Samples of creative and scholarly work:
1. Will Mason Quartet - Hemlocks, Peacocks (2025).
with Anna Webber, deVon Russell Gray, Daniel Fisher-Lochhead.
More information about the album is available here.
Score pdf for I. Hemlocks
Score pdf for IV. Turned In The Fire
2. Will Mason, Ned Rothenberg, Lester St. Louis electroacoustic improvisations, March 2023
3. “Rime,” for Solo Violin. 2016/2020
commissioned and performed by Michi Wiancko
Score .pdf
4. Happy Place - Tendrils. Exit Stencil Records, 2020.
with Kate Gentile, Charlotte Mundy, Elaine LaChica, Dan Lippel, Andrew Smiley
More information about the album is available here.
Score pdf for 1. illuminations
Score pdf for 2. tarnish
Score pdf for 4. having, climbing
5. Mason, William. 2022. 'Expression and Technologies of Perception in Zosha Di Castri and David Adamcyk’s Phonobellow', in Amy Bauer, Liam Cagney, and William Mason (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Spectral Music (online edn, Oxford Academic, 8 Dec. 2021)
Abstract:
This chapter considers the legacy of the spectral school regarding their uses of and attitude towards technology. Spectralism is a musical practice fundamentally mediated by technology, and the ways in which this mediation is manifest are highly diverse, exposing the heterogeneous assemblage that constitutes “technology.” The chapter considers excerpts from pieces by Grisey and Murail against Zosha Di Castri and David Adamcyk’s 2015 piece Phonobellow, an evening-length music theatre work for five performers and electronics which centers around a massive wooden bellows. That structure, the phonobellow, is part musical instrument, part spectacle; it transforms repeatedly through the piece, from a comically large evocation of early cameras to a monstrous structure with viscera comprised of musical instruments. Though familiar pitch-centric hallmarks of spectralism are not central to the piece, the author argues that it emerges from a tradition of musical inquiry into technology and expression that characterizes the particular strand of modernism that included the spectralists.
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37085/chapter-abstract/371824760?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Download .pdf
6. Mason, William. “Holly, Plus Whom?: The Holly+ Timbre Transfer Program and the Valuation of Musical Labor under Web 3.0.” Currently under review at the Journal of Popular Music Studies
Abstract
In July 2021, the electronic musician and scholar Holly Herndon launched Holly+, a vocal deepfake modeled on her singing voice. Holly+ is powered by an artificial intelligence engine trained on recordings of Herndon’s voice. Musicians were welcome to use the transformed audio commercially and simply credit Herndon and Holly+. They also could release their work with the official imprimatur of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a Web 3.0 entity tied to the Ethereum blockchain. My paper situates the Holly+ project against the backdrop of intellectual property law in the US, both as it stood in the late 2010s and 2020s and in light of the legacy of legally sanctioned appropriation and extraction of work by Black performers. The DAO framework Holly+ uses is unlikely to gain traction, and Herndon and Dryhurst’s provocative invocation of “identity play” suggests an uneasy relationship to the racialized legacy of mimickry and impersonation in the history of American popular music. But the project stands as an important attempt at creating an artist-driven, grassroots effort at monetizing, authenticating, and protecting the intellectual property of musicians in the era of machine learning.
Draft article .pdf