Unsound Connections: No-Input Synthesis System

Abstract

One of the ongoing projects developed within the author’s sound-art practice, ‘Unsound Connections’, utilises feedback tones and digital signal processing within a live performance system where crude sounds induced by inappropriate usage of audio equipment are shaped and arranged by software audio effects. The resulting composition is a hybrid of aesthetics, technologies, and methodologies found in electroacoustic music and electronic dance music. Musical terms are used in describing the process by which the composition was created, as opposed to the technical analysis of feedback tones by Knut Aufermann in his dissertation Feedback Processes: an investigation into non-linear electronic music. While that particular paper provides not only a comprehensive technical analysis, but also a cultural reflection on the notion of feedback, it lacks a musical analysis of the resulting material. This paper intends to provide readers with a description of the composed piece in a manner closer to that of an analysis of a musical performance.