UC Irvine

Musical improvisation and video game play are often treated as distinct practices, yet both invite participants to explore possibilities within structured environments through voluntary participation, real-time decision making, feedback, iteration, and agency. This dissertation investigates how the exploratory nature of video game play can serve as a framework for the composition and performance of improvised music through the creation and analysis of Duet for Flute and Video Game. In Duet, a live instrumentalist and an audience volunteer encounter and transform musical materials together in real time. The game player requires no prior musical training, and the instrumentalist requires no gaming experience; both learn to engage with the work through acting, listening, observing, and responding. The dissertation argues that gameplay and improvisation do not merely exhibit parallel qualities within Duet, but transform one another. Gameplay foregrounds improvisation as interaction within a structured, rule-based environment, while improvisation reframes gameplay as an open-ended, expressive, and collaborative act. Game mechanics function as compositional materials that shape attention, timing, movement, coordination, and musical exchange. Together, these mechanics, affordances, and audio-visual materials form a “possibility landscape”: both the virtual terrain through which the player moves and a conceptual field of discoverable musical actions. This inquiry employs practice-based research and iterative design. Duet developed through cycles of designing, testing, performing, observing, reflecting, and revising across conferences, classrooms, demonstrations, and concert settings. The analysis draws upon creative and technical documentation, musical materials, recordings, firsthand reflection, and informal observations of participants and audiences. It informs the study of what continues to be an evolving artistic system.