The Forms and Functions of Computational Music: Three Essays and Artifacts
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Clester, Ian James
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Abstract
This thesis proposes that computation is not a special property of electronic or algorithmic music but a dimension of all musical practice: the systematic processing of information according to rules, whether explicit or tacit, formal or embodied, is present wherever music is made. It develops a computational lens that asks of any musical practice what is being computed, by whom, on what substrate, when, and how formally, and applies that lens to three dimensions of computational music through critical essays paired with original software artifacts.
Each artifact gives computational music a different form: Alternator distributes generative music as executable programs over the web; ScoreCard compresses generative music programs into QR codes printed on physical cards; Invoke makes the performer's voice the sole interface to and material of computation in live performance. Each form determines the music's functions: what relationships it establishes between composer and listener, human and machine, code and sound. The three forms trace a trajectory from infrastructure to instrument, from generality to specificity, from the browser to the body.
The three essays develop linked arguments about the values embedded in these forms. The first examines general-purposeness as a technological value and argues that it conflicts with the necessarily specific character of artmaking. The second traces the compressive tendency in music analysis and composition, distinguishing programmatic compressibility (the shortness of a generating program) from perceptual compressibility (the richness of the output as experienced by a listener). The third draws on programming language design and human-computer interaction to argue that resistance between human and computational systems is not a problem to be solved but the site where musical meaning is produced, distinguishing resistance as a means to an external goal from resistance as a medium of expression.
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Date
2026-05
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Dissertation (PhD)