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Exposition

The Act of Patching: Musicking with Modular Systems (last edited: 2025)

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About this exposition

This artistic PhD project is a composer-performer oriented exploration of live electronics understood as modular musicking systems. The conceptual framework draws upon an understanding of agency that views musical instruments as real or virtual objects-in-time that come into existence through the act of musicking. The systems created and presented in the thesis are explored through various scenarios presented as patches that include compositions, performance systems, and strategies for musicking. The project seeks to gain knowledge about the co-evolutionary processes found within the acts of composing and performing with such systems. At the core of the research is an exploration of the field of tension between the relative stability and flexibility in the affordances of live electronic instruments. It presents strategies for the design of live electronic systems in order to obtain a balance between these two states, and to understand how instruments are adapted in relation to the artistic processes of composing and performing. The thesis addresses the following research questions: 1. In what ways are my live electronic setups adapted within the acts of composing and performing? 2. How do my live electronic instruments manifest the field of tension between stability and flexibility? 3. What type of strategies can be used to create a predictable field of affordances of live electronic instruments? Through artistic research methods of meletē, transcription, and re-composition, the project gains a deeper understanding of when, how, and why human and non-human agents co-evolve in musicking with live electronics. It presents four core systems developed and refined within the project: Paragraph – a live coding environment, Parsimonia – a modular digital musical instrument, the EMP Triangle – a serial and modular composition tool, and the Sinew0od feedback system – used as a foundation for three transcriptions. The artistic outcomes are further studied using qualitative methods for data collection and analysis. The main contribution of this thesis is a novel understanding of live electronic musicking as co-evolutionary acts of patching. These acts entail processes of making and breaking connections between human and non-human agencies, and through patching create, transform, and manipulate compositions and performance setups, in order to achieve metastable systems. Hereby, the thesis proposes a cybernetic understanding of musicking as a process, challenging the traditional notion of fixed musical works, blurring the lines between compositions, instruments, interpretations, and performances.

type	research exposition
keywords	live coding, live electronics, composition, composer-performer, Musicking, modular system, modular synthesizers
date	16/05/2025
last modified	22/05/2025
status	in progress
share status	public
affiliation	Luleå University of Tehcnology
copyright	Mattias Petersson
license	CC BY-NC-ND
language	English
url	https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3411062/3418320
external link	https://mattiaspetersson.com

References

Ek, Robert, “Playing With Resistance” <https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.13904814>
Fidom, Hans, “The Utopa Baroque Organ”, 2020 <https://www.orgelpark.nl/zip/extracted/web-5/2/nl/>
Harlow, Randall, Mattias Petersson, Robert Ek, Federico Visi, and Stefan Östersjö, “Global Hyperorgan: A Platform for Telematic Musicking and Research” <https://nime.pubpub.org/pub/a626cbqh>
Karplus, Kevin, and Alex Strong, “Digital Synthesis of Plucked-String and Drum Timbres”, 7.2, p. 43 <https://doi.org/10.2307/3680062>
Petersson, Mattias, The Act of Patching: Musicking With Modular Systems (Luleå University of Technology, 2025)
Petersson, Mattias, and Robert Ek, “Exploring Sinew0od” <https://doi.org/doi: 10.47041/QPSR1612>
Petersson, Mattias, “A New Morphology: Strategies for Innovation in Live Electronics Performance”, in Innovation in Music: Technology and Creativity, ed. by Jan-Olof Gullö (Focal Press), p. 310-27
Petersson, Mattias, “Live Coding the Global Hyperorgan: The Paragraph Environment in the Indeterminate Place”, 28.2, p. 206-17 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771823000377>
Simondon, Gilbert, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
Visi, Federico Ghelli, “The Sophtar: A Networkable Feedback String Instrument With Embedded Machine Learning” <https://nime.org/proc/nime2024_22/index.html>

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