Formless, bodiless, purposeless: development of a portfolio of non-teleological electronic sound works
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Full Text E-thesis
Date
2026-01-19
Authors
Maguire, Philip Stephen
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Publisher
University College Cork
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Abstract
This research project explores and develops my compositional practice. I make music and sound works in which the experience of electronic sound is the sole pursuit, working with simple sound sources such as sine tones. They fascinate me, but I do not know why. The project is a portfolio of five works and written commentaries that examine them and their composition. The compositions are works for hardware and software-generated synthesis.
Each piece develops this idea of the work as sound solely to be experienced. The portfolio begins with works for synthesiser and computer, to a software piece operated by the listener, to a collaborative work between computer-generated tones and audience operated smartphone instruments, and finally a work for sub-bass tones that invites physical movement and experience of near-inaudible sound.
In the commentaries, I break down the main material of my practice into four areas: space, time, sine tones, and timbre. In these chapters, I problematise compositional decisions I make, and how I think about things like sound and its interaction with, and habitation of, space. There are also more nebulous factors to my practice that come and go throughout the commentaries: finding out, use of constrained random processes, mystery, and sensation. They are, perhaps, the unknowable parts of my practice, but they are always present and permeating one another. In these chapters, I contextualise my work among other practitioners of music and visual art. These practitioners may compose similar sounding music with very different methods, or be visual artists whose work speaks to my own sensation of sound as a three-dimensional object or substance that can move around and with a listener, as they move around and with the sound.
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Keywords
Experimental music , Non-teleological music , Sound art , Abstract music , Minimalist music
Citation
Maguire, P. S. 2026. Formless, bodiless, purposeless: development of a portfolio of non-teleological electronic sound works. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.