Borderlands : an electroacoustic environment experience

Borderlands is a new musical work for violin, clarinet, cello, piano and laptop. Above all else, it is a musical story portraying the travels of four instrumentalists in a strange new world. Each performer is routed via microphone into the laptop, which performs a variety of real-time audio processing manipulations. This electroacoustic work is reflective of my ongoing research in music interpreted as an environment. There are three main aspects to this dissertation. The first aspect is the laptop software (programmed in Supercollider) that is largely responsible for providing the electroacoustic elements during the course of the work. The second (and largest) aspect is the music that utilized this software to create the environmental experience. The last aspect is the text of the dissertation itself, which analyzes and philosophically explains the inner workings of the first two aspects.