Story-time : physicalising sound object for sonic narrative.

This thesis describes a compositional process that is homogeneous to LaMothe’s four modes of organising experience: corporeal-contiguous, taxonomic-object, symbolic-subjective and narrativecommunal. It begins with the composer's subjective experience of hearing, rooted in the relationship of a particular human body to its physical neighbourhood (LaMothe's corporeal-contiguous modes). The human body is used as a benchmark for measuring and apprehending the world (Benthall and Polhemus 1975). The thinking body conceptualises the claim that sensation, motor functions and cognition are distributed functions of the body, in a complex interrelationship with the mind (Baily 2006). Our embodied knowledge of proprioceptive and motor activities act as constraints on interpreting music. Sonic objects (LaMothe's taxonomic-object modes) are interpreted as gestural sonic tokens, these being the smallest meaningful units of gestural information in a sound sequence. These act as signs from which metaphor can be derived, based on the composers interpretations of the meaning of the gestural sonic tokens in the context of the composition (LaMothe's symbolic-subjective modes). This process creates a sonic signscape, a sign system in which the signifier is the gestural sonic token and the signified is the imagined sound source. When used by the composer as foretokens, such signifiers build sequential structured relationships that form a sonic narrative. In this thesis the term sonarrative is used to describe such a sonic account of contiguous and contrapuntal events that create a coherent whole – a composition. The creative process incorporates physicality, sign, metaphor and narrative to organise a meaningful sonic experience for the listener by way of sonarratives (LaMothe's narrative-communal modes). In order to ground this theoretical framework in practice, the concepts are applied to a body of compositional work completed between 2009 and 2011.