Texture and Entropic Processes in Electroacoustic Music

This paper investigates the aesthetic possibilities of textural processes as the root of organisation, causality and gesture in electroacoustic music. A general model for the qualification of textural properties is outlined, providing a foundation for elaborations concerning transformational and mutative, textural and gestural processes. In these explorations, metaphorical thinking is applied, inspired by contemporary natural science, rooted in thermodynamics, which has a wider relevance to the questions of organisation, causality and time in nature. The approach renders entropy (irregularities, disorder, unpredictability) the central subject, held here as a key influence on the emergence of temporal process and form out of textures. These processes are described as dissipative structures an aesthetic concept based on the scientist Ilya Prigogine’s work on self-organisation in nature (1984), which metaphorically matches well with the notion of texture as a self-propagating phenomenon (Smalley 1986). The ideas presented here are a condensation of my MA dissertation, and are supported by excerpts from two compositions, Multiverse (2007-08) and Far-fromequilibrium (2008), which were realised as part of the research, supervised by Professor Denis Smalley at City University.