Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses
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ItemSelf-Sampling in a Multimedia Practice: An Exploration of Sampling Transformation Techniques & Typologies( 2022)Digital sampling has become a prevalent creative technique in contemporary music and multimedia practices. It allows a practitioner to sample existing recorded media and recontextualise it through a multitude of transformation techniques, offering a potent creative tool that has been utilised by many artists to create new works and develop an individual artistic aesthetic. The transformation of media also allows the identity of artistic works to remain fluid - rather than fixed - as the recontextualisation of media pluralises the outcomes of singular events. This practice-led research project comprises a folio of multimedia works and an accompanying dissertation that investigate the use of self-sampling: where the sampled media originates from within the practice itself, rather than being externally sourced. This allows an individual creative aesthetic to emerge through the transformation and recontextualisation of self-made media. A secondary benefit to this approach is that the legal and ethical issues that influence sample-based practices are avoided by removing externally-sourced media; instead focusing on the techniques of transformation, without concern for sample ownership. Alongside these legal and ethical concerns, the process of examining sample-based music can be difficult due to the reliance on aural analysis methods - as heavily transformed samples may escape identification without additional knowledge of the media origin. The analytical tools used in this process can also suffer from a lack of standardised terminology and inconsistent methods of sample categorisation. To aid the process of analysing the works, a Typology of Sampling Transformation Techniques has been developed and is presented in this dissertation. This typology is used to analyse and categorise the techniques of transformation that have been used within the folio of works, uncovering methods and approaches of the creative practice that may otherwise remain veiled.
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ItemFrom Counterpoint to Composition in the Early L'Homme armé Mass( 2020)Fifteenth-century music theory seems remote from fifteenth-century composition. Florid polyphony in three or more voices stands in contrast to the rhythmless, note-against-note consonant progressions in two voices found in counterpoint treatises, making it difficult to analyse composed music in terms of the contrapuntal theory of the period. This dissertation proposes a new analytical framework for one form of fifteenth-century composition, the four-voice cantus firmus mass of the 1460s and 1470s. Research of the last twenty years has substantially reshaped our understanding of medieval musical training and practice and by combining this new awareness with tools for digitally-assisted musicology, it becomes possible to test the relationship between the surviving compositions and counterpoint teaching. The opening chapters summarise this research and describe these tools. This summary leads to a method of analysis that allows a prestigious, coherent body of repertoire—the early masses on the L’homme arme cantus firmus—to be measured against the most comprehensive statement of fifteenth-century counterpoint, Johannes Tinctoris’s De arte contrapuncti. Analysis reveals that Tinctoris provides an accurate description of elements of fifteenth-century compositional practice but that his teaching considers only one of several contrapuntal techniques at work within the L’homme arme masses. A comparison of passages with and without cantus firmus permits a description of these other forms of counterpoint, while an awareness of this contrapuntal variety enables an understanding of mass composition as the interaction of distinct contrapuntal techniques based on changing voice-pair relationships. Further analysis based on cadential voice pairs confirms the relationship between counterpoint and composition through the effective elimination of divergences from Tinctoris’s teaching The conclusion presents a general theory of four-voice polyphonic texture as a compound contrapuntal entity. Through its two-level structure, this theory provides an opportunity for the empirical analysis of compositional style and has further potential applications to the problems of source criticism, attribution and reconstruction.