People in this global age are very often suffering from a consumerist mentality where instead of generating their own meaningful life-narrative through creative outlet, they are driven to constantly distract themselves with short bursts of entertainment. This paper offers a personalized account of a long-term study and practice of creativity from a Buddhist philosophical perspective. After a brief explanation of Buddhist philosophy, this paper examines the aesthetic position of composer, John Cage, his relevance to our current cultural atmosphere, and offers a new aesthetic perspective based on the author's own exploration of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism in conjunction with the practice of music composition.

Part A of this document is an analysis of movements one and two of the electronic work 'Les Arythmiques' by Luc Ferrari. This dramatic work is one of Ferrari's major pieces from his last decade. The analysis uses spectrograms as well as sound clips to point out important moments in the piece. Part B is a brief exploration of the author's compositions that are in Appendix D (portfolio of scores). Part B shows the compositional methods chosen for each piece. Some of the techniques used in Part B explore the use of Cellular Automata, Markov Chains and Fibonacci Numbers. This part shows the purposefulness to get a specific result by using a particular method that would suit the overall envisioned aesthetic.

Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860 – 1936) was one of the most prominent musicologists in the history of India who wrote the first modern treatise on North Indian Classical Music, an art which had been propagated earlier mostly through oral tradition. Early in the 20th Century CE, he wrote a series of books of great current renown; perhaps the best-known of these is his Hindustānī Sangīt Paddhati – Kramik Pustak Mālikā (System of Hindustani Music - Book Series), written in the North Indian language Marathi, in which he outlined his system of the categorization of the North Indian modal system: he classified the hundreds of known rāga-s (scales replete with instructions for melodic movement) into ten modes called thāṭ-s which form the basis of current North Indian Classical Music theory. This six-volume work illustrates the rāga-s and their thāṭ-s by the inclusion of ~1900 different short Hindustani classical music compositions. In 1968 the Czech-born composer Walter Kaufmann, then professor of musicology at Indiana University, Bloomington, published his book The Ragas of North India, in which he transcribed into Western staff notation a generous selection of the compositions in Bhatkhande’s Kramik Pustak Mālikā. However, Bhatkhande’s work – apart from Volume I, a very brief introductory booklet comprising only 68 pages – has never been translated into English. This project has as its goal the porting into Western staff notation of all ~1900 compositions in the 3500-odd pages of the Kramik Pustak Mālikā to make it accessible to the Western music community. Given the large scope of the work, the solution is to leverage and build technology into the software platform - InSargam - Indian Classical Music Notation Editor that can export Western staff notation and accomplish this task.

This paper explores referentiality as a way to overcome the excessive inward focus of New Music compositional thought. My reflections are placed in relation to abstraction and representation as a basic opposition that has operated throughout music history. In Part 1, I argue that not only “real world sounds”, but borrowed music as well, can be used to articulate musical discourses that belong to the realm of representation, and I illustrate the sampling and sequencing techniques that have allowed me to achieve such goal. In Part 2, I demonstrate that any concert is a visual spectacle in itself and I explore how both the performer’s physicality and the concert space can be expanded by technological means to articulate audiovisual narratives that are connected with aspects of our contemporary society. In Part 3, I illustrate how the concepts exposed in the first two parts informed my compositional process in “El libro de los flasheos (The Book of Trippin’)”.

Most, if not all, composing is done through some form of interface, in which the composer makes modifications to, and receives feedback about, the composition in progress. Such interfaces can take a wide variety of forms, including both analog interfaces, such as pencil and paper, and digital interfaces, such as notation software and Digital Audio Workstations. This document presents a theory of these `compositional interfaces,' and of their effect on the compositional process. Starting with a review of the literature about interfaces in general, and musical interfaces more specifically, the anatomy of the compositional interface is then examined, with a detailed discussion of forms of input, representation, and feedback. Important properties of the interface as a whole---such as latency, openness, and scope---are then discussed, after which two case studies are analyzed. In the final chapter, the role of interfaces is considered within the context of the author's own work.

This dissertation comprises a collection of works that address aspects of sound

occupying space. Those aspects refer to inner components of timbre and rhythm and

how these may influence the perception and projection of sound. These works also

address the interaction of physical or virtual spaces and spatial attributes of sound in

regard to rhythm and timbre. The composition of timbres serves as fundamental base

for the musical material contained in the works, using sound synthesis and extended

techniques as a paradigm for articulation and instrumentation of sound in vertical and

horizontal layers. Rhythm is not only a parameter that articulates time; it may also be

the parameter that articulates musical material. The relationships of timbre and rhythm

serve as expressive substance for the elaboration of immersive soundscapes that are

molded by time and memory.