Composition (Electroacoustic Music and Interactive Media) MusM postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The handrail in the stairwell of my university's music building rings when you tap it, a dull metallic note somewhere near a low B flat, with a short buzz where one bracket has worked loose. In my final year I attached three contact microphones along its length and spent a term turning it into an instrument. People climbing the stairs triggered sounds simply by holding on. The installation, built in Max, tracked the amplitude and rough position of each touch and used it to stretch and filter recordings I had made of the building at night: ventilation hum, a door closer, the lift. It was not sophisticated, but watching students slow down on the stairs to find out what their hands were doing told me more about interactive work than anything I had read.

That project grew out of my BMus, where I gradually moved from writing for acoustic ensembles towards fixed media and live electronics. A second-year piece for clarinet and tape taught me how hard it is to make a live player and a loudspeaker feel like they share a room. My first attempt had the electronics simply accompanying; the version I submitted had the clarinet's multiphonics feeding a granular process in real time, so the player was shaping material rather than chasing it. I was pleased with the result, and my tutor's comment that the ending relied too much on volume has stayed with me as something to work on.

My listening has followed the same path. Reading Denis Smalley's writing on spectromorphology gave me vocabulary for things I had been hearing without naming, particularly the way a sound's onset and continuation suggest a physical cause. I find this useful when I compose, because it makes me ask whether a transformed sound still implies a gesture or has become pure texture, and whether that change is what I want. Pierre Schaeffer's idea of reduced listening is something I find harder to practise than to understand, but the handrail project was partly an attempt to make listeners hear a familiar object as sound first.

Outside university I have worked for two years as a part-time sound technician at a community theatre. Most of the job is unglamorous: patching radio microphones, rebuilding cue lists when a director cuts a scene, finding the source of a hum ten minutes before the house opens. I have also designed sound for three small productions, including a children's show where I triggered effects from QLab to match an actor who improvised her timing differently every night. That experience made me think carefully about responsiveness, and it is the same question I want to explore more seriously in interactive composition: how a system can follow a performer without becoming either rigid or random.

I also play bass guitar in a ceilidh band, which has nothing to do with electroacoustic music except that it has made me a much better listener to a room. Playing for dancers rather than an audience, you learn quickly whether the sound is carrying. Twice a week I collect my nephew from school, and I have recorded more playground and bus-stop sound than I will probably ever use.

At postgraduate level I want time and structured feedback to develop a portfolio that moves between acousmatic pieces for multichannel diffusion and interactive work where the audience or performer changes the music. I am particularly keen to improve my spatialisation, since most of my pieces so far have been in stereo, and to learn more rigorous approaches to mapping physical data onto sound so that my interactive systems feel designed rather than improvised. I would also value working alongside other composers whose practice differs from mine, because the most useful criticism I have received has come from people approaching sound from somewhere else.

I bring practical technical skill, a habit of finishing and presenting work, and a curiosity about how ordinary spaces sound. I would like the next two years to give that curiosity more discipline.