Not loud, but detailed

: an exploration of intimacy through amplification, recording, and production techniques

Abstract

This commentary accompanies six new compositions written between 2019 and 2023, presented through audio recordings and musical scores. There are also accompanying photos, video and audio clips that provide insights into my working process during the creation of these pieces.

In this commentary, I discuss how I have explored intimacy in my compositions through technical means, both acoustic (sustain, resonance, microtonality) and electronic (close-miking, time-stretching, and other production techniques), and through nostalgia, by which I mean a perceived emotional relationship between the music and the listener. My use of the term ‘intimacy’ refers to a musical aesthetic that is characterised not only by a perceived sonic closeness between sound source and listener, but also by a perceived emotional relationship between the listener and performer(s). This intimacy in my music can be afforded to quiet and delicate sounds through sonic magnification, in which the detail of each sound is focused on and thoroughly examined in various ways, resulting in often imperfect, highly detailed, and almost tactile sounds.

For the creation of this compositional body of work, I have developed an approach that integrates a considerable number of disparate musical frameworks and that encompasses several techniques and compositional tools, which have grown out of my experience as an experimental electric guitarist fused with my practice as a contemporary classical composer. These techniques include instrument manipulation, object amplification, improvisation and production techniques, as well as my attempts to translate these ideas into purely acoustic composition. I have synthesised these elements into a personal and unified compositional whole, which has defined both my compositional process and the resulting compositional work.

Date of Award	30 Jun 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	David Fennessy (Supervisor), John De Simone (Supervisor) & Matthew Wright (Supervisor)