This project combined four main approaches: artistic creation, observation and interviewing of the composer in order to follow the process of musical creation, experimentation on the psychological processes at work during musical listening, and musicological analysis of the work and its place in a larger historical context. The degree of interaction between these different approaches was very high. The result of the artistic approach was a musical work that was premiered in Paris and San Diego within the framework of the project. The results of the observation of creative processes include a very rich written documentation and recorded interviews on the influences and decision-making processes at work throughout the conception and composition of the piece, as well as several musicological and psychological analyses of these elements. These initial analyses served as landmarks to orient different aspects of the later in-depth musicological analyses and human experimentation. The musicological analyses conducted up to the point of this publication have focused primarily on the thematic materials and their transformations by compositional and electroacoustic means. These analyses were necessary for the interpretation of the results of the experiments on the perception and memorization of the materials.
Within this project, the psychologists have explored the cognitive processing of musical structures of increasing complexity, from thematic subsections to the themes themselves and then to the whole piece in a concert situation. Because the structure of Reynolds' work is based largely on the variation and transformation of the five thematic elements, the musicologists and psychologists were interested in their genesis, in their perception, understanding, and memorization, and in the understanding of transformations applied to them through instrumental writing or computer processing of their recordings.
The psychologists presumed that a listener's ability to process the themes and their transformations would constitute a sort of "prerequisite" to be able to apprehend the work in its entirety while listening to it in a concert situation. In other words, difficulties in perceiving, for example, the perceptual identity of themes after modification of their instrumentation, as observed in the laboratory, would also be present when listening to an actual performance of the work. In similar fashion, the results of studies on the influence of material transformation processes on memory for the themes suggest that the derived sections between themes (Transition and Combination regions) would not contribute to reinforcing listeners' memory traces for these themes. This is contrary to what one might have thought on the basis of cognitive science research on the integrative processes in the brain. These results allow us to specify, among other things, the cognitive nature of the difficulties encountered when first listening to a contemporary work in performance.
Experiments on the thematic materials suggest that listeners succeed locally in perceiving similarity relations among these materials and globally in comprehending the temporal articulations of the themes. Listeners would therefore seem to have a fairly sophisticated perception of the structure of this musical idiom over relatively short time spans. The integration of the whole set of these materials over large spans of time seems to be more difficult to realize in terms of memory. Still, the in-concert results on continuous resemblance and emotional force responses suggest an implicit influence of the large-scale form on instantaneous responses, and thus on the integration of materials and their affective meaning over long time spans (on the order of several tens of minutes). The analysis of these integrative processes over the whole musical form will require further intense collaboration involving music analysis and psychological experimentation. Beyond the implications of this work for the cognitive sciences and musicology (taken in its broadest definition), the present project has allowed us to establish for the first time in the history of these two disciplines a systematic methodology that addresses the documentation of both the possibilities and the difficulties of perception encountered by listeners during the in-concert reception of a contemporary musical work.