Dr Matt Geer and the compositional philosophy
Dr Matt Geer is a British composer, researcher, educator and organist whose work explores musical time, temporal consciousness, ritual, repetition, permutation and systems-based composition.
Utterance Studio develops ideas from his PhD, The Narrative of Awareness in the Listener’s Fluctuating Experience: A Portfolio of Original Compositions. The research treats music not as a fixed, predetermined narrative, but as a temporal framework through which listeners form personal experiences shaped by shifting attention, memory, anticipation and consciousness.
The software embodies this approach by placing permutations of metre, rhythmic cells, pitch and harmony inside clearly defined systems while leaving the sounding result—and the listener’s route through it—open-ended.
Compositional process, time and permutation
For Geer, musical time is not simply a neutral container in which events occur. Repetition, stasis, self-similarity and temporal ambiguity can alter the felt passage of time, encouraging attention to move between minute changes in the musical surface and the listener’s own reflections. Phenomenological thought therefore acts as an inspiration for considering experience, rather than as a rigid compositional methodology.
Permutations are central because they provide structural rigour without requiring conventional teleological development. A limited collection of time signatures can be ordered into a long array; every recurrence of a metre can call upon a related rhythmic utterance; and pitch, rhythm, instrumentation and harmony can operate through parallel combinatorial systems. The rules establish continuity while continually changing the context in which familiar material returns.
This method has been used repeatedly in Geer’s work because it balances precision with perceptual openness. Recurring cells offer anchors for memory, but reordered metres and subtly altered utterances weaken predictable metric pulse and prevent the form from declaring a single narrative direction. Through repetition, familiar gestures may also undergo a kind of semantic satiation: they remain materially recognisable while gradually becoming strange, renewed or newly audible.
Utterance Studio makes this “enumeration of a system over time” practical and visible. The composer defines the materials, constraints and degrees of chance; the programme unfolds their possible permutations; and the resulting music creates a space in which the listener’s awareness may expand, contract, drift and return.
Short user manual
Utterance Studio builds music in five connected layers. You may regenerate any layer independently, or generate the complete score in one operation.
Recommended workflow
- Choose the number and names of the instrumental voices.
- Define the available metres and generate the shared time-signature sequence.
- Choose a rhythmic complexity and randomise the independent cell libraries.
- Choose each voice’s scale, interval character and range, then select a harmony level.
- Choose how successive metre occurrences select cells and build the score.
- Validate the result, then export MusicXML for Dorico or CSV for analysis.
1. Project and instrumental voices
Sets the project title, number of parts, names of the instruments and number of A–D cell variants. Every part receives the same metre permutation, but its rhythmic cells and pitches are generated independently.
2. Shared time-signature permutation
Defines which metres exist and how many times each appears. Generate metre sequence changes only the shared bar-by-bar metre order. The metre seed reproduces the same permutation later.
3. Random rhythmic-cell generator
Creates a separate A–D cell library for every voice and metre. Levels 1–5 move from long, simple values to very intricate subdivisions and tuplets. Every cell is checked with exact fractional arithmetic so it fills its time signature precisely. Rhythmic values are named throughout using British terminology: semibreve, minim, crotchet, quaver, semiquaver and their smaller divisions.
Randomise rhythmic cells keeps the metre sequence but replaces the rhythm libraries. New seed and randomise first creates a new rhythm seed.
4. Pitch generation and harmony
Each voice receives its own tonic, scale or mode, interval character and register. The global harmony level coordinates vertical sonorities from strongly tonal at Level 1 to unrestricted chromatic writing at Level 4.
Randomise pitches only preserves all metres and rhythms while assigning a new melodic realisation. The pitch seed makes that realisation repeatable.
5. Occurrence assignment and score
Determines how the first, second, third and later appearances of each metre choose cells. Pattern mode follows each metre’s A–D ordinal sequence; random and shuffled-bag modes provide progressively freer selection.
Build multi-voice pitched score combines the current metre sequence, rhythm libraries and pitch settings. Generate everything regenerates the complete structure using the displayed seeds and settings.
Saving, validation and export
Save project preserves settings and generated material in a JSON project file. Validate every cell checks exact duration and sounding content. MusicXML can be exported either with analytical text above every bar or as a clean score without bar labels; CSV creates a detailed process and analysis table.
1. Project and instrumental voices
All voices receive exactly the same time-signature sequence, but every voice receives an independently generated rhythmic-cell library.
2. Shared time-signature permutation
3. Random rhythmic-cell generator
Level 1: mainly crotchets, minims, dotted minims and other large values appropriate to the bar.
4. Pitch generation
Each voice has its own tonic, scale or mode, interval character and register. Conjunct motion favours steps, mixed motion balances steps and leaps, and disjunct motion favours larger intervals. No generated melodic leap exceeds one octave.
Level 1: pitches are coordinated into strongly tonal, chordal sonorities. The system searches for common major, minor, suspended and seventh-chord fields compatible with the voices’ selected scales.
5. Occurrence assignment and score
Metre sequence
Generated rhythmic-cell library
| Voice | Metre | Cell | Rhythm | Exact total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No cells generated. | ||||
Generated score structure
| Bar | Metre | Occurrence | Harmony |
|---|---|---|---|
| No score built. | |||