This paper presents an overview of the concepts and strategies in the original composition, The Harbour of Incense, a cycle of three movements for different groups of instruments. Each movement addresses an aspect of the musical cultures of Hong Kong. The first movement Taan Go for Harp Solo explores the sound world of the folk genre saltwater song; the second movement Jat1 Wun2 Sai3 Ngau4 Naam5 Min6 for Flute and Piano highlights the musicality of Cantonese language; the third movement Daa Zaai for Oboe, Clarinet in B-flat, Bassoon, and Percussion, is inspired by the keyi music used in the Taoist funeral. The paper discusses how to bring together Southeast Asian aesthetics and contemporary Western compositional techniques, as well as how to communicate this unique cultural experience to performers and audiences from other backgrounds. It provides the transcriptions of two saltwater songs and an excerpt of keyi music, and illustrate how they inform the structures, textures, and melodic gestures of the composition. The nine tones of Cantonese language are also explored for generating melodic materials, metric plans, and articulation writing.

Starting in the mid-2010s VR's high cost of entry became low enough for consumers and artists to explore and experiment with the technology. There have been a few VR operas developed by medium to large sized teams such as Michel Van Der Aa's Eight (2018) and Alexander Schubert's ⁂ASTERISM⁂ (2021), but no widespread work has been produced by a small team comprising only a librettist and composer. Vessels engages in this process with a libretto written by Bea Goodwin and music, audio processing, visual design, and programming by Christopher Poovey. The first step in the process of creating Vessels was the creation of the song cycle Songs from Vessels for soprano, extended tenor, flute, bass flute, A clarinet, viola, contrabass, percussion, and live electronics. These songs are the basis of the micro-opera Vessels which presents recordings of the songs with live processing alongside two songs exclusive to the opera in a VR environment with immersive projections and audio. The development of an ensemble and electronic work along with a VR micro-opera necessitates the implementation and creation of software. Both the Grainflow and cpDelayNetworks packages for Cycling ‘74 Max are pivotal to audio processing in both versions of the work. In …

Based on the poetry of Jehanne Dubrow, professor of English at the University of North Texas, Stateside: An opera in one act uses the mythology of Penelope and Odysseus to tell a story of a modern day military wife. David T. Little's opera Soldier Songs, Sarah Kirkland Snider's song-cycle Penelope, and Stateside are dramatic musical works influenced by the genre, instrumentation, and formal structures of popular music that broadly deal with the emotional and internal elements of military life. These three works prioritize narrative structure of the text in relation to character, and employ elements of popular music harmony, melody, and structure. The critical essay analyzes selections from Soldier Songs and Penelope and explains the compositional process of Stateside. The creative document consists of the full score of Stateside: an opera in one act.

The two fields of acousmatic music and site-specific conceptual art take strikingly different approaches to the notions of space and place. In this document, I describe how these two areas of aesthetic research diverge and relate to each other, focusing on how their unique approaches can be implemented in the practice of site-specific music composition. The first part of this document surveys the distinctive features of each of these fields, describing the particular differences between them in their approach to space and place. The contradictions between the two approaches are then briefly analyzed in reference to Georgina Born's understanding of music as fundamentally multitextual. In the second part of the document, I describe in detail how I implemented a site-specific approach when composing "…threaded through," a 16-channel audio, 6 video, site-specific installation for the UNT College of Music Main Building. In this, I describe how both the space and place of the UNT College of Music Main Building influenced my musical choices, visual content, and approach to audio and visual spatialization. The final part of the document contains a detailed score for realizing "…threaded through" in the location of the UNT College of Music Main Building.

Untune the Sky is a collection of ten original preludes, dances, and songs for microtonal viola da gamba in 7-limit just intonation with voice and live electronics that incorporates elements of Baroque music, traditional Irish dance music, extended just intonation tuning theory, and live electronic audio processing techniques. This thesis thoroughly describes the work and contextualizes its relationship to its historical and contemporary influences. The first sections explain why extended just intonation and viola da gamba were chosen as the central elements of the work. This is followed by a description of the structure, instrumentation, notational conventions, and intended performance practice of the work. The final section contains a musical analysis of the form, harmony, and structure of each piece in the collection. For researchers and interested performers, Appendix A contains a brief catalog of existing microtonal viol repertoire listed with a description of the microtonal techniques used.