In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009 Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 45 Texture and Entropic Processes in Electroacoustic Music Erik Nyström Department of Music City University London United Kingdom studio@eriknystrom.com In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009, Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 Abstract This paper investigates the aesthetic possibilities of textural processes as the root of organisation, causality and gesture in electroacoustic music. A general model for the qualification of textural properties is outlined, providing a foundation for elaborations concerning transformational and mutative, textural and gestural processes. In these explorations, metaphorical thinking is applied, inspired by contemporary natural sci- ence, rooted in thermodynamics, which has a wider relevance to the questions of or- ganisation, causality and time in nature. The approach renders entropy (irregularities, disorder, unpredictability) the central subject, held here as a key influence on the emergence of temporal process and form out of textures. These processes are de- scribed as dissipative structures - an aesthetic concept based on the scientist Ilya Prigogine’s work on self-organisation in nature (1984), which metaphorically matches well with the notion of texture as a self-propagating phenomenon (Smalley 1986). The ideas presented here are a condensation of my MA dissertation, and are sup- ported by excerpts from two compositions, Multiverse (2007-08) and Far-from- equilibrium (2008), which were realised as part of the research, supervised by Pro- fessor Denis Smalley at City University.