This thesis documents the practice-based research case Simulation Design in Prototype Development: Composition for infra.norma.meta (2019–2024). It investigates how musical composition can be reconceived not as the production of fixed artefacts, but as the design of infrastructural systems capable of generating, testing, and sustaining musical activity across rehearsal, performance, and re-realisation contexts. Situated within contemporary practice-based research in music, and informed by traditions of system-based, algorithmic, and performer-mediated composition, the project addresses a central problem: how to produce works that are structurally coherent and performatively adaptable while remaining analytically traceable and reproducible under conditions of variability. The research is organised across three interdependent portfolios—Opus I (Composition), Opus II (Research and Theory), and Opus III (Analysis and Application)—comprising twenty-six compositions and fifty-three research objects. Together, these portfolios function as an integrated experimental field in which compositional prototypes are iteratively designed, realised, simulated, optimised, and evaluated. Methodologically, the project integrates practice-based composition with systematic mapping and simulation. It develops from historical models of procedural and schematic composition—including Notre-Dame polyphony, partimento pedagogy, Baroque improvisation, Classical dependency-based form, serial and post-serial formalisation, and nineteenth-century operatic co-determination—alongside modern frameworks of practice-as-research, generative and algorithmic composition, open-form and improvisational practice, perceptual and embodied models of musical structure, and technology-mediated system design. These lineages are extended by treating evaluation, reproducibility, and stability under variation as intrinsic compositional concerns rather than secondary analytical criteria. The central research question asks which compositional frameworks, realisation conditions, and generative models can produce sources that are structurally novel, conceptually coherent, and performatively adaptable, enabling meaningful co-determination between composer and performer. The guiding hypothesis proposes that the iterative simulation of formally specified prototypes, combined with performer internalisation of mapping and simulation logics, constitutes a reproducible method for generating and stabilising compositional systems. The findings demonstrate that structured mapping combined with adaptive simulation yields prototypes that maintain structural integrity across diverse performance conditions. Performer engagement proves decisive: stability depends less on stylistic background or technical virtuosity than on the performer’s capacity to internalise and enact the cognitive and procedural invariants specified by the system. The thesis contributes a transferable compositional methodology that reframes composition as infrastructural design, extending practice-based research by integrating system specification, simulation, and performance into a unified, evaluable framework applicable to composition, performance practice, pedagogy, and scholarly inquiry.
| Date of Award | 1 Sept 2026 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Alex Harker (Main Supervisor) |
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