis, and pre-recorded sounds of my voice or other non-voiced sounds. Also, like Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, I start with a singular vocal line that then expands into a dense texture of voices; however, I expand the work by singing the actual Lux Aeterna chant multiple times, directly shifting the focus to the original chant. The use of this chant represents the disembodiment of the singing of chant in the Catholic church. Through the creation of the choir loft in many Catholic churches, the congregation never sees the cantor or choir sing these chants. There is no body attached to the chant, no body physically connected and working to produce these sounds, just a nonbodied floating voice above the congregation seeping throughout the church. I relate this disembodiment to me singing “Lux” repeatedly, connecting the translation of lux (light) into the representation of stars and how they are out of reach for us. I then shifted the piece into the physical body through the inclusion of the light instrument that I had built for Moon Dark World. Instead of the buzzing of a light being produced with the light instrument, the sounds that are played are my voice singing the poem “Stars” by Sara Teasdale.

“Alone in the night

On a dark hill

With pines around me

Spicy and still,

And a heaven full of stars

Over my head,

White and topaz

And misty red;

Myriads with beating

Hearts of fire

That aeons

Cannot vex or tire;

Up the dome of heaven

Like a great hill,

I watch them marching

Stately and still,

And I know that I

Am honored to be

Witness

Of so much majesty.”

Through this poem, I shift the focus of witnessing the stars within this piece to the stars becoming embodied themselves, relating to the idea of posthumanism through the inclusion of the past, present, and future creation of music based around light. Through my slight shifts of pitch in singing, or through the use of live processing within the electronics, these small changes in sound are created to change how the listener perceives the overall piece, occupying the fluid space between time-based notation and that of a traditionally notated classical Western score.

       Through my pieces In An Artist’s Studio, Vox, Moon Dark World, and Lux, I create a framework for understanding my compositional process and its relationship to cybernetic feedback loops, posthumanism, identity, durational performance, and the body as source material. This exploration of concepts gives me, as a composer, a better understanding of the intentions within my compositions and how the influences of other theories, ideas, and composers directly impact my work. Through this theoretical, compositional,  and performance-informed analysis of my works, I will better understand my artistic practice in the creation of future pieces and their impact on the listener. While there are frictions between posthumanism and the focus of the individual body in the creation of my music, recognizing and exploring this tension in future works will help me expand and develop my compositional voice.