Brent Clowers

Numbers and Colors

Integrating Acoustic and Electronic Sounds: Tools, Strategies, and Ideas Available to the Contemporary Jazz Composer

This project investigates the development and recording of a series of works for saxophone/laptop electronics and an electro-jazz composition. Throughout these works, specific tools and strategies are examined and discussed in order to provide insight to contemporary composers interested in combining acoustic and electronic sound worlds within a jazz medium. Guided by a practice-based research model, this project documents a series of jazz workshop sessions in solo and duo formats. These sessions are used to gather raw material through improvisational processes for electronic processing and sampling. From this point, the compositional phase of the research works to integrate these sounds into a form-based jazz composition. Specifically, this project addresses the relationship between acoustic and electronic sounds, possible methodologies of achieving an electroacoustic sound world, and the integration processes available for combining the two compositionally, all within a jazz context.