Composer's Statement

My current and recent compositions engage technology to a great extent, as a tool to enhance and enable the creative process. I have chosen the electroacoustic medium as my main creative platform, because of its wide competence in controlling and processing sound material, and the immense capabilities it offers in exploring timbre, gesture and texture. Within the electroacoustic environment I feel free to develop sound repertories that are not confined to the notion of the instrument or voice. Far from being an emotionless medium, electroacoustic processes enable the composer to carefully shape sound events in order to give them emotion characteristics in appearance and direct the audience's attention to carefully considered paths in a music piece.

Field recordings, such as the sounds of nature and sounding cultural activities are frequently employed in my compositions, involving the listener in a process of transcontextual interpretation, where the recorded event carries a dual meaning - one emerging from its natural and the other from its musical context.

Human presence is often integrated in my acousmatic work through vocal utterance manifesting direct human, physical and therefore psychological links. My understanding of the creative possibilities of the human voice and the disintegration of language is informed by a systematic investigation on the historical use of voice by the futurists, dadaists and sound poets, and an extended research on ethnomusicological issues related to the use of human voice in non-western cultures.

In addition, my background as a graphic designer and photographer informs my work. Visual information is regularly used either to influence and direct the structure of my pieces, or to construct graphic scores for instrumental and vocal performers with or without the use of live electronics.

My doctoral research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), aims to contribute to the understanding of mechanisms of linking and controlling different time levels in composition. It expands the possibilities of musical expression by identifying links among timescales, through a perceptual analysis of the properties of sound in relation to the mental mechanisms of time perception. My study was conducted through practical implementation of ideas, composition and analysis of acousmatic works, and an investigation of the related fields of psychoacoustics and cognitive psychology.