Network music: a spatial paradigm in musical composition and performance
Nuno Gonçalo Prazeres Torres, 2018
Master Thesis in Music – Music Technology
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
link: NETWORK-MUSIC_a-spatial-paradigm-in-musical-composition-and-performance.pdf

Abstract:
The growing dissemination of Internet in the last decades, in relation to recent technological development, establishes new paradigms on today’s social and community experience. Thus, arising a number of questions that challenge both thought and musical creation.

It is within this framework that I formulate in the present thesis, a body of research knowledge that addresses the ways in which the Internet informs the content and musical experience in networked music practices, specifically its compositional and performative dimension. Networked Music as a practice within contemporary music domain, at the crossroad of experimental music and sound art.
As a starting point and throughout the research, two questions are explored in order to make an in-debt contribution to the concepts of territory and auditorium in the specific context of the object of study.

To what extent, can the practices of network music contribute to redefine the concepts of territory and place, when one resorts to the Internet as a structural medium in music creation? What are the possible auditorium formats as listening spaces for an audience and how can they be reinvented in order to challenge new relationships between the public and the artistic object?
The present research is constructed through a methodological basis that articulates the practical experience with theoretic research, by exploring a case
study, done with two artistic networked music projects and questioning it through a multidisciplinary literature lenses.

Two major results emerge from the present research. The systematization of the described case study projects, their technical and artistic components; which are possible to be replicated by different communities of interest (artistic and scientific). The development of a theoretic body of work, that contributes to inform and question the network concept and the different possibilities of audience participation.
I believe that the different questions raised by this research, considering both its practical and theoretical dimension, contribute for a thorough critical analysis of the impact of the new technologies in contemporary music studies.