Tectonic: Pannotia [2025] – is the latest in a set of works based on the concept of a score-based composition with groups of players interacting like Tectonic plates. It draws on conventions and practices in Post-War music including: Sound-Mass, Group Improvisation, Acousmatic and Interactive Composition and research in Digital Notation that has been one of the preoccupations of the Decibel New Music Ensemble, that Aaron and I have both been part of for over 10 years.
In Pannotia, this project collided with the experience of “vertical communities” - like minded but geographically  disconnected people perhaps especially from isolated locations like Perth/Australia and and made particularly acute by COVID.
A number of issues informed its development:

Tectonic Pannotia is the first implementation of a telematic musical score using the Decibel Scoreplayer "Canvas" format. Canvas allows for a computer to send drawing instructions to the Scoreplayer opening the possibility of indeterminate, generative processes to be explored. Although it had previously been used in a Local Area Network, this was the first time that scores were distributed to an ensemble of non- "co-located" performers.
It belongs to a series of works by Vickery, named after: primordial supercontinents: (Vaalbara [2010], Rodinia [2016]); oceans (Iapetus [2020], Mirovia [2021]; Landforms (Tjoritja [2025] and Wuyi-Yunkai) and animals (Medusoid [2022]). 
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Ancient Oceans: Iapetus [2020] and Mirovia [2021] - fixed scrolling scores with “extended” notation, scores and individual instrumental parts;

A range of score paradigms were considered for the next planned work in the series, Tectonic: Pannotia. These may be explored in future work.
​ A graphical texture terrain – although this may be a possible and attractive solution, it was abandoned because it required:

• significant computer processing – potentially reducing the dependability of a “distributed score”;
• reading of abstract graphical scores is a specialised skill;
• animation of this type was not yet implemented in the Decibel Scoreplayer;
• the scoreplayer provides dependable network communication.

The textures of Medusoid were based on text prompts that I had long used  as a shorthand means for planning the evolution of musical structures. In 2023, I built out this collection of text prompts to include varieties of Musical objects, tempi, textures, structures, emotions, transitions, kinetics, morphological variables, physical states, living things, machines and environments. Textual instructions based on these prompts were incorporated in the next phase - Salmon Hats.

Salmon Hats [2024], created for a performance by Audiovisual improvising noise group Black Zenith and staff at WAAPA,   was not explicitly part of the Tectonic series. For the work, a notated score was rejected in favour of (almost entirely) text-based prompts. Several elements of the work contributed to the final model adopted in Pannotia:

• A networked scrolling score allowing the possibility of both coordinated evolving and periodic textures and sections.
• Instructive and allusive textual indications
• Graphical indications variously for players, section boundaries and events.
• Synchronised WAN capability. (It was performed in the Text Score Performance Demo earlier today.)

The ​Final Pannotia Score Paradigm:
To these fixed text/graphical prompt screens are added indications of part name, dynamic and next texture and red indicators for register and a “playhead” that scrolls across the page from left to right. This recording shows the sound of the work (in the room) with 25 performers in 4 acoustic instruments and one electronic instrument groups:  Pannotia Rehearsal and this is a recording of the telematic performance of Pannotia as part of NowNet - the Jacktrip MIX was unfortunately quite unbalanced.

(page (excerpt) from TECTONIC: Pannotia [2025])

Issues encountered:

• in the NowNet performance draw commands were occasionally “lost” on the network, resulting in the score “hanging” or being otherwise ambiguous - this appeared to have been mitigated by increasing the buffer size for the Open Sound Control object in Max;
• although scoring the structure and the “scheduling” process were gradually streamlined, it was relatively laborious.

Unknown or future work

• The exact degree of synchronization has not been precisely measured;
• the text+graphic prompt model could be further refined by adding more effective and removing more ambiguous  prompts.

Ablinger says it is “always the connection between modules, the edge, is the crucial part: the perfect cut”. ​The facility to coordinate multiple channels of audio on iPads via WiFi was used to precisely synchronise the unfolding of each module and its contrasting performance practice.

In 2018, the Limited Hangout: in the field project, a series of site-specific long form compositions responding to the sonic/physical environment of a chosen locale, using tools such as acoustic measurement and analysis, topographical mapping, physical structures and weather conditions of specific spaces and times.
This presentation discusses performances presented so far in the the Limited Hangout project as well as 2 other works by the author willson's downfall [2018] for three instruments and field recordings, and decompression [2019] for 144 musicians and the St. Pauli Elbe tunnel. These works explore a number of approaches to the creation of site-specific music and means of establishing connections and interaction between sound and site, including the use of field recordings, topographical information, transcriptions, resonant frequencies of an 864 meter two tube tunnel respectively to interact with site-specific locations. The paper discusses methods of synthesising big data sets, for the generation of scores for acoustic instruments and electronic audio components and approaches to creating spatial audio environments within existing ambient natural environments. These approaches are compared to the work of composers such as R. Murray Schafer, Matthew Burtner, Marta Tiesenga, Vanessa Tomlinson and Charles Underriner.
A series of 6 site-specific performances responding to the sonic/physical environment of their chosen locale. 6 composers are challenged to create sounds interacting with particular environments using tools such as acoustic measurement and analysis, topographical mapping, physical structures and weather conditions of specific spaces and times. The initial concept was to limit the audience for each performance to 30 and to only supply the precise location will only be shared a week in advance of the performance.

Sage Pbbbt Narrows / Expands / Elides [2018]  29 Jul 2018 5pm
The first performance in the Limited Hangout series was Sage Pbbbt’sNarrows / Expands / Elides. The site for the work was the underside of the Perth Narrows Bridge –the central conduit between the north and south sides of the Swan river. The piececonsists of three movements; the first two attempting to “explore ideas of (non)striated space and (de)colonization” and the third reflecting on the problematic nature of such attempts.

Movement I: through a clumsy musickalanalogy of de-striatification/ de-colonization

njookenbooro [2018] for 12 performers at  Herdsman Lake 2 Sep 2018 8pm

The first section of the score was created through the transcription of prominent environmental frequencies which were mapped directly onto a spectrogram of a field recording made at the location several days earlier.

New piece for GreyWing for the concert Artificial Field - rising water. A field recording by Leah Barclay of flood waters in Queensland was resynthesised: firstly by using frequency data to control amplitude and amplitude data to control frequency; secondly by "threshing" - using and sustaining only the strongest sinusoids (the lower spectrogram); and finally by "freezing" the frequency spectrum at points of prominent amplitude transitions (the upper spectrogram). The spectral freeze points were then used to derive a sectional formal structure for the work. "Lyrebird" software was used to create a "base" score representing strongest sinusoids and coloring them according to their timbral qualities. This score was then separated into three colours (timbres) and distributed to the three instruments (bass clarinet, electric guitar and harp). Then layers sometimes obscuring this score were built by transcribing shapes from the "thresh" and freeze" spectrograms. The variation in this  material was used to define the sectional structure (which had been derived from the data in the original recording). Thanks to Leah Barclay for letting me use another of her fantastic field recordings. Below is the opening few seconds of the "full score".

kurui [2018] for bass clarinet, piano​/​melodica and percussion was written for a performance at the Cooroora Institute on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland. The performance was part of my sub-residency within a residency by Clocked Out (Erik Griswold and Vanessa Tomlinson) at the Griffith Conservatorium in Brisbane. The institute’s name is derived from the name for possum in the Gubi Gubi language: kurui. Although it is a scrolling score the notation is relatively traditional, aiming to bridge the space between 'faithful" transcription of sound on its own terms and a more "interpretive" transcription of sound in human "musical" terms. 

The work ends with the repetitive huff/clicks of the possum. Some of the prominent pitched content is highlights on bass clarinet and melodica.

​The score for willsons downfall [2018] was written for a performance at Harrigan's Lane a property in the Great Dividing Range on the border of New South Wales and Queensland.

​The final score (excerpt below) comprises the lines (representing the volume/spatiality of the field recordings) and the stylised representations of terrain, forest and river.

The performer’s relationship to Lyrebird in the example below is the most “score-like”, in that the pitch, rhythmic and dynamic contours of the bullfrog croaks from the field recording are adhered to with a great deal of  precision. The task is perhaps simplified because the pitch range of the croaks is limited to about 3 semitones, however the spectrogram indicates that this method of synchronisation of the recording and the performance by pianist and composer Michael Terren is effective in this instance. 
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TLQ#7 -
Lindsay Vickery September 14, 2017 
in TLQThe same questions, asked to different improvisers in Perth. Credit for the idea, and some of the questions, goes to the amazing Addlimb archive.

and podcast
MAKING CONVERSATION,
EPISODE 16: REBECCA ERIN SMITH INTERVIEWS LINDSAY VICKERY

In the process of developing the work Field Notes, I made a Max patch to analyse field recordings and derive pitches, translate them into MIDI notes and record them as the basis of a score. It became easier to record the MIDI output into a Logic file where they could be further threshed into information that might become a score: the Max Patch was quite capable of generating data that was too complex to transcribe into a traditional score. (In fact it brought into focus just how little information can be captured in a traditional score: because of the temporal grid that the score imposes). In any case I found that the output could also be used to generate an interesting accompaniment for an improvisation. The sample below demonstrates this idea - using an electric piano sound that (to me anyway) sounded a little like the Zawinal/Corea accompaniments found in Mile Davis' Bitches Brew. I'm yet to turn this into a viable performance tool: it took a lot of tweeking to get the output heard here.