As the global population grows, there is a pressure to maintain growth and productivity while encouraging society toward efficiency-driven and 'simulated bubbles' of existence. Jean Baudrillard’s vision of an inescapable hyper-reality denies any experience of ‘the real’ and appears ever more pertinent. However, a profound moment in this author’s life as a music composer suggests that experiences of reality are indeed possible. These experiences arise not from a turning inward or away, but from an engagement with the objective world: a realisation that the subject is locatable in the object. In this doctoral dissertation, based on my creative work, original music compositions are located as outdoor events and as a framework though which to address the central research question of how such works might reframe personal understandings leading to an experience of ‘the real’. The idea of noise as a contemporary city-based cultural artefact is central to this project where perceptive barriers are removed and the world may be seen and heard as complete. To this end the relevant literature is examined; this includes the music of Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, Richard Barrett and Brian Ferneyhough; the art works of Johannes Vermeer, Domenico de Clario and Mario Merz; and the philosophies of Jacques Ranciere and Giles Deleuze – all of which are utilised to offer insights into a rethinking of the compositional process. This leads to the examination of arguments for seven methodological principles: 1) Space and Time; 2) Mapping the Soundscape; 3) Instrumentation; 4) Layering; 5) Pathways; 6) Personal Elements, and 7) Silence. These principles are applied in the creation of three large scale outdoor musical works: The Circular Ruins 1, The Circular Ruins 2 and The Circular Ruins 3. Jorge Luis Borges’s story The Circular Ruins serves as a guiding metaphor to understand these events as a bringing to life of the soundscape. Each of these three projects are examined both in text and in an accompanying digital book on iPad in order to offer alternate readings via video, image and recorded sound. The digital material aims to allow the viewer /listener opportunities to more fully interact with the creative viewpoints and, when combined with a reading of the dissertation, this collectively provides a deeper interrogation of the research project. While very different from the live events, the digital materials in conjunction with the dissertation directly address and exemplify the author’s aims, questions and conclusions.