Voice and poetry as inspiration and material in acousmatic composition

Abstract

This thesis combines both practice-based research, in the form of acousmatic composition, and theoretical research, addressing voice and poetry both as inspiration and material. It includes a portfolio of original compositions and a written text with aesthetic ideas that informed the compositional process. The aim of the research was to propose a particular creative strategy, based on Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s aesthetic theory; a system which aims to create artistic works independent of real world by taking materials from reality and combining them in unexpected ways through an equilibrium between rationality and intuition. This theory, alongside various other theoretical and artistic sources informing the creative process, is explained in a section entitled Compositional Rationale. The broader thesis is divided into two parts, each starting with a methodology relating to the compositions described within: Part 1: Octophonic cycle La lumière artificielle and Part 2: Three acousmatic tributes. In order to examine how the Compositional Rationale operates within the portfolio’s pieces, an analytical methodology has been proposed. This is described in an Analytical methodology section and considers the use of two parts of the tripartite model proposed by Nattiez (1990) and developed for electroacoustic music by Roy (2004). The two parts of the tripartite model are poietic analysis and neutral analysis. The first describes the creative process and compositional considerations of the author, and the second details the constitutive elements of each piece within five areas; Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of sound objects (1966), Denis Smalley’s notion of spectromorphological functions (1997), levels of spatial function by Annette Vande Gorne (2010), and finally two more types of analyses developed by the author: voice type and speech-sound type. Taken as a whole, the analysis demonstrates the structural constitution of each piece, and thus shows how Huidobro’s creative system, called creacionismo, has been applied successfully to acousmatic composition, generating the notion of acousmatic-creationist as nomenclature for the process. This is the main outcome of this thesis, a new artistic strategy which balances rationality and intuition within acousmatic composition and places poetry as a driven force in the use of voice, merging artistic practice and theory in a recursive action.