Telling life stories through algorithms embedded in compositional processes

Abstract In this article, I examine how I embed algorithms in instrumental and electroacoustic compositional practices to organise numerical data drawn from extra-musical environmental and cosmological contexts within musical materials and structures. I explore such material-semiotic exchanges between music and surrounding environments to sonically reconfigure the matter of the life stories suggested by Ursula Le Guin, stories that challenge anthropocentric narratives. The aim of telling life stories aurally is to both explore Baradian new materialist feminist deployments of technologies and encourage conversations and reflections on the forms, causes and effects of the relationship between humanity and its environments as proposed by Donna Haraway. Through the integration of environmental and astronomical data into musical materials and structures, real-time sound processing, octophonic spatialisation and generative interactions, the works I composed and discuss in this article unravel the sonic textures of the displacement of vegetal species across the Earth, the formation of galaxies, the physical dynamics of bird flight and the pollution of the seas, creating meaningful intersections of different media to examine how sonic practices developed within hypermedial settings may narrate more-than-human processes.