Breath through water: Personal cross-cultural and multimedia processes flowing towards dao in composition

This thesis presents a composer's journey that uses water as a symbolic tool for analysis and inspiration across three creative audio-visual works: water. wave. form. (2010), Antibiosis (2011) and The Ghost Cave (2012). These concepts of water are drawn from the perspectives of Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung who formed his analogy of the unconscious with an engagement with East Asian Daoism's notions of: yin-yang, flow and natural phenomena. The cultural heritage of the film maker (East Asian) and the composer (European) informs an intercultural context. As the composer, I focused on music and philosophies from several countries and their composers that contribute to this work, these include: Chou Wen-chung (China), Chinary Ung (Cambodia), Toru Takemitsu (Japan), Liza Lim (Australia), Bruce Crossman (Australia), and Philip Glass (America). Ideas found in water, video works and music are unified with concepts of time from French composer and audio- visual theorist Michel Chion. His concepts include: temporal vectors, non-temporal vectors, directional, non-directional, scansion, syncresis and sync points. These are shown to contain traditional European directional development that are placed alongside traditional East- Asian concepts of stasis, single-tone and momentary philosophy with its focus on resonance.