Miguelangel Clerc

Composing silence: study of perception and compositional processes on the moments of musical silence

The main goal of my compositional research is to gather information about how groups of listeners perceive periods of silence in new music. My research is based on the combination of music psychology, theoretical analysis and composition. I create this research in order to obtain and develop compositional tools dealing with musical pause.
This research will be developed through the composition of new works which are built adhering to the specific objectives of the perception of silence. These compositions will be based on existing music psychology research, and on the analysis of music of composers who work with silence as one of their principal subjects. My analyses will also investigate how composer´s expectations of their listener´s psychological perceptions affect their compositional output. Data gathered from different groups of listeners must be analyzed. This will obtain, through the use of statistics, the information required to achieve the composer´s aims of composing silence.

The field for this doctoral study is music composition. The research will be focused in the composer´s creative process and how compositional decisions are related to the listener´s perception. To develop this relation from composer to listener, the composing process will be connected, from an early stage, to the interpretation of sketches and audience feedback. In this way, through all the research process, there will be a constant interdependency between composing, gathering theoretical information and music performance.

The research subject is composing the perception of silence. The main goal of the research is to develop tools for the use of musical silences in the compositional process. This will also develop a real connection between what the composer intends to produce and what the audience actually perceives. The research is not specifically related to psychoacoustics or tonal expectations where there already exists a large amount of research. The main parameters of the research will be rhythm and proportional structure. Since these parameters cannot be removed from their context, they will be investigated as how they relate to other parameters such as pitch, dynamics, timbre or even space.

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