Viktoria Arvayová (1st-year master’s)
Sounding Archives: Vision, Memory and Obsolete Media
Sound is always further mediated – once removed – from its source. Through technologies, cultural contexts, and communicative frameworks, each new medium of transmission does not merely carry sound but transforms it, reshaping our listening and opening new aesthetic and communicative possibilities. The sonic archive is traditionally conceived as a repository of materials, data, and documents. It is always mediated by acts of selection, omission, and organisation. Therefore, it is never neutral; rather, it reflects the cultural, ideological, and historical conditions under which it is assembled. In this sense, the archive itself is a generative force and a site for interpretation. Connecting realities across time and space, it structures both what is remembered and how it may be reimagined.
How can acts of selection and transmission inform compositional decisions? Drawing from these concepts, the aim of this research is to form a practical investigation into the subject of sound archives within the field of current sonic practices, to approach sound not only as a medium of musical expression, but as a form of communication.
The process will reveal how technologies of storage and circulation shape the context of sonic material and influence compositional frameworks. Through the analysis of existing works, collection, organisation and reinterpretation, the project will explore how the accumulation of sounds over time generates new musical inspirations and compositional approaches in electronic and electro-acoustic music, expanding the notion of a sonic archive as both a source of study and a creative methodology. Practical results and knowledge gained from the process will be presented in the form of written research, sound installation and electroacoustic compositions.
Martin Kosorín (1st-year master’s)
Re-Mapping the Instrument: Transferring Instrumental Muscle Memory into Electronic Music Performance
This research explores how instrumental muscle memory—understood as a preconscious capacity to produce musical patterns and nuanced expression—can be re-directed toward controlling electronic sound in real time. Taking the guitar as a point of departure, the project decomposes the instrument’s physical and gestural interface, experimenting with new mappings between bodily action and sonic response. The goal is to retain the expressive subtleties of an electro-acoustic instrument, while expanding their functions to synthesis, dynamic processing, and spatialization.
The dense cultural background of the guitar shapes the way it is played and heard. This project acknowledges that heritage while seeking to detach the instrument from its idiomatic patterns. By treating the guitar primarily as a body–machine interface and sound object, it re-examines how familiar gestures and tactile feedback can generate unfamiliar sonic results, extending the expressive domain of performance beyond traditional technique.
Through iterative prototyping and live performance, the research develops and tests mappings that translate micro-gestures of the hands and body into effective control of electronic sound.
The process involves the design of custom performance system that interpret physical gesture as a multidimensional control source, allowing the performer to manipulate synthesis parameters, spatial diffusion, and real-time processing. These experiments create musical situations that intentionally challenge habitual gestures, forcing the performer to form new relationships between motion and sonic outcome. This performative inquiry reveals how embodied skill—shaped by the instrumental practice—can be re-purposed to produce expressive interactions with electronic sound processes.
While centered on the guitar, the methodology is conceived as transferable to other instruments, proposing a broader framework for re-embodying instrumental skill within electronic music contexts.
Liza Kuzyakova (1st-year master’s)
Spatial Composition: PerceptualSonic Materiality and Physical Space
My research project focuses on spatial composition and investigates the space-forming potential of perceptible sonic materiality and its relationship with acoustical conditions – the physicality of space itself. Positioned at the intersection of electroacoustic and computer music, the project proposes an incorporation of compositional approaches from site-specific and sculptural sound art practices that focus on body-space-material relationships. In response to the proliferation of existing notions of sound spaces, the research is intended to form a unified and nuanced framework for composing music with and as space.
The project approaches sound phenomena as capable of constituting perceptual space and unfolds on two planes. One plane of inquiry addresses the spatiality inherent in the source material – created by texture, frequency (e.g., Pratt’s effect; spectral verticality in Erik Nyström), and sound reproduction technologies. The other perceptual level concerns acoustic response. Utilised with intention and precision, spatial characteristics such as site’s dimensions, the distance and positioning of sources – loudspeakers and/or instrumentalists, and the amount and behaviour of acoustic reflection extend the artistic and aesthetic realms of composition. Advancements in the technology of electronic sound have expanded the scope of precision in working with both acoustic and psychoacoustic phenomena, such as inner ear distortion, masking, acoustic beatings, and other phase events. Alluding to tactile sensations, these phenomena entail additional layers to sonic tangibility and are shaped by and with the physical environment, from the ear to the architectural construction to the loudspeaker.
Unfolding across selected locations, the works I plan to develop employ non-conventional speaker configurations and site-responsive strategies, articulating the interdependency between spatial and perceptible material qualities of sonic structures and the physicality of site and sound registration. An important aspect of the research addresses the constraints on documenting spatial sound by reviewing the perceptual implications of the recording tool. In the wider scope, the project engages the entangled relations between the production, presentation, and reception of musical structure as a perpetually situated, shared spatial experience. The outcome of the project will be the formulation of compositional spatial-material methodology, applicable to electroacoustic and electronic works, stage performances, and installations.
Eva Morgado Oliveira Aguilar (1st-year master’s)
Sense of Place: Transformation within Site-specific Performance
A site can act as both a catalyst and collaborator, shaping how a work is conceived, experienced, as well as influencing its content and resources for creation. When this is taken into account, the removal of a performance from its spatial origin inherently transforms its meaning: it is a loss, but at the same also an opportunity to reshape, reimagine and reinterpret a work. This research project brings together place and its sensory exploration, aiming to develop creative tools for approaching site-specific performance while also rethinking an artwork’s continuity — its future life — through a movement of chronological and geographical transfiguration.
The process begins with observation, search and selection of places based in distinctive acoustic and visual characteristics, and with conditions that allow for durational presence. This duration expands real-time responsiveness and sensitivity to the gestures, events, and behaviours that can traverse a place over time. I will apply micro-to-macro degrees of action – thought sonic and visual intervention within the site’s standard activity and test new forms and formats for presenting music, configuring audiences, developing documentation strategies — whether from the viewpoint of the performers, audience or composer — all specifically adapted to the dynamics of each unconventional setting. This phase also involves reflecting on challenges facing electroacoustic music implementation in site-responsive environments. Case studies will be employed to inform my practice and examine how certain equipment has been built and designed to serve specific purposes as well as how such technologies have evolved to meet artistic needs. Virtual systems, including artificial recreations of selected spatial elements, will be considered both as tools for planning performances and providing performers with instructions. How can these representations guide the performer’s perception and interaction with the environment? In an era of globalisation and digitalisation, the notion of place has acquired new meanings. How digital space influences us, and in what ways does this perception differ from— or connect with— that of a physical environment? How can a sense of place be conveyed without diminishing its complexity?
In a second phase, I propose to explore how these pieces can be re-staged and further developed within more controllable, neutral environments such as black boxes. This involves composing a series of mutations that retain a resonant dialogue with the original site-specific source material, yet emerge as reimagined artworks that automatically carry intentionally detached and decontextualised elements from the spaces that shaped their creation. This re-stagings allow my artistic decisions and associative connections to unfold and enter into dialogue with these residual traces.
Nefeli Sani (1st-year master’s)
Woman and the Machine: Exploring the Sonic Creativity of Women through Collective Improvisation
This research aims to explore the creative expression of women in contemporary electronic music, focusing on how collective improvisation can open spaces for uncensored experimentation and exchange of knowledge. A central research question is how gender shapes access, participation, and visibility in electronic music: What strategies do women artists develop to navigate barriers around technology and professional opportunities? How do these experiences of marginalization influence their creative processes, and what practices emerge when they collaborate in supportive environments?
To address these questions, I will invite women sound artists into collective ‘living labs’, where improvisation will function both as artistic practice and research methodology. Collective improvisation will be used to open artistic dialogues, through which feminist approaches to listening, sound-making, and performing can generate alternative forms of learning. These encounters aspire to foster artistic creation away from structures of exclusion, while highlighting the political dimensions embedded in sound, listening, and technology, and amplifying voices and experiences often silenced.
The documentation of the processes and outcomes of these improvisation sessions will provide material for analysis, composition, and artistic research. By employing innovative methods for sonic exchange and collaborative sound experimentation, this creative process will also expand my artistic practice, allowing me to explore new directions and pathways. The work hopes to illuminate women’s contributions in electronic music, to expand possibilities for inclusive and collaborative experimentation, and to emphasise the potential of sound as a driver of social change.
António Sou (1st-year master’s)
Composing Interactions with Algorithmic Bias
Bias is a tendency that skews perception or judgement. It can lead to error or, in extreme cases, systemic failure – but repeated error can also generate new forms of exchange. Such iterations produce mimetic behaviours: gestures that approximate understanding without fully achieving it.
My research investigates the development of dynamic musical systems, focusing on how processes can be modelled on the adaptive and epistemic processes of humans and machines in learning. The biases formed within these processes determine what is carried across in transformation between systems, while what fails to translate becomes residual – forming a generative space. In my research, I will explore how failure in computational processes can shape new sound and meaning, and how bias – rather than leading to error – acts as a generative force that shapes the system’s adaptive responses and the ways understanding is simulated.
As a case study, I developed a recursive speech feedback system that loops a voice or text through speech recognition and synthesis processes across different languages. At each stage of translation, the results are documented in text and audio to trace how sound and meaning gradually transform through recursive machine listening – each model reinterpreting the voice of the previous. The process exposes how systemic bias and error interact over time, revealing emergent transformations in timbre, prosody, and intelligibility that can themselves become compositional material. While contemporary AI speech models achieve high levels of accuracy, their behaviour in recursive or cross-lingual configurations shows how they adapt – or fail to adapt – when confronted with input beyond their comprehension. This system therefore functions as an experimental ecology for studying how bias, error, and adaptation co-produce sonic organisation.
The broader goal of this research is to develop compositional strategies for dynamic musical systems that draw from – but are not limited to – principles of translation and language cognition. Building on Thor Magnusson’s notion of digital instruments as epistemic tools that extend human cognition (Magnusson, Sonic Writing, 2019), this work examines how musical systems enact processes of learning: how feedback, bias, and adaptation give rise to epistemic behaviours through which the system listens, learns, and organises sound. Through this lens, composition becomes a means of investigating how systems construct, simulate, and negotiate understanding through sound.
David Bilek (2nd-year master’s)
Digital Resonance: Lutherie in Contemporary Composition
Through the electrification and digitalization of musical instruments, new musical forms and possibilities have emerged. With this unprecedented control of parameters such as timbre, time, and dynamics, choosing what to compose with is no longer a question of access to a specific instrument, but one of deciding what to use and what not to use. Choosing a digital/electroacoustic instrument means deciding not only on a sound, but also on its interface. Since these interfaces are no longer bound to physical affordances, they can influence the final musical result much more than before.
What parameters to show, the use of submenus, and what kind of physical control surface to pick are typically the concerns of instrument builders, and much less of composers, who, when using those instruments, are bound to their logic and affordances. This research connects these fields by linking the compositional and instrument-building process. An instrument will be built with which one or more compositions will be created. This iterative process moves between instrument building, exploration of musical parameters, instrument refinement, composition, and again instrument refinement.
The concept of Digital Resonance was chosen as a guiding principle. Resonance is a two-way movement: being touched from the outside and a response, thereby establishing a connection that can transform both parties. Digital Resonance thus examines how to achieve this within computational systems, which operate in discrete steps rather than continuous flow. To put this into practice, the instrument—combining physical hardware controls with a digital sound engine—will focus on three main aspects: embodied interaction, mapping strategies, and digital-analog conversion. On the compositional side, aspects of Digital Resonance will shape how this instrument is explored and the topics of the compositions. However, the specific ways digitalization influences the compositional process will emerge through the iterative practice itself.
Jacob Eckhardt (2nd-year master’s)
On Turntable Musics: Pasts & Present
Taking part in the (somewhat) recent resurgence of turntable musics within experimental music discourse, this project undertakes an exploration of turntablism as a discipline deeply entwined with the materiality of its instrument—the turntable. This perspective opens up broader questions about the physicality of sound-reproducing technologies, their malleability, and how these aspects relate to notions of noise, tactility, and the dual role of the turntable as both an instrument and a mediator of pre-recorded material. The project also aims to address the divisions between ‘experimental’ and ‘popular’ musics, and how these segregations permeate the turntablist discipline both historically (in how its history is told), artistically (in the segregation of techniques between these fields), and culturally (in how the discipline is generally perceived).
These theoretical concerns inform and run in tandem with an experimental music practice that employs instrument preparations to explore alternative methods of reading the sound content inscribed on vinyl discs, with these techniques being presented in a performance setting, though other formats will also be explored.
Ivan Kalashnik (2nd-year master’s)
Interfacing Reality Beyond Auditory Perception
Large-scale computational research in Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA), focused on the perceptual and cognitive principles of auditory processing, indicates that the human auditory perception system is inherently fragile due to both physical and cognitive limitations. This mirrors insights from various recent philosophical movements influenced by anti-correlationist thought, which argue that human interpretations of reality lag behind actual events. These perceptual limitations bias any attempt to interface with the reality of sound, making speculation unavoidable.
According to Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), both human and non-human objects possess independent existence and agency, and should be studied in their own (speculative) right. At this point, aesthetics is no longer only about human-centred sensory experience but also about acknowledging the complex interplay between the perception, relation, and materiality of sound objects. This framework emphasises a shift from seeking comprehensive control of the auditory experience to engaging in a more interactive, speculative mode of thinking in relation to sound. Such an approach focuses on the exploration of new dimensions of aesthetics that align with the speculative reconfiguration of human <> nonhuman interactions, positioning sound as an active agent in the broader ontological landscape.
The proposed project aims to explore the potential ways of interfacing reality beyond auditory perception, offering access to the transient phenomena shaped by the cognitive, spatial, and temporal locality implied by a human body. I intend to develop a digital audio synthesis environment that functions as a mediator, offering access to both the evident and hidden properties of sound actants, as well as the complex emergence of auditory scenes.
Referring to ASA, one can assume that the human experience of auditory information is processed through principles of segmentation, integration, and segregation—coincidentally fundamental in Pulsar Synthesis (PS), a variation of granular synthesis described by Curtis Roads.[1] A PS-oriented approach could serve as the basis for an interface, offering precise control over various time-span domains of listening and sound composition and unlocking new dimensions for digital audio synthesis within the framework of object-oriented aesthetics and philosophical inquiry.
[1] Roads, Curtis. (2001). Introduction to pulsar synthesis. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 109. 2401-2401.
Isul Kim (2nd-year master’s)
Process as Methodology in Artistic Practice
In practice, process encompasses the body of work in its developmental stages. Contemporary art and sound worlds have expanded the definition into theoretical domains by approaching it as a form-bearing concept; scenes, narratives, and durational pieces that present its unfolding (as the work itself) are some examples. Process, as it is understood in process philosophy, focuses on change as the fundamental aspect of reality and marks pivotal points where an idea can take on new forms as critical junctures for analysis. At these points—spontaneous concentrations of activity, accidents, coincidences, or unintended obstacles—one is given the chance to reassess the work and engage in its transformation into another state. It can be hypothesised that these situations provide spaces for imagination where intuition can be examined for further intuitive decisions.
This research aims to detach from outcome expectations and redirect attention to the artistic process, thereby developing a conscious relationship with my own method of practice—it is about intuition, non-fixation, change, and one’s involvement with the process of discovery. Through a combination of art theory and sound-making, with a critical cultural approach to the context of a work’s ideation, the research will make personal interpretations and create new meanings around the theme of process, while engaging in my own process in practice. Undoubtedly, feedback becomes a sound metaphor for this research, along with sonic situations representing critical junctures of change. The malleability of these situations will be investigated through speaker technologies, multichannel configurations, and spatial mixing to create immersive spaces and augmentations of spatial reality.
To understand the plurality of perspectives and methodologies explored around this topic, the research will analyse a handful of time-based works where process plays a thematic role and present this in written form. To further ground the theoretical component, I will create a body of electroacoustic compositions and mixed media assemblages for performance and installation, while documenting its development.
Axel Kolb (2nd-year master’s)
Rupture as Relation
Rupture presents an opening, a crack, a rift, a crevice from which something can emerge. It delineates parts and projects its surface onto the separating elements; the surface of one is negatively mapped onto the other. Rupture becomes the common denominator between partitions. It is constantly shaped by what it shapes, and assumes the superficial structure of an element at the very moment it produces it. It is through Rupture that what is separated stays or becomes related. Reversing a common notion of Rupture – one that sees it only as a symptom of their host – leads to a reading of Fissures, Crevices, Cracks, Tears, Shears, Fractures and Ruptures as agents of the in-between.
My thesis presents Rupture as causal for the (in)differentiation of perceptual elements in the flux of associative aural perception. In my research, I translate the event of Rupture to the perception and cognition of sound by looking at Ruptures and Fissures in various fields. These include, but are not limited to, phenomenology, fiction, acousmatic theory, metaphorology, fracture mechanics, topology, tectonics, and philosophies of perception. Ruptures become prevalent as these fields are subverted through a fictionalised reading that de- and re-contextualises the topics discussed.
This approach traces the hole-linings created by Ruptures and Cracks through the back-feeding processes of listening and composing, reading and writing, perceiving and interpreting. Questioning the inferential prescriptions of relational coherence, I present these processes as being inherently spatiotemporal and delineated by Rupture.
Lawrence Mc Guire (2nd-year master’s)
Poetics of Synthetic Vocality
This project proposes an investigation into vocality through a simultaneous exposition of natural and synthetic voice, where synthetic voice is theorized as a way of knowing, or gathering a vocal understanding (e.g., acoustemology). The synthetic voice will be used as a vehicle for furthering an experiential understanding of what does not fit within a vocal identity, pattern, or structure. How can the perception of a vocal sound be enriched through techniques of juxta- and superposition with a synthetic voice?
Drawing inspiration from sound poetry both before and after the Second World War (e.g., De Stijl, Ultra-Lettrism, Concrete poetry ), I will explore approaches to structuring units of language, using voice either as an endpoint or a departure point. Where, in the sonic abstraction and reinterpretation of voice, I will rely on ambiguity as a key perceptual element to enhance the interpretative qualities of voice. I will experiment with compositional techniques to attain these qualities, particularly in forming vocal hybrids from two vocal identities and interpolation between the two, inspired by the Spectralists and contextualized by the idea of perceptual fusion of vocal identities. Synthesized voice will be utilized to both align with and deviate from familiar vocal aspects, such as the envelope of a speech signal, timbre, or intonation pattern. Meaning, I would like to use the ‘deviating’ voice as a sensory tool to probe the speech processing system and use the perceptual and acoustic distinctions and commonalities with natural voice as acoustemological clues to gain a deeper understanding of what is vocal; to pose questions and provide speculative answers regarding vocal timbre, articulation, and rhythm and speech across various time scales and perceptual dimensions.
Roc Montoriol (2nd-year master’s)
Sessile Auralities
Plants are often regarded as silent, though vegetal existence engages with sounds in manifold, and ubiquitous ways. Vibrating in step with their ecophysiological rhythms, or resonating with the sounds of a zillion earthlings, they unfurl myriad forms of sounding and listening in place with many sorts of partners—human and nonhuman alike. What can their fields of sonic activity tell us about their symbiotic modes of living and dying, emplaced with others? What possible worldings, and transformative listening practices could arise when adopting a vegetal perspective? To listen to and with the vegetal may help us ask pertinent questions about the act of listening, and rethink meaningful ways to render the earthbound audible.
Noticing the sounds, and energetics of multiple configurations of place across the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal, I will tune my ears to vegetal auralities through various means of recording, listening, and performative approaches. Informed by methods in plant bioacoustics, and biotremology, I will craft and utilize a range of microphones, and vibration transducers in different field recording strategies, involving in-site listening performances, and aural improvisations. My research-practice will be further addressed in the form of sound performances, collective listenings, and writings.
Drawing from emerging fields of research in the biological sciences, together with listening practices within the artistic domain, this project considers how vegetal vibrations participate in geo-biological entwinements between humans, nonhumans, and places; and it proposes, with plants, a practice of listening otherwise.
Alina Petrova (2nd-year master’s)
Sonic Becomings: Extended Techniques and Digital Processing as a Gateway to New Acoustic Realities
My research investigates the application of extended techniques in sound processing through digital platforms, specifically Max MSP and SuperCollider, to transform the acoustic qualities of real instruments. While extended techniques typically involve unconventional methods of playing instruments, I expand this concept by integrating real-time digital manipulation. This approach reshapes an instrument’s timbre, pitch, and spatial properties, producing hybrid soundscapes that extend beyond traditional performance limitations.
By leveraging Max MSP and SuperCollider, I explore how digital tools can break down and reassemble the acoustic identity of an instrument, modulating its timbre and deconstructing its sound. This process opens up new auditory dimensions and redefines what is considered “natural” sound. Through digital augmentation, I aim to create a fluid dialogue between the acoustic source and its digitally processed version, offering new perspectives on the relationship between performer, instrument, and sound technology.
My research also engages with the concept of sonic space. Through spatialization, I explore how digital processing can alter not only the texture of sound but also its interaction with both physical and virtual spaces. This study challenges conventional performance concepts by blending the organic nature of acoustic instruments with the dynamic possibilities of digital sound manipulation, resulting in immersive and multifaceted listening experiences.
Jun Ryu (2nd-year master’s)
Free Improvisation as a Composing Interface in Electronic Music
What makes a live performance truly distinctive is the uniqueness of its specific characteristics in time and space. It is the interaction between all elements present in the situation; performers, audience, ‘atmosphere’ (including temperature and humidity), and temporal aspects. Under this premise, my study begins with a focus on the field of free improvisation, which is likely the most practical and direct method for understanding the parameters which affect live performance.
The essence of free improvisation is to achieve diverse creative expressions through the real-time interactions between all individual subjects and objects. For this reason, it acts as a mirror of the performance situation. With this in mind, within the field of improvisation, composition can be considered as the act of creating an interface that could leads to certain situations, regardless of whether specific situations are intended or not. This includes not only instructions given to the subjects but also the creation of diverse spatiotemporal situations and atmospheres. In this context, it is possible to consider the situation itself as a instrumental interface, allowing not only the subjects but also the elements that influence them to be incorporated into the act of composition.
This research takes this premise as its foundation, exploring and experimenting with the idea of incorporating various elements of the performance situation as an interface for improvisation, aiming to engage more broadly with the context of live performances. Aesthetically, improvisation can be interpreted as each subject’s life attitude in response to the situation, raising questions about how far unexpected musical moments can be discovered and extrapolated. Furthermore, this research challenges the power dynamics between means and ends, as well as between processes and results, by exploring and expanding the possibilities of live performance, thus broadening the range of performance art forms within the field of electro-acoustic music.
Otis Thomet (2nd-year master’s)
A non-peripheral musical body: Embodied musical knowledge in electroacoustic improvisation
“musical improvisation is ineluctably embodied; its creative and political force manifest through sounds and gestures that are traces of experience at once relational and contextual” (Gillian Siddal and Ellen Waterman, Negotiated moments improvisation, sound and subjectivity).
Inviting an understanding of the body as an emergent relational happening, this research will be guided by the sensing and improvising body. Based on this notion I want to pose the questions:
Is the body and the way we iterate these traces, gestures, and repertoires an archive of engaging with sound?
How does this archive structure our musical decision-making?
What are methods to complicate, disrupt, and utilise this archive in a musically meaningful manner?
A starting point for this inquiry will be a series of workshops that I facilitated titled “sonic acts of noticing.” Attempting to liberate listening and sounding from the indoors and its acoustic and cultural conventions, these workshops took place in contrasting environments such as a dense forest and the relatively open Furka-Pass above the tree line. Specialised microphones and listening stations provided amplified access to sonic occurrences in the given environment. This setup also served as an amplification/attention feedback loop between the participants themselves and the surroundings. Guided by listening scores, the participants were invited to tune into registers of simultaneity, plurality, and polyphony and to utilise their voice to direct attention to, amplify, mimic, sound out, and enter a sonic correspondence with each other and the nature present.
Using the recordings of these workshops as a oral-electronic score that activates amplification/attention feedback loops mimicking the workshops setups in ways that bring forward the emergent behavioural properties of improvising subjects, and working with sound as a physical phenomenon that registers in our bodies “in ways that confound the assumed discreteness of exterior and interior space,” as Julie Dawn Smith writes in Diva Dogs: Sounding Women Improvising, as well as acknowledging the body’s presence as necessity and part of the production circuits of electroacoustic music, I will extend the idea of a relational sensorimotor loop between the body and the contextual into the studio to research the areas of knowledge afforded by human embodiment as well as cultural and historic constraints that are specific to improvising in an electro-acoustic setting.
Kacper Werkowicz (2nd-year master’s)
Digital Synthesis Genealogies
Digital sound synthesis and its historical evolution stand as the central focus of this research. It aims to trace the genealogy of various digital sound synthesis technologies from their nascent stages in research laboratories to their current ubiquity. Historically and contemporarily, these technologies have had a profound impact on how sound is conceptualised, listened to, and created. A thorough understanding of these paradigm shifts can only be achieved when considering them in close relation with the technologies they stem from, calling for a unique combination of technological expertise with a critical cultural approach.
With this in mind, a mixed methodology is proposed, beginning with individual digital synthesis methods (both historical and contemporary) and exploring the circumstances of their invention, followed by a detailed study of their technical implementations. Afterwards, an attempt will be made to delineate the technological, historical, and cultural relationships between said methods, along with their possible broader categorisation and further impacts within music technology, culture, critical theory, and ontology. This part of the research aims not only to build upon technical resources, but also to delve into works of sound philosophy and journalism, music communities, and internet culture.
Such inquiry should result in a comprehensive body of cross-disciplinary knowledge, providing new avenues to critically engage and experiment with digital synthesis, informed by its past and ongoing influence on cultural production and perception of sound. It may also encourage an interest in the revival and re-integration of obscure or less commercially utilised technologies, and deepen understanding of how digital sound has been conceptualised across different times and cultural contexts. By engaging with diverse sources and communities, this research aims to enrich the discourse surrounding digital sound synthesis, broadening how it can be understood and engaged with in the future.