Composition (Interdisciplinary Digital Media), MM postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At half past five most mornings, the bakery where I work is louder than any concert hall I have played in. The spiral mixer has a low, uneven grind that changes pitch as the dough stiffens, and the proving cabinet clicks on and off every few minutes. Last winter I asked my manager if I could leave a small recorder on the shelf during a shift. Over the following weeks those recordings became the raw material for a short fixed-media piece, and they also made me notice how much of my composing begins with listening to something I did not choose to hear.

I completed a BA in Music with a 2:1, taking composition alongside modules in music technology and twentieth-century repertoire. Early on I wrote mostly for small acoustic ensembles, but I grew more interested in what happens when a performer's sound is shaped as it is being made. For my final-year project I wrote an eleven-minute piece for clarinet and live electronics. I built the patch in Max: a contact microphone on the clarinet bell fed a set of delays and granular processes, and the performer's dynamics controlled both how dense the texture became and a simple projected image, a field of lines that thickened as the playing grew louder. Working with a fellow student who played clarinet taught me practical things that no tutorial had. My first version reacted so quickly to small changes in volume that the visuals flickered distractingly, so I added smoothing and a threshold, and we agreed on cues she could read from the screen rather than counting seconds. The final performance in our department's studio was not flawless, since one delay line was set slightly too long in the second section, but the piece held together, and the audience discussion afterwards was mostly about how the image seemed to breathe with the instrument. That reaction is what I want to understand more deeply.

Reading has helped me think about this outside my own work. Pauline Oliveros's idea of Deep Listening, the practice of attending both to focused sounds and to the wider field around them, gave me language for something I had been doing instinctively with the bakery recordings. I have also spent time with the open-source tutorials for Pure Data and Processing, partly because I want tools that other people can use without expensive licences.

Alongside the bakery, I play bass guitar in a ceilidh band that performs at village halls and weddings. It is unglamorous work: loading in through fire exits, adjusting to halls with dreadful acoustics, and keeping time for a caller who changes the set at a moment's notice. It has made me a reliable ensemble player and has given me a strong respect for music that serves a social purpose. A room full of people dancing a Strip the Willow tells you immediately whether the groove is working.

At postgraduate level I want to develop work in which sound, image and audience movement are designed together rather than added to one another. I am particularly interested in pieces for non-concert spaces, such as a foyer, a market or a workplace, where listeners arrive without expecting music. I need more rigorous training in interactive systems, in visual programming and in the theory of how media combine, and I want the critical environment of working alongside composers, designers and performers from other disciplines. I am used to early starts, practical problems and finishing what I begin, and I would bring that steadiness to sustained, ambitious creative work.