Unstructured Structure
Unstructured structure is a body of work featuring a series of sonic XR sculptures that showcase a mixture of unconventional compositional techniques throughout music history. Through this project, I hope to invite viewers to reconceptualize the boundaries of music and how we listen.
While fabrication of physical sculptures for AR is still in progress due to COVID, the main event currently takes place in a VR gallery.
Form I - Pitch Space As Topological Surface
The first room showcases a 4-measure Bach-style composition on a Mobius strip where pitch space and time were folded due to the glide reflection symmetry of the score.
Form II - Music Timbre as physical texture
The second form marries time-based conceptual notation with the Sound Mass technique. Sculptures are made out of an assortment of materials as metaphors for timbres and arranged across a hallway where visitors experience the composition linearly by passing through it.
Form III - spectrogram as fractal pattern
The third form is inspired by the recent trend among experimental electronic musicians who embed hidden images into the spectrograms of their songs. The artwork allows visitors to synthesize sounds in real time from algorithmically generated fractal patterns as spectrograms.
All the sounds in the gallery are spatialized as if they were coming from the sculptures relative to the visitor's position. The dynamic motions of the sculptures and their sounds together visualize and sonify relationships between compositional structures and the physical forms.
Research
This project is conceptually influenced by many progressive composers who gave music new definitions by breaking away from the traditional harmonic system and linearity in music. The first section is inspired by the hidden topology in J.S. Bach’s intricate music structure in Canon 5 from BWV 1087, where its steady state can be read on a Mobius strip. The second section draws inspiration from John Cage’s iconic collection of graphic notations that were meant to evoke improvisation from musicians, rather than strict performing rules for them to follow. The only constraint of this composition is to use the Sound Mass technique which minimizes the importance of individual pitches and harmonic motion in preference of timbral and textural elements as the main shaper of music. The third section resonates with pioneer electronic musician Morton Subotnik’s advocacy of using analog synthesizer as an instrument to liberate sounds that were never-before-heard of.
Watch my thesis presentation here: