For artistic research I decided to explore the vast field of musical imagery and use some of its features to help me in the creation of an arrangement of Claude Debussy’s Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (from the second book o Images) for piano and percussion instruments. In my research I discovered that imagery can affect numerous activities related to music, such as linguistics - how a performer talks about music, the words a teacher chooses to make a student find a certain character or sound for a piece, or even how a person with no expertise in music voices their reaction to music -, gestures – how performers express sound with gestures and search for sound by analysing the gestures used to create it, or, also in this case, how a person that has no studies in music uses gestures to emulate sound and perceives gestures used by performers to increase expressivity -, and other features regarding the ‘search for sound’. 

I was able to put some of those features to use in the creation and interpretation of my arrangement. During the composition, the narrative I created of a mythical creature reacting to the movements of the moonlight (and how it was reflected in a magical temple), was my main influence for the choice of instruments for each section and the atmospheres they created. With a new set of timbral atmospheres the piece gained new images (like, as I said in the last chapter, the association of the vibraphones playing with bows with waving beams of moonlight reflecting on a mystical temple), that made me conclude that not only is imagery effective in evoking sound, but also, sound is an extremely powerful source of imagery. With the performance of the arrangement came my empirical confirmation that is possible to look for sound by searching for the gesture that allows a performer to play it (in my efforts of connecting the piano’s timbre with the percussion instruments) and, once more, that sound is an excellent and simple way of explaining performance (by the reaction of the percussionists to my playing of the original version of the piece for solo piano). 

This artistic research could also raise other theoretical questions for future research, beyond the relationship between image and sound. For example, exploring the limits of notation in its capacity to depicting images, studying historically informed practice of Debussy's music to explain what we mean when we talk about his original sound, understanding the borders between arranging and composing and how far can we go with it, exploring the role of the performer and his relationship to the score, amongst many other issues. 

The realisation of this research proved to be extremely helpful and rewarding. With it I acquired new capacities that made me develop as a musician (both as performer and arranger), and the interest in doing experiments in the realm of composition. I hope this research can inspire other musicians to look for new ways to practice and gain interest in the acquirement of other skills regarding to music, such as analysing, arranging and composing.