Peter Mcilwain - Sonic Art

The following videos give an overview of my practice as a composer specialising in computer music. The works involve the creation of music, sound and visuals using a range of software including coding environments such as MaxMSP, Processing (Java and Javascript) and Open Frameworks (C++). I have made works professionally for film, installations and concert environments. As part of my research work as an academic I was constantly developing new techniques and methods of working.

This was a large scale project at Burrinja Cultural Centre that incorporated audience participation via the internet with a gallery exhibition of both sound and visual elements.

I was a lead researcher on the Nodal project in which our research team developed cutting edge software that presented new concepts in the representation and generation of music. The research component of this work won the 2012 Eureka Prize for innovations in computer science. The software has been used around the world and is still available today see https://nodalmusic.com

The Phonozoa project was creative research that explored the relationship between our perception of sound and gesture. The software creatures shown here are not animations, they are algorithms that generate both the sound and the gesture (or motion) at the same time.

This project explored the concept of a field of musical generators (the circles) that play in response to wind.

This was a software instrument that I developed and used in many compositions and live performances. It was an attempt to engage audiences in the otherwise invisible process of complex additive synthesis.