Portfolio of compositions created for my PhD in Electroacoustic Composition at the University of Hull between 2008-2012.

Electroacoustic Composition

Programme Notes

Tools to Technocracy is based on the 2nd Chapter of Technopoly, written by cultural critic 
Neil Postman, and is the 3rd composition in the Technopoly Suite. 

Postman’s theory states that the mechanical clock is an invention which has imposed an industrialized framework onto society and is the lynchpin of the capitalist system. This enforces populations into a standardized mode of operation, on the basis of production and consumption, without taking into account the base values of humanity and our delicate nature as organic entities. 

The composition is created using materials derived from a clock mechanism and the resonating steel frame of a clock chassis.

Tools to Technocracy FIX

Programme Notes 

Inspired by the theories of Professor Neil Postman, Data Fracture is an interpretation of his views with regard to data paralysis and information overload. Modern technology has exposed the population unprecedented access to information, which he believes can paralyse and confuse the individual to a state of total dysfunction or impaired judgement. 

Interpreting his work; disorientation, fragmentation and overload are the key themes explored. All of the soundtypes used in the work are captured from computer components, disk drives or digital media devices.

Data Fracture

Programme Notes

Corporate media groups are among the most powerful organisations on the planet, framing and sculpting the information distributed across the globe. In Manufacturing Consent the 1994 publication by Noam Chomsky and Edward S Herman, the authors demonstrate that collusion and innate bias as inevitable products of a corporatised news media. 

Adapting the literary work, Print + Press is inspired by these themes, and attempts to depict a varied and fragmented dataset, which is inevitably unified by its central objective. The composition is composed entirely from sounds derived from printing and copying equipment and in doing so encapsulates soundtypes directly related to the thesis.

Print + Press

Programme Notes

In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein’s 2007 theory of ‘Disaster Capitalism’, she describes a deep link between a particular branch of predatory economic ideology and the electroshock experiments performed by psychologists in the 1950’s. Klein claims that Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist and the father of what Klein describes as disaster capitalism, was deeply influenced by the psychological experiments performed by Ewen Cameron, a government employed Psychiatrist. 

Blank is Beautiful, the first Chapter of The Shock Doctrine outlines this link, by drawing parallels between Cameron’s use of electroshock in order to “erase and remake” a persons psychology and the use of ‘Shock Capitalism’ where corporate power seeks exploit shock and disaster on  a larger scale in order to ‘erase and remake’ a society. 

The composition, by harnessing the sounds of electrostatic discharges and high voltage equipment, re-interprets the work; exploring the themes of erasure, disruption and ultimately reconstruction. Blank is Beautiful borrows its title directly from Klein’s book, and aims to abstractly interpret her political theories.

Electroacoustic Composition

Nick Del'Nero