While much of the established theoretical framework for electroacoustic music addresses issues of ‘traditional' electroacoustic music, I will work with Annette Vande Gorne’s “energy-motion” models which lists music producing gestures based on physical models and apply them to PSA’s motors and electro-magnetic movements. Guy Rebel’s “Play Sequence” theory focuses on one parameter from which musical writing is extracted through controlled gestures. I will apply and document how such a notion of a musical controlled gesture combined with Vande Gorne’s energy-motion can be applied to PSA’s automation controls, both in the choice of hardware (motors/devices/materials) and in software (parameters to automate and to make “playable” when improvising with PSA and “writable” when composing for PSA). I will apply aspects of Denis Smalley’s “Spectromorphology" notion to show how PSA’s automation controls affect the change of their sound shapes through time, by studying their spectrograms under different automation parameters and with the use of different types and positions of microphones with which their sound is captured.

With this project, I aim to create a toolkit informing about the parameters that need to be considered during the building of electroacoustic musical automata in respect to specific electroacoustic theories and practices. It documents methods of composing with such automata and research on how their sound is perceived against the backdrop of these theories, creating new fields of applications for traditional electroacoustic theories and enriching conceptual and compositional frameworks for musical automata.

First supervisor: Univ. Prof.Dr. Volkmar Klien, ABU
Second supervisor: Prof. Dr. Cathy van Eck, HKB