Conclusion
After having finished one of my sound-generating sessions, I wrote this reflection:
"There is inherent wonder in listening to these sounds. As you press a button and something completely unexpected happens. As you listen to it evolve, thinking that now it has reached its final state as it goes for several minutes without changing before suddenly evolving into another form. It is the closest I have come to the inherent promise of experimentation, interacting with a magical object containing eternal worlds unknown. It is childlike yet contemplative."
Initially the task of organizing these sounds, often abrasive and abstract, into fixed compositions seemed daunting. What I ended up finding, however, was that the inherent qualities I found in the sounds changed the organizing process away from a need to make the sounds bend after my compositional will. Rather, it ended up being a process of studying the sounds for where they wanted to go, allowing them to organically grow into compositions of radically different styles.
The sounds, seeming as something that I had discovered rather than created, did give me the sense of inherent meaning that I had been searching for. They seemed to hold promises of what else might be to come, and as the compositional process turned into a process of simply framing them it was given a new sense of direction.
It is evident that I have only scratched the surface of this methodology even within Ableton Live, and even as this writing process comes to an end I am continuously sitting down and having deeper, more fulfilling experiences exploring the software. I am creating a richer variety of sounds with more complex and developing textures.
In writing this thesis I have begun to approach a stronger sense of identity as a composer, one that connects to my roots and manages to define a continuous narrative of the disparate practices of my creative career. More than that, I now feel myself as part of a tradition of composers continuously looking for new ways of charting and pushing the edges of whatever material borders define their practice.
I am both hoping to continuously expand my own practice of misuse in the future, as well as hoping that I have managed to inspire whoever might read this to make their own explorations into practices of misuse. Even within the limits of my own practice the work has just begun, and from the uncountable practices able to misuse, endless roads forward may spring.