For a "nanomusic" - Sound nanomachines and elastic space-time: A transversal approach to music composition

This thesis describes my transversal approach to composition and underlines how structuralist psychoanalys is, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, and areas of thinking in the nanosciences played a central role on my conceptions of space and time. My most original contribution lies in the endeavour to elaborate a malleable and evanescent musical matter in which micro-fluctuations exert their forces on macro-entities creating a musical space-time as elastic and mobile as that of the psychic unconscious. The pieces are conceived as cartographies of flux, fleeting constellations of sound particles whose migrations either interweave filaments in elastic and heterochronic textures or converge on an object. Small modular pendulums are the elementary figures of this ramified network. They connect to one another and permeate the musical matter. Time is multiple and pluridirectional. Jumps and rebounds, temporal gaps, annunciative anticipation and retroactive reverberation (Green), keep combining fragmentary elements which echo with one another and which allow the listener to perceive the work of time as a "compound of splinters", an assemblage of "quanta of memory", or a pure flow. Repetition has a paradoxical function, both favouring the identification of abstract gestures and their step-by-step mutation. Sound trajectories are envisaged as "pulsounds" and chains of "sonifiers", in reference to concepts of pulsional phenomena (Freud) or signifiers (Lacan). This intersection between psychic topology and sound topography also investigates the structural potential of relationships between humans and urban environments. The addition of electronics, the use of both instrumental and mechanical or urban sounds, materialize a transitional space (Winnicott) with ambiguous boundaries between inside and outside, a hybrid sound territory, a zone of indiscernibility (Deleuze) between mind and machine, scream and noise, the organic and the mechanical. These evolving sound diagrams refer to nanotechnology’s atom-by-atom engineering with its increasing crossing-over of animate and inanimate matters. Sound processes operate as quasi microscopic units grouped in transitory configurations under the action of forces,and with this perspective I have coined the term "nanomusic" to describe my musical project.