The notion of playing music is a familiar one, whether it relates to cueing a track to listen to on an iPod, or performing in a brass band. Yet play has other resonances for us in negotiating the way we encounter the world: children creating narratives in adventure playgrounds, corporations gamifying routine tasks to increase engagement, and five minutes of escapism on the train home through an app. This broader sense of play is also found in music, where rule-based compositions govern decisions made by the players in response to environmental cues to shape the resultant sound.

In this seminar James Saunders will present theory drawn from game studies and heuristics, and consider ways to apply it to compositional processes, exploring the balance between purpose and play in indeterminate music.

James Saunders is a composer who makes open form compositions that explore group behaviours and decision making. He studied at the University of Huddersfield and the Royal Northern College of Music and is Professor of Music at Bath Spa University, where he directs the Open Scores Lab. He is the co-author of Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation with John Lely.