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This thesis explores double bass feedback systems, with a focus on the FAAB (feedback-actuated augmented bass)-a self-resonating vibrotactile feedback string bass instrument equipped with onboard DSP. Developing against a background of an extensive acoustic instrumental practice in improvised and experimental music, the thesis examines how salient properties of timbral complexity and performative resistance may be applied in an extended electro-acoustic domain. An analysis and discussion of interaction and human-machine improvisation informed by neocybernetic and enactivist theories of autonomy and interactional asymmetry leads to the development of a conceptual framework for the creation of adaptive signal processing architectures. This framework is applied to the design of a set of algorithms, the behaviours of which are described in the context of performance, improvised as well as composed. The discussion is guided by the conviction that what is often conceived of as digital/material binaries is better understood in a shared performative domain. In the discussion of performance, attention is paid to how the FAAB affords the reconsideration of old-as well as the development of new-instrumental techniques and modes of performance, through the unpredictable, yet largely deterministic behaviour of the instrument. The final chapter of the thesis discusses resistance, mastery, and virtuosity, again in the context of a performance practice with the FAAB. With the instrument eluding traditional notions of performative control, materialist, queer, and decolonial theories are employed in a discussion of precariousness and failure as artistic opportunities particularly suited to feedback musicianship and human-machine improvisation. The practice-based contribution of the thesis consists of a set of solo and duo performances using three different feedback bass configurations. The majority of these highlight the role of the FAAB in developing a largely improvised solo performance practice in which the feedback-induced and algorithmically extended behaviour of the instrument affords timbral, amplitudal, and interactional complexity. The two collaborative works situate the FAAB within a performance ecology comprised of other performers, compositional scaffolding, and a set of laptop-based multichannel signal processing algorithms developed in extension of the embedded DSP of the FAAB. The accompanying DSP library consists of familiar low-level algorithms. Yet, their creative integration with a feedback instrument and the implementation of an adaptive and largely autonomous high-level digital infrastructure contributes to the field of feedback signal processing, and can be of value to practitioners beyond the specific field of feedback. The identification of instrumental resistance as being intimately tied to the establishment of interactional asymmetry and instrumental autonomy affects the cultivation of a performance practice as well as an aesthetic, both of which are grounded in an appreciation of unmastery and failure. This does not entail the absence of skill or tools for evaluation, but rather paves the way for the development of aesthetics as well as skillsets that accommodate the dynamic and precarious ecologies emerging through nonlinear human-machine relationships.

A great deal of writing has been made on the subject of electronic musical instruments from a technical aspect. This document comprises a collection of critical notes on the findings which emerged during art-orientated practice research (2017-2022) on making do-it-yourself electronic musical instruments (DIY EMI). This is in support of a portfolio containing documents in a variety of formats: instrument designs, recordings from events and studio work, and workshop materials. The text is commentary on making with a mix of materials and artistic approaches which has resulted in multi-media output. The work of making DIY EMI led to writing chapters on editions, versions, and physical remixing. The writing on the production of editions shows that attempts to make a copy in the physical world (as opposed to the digital) will always reveal inconsistencies when using a DIY approach, and that these inconsistencies are part of the value of such an approach in the contexts of making contributions to art and sound culture. The writing on versions offers insights into the roles that iteration has in the creation of new DIY EMI. Making versions of instruments is re-creating what already exists with changes. I argue that physical remixing as a process develops a critical relationship to the materials used via appropriation and transformative processes. This contributes to an understanding of how the practice of instrument making influences relationships to the materials available in our environments.

The aim of this practice-based research is to identify how the internet's involvement in music creation and dissemination influences choices related to the compositional and structural elements of music making. Throughout this writing, the author looks at the increasingly volatile structures surrounding recorded music in the early 21st Century as a result of streaming becoming one of the most dominant ways in which music is consumed. It explores this volatility as a method for approaching the composition of new music and looks at the growing art scene focusing on this way of working. The music composed for this portfolio, which is collectively titled 'release', and published under the artist name 'aliceee', explores the aesthetic characteristics of online culture, new media and social media websites, by incorporating compositional techniques inspired by streaming and how we interact with the internet in general.

This thesis explores how concepts of space and place can inform compositional approaches to auditory virtual environments. It is practice-based artistic research that combines electroacoustic composition, storytelling, and field recording with the use of Extended-Reality (XR) technologies to examine these themes in context. A portfolio of works, together with this text, are the outcome of a creative and conceptual investigation, in addition to a developed framework which can be used for the creation and presentation of new spatial works. The immersive audio framework is the culmination of the compositional strategies and feature sets explored in the pieces of the portfolio. The works are designed for multiple listeners in a shared experience, where each listener, based on their tracked position and rotation in space, wirelessly receive an individually binaurally decoded sonic perspective via open back headphones. The sounds presented in open-back headphones are combined with a periphonic loudspeaker array to form a hybrid listening system. The research responds to the recent rapid evolution and accessibility of XR technology, as well as the increasing ubiquity of immersive spatial experiences, and seeks to explore compositional methods that achieve a semantic connection between the sounds and the strategies employed for their spatialisation. The discussion explores the multifaceted aspects of space, its effect on auditory perception, and its intersection with other domains such as time, timbre, and movement. This symbiotic relationship is encapsulated by the term agency, that is used to depict the fluid nature of the exchange and represent the human interaction at each of these intersections. This is then situated in relation to concepts of place, which are presented as important factors in considering an individual's engagement with auditory virtual environments and their design.

This research presents a nuanced account of inhabitants' experiences of listening in everyday urban places. Using a methodology based on situated listening, the research turns a hearing perspective on Belfast City sites. As cities undergo various climate, health and social crises, sonic qualities of places too often remain a by-product of other planning and policy decisions. In Belfast, these issues are compounded by unique socio-political dynamics shaping its public realm. This project seeks greater consideration of sonic experience in urban planning. The thesis asks: To what extent are inhabitants of cities, such as Belfast, aware of the sonic domain and its impact on their everyday lives? In what manner is it possible to intervene in sonic awareness in urban spaces? These questions are addressed through qualitative research methods, drawing on sound art and ethnographic practices. Fieldwork, centering on in-situ 'conversational soundwalks' with Belfast inhabitants, triangulates listening, walking, interviews, recording as well as site-specific performances. Urban sound space is theorized as an interrelation of personal, situated and sonic nodes. Employing concepts from sonic, spatial and social disciplines, observations from fieldwork are framed though themes including: sonic awareness, filters and activators; thresholds and interfaces; misfits and mishearing; commons and agency, and empathy. Audio and visual recording form an accompanying document of the work.

This is a portfolio-based PhD thesis within the academic framework of Composition in Sonic Arts. Interpreting resynthesis to mean recombination as well as reproduction, this thesis investigates the resynthesizing of club music's past along with the personal past as a form of compositional practice. This results in a portfolio of 23 pieces ranging from 3 to 9 minutes in length that explores the tropes, structures and techniques of jungle, grime, techno, hardcore and garage, while also containing hauntological works that explore false memory and the sonically re-produced past as sources of inspiration for composition. The thesis offers insights which grow from an exploration of this combination of personal experience, club music and memory through the practices of sonic art and composition.

In the island of Corfu in Greece, there are four sculptures of pinecones hanging in the streets around Saint Spyridon's church in the old town; these pinecones can also be found around the icons of the Saint inside the church. Pinecones are an ancient symbol, but in the case of Corfu, they reflect the unity in the society. In this case, pinecones work as a mosaic, pine nuts as tesserae (mosaic tiles), which can include different materials, organisations and forms of energy that co-exist in the city, while the city is the space where the dialogue between diverse types of tesserae takes place. Through my PhD research, being inspired by the above symbol, I propose Pinecone Structures as a new concept of creation for art organisations, where the symbiotic relationship between different media and kinds of materials, enables their equal utilisation to the artist's practice. This transdisciplinary phenomenon makes all materials, beings and events interact with each other by being a part of the same play. This idea in practice leads to the creation of a mosaic with materials rather than a composition with objects, sounds and notes. The output of my research is the creation of situations in which actions can involve all kinds of materials. This means that I do not use all possible materials throughout my work, but it is important to have them in my palette. This hybrid method of art creation brings together action and metaphors with transdisciplinary practices, by extending and connecting all the materials an artist can use. Pinecone Structures is a concept, which can be perceived and understood at the same time as methodology, epistemology and metaphor. Four main elements shape my practice through the creation of an interactive community. Pinecone Structures, Narration, Space and Society create an "ecosystem", where disconnected materials or- bit as a single unity. I argue that Pinecone Structures is the concept that connects different types of matter; Narration is the umbrella that covers and gives a purpose to this network; Space is the volume, where the dialogue between the artwork, artwork's materials and the Society takes place. This approach seeks to blur the borders between the disciplines.

The aim of this thesis is to identify and locate an experimental elec-tronic music ‘scene’ in Iran within a web of historical-social-political-religious-economic-technological agencies. Drawing from the growing traditions of digital ethnography and artistic research, this project doc-uments and analyses the processes, aesthetics, and practices that shape the ‘scene’, while exploring and feeding back to those through sound-based practice. In setting ethnographic study and artistic practice in action within a mutually-interpenetrating loop, this work suggests a context for further anthropological and/or (ethno-)musicological in-quiry that incorporates (collaborative) music- and/or art-making as a beneficial and rigorous research methodology. Digital ethnography—online fieldwork and one-to-one inter-views—as well as individual and collaborative composition, installa-tion, and collaborative performance are the main strategies applied to investigate the subject matter. The outcome is, therefore, presented in the form of a portfolio of original works along with this thesis that is produced to contextualise the project’s concurrently theoretical and practical engagement with and investigation of the case at hand. Furthermore, through a grounding in personal experience, this text provides reflections on the author’s relevant backgrounds and in-volvements, both inside and outside Iran, to further uncover the com-mon processes of production-consumption within experimental elec-tronic music networks in Iran. It investigates how his own practice has performatively taken shape in contact with, while mutually influencing, the material subject to scrutiny in this work. In so doing, the thesis aims to balance the particularities of practice-led (practice-based or artistic) research with generalities of engaging with histories and sto-ries, while highlighting the perspectives through which the author, as a situated embodied agent, was afforded a particular understanding of the ‘emergent’ forms of experimental electronic music practice in Iran.

Through a creative portfolio and an analytical and critical commentary, this research investigates the use of spatial references in the composition of semi-open environmental sound works. The portfolio explores a number of strategies to make use of spatial references as formal compositional components to enable more intuitive performance/reading experiences. The pieces present a number of electronically mediated scenarios in varied formats; concert, installation and mobile application. Counting on the intuitive way one tries to constantly identify surrounding spaces, each piece uses physical (performance/presentation spaces) and representational devices (illustrations, maps, video projections, spatialised sound etc.) to articulate and delimitate semi-open artistic experiences. Such ambiguous scenarios are enabled by both the unpredictability of elements of each work and the dependence on the subjective interpretations of the agents involved in the process. The creative processes presented here in a descriptive, analytical and critical manner attempt to make an artistic contribution and provide documental material for future reflection about related practices.

The research investigates the dynamic relations between sound, space and the audience perception as related to an artist’s intention. What is the relation between sound and space in the sonic arts, and to what kind of merger does it lead? What relationship exists between the intention of the composer and the perception of the audience regarding architectural and environmental spaces? Is there a common thread of perception of architectural and environmental spaces among participants? Is embodiment a key for the perception of the dynamic relations of sound and space? The framework for the investigation is based on a map of three defined spaces (Real, Virtual, and Hyperbiological) included in a portfolio of six works (three electroacoustic compositions, two sound installations, and one performance), which lead to the analysis of the perception of space, namely, the perception of architectural and environmental spaces as required by the portfolio. The original knowledge resides in the exploration of a potential common representation (space and sound perception being, of course, a personal representation) of internal perceptual spaces and mental imageries generated by the works. The act of listening plays a major role in the development of the portfolio presented and includes Pauline Oliveros’ concept of deep listening (Oliveros 2005). Sound and space are intimately related in the portfolio. One particular element emerging from this relationship is the plastic quality of sound, meaning that sound is considered and observed as a material that is shaped by space. From this perspective the research investigates the ‘sculptural’ and morphological quality of the relationship between sound and space. The results include the specific language and signature of the artworks that delineate the intersection of music and fine arts. The portfolio pays a large tribute to several iconic artists present in the outposts of sound blurred by space. Composers and artists are therefore presented in the theoretical section in order to highlight how their pioneering works have influenced and informed the present research portfolio. The analysis of the perception of the artworks relates to a methodology based on an empirical survey inspired by phenomenology.