Strange Attractors: A Commentary on Applications of Indeterminacy in my Recent Music

This commentary reflects on how indeterminacy has been used in the music I have written over the period of my doctoral studies, 2005-2008. Non-musical ideas play a major role in my compositional language and this is reflected in the use of 'strange attractors' as a metaphor for the philosophical and aesthetic stance behind composing with indeterminacy. After a brief introduction chapter, the links between strange attractors—and chaos theory in general—and indeterminate music are discussed. And applications of indeterminacy to pitch organisation techniques such as spectral modelling and frequency modulation are examined as part of a frequency-based harmonic continuum. Different methods of generating ambiguous pitch percepts that sit at the boundaries of the harmony/timbre duality are considered In pieces with text processes.