Abstracts 
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Iracema de Andrade - Temporal convergences in mixed electro-acoustic works
Iracema de Andrade
Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM)
This paper will address the idea of temporal convergences as one of the various levels of interaction between the acoustic instrument and the electronic material in mixed electro-acoustic works, based on Smalley’s concept of behavioural relationships in acousmatic music. A series of concepts and terminologies have emerged from the observation of different temporal convergence categories.
Horizontal and vertical temporal convergences are presented as organizational forces in the musical discourse that deserve consideration in the composition and interpretation of the mixed repertoire. Short musical examples are given in order to illustrate the application of this systematic approach in a performance context and also to offer insights into the process of collaboration between composers and performers.
1. Introduction
2. Fixed Medium or Live Electronics: That’s the Question!
3. Performing Mixed Works
4. Temporal Interactive Behaviour
5. Horizontal Temporal Convergence
6. Vertical Temporal Convergence
7. Final Considerations
8. ReferencesAlthough one of the main purposes of Musique Concrète and Elektronische Musik was to achieve freedom from the constraints of Western art performance traditions, the acoustic instrument has remained as both sound source and expressive medium for the electroacoustic composer (Emmerson, 1998). Works such as “Musica en Su Due Dimensione” (1952) by Maderna, or “Orphee 53” (1953) by Schaeffer and Henry, foretell the consolidation of compositional techniques and aesthetic approaches combining electro-acoustic resources and live performers. Throughout its aesthetical development, mixed works have comprised compositional approaches that vary from rhythmic and pitch intricacies derived from post-serialism (event-dominated), to textural or spectral transformations (signal-dominated). The elaboration of temporal interrelations between the live performance and electro-acoustic sounds, whether on fixed medium (sur support) or in real time transformations (live electronics), may prove to be a useful compositional strategy in creating structural coherence. The uncovering of interactive behaviours in mixed works reveals horizontal and vertical dimensions of temporal convergence. The horizontal dimension is concerned with the coordination of successive contexts. Its action is not based on an explicit pulse or metric frame but rather on rhythmic impressions provided by durational proportions of lineal succession of events. The vertical dimension is concerned with synchronized attacks and metrical congruence between overlapping events.
Its degree of coordination may demand more punctual and rigidly controlled levels of pulse and rhythmic organization. The interpretation of mixed works has raised practical issues concerning the synchronization between the instrumental part and the electronic material. The performer’s ability to identify the different types of horizontal and vertical temporal convergences plays an important role in the event coordination process. In the chronological flux of a given mixed piece there will be inevitable associative connections of cause and effect between the live performance and the electronic part that are crucial for an effective understanding of the work. The articulation of these associative connections will depend on the player’s amount of precision in identifying and controlling the coordination points. Composer’s treatment of temporal convergences within structural and expressive constraints may also be decisive in providing effective flexible and precise temporal relationships. The study of various levels of behavioural relationships may contribute to the consolidation of a performance tradition of mixed works.
Jorge Antunes - La musique électroacoustique figural: chiasme, éloquence et communicabilité
Jorge Antunes
Universidade de Brasília, Departamento de Música
La musique électroacoustique à la fin du XXe siècle et au début du XXIe siècle, présente des indices de que le compositeur veut rompre avec la traditionnele incomunicabilité propre à la musique nouvelle. On continue à pratiquer des transgressions, mais le goût par l'éclectisme dans la musique électroacoustique a pris un chemin esthétique, tel comme d'autres manifestations post-modernes, qui cherche également la communicabilité.
Il semble que l'expression musicale gagne des facilités concernant le désir de communication. Des objets musicaux sont construits avec soin et avec des qualités de persuasion. Il semble que le compositeur de musique électroacoustique commence à vouloir "convaincre" et "émouvoir", après avoir abandoné la pratique du pur plaisir sonore.
Pendant l'analyse de nouvelles œuvres électroacoustiques des auteurs différents, j'ai identifié des constructions syntaxiques semblables aux figures utilisées dans la rétorique classique et dans la poesie. Ainsi, en travaux antérieurs, j'ai divulgué des trouvailles: anaphores et epistrofes en œuvres de François Bayle, Dick Raaimakers, Elzbieta Sikora et autres. Dans des œuvres de João Pedro de Oliveira, Mario Mary et d'autres compositeurs, j'ai identifié pas seulement des anaphores, epistrofes et poliptotes, mais aussi des anadiplosis et epizeuses. Après avoir fait des entrevues avec les compositeurs, j'ai remarqué qu'eux-mêmes ne connaissaient pas les similitudes avec les figures de langage trouvées dans ses oeuvres. Tout a été construit de manière spontanée, sans intentions préalables.
Dans la présentation de ce travail j'ai l'intention de parler de ma recherche centrée sur la figure de langage connue sous le nom de chiasme.
Le chiasme appartient à la catégorie de la métathèse, car il fait usage de la transposition, la commutation ou la permutation des mots. Comme figure de syntaxe, le chiasme peut être caractérisé comme une figure de style avec l'utilisation de la répétition dans laquelle l'ordre des mots est inversé.
L'exemple donné par Quintiliano est paradigmatique:
Non ut edam vivo, sed ut vivam edo.
(Ne pas vivre pour manger, mais manger pour vivre.)
(Quintiliano, I siècle)
Le chiasme n'est pas utilisée seulement dans la poésie. On le trouve également en des célèbres tirades, pensées et textes théoriques:
"La seule façon d'exister, pour la conscience, est d'avoir conscience d'exister."
(Sartre, 1936)
"Les armes de la critique ne peuvent pas, en effet, remplacer la critique des armes." (Marx, 1843)
On trouve des exemples importants de chiasme dans les oeuvres de Bach et Anton Webern. Ma conférence est consacrée à montrer un peu de mes recherches dans ce domaine, en présentant des exemples de quiasme trouvés dans les oeuvres électroacoustiques de Eduardo Reck Miranda, François Bayle, Francisco Kroepfl, Mario Mary, Javier Alvarez, João Pedro de Oliveira et autres.
Marianela Arocha and Adina Izarra
Simón Bolívar University of Caracas.
The present research presents some of the mix electroacoustic concert works of Venezuela at its highest expression, from the 70´s to this day, seen through the analysis of the relationship between instrumental sections and their electronic resources.
Venezuela has a great number of mix electronic works, which have been very little promoted, interpreted or recorded.
This repertoire includes tape works, -which are created through several procedures-, works with synthesizers among the instrumental group, and interactive works, all this is written along with a short history of electroacoustic music in Venezuela, its composers and performers.The main aim is to establish relationships, jerarquies, proportions and functions between instrumental and electronic sources in order to conceive the work as a whole, where each fragment forms part of the whole in its closest and smallest part. A complex discourse is consolidated, generating multiples relationships, which contribute to build the structure of the work, where usual acoustic instrumental phenomena are conceived as sonic objects as much as the synthesized sound or pre-recorded and processed ones.
Listening and perception play an a decisive roll and can be shown through some examples, some of which will be shown during this lecture, and which will frame different periods and tendencies which have reign in Venezuela.
Some analysis tools have been applied: concepts form Schaeffer "Le Traité des Objets Musicaux", also Smalley: Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes, and the article of Daniel Schachter: Towards new models for the construction of interactive electroacustic music discourse.
Among the elements for the analysis of the mentioned repertoire, attention is paid to the three phases of the production of sound: attack, sustain and decay, de duality between gestures and textures, and also the spatial movement of Spectromorphologic densities. Gesture is conceived as a builder of the basic principles and the textures as the generates of the internal characteristics of the sound, in the spatial dimensions in which all this elements are constituted, the process of gestures growing and texture behaviour are of great importance. A general reference is made to different orders of gesture and its surrogates. The classification is made of the works according to each one´s basic constitution.
In order to establish closest relationships between the interpreter and the electronic resources a classification is presented according to its functions and typologies, developed in John Croft: Theses on Liveness article as paradigms of the relationship among performer, instrument and electronic sound.As a contribution to the development and diffusion of Venezuelan electroacoustic music, which includes mix genres, it is important to know all this repertoire, to understand it, and the active participation of interpreters, who must have the tools to get involved properly in this creative act, with conviction.
All of this leads to a close approximation from musicians and listeners allowing a greater accessibility for its performance and diffusion.Marianela Arocha. Venezuelan composer and pianist. Student of the Masters degree of music at the SImón Bolívar, Caracas.
Adina Izarra Venezuelan composer Director of LADIM (laboratory of digital music) of the Simón Bolívar University of Caracas.
B
Daniel L. Barreiro
Federal University of Uberlandia (UFU)
This paper draws considerations about a listening attitude which differs from the reduced listening approach and mentions examples of recent electroacoustic works that invite listeners to appreciate them with both an ‘abstract’ and ‘anecdotal’ set of mind. It is common knowledge among the electroacoustic music community that the ideal of reduced listening in the context of Schaefferian paradigm has often influenced the over-spread (yet not unanimous) compositional preference for sound objects that do not explicitly reveal their source nor make easily identifiable references to meanings of extra-musical nature. This is manifested in the scope of Schaefferian solfège (Schaeffer 1966) by the distinction between sound objects that are and that are not appropriate for musical exploration. Over the last 60 years, however, works by various composers have shown different degrees of attainment of this belief, from following it strictly to following it loosely or even completely disregarding it (in which case the works by Luc Ferrari, for example, are important references). On the theoretical field, the influential book On Sonic Art, by Trevor Wishart was written with the assumption that all sounds are potentially appropriate for compositional exploration (Wishart 1996, p.8), which clearly disregards the distinction mentioned above. The richness of associations that ‘anecdotal’ sounds (and also ‘abstract’ ones) can trigger in the listener’s mind has drawn attention to the expressive potential that they can bring to electroacoustic composition. As a consequence, the role of sound image - understood as mental representations generated by sensory stimuli that reach the attentive listener – has been highlighted by composers and scholars. In this respect, John Young (2007) mentions that “the capacity for electroacoustic music to project and manipulate sonic images is now acknowledged as a cornerstone of the medium’s aesthetic potential” (p.25). Suk Jun Kim (2008) also highlights the role of sound image in his approach on listening imagination. He points out that, while listening to electroacoustic music, listeners exercise their acousmatic reasoning based on a continuous interplay between a semiotic listening attitude (centred on the identification of possible significations and references the sounds may have) and a spectromorphological one (centred on the identification of the inner qualities of the sounds themselves – related, therefore, to the reduced listening approach). Such a combination of two different listening attitudes (and its influence on composition) resonates with Jonty Harrison’s considerations about his own approach while composing (expressed in the text that presents the CD “Évidence matérielle”). Following Denise Garcia (1998) and Denis Smalley (1992), it is possible to notice that sound images generated by sonic stimuli can be also associated with other kinds of sensory experiences.
Smalley identifies nine indicative fields or networks that can be present in a listening situation: gesture, utterance, behaviour, energy and motion, object/substance, environment, vision and space. According to him, the indicative relationships expressed by these fields are not restricted to sound understood as carrier of mere messages, events and information but “include a wider frame of references to experience outside and beyond music” establishing a “relationship between musical experience and our experiences of living” (p.521). Garcia mentions sonic models, visual models and spatial models that can work as guidelines for approaching sound in composition in connection with our experiences in a broader sense. This paper explores this theoretical framework and gives examples of recent electroacoustic works by various composers which play with the expressive (and aesthetic) potential of sound image generated both by 'abstract' and 'anecdotal' sounds.
Edgar Barroso
Harvard University Studio for Electroacoustic Composition (HUSEAC)
Electroacoustic music has inherited a tradition of collaboration. Technological advances in telecommunications have led to the first tools which became the genesis of electronic music. Collaboration with areas that apparently have no direct relations with the traditional conception of music has been a common place for electroacoustic music. Intrinsically, this heritage is pushing composers and developers to follow this tradition of collaboration with non-musical related areas of knowledge. Moreover, everything points to the fact that this is just the beginning, and this trend will expand to unimagined levels in the coming years. This presentation proposes three critical aspects that will play an important role in the future of electroacoustic music: Online Compositional Tools, Synectic Strategies and Free Trade of Knowledge.
Recently, internet offers a vast number of free/commercial software and online applications for sound production. In the following years we will witness online high quality realtime multimedia applications that will enhance collaboration concerning composition and performance of any form of sonic experimentation. In despite on all the advances in these tools, the paper will not focus in the technology, but in the compositional impact on the users and the social implications of them. These applications willallow users to realize alliances in a simultaneous manner. Composition, performance will have a similar platform as online video games, where people from all over the world will get online to create or to collaborate with any form of sound art or interdisciplinary task. With appropriate tools, creation groups or "bands" will emerge. An increasing amount of Digital Art will be the result of collectiveness rather that individuality.
A key element for these phenomena is that these interfaces will be enriched through collaborations with other areas of knowledge, in other words music will move to towards a synectic approach to creation. As defined by William Gordon, Synectics is an approach to solve problems based on the creative thinking of a group of people from different areas of expertise. This technique provides a systematic approach to a new way of thinking and creation which opens a new gate of using artistic features to improve other areas of knowledge. In David Edwards words, the production of Artscience.
The presentation will also show some results of one year of work with the Open Source Creation Group at Harvard. A group of five PhD students from Harvard University, dedicated to share and develop artistic and scientific ideas. The members have different backgrounds such as Literature, Music, Physics, Medicine and Government. We will show how a Synectical approach towards knowledge and creation between different professions enables researchers to find common interests, helps to solve problems in a more efficient way and enhances novelty also in electroacoustic music and/or in another kind of hybrid electronic art form. These individual objects of knowledge will be part of a free trade, and unlimited exchange that will give a new contour to interdisciplinary.
Finally, the presentation will explain how in spite of all these major changes of cross-disciplinarity, a self-sustained electroacoustic art will prevail. The treatment of sound alone is indispensable to develop the objects of knowledge, which composers and programmers will exchange in the knowledge market.
Tatjana Böhme-Mehner
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
The idea of heritage and its centralization in music theory and aesthetic is a principal born in and related to the 19th century and thus in a certain way also in concordance with the ideas of romanticism. It results from the artist’s belief, that he was creating durable values to exist eternally, the more or less (but ideally absolute) independently from environmental influences.
But thus, this idea of heritage is also strongly related to the nearly spiritual opinion that the ideal work was manifest in the written score and that (as Guido Adler outlined) this art work always had to be a mirror of the “highest” compositional standard ever achieved until that moment, assigning to interpretation and research the task to preserve this heritage by serving the ideal in the closest possible way.
As it is the case with any heritage, this process demands two sides – a bequeathing and an inheriting one.
Taking a closer look at the history of electroacoustic music (especially in early times) we can easily articulate some doubts, whether we have it to do with that kind of propagation. Of course we – in electroacoustics – know the artwork in many ways, too. Of course (the more or less) everybody would hope, that there would be people to preserve what one is leaving to the world. But of course, most of the conditions of electroacoustic production, reproduction and our today’s environment make this kind of music more related to its time, to another kind of here-and-now, as will be shown by analysing some examples taken from historical and actual preservation practice (pedagogy and performance). As an influence of the technological conditions and their development electroacoustic composition is related to another historiographic time-model.
Nevertheless, we live in a society, in which having to preserve a heritage is a kind of guarantee for having a future, as we can see by observing the discussions on the UNESCO world heritage title for example. The search for giving a past to the present in order to have a future is one of the most initial cultural desires, especially in economically problematic times as ours. Here this situation will be in question, asking in a provoking way where our heritage can be found, and what is its use for a living electroacoustic culture. Here points as the debate around the preservation of the WDR studio in Cologne will be touched.
Thus, the contradictory relation between a (critical) historiographic research and the idea of heritage will be touched as well as the difference between the concepts of heritage and tradition.
Finally, these points will be taken to demonstrate, in which way the idea of having a heritage to preserve can be useful in electroacoustic studies and in which not (especially focussing reproduction and pedagogy purposes).
Here the terms of “(‘the’) artwork” and “spirit” are questioned, in order to outline some fruitful preservation strategies and a new (innovation adapted) way of aesthetic inheriting.
Thus, we will celebrate a kind of new “reading of the will”: what is the heritage in electroacoustics?
Manuella Blackburn
Novars Research Centre, The University of Manchester
Denis Smalley’s concept of Spectromorphology (1997) provides the listener of electroacoustic music with thorough and accessible sets of vocabulary to describe sound events, structures and spaces. Traditional means of describing Western art music are usually inadequate in this regard, since we are dealing with music that is not note-based and often lacking a representation equivalent.
The use of this descriptive tool need not stop here. Fortunately, and often unconsciously for the composer, it does not, since all composers create music that is spectromorphological with or without an awareness of its presence at work.In a reversal of conventional practice, spectromorphology can be approached from an alternate angle that views the vocabulary as the informer upon sound material choice and creation. In this reversal, vocabulary no longer functions descriptively; instead the vocabulary precedes the composition, directing the path the composer takes within a piece. This new application is an attempt at systemization and an effort to (partly) remedy the seemingly endless choice of possibilities we are faced with when beginning a new work.
The author envisions a number of advancements for the future use of this tool. Composing from vocabulary has scope to be developed into a pedagogical tool. Using vocabulary sets and combinations as starting points for sound material creation is one example of how this methodology can be employed in an educational situation. A further look into the future sees spectromorphological vocabulary as a suitable way to tag sounds as metadata. This vocabulary seeks to build upon this concept, first implemented by Ricard and Herrera (2004) using Schaefferian typo-morphology for sound labeling and retrieval. Little research has looked beyond this retrieval stage. The use of more exoteric spectromorphological labels within a sound recall system may provide a number of approaches for the electroacoustic music composer to create new material and new sounds assembling strategies.
This paper presents these concepts and thoughts within the context of fixed media works. An outline of composition methodologies developed from spectromorphology is presented using examples from these works, highlighting how this language promotes stimulation of visual and sounding equivalents in the compositional process.
This new application undoubtedly raises a number of questions. If we can use spectromorphology to describe the internal functioning of sounds and entire work structures that we find to be rewarding, is it possible to re-use this language in the creation of future works? Is it possible to isolate the language we regard as ‘successful’? In searching for a methodology that uses ‘successful’ language to generate sound material we expectedly run into issues of language subjectivity, and whether or not composer intuition is relinquished while working with such a scheme. Guiding the reader through these themes in works utilizing spectromorphological vocabulary will provide answers to these questions, while presenting a practical example of how one might implement these concepts.
Bruno Bossis
Chercheur permanent, MINT/OMF Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris-IV) Maître de conférences, Université Rennes 2
L’objet filmique peut être envisagé comme une source musicologique de premier ordre pour la musique électroacoustique. Pourtant, aucune étude d’envergure ne lui a été consacrée malgré la richesse des fonds disponibles. La localisation et l’analyse du contenu de ces documents doivent ainsi permettre de construire une base de donnée accessible à tous. Un travail de synthèse est également indispensable à partir de quelques questions simples. Que nous apprend le film sur la création musicale ? Comment y sont perçus l’acte de composer, la préparation de l’interprétation et le travail sur la lutherie électronique ?
Une recherche sur l’acte de filmer la création artistique vient d’être financée pour les quatre ans à venir par l’ANR française (Agence Nationale de la Recherche). Dans ce projet développé à l’université Rennes 2, tous les arts sont concernés. Les films et les vidéos témoins de l’évolution des musique électroacoustiques dans le monde entier seront repérés, classés et étudiés.
La musique de film est exclue de l’étude, de même que les interprétations filmées. Par contre, les documentaires vidéos, dans lesquels les compositeurs, les interprètes, les techniciens et les chercheurs s’expriment, forment le cœur de toutes les sources retenues. Le document peut être un film, une vidéo, une émission de télévision, un CdRom, un DVD ou être hébergé sur une page internet. En 2009, de façon à limiter et faciliter les premières recherches, le corpus filmique étudié est centré sur les documentaires datant des années 70 et 80 disponibles à l’Ircam. La recherche sera ensuite étendue à la France entière et aux autres pays.
La première étape du travail a permis de repérer et de répertorier les vidéos qui ont été tournées avant 1990 à l’Ircam. En dehors des vidéos facilement disponibles à la Médiathèque de l’institut, un grand nombre de cassettes de différents formats restent encore à visionner, et d’autres sans doute à découvrir. Les répétitions filmées et les interviews de compositeurs, interprètes et scientifiques présentent un grand intérêt musicologique.
La seconde étape, déjà en cours, consiste à établir une base de données permettant une recherche à partir de rubriques précises. La réflexion sur la définition de ses rubriques est très importante puisque la structure sera utilisée lors de l’extension des recherches à toute la France et au monde entier, des origines de l’électroacoustique à nos jours. Ce travail est destiné à être mis en ligne sous une forme interrogeable à distance.
La troisième étape consiste à étudier les documents et à construire une réflexion à partir des documents répertoriés. L’objectif est de déterminer en quoi les documents, même lorsqu’ils ne sont pas inédits, peuvent enrichir la musicologie. De plus, une étude sur la façon de filmer l’acte de création (au sens large) est entreprise dès à présent. En effet, les technologies ont irrigué aussi bien le domaine de la musique que celui du regard sur la musique.
Jean Bresson and Carlos Agon
IRCAM – Music Representation Research Group
Dans cet exposé nous présentons des éléments de réflexion concernant l'écriture électroacoustique, établis lors d'un travail de doctorat portant sur "la synthèse sonore en composition musicale assistée par ordinateur" (Bresson, 2007). Parallèlement aux problématiques techniques et scientifiques qui ont pu être soulevées durant cette recherche se sont en effet présentées de nombreuses questions relevant des pratiques et théories musicales, qui ont constitué un socle important de ces travaux.
Avant de s'engager dans la réalisation d'outils de composition adaptés à la création sonore, il s'est en effet révélé opportun de se poser certaines questions fondamentales : comment un compositeur, avant même de choisir de manipuler un outil, conçoit mentalement le son qu'il va créer ? Quelle forme prend le son encore inexistant dans son imaginaire ? S'agit-il d'une reproduction, même transformée, d'un son perçu, préexistant ? Y a-t-il une "forme" qu'il s'agit de mettre à jour? Cette forme est-elle statique, immuable, ou bien est-ce une structure dynamique en permanente redéfinition ? Quelle en est la part d'intuition, de logique ?
Notre objectif n'est pas nécessairement ici d'apporter de réponse à ces questions, mais plutôt de les étudier ou reformuler de sorte à révéler à travers elles des problématiques pertinentes dans le cadre de la conception d'outils informatiques. Différentes collaborations et expériences, ainsi qu'une série d'entretiens effectués auprès de compositeurs et théoriciens (M. Stroppa, Ph. Manoury, H. Dufourt, C. Cadoz, K. Haddad, …) nous ont ainsi permis de mettre la jour une partie de la complexité et des multiples facettes que pourraient prendre une approche concrète et pragmatique de ces problématiques.
Nous en détaillerons ici les principales, concernant par exemple la redéfinition et le repositionnement des notions et catégories musicales traditionnelles, comme celle d'instrument, d'interprétation, de partition. A cette dernière, en tant que support d'écriture, se rattachera le problème de la notation musicale. Des questions plus générales sont alors abordées : celles des représentations symboliques, des formes temporelles, des paradigmes du temps discret et du temps continu, appliquées au cas de la composition musicale électroacoustique.
Dans ce même contexte, nous considérerons différents types d'outils informatiques existant pour la création électroacoustique en nous focalisant sur les paradigmes et approches compositionnelles sous-jacentes, et en essayant de mettre ceux-ci en regard des problématiques soulevées auparavant.
Le parti pris dans la réalisation concrète de nos travaux, qui sera brièvement décrit pour finir, est celui de la composition assistée par ordinateur (CAO) au sens qui en est donné par des environnements de composition graphiques et programmables, et en particulier l'environnement OpenMusic. Nous verrons dans quelle mesure celui-ci nous a permis d'apporter des propositions effectives pour les différentes questions évoquées tout au long de notre exposé.
William Brunson - Text-Sound Composition – The Second Generation
William Brunson
Royal College of Music in Stockholm
Text-sound composition denotes a Swedish artistic movement which arose in the open environment of the 1960s as an expression of interests in multi-disciplinary art, particularly that of text and music. As with most labels, text-sound composition in Sweden was an umbrella characterization for a complex confluence of diverse interests, the most common being language, music and the use of technology. Another unifying aspect was the idea of works utilizing the particular qualities of the radio media.
The work of the pioneering poets, composers and artists including Öyvind Fahlström, Lars-Gunnar Bodin, Bengt Emil Johnson, Sten Hanson, Åke Hodell, Ilmar Laaban and more has previously been richly documented both in books and on cds. Much less, however, has been written about second (and third) generation of composers who have in several diverging manners and means both developed and maintained this particular home-grown and internationally recognized approach.
Text-sound composition differs from other related art forms such as sound poetry, concrete poetry, poesie sonore in that it was never puristic in its approach to language. Already the hyphenated "text-sound" (text-ljud) points to the linguistic dichotomy of the written and spoken word, to text and the sound of its utterance. "Composition" indicates relations both to poetry and to music. Yet, it is safe to say that, in Sweden, the musical aspect has been emphasized by the second generation composers. This can be attributed in part to Lars-Gunnar Bodin's
artistic trajectory into the electronic manipulation of text and sound which moved the genre
towards the musical realm.
The proposed paper will focus on works by three composers - Rolf Enström, Anders Blomqvist and William Brunson - in Sweden who continued and developed the text-sound composition genre during the 80s-90s. Slutförbannelser (Final Curses) by Rolf Enström is an extended, apocalytptic work based on poetry written and performed by the Swedish poet, Elsa Grave and combined with electronic and concrète sound sources. Löpa Varg by Anders Blomqvist is a modern homage to text-sound pioneer and poet Bengt Emil Johnson. With texts by the composer, companion pieces Inside Pandora's Box and Creature Comforts by William Brunson are more closely related to the practice of Lars-Gunnar Bodin. In addition, other composers such as Åke Parmerud, Tommy Zwedberg and Erik Peters are also mentioned.
The selection and adaptation of texts in the selected works will be examined as well as their respective musical transformations and settings. Their technical realizations will be discussed, in particular with respect to advanced studio facilities that were established in Stockholm in the early 1980s. Based on the notion of a shared technology with popular music, these studios at EMS and The Royal College of Music featured state-of-the-art in-line mixing consoles and 24 and 16-track tape recorders from the legendary audio equipment manufacturer MCI. It is argued that the large number of channels and easy access to equalization, automated mixdown, etc created a unique compositional environment nearly unrivaled in the world at that time. The establishment of these studios signaled a new era of electroacoustic music in Sweden first with analog and later digital multitrack systems. At each of these succeeding stages the idea of text-sound composition has been renewed showing the vitality of this heritage.
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Michael Clarke - Extending Interactive Aural Analysis: Acousmatic Music
Michael Clarke
Department of Music and Drama, University of Huddersfield
This paper describes a new stage in the development of an ‘interactive aural’ approach to the analysis of electroacoustic music. I originally developed Interactive Aural Analysis in studying Jonathan Harvey’s Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco. The approach uses software to enable the listener to engage aurally with the structure of the work and with the processes and sound materials used in its composition. The interactive software includes, for example, an aural paradigmatic analysis of the work, opportunities aurally and interactively to investigate the sound materials used by the composer, and interactive exercises using accurate emulations of the techniques employed in the work. It provides a way of understanding our heritage more deeply and exploring what we might learn for the future.
Both the approach and the resulting analysis, comprising text and software (in Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music, ed. M. Simoni, Routledge, 2006), have been well received. My description of the approach can be found in the Proceedings of the 2005 International Computer Music Conference (pp. 85-8). This approach is now being extended to other works and the works chosen for analysis have been specifically selected to help broaden the scope of the interactive aural approach. Mortuos Plango takes recorded ‘musical’ sounds and analyses these sounds to obtain data which then forms the basis for the sound transformations and structure of the whole work. It is a highly successful work but this is not, of course, the only way to approach electroacoustic composition. The types of sound, the analytical approach to these sounds and the structural planning (in many ways reminiscent of Stockhausen) contrast strikingly with the approaches taken, for example, by composers in the acousmatic tradition in which the sounds used are often not traditionally ‘musical’ and the approach taken to these sounds is usually empirical and pragmatic rather than analytical, with the structure derived from spectromorphological principles. Developing an interactive aural analysis of such works therefore requires an expansion of interactive aural analysis conceptually and in terms of software tools. The analytical approach is also being further expanded in a different direction through the analysis of music combining live acoustic performance with real-time computer processing. This presentation however focuses on the issues raised and the solutions proposed in relation to an acousmatic work: Denis Smalley’s Wind Chimes.
The new features include the following: Printed sonograms are a feature of many analyses of electroacoustic music. Although they have uses in certain circumstances they do have significant limitations in terms of what they show and how they relate to aural experience (as I have discussed previously, for example in my presentation at EMS07). However, a sonogram that can be manipulated and heard in the context of interactive aural analysis software has many advantages over a purely visual, static printed sonogram. As part of this project an interactive aural sonogram is being incorporated into the MSP-based software accompanying the musical analysis. This allows the user to focus in on particular aspects of the sound, isolating time and frequency regions and comparing these with similar occurrences elsewhere in the work. Selected gestures or passages can also be saved and placed in interactive aural paradigmatic charts or genealogical trees to elucidate the structure of the work or the development of material. Software is also being developed (using analysis data in SDIF files) to examine and compare aspects of the spectromorphology of sounds.
This presentation will demonstrate some of the tools being developed and discuss more generally issues arising in the development of interactive aural analysis for acousmatic music.
Rodrigo F. Cádiz and Patricio de la Cuadra
Centro de Investigación en Tecnologías de Audio, Instituto de Música. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Electroacoustic music has expanded not only the possibilities of instrumental music towards a wider field of sonic material, but has indeed created a new art form, usually denoted as sonic art. The usual absence of a written score, in addition to the relatively young age of electroacoustic music has presented some unique difficulties to its analysis, and as a consequence a common analytical lexicon consistent with the particularities of this new art form has not been clearly established yet. A critical survey of different methodologies of analysis is discussed in this article.
Electroacoustic music, defined as music that is generated by electronic means, or by a combination of these with acoustic instruments, constitutes a very particular genre in the history of music. This music manifests important differences with respect to instrumental music, among them the usual absence of a written score and known sound sources, and the possibility of composing not only between sounds but within them. Some composers of this kind of music have questioned if what they do can still be denominated music in the traditional sense of the word, and reject the notion of being a composer. In general, these artists understand music as a subset of a more general sonic art, a new art form that, as Jean-Claude Risset states, is so different from instrumental music that it belongs to a totally different branch, in the same way that cinema is different from theater. These differences clearly affect the analysis. Most of the available analytical methods for instrumental music, cannot be applied in electroacoustic music.
As a consequence, several analytical strategies and methodologies have been proposed through the literature, each one with their own strengths and weaknesses, there are still neither general strategies or methods, nor an established analytical lexicon, something desirable for any kind of analysis. The analysis of electroacoustic music is usually done heuristically and particularly for each work being analyzed. There are no universally accepted strategies, despite the fact that some tools such as the sonogram are widely used. It is important to be aware that this is true for most music, but given the complexity and particularities of electroacoustic music, this is especially important in this case. Some authors have recently identified this problem and attempted to find invariant features and common strategies, so that the analysis could be systematized. Despite some notable advances in the last few years, published analysis of electroacoustic music are still very rare in comparison to analytical publications of instrumental or even contemporary music.
We propose an exhaustive survey and critical review of some important methodologies for analysis of electroacoustic music that have been proposed in the literature. This review could be of help in the establishment of an adequate analytical lexicon and provide some solid foundations for a future comprehensive methodology for the analysis of electroacoustic music.
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Ricardo Dal Farra - Re-thinking the gap. Electroacoustic music in the age of virtual networking
Ricardo Dal Farra
Department of Music - Concordia University - Canada, and Electronic Arts Experimenting and Research Centre (CEIArtE) - National Univ. of Tres de Febrero - Argentina
Artistic creation, scientific research and technological innovation represent three different “areas” that seemed to be well established in the western culture during the last centuries. Nevertheless, because of a real interest, necessity or fashion, these fields have met again and are now associated to continue deepening the cultural changes caused mainly by our use of recently-evolved electronic technologies.
Electroacoustic music is an interesting example, merging art with electronic technologies and even scientific knowledge. From isolation to virtual networking, today’s life is different from what it was a few years ago. An electronic music centre was before a place for sharing knowledge and sophisticated equipment as well as a networking space to meet colleagues and maybe start collaborating on new projects. Today we have other options. We give for granted email communication and we increasingly use online community-based systems to chat, share experiences or even meet people and work on projects (e.g. MSN, Skype, Facebook).
After an exploratory period, artists using new media (including electroacoustic music composers) have been slowly entering a new stage of refinement. But the past is not only different because of the tools; we are different too. We expect to access information like never before. If an information or “knowledge” is not available on the Internet, does it really exist? Maybe we are not that far from arriving to that point where people around will ask themselves that question, at least those living in highly populated cities with access to the newest communication technologies.
We are living the transition period to something else, but we don’t know what it will be. Will the future find the world divided according to the access to digital information and communication systems? What will be the place for electroacoustic music in the future, still an art for an elite? Who cares about it if most people don’t even know that it exist?
Are the new communication and information paradigm shift changing our way to create, research and innovate? The following projects have been build up aiming to explore and provide platforms of knowledge sharing, information exchange and collaborative work developments between artists, scientists and technology innovators concerned in studying the potential and effective richness of merging their different areas of interest.
(a) redcatsur (http://redcatsur.net/mailman/listinfo/redcatsur) is a network of artists, scientists, engineers and theoreticians promoting communication and collaboration in art, science and technology around Latin America.
(b) CEIArtE (http://www.ceiarte.com.ar/), the Electronic Arts Experimenting and Research Centre at National University of Tres de Febrero, Argentina, is focused on media arts research, creation and dissemination projects. Two examples are: BaDArte (http://www.badarte.com.ar/), a database for artists/researchers looking for electronic-arts oriented resources, and the organization of the EMS09 in Buenos Aires.
(c) Amauta (http://www.amautaproject.org/english/) is a project affiliated to Centro Bartolomé de las Casas in Peru, serving the mestizo and rural communities from the Andean region around Cusco through residencies, exhibits, and workshops both for city-based young professional artists as well as motivated peasants living in isolated regions.
All of the above projects are also related to electroacoustic music creation, documentation, performance or dissemination, considering it inside the wide umbrella of the nowadays called media or electronic arts.
Between the isolation of the Andes’ mountains in Cusco and over-populated cosmopolitan cities like Buenos Aires there is much work to do. Will the future find the work done with those projects positive or disruptive, educational or artistic, exploratory or useless? Most of it together? Something else?
Electroacoustic music will be taking part in the definition of our future?
Music, will still be taking part in the definition of our future?
Vania Dantas Leite - Music-Video: a new musical genre
Vania Dantas Leite
Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO)
The main goal of this research was to highlight a new genre of musical language, investigating a growing tendency in the works of composers who use technology as a means of expression: the increased use of visual language in musical composition. In order to study and characterize the genre we designated Music-Video, we used the development of musical language itself, associated to production models and audio-visual perception, as a basis. Due to the research’s very nature, we concentrated on the practice of electro-acoustic music, as well as the technological models that allow the blending of both languages in an audio-visual format. For illustrative and analytic purposes, we used the works of Brazilian composers, currently active in Rio de Janeiro, who best exemplify the genre.
Despite being the result of the interaction between two languages, we named Music-Video a genre practiced by composers. Therefore, to study it, we already had the statements of musical theory and practice themselves, as well as the interpretation/diffusion and perception of music in a given context. The challenge however, was the opportunity to review these concepts in a more comprehensive approach, beyond the sonic nature on its own, investigating for example, how images were present or how did they interfered in the various forms of sound constructions that historically preceded the Music-Video. Our idea was to show that music has always been an audiovisual spectacle, that images have always been part of the practice, dissemination and understanding of music in its three major historical/cultural manifestations: in oral tradition music, in written score music and in electroacoustic music. We believe that any expression of an artistic creation, additions, in evidence or impliedly, other forms of expression, even if this is not the intention of the artist creator. A spectacle has been and will always be a meeting point between multiple perceptions.
The musical genre we are pointing out is just one more between the artistic events of our days, newborn from the technology explosion that makes available to the artist not only new tools, but also the real possibility of overlap different languages - the multimedia. The research demanded a thorough study of the sound/image relation with specific focus on the constructing process of the product we named music video. Thus, from the works discussed, we arrived at an initial classification of the genre, including 5 modalities combining 12 models according to conception, diffusion and perception of the different interactions in the sound/image relation, from the traditional instrumental gesture until the newest interfaces for interactive real-time. There are certainly many more Music-Video models than those we examined in this study. From a video clip to a mixed media installation, modalities has been unfolding and, every day, new horizons appear in the mixture of languages.
This text seeks to make a brief exposition of the thesis by introducing an overview the theory and practice of music-video which will be illustrated through the display of some of the models in the audiovisual format (DVD).
By May 2004, the date of defence of this thesis, we did not find any literature or reference to the subject, with the specific intent that have been here adopted. We believe we have taken a first step to meet a need not only to think the genre but also to contribute to the foundation of its theoretical and analytical bases. It was mainly for this purpose, to rethink the relationship between music, media and technology that we immersed in this work.
Jean-Louis Di Santo - L’acousmoscribe, un éditeur de partitions acousmatiques
Jean-Louis Di Santo
SCRIME (Talence, France)
L’acousmoscribe est un logiciel que j’ai conçu et qui a été développé par le SCRIME. Cet éditeur de partitions acousmatiques sera très prochainement proposé en téléchargement libre sur le site du SCRIME, et est basé sur l’unité minimale de la musique électroacoustique que j’ai décrite en détail (ems06). J’en rappelle rapidement la définition :
l’unité minimale (ou « phase ») se définit comme tout son présentant une unité de processus, quelle que soit sa durée.
Toute phase se décompose en 4 « profils » qui obéissent à 3 processus : augmentation, diminution ou stabilité : les profils mélodique, rythmique, harmonique et dynamique.
La notation va donc s’attacher à décrire les différents profils de chaque son, tout en ayant un souci de clarté (actuellement, l’acousmoscribe permet environ 20 000 combinaisons). Les notations les plus performantes (alphabet, solfège) sont toutes basées sur l’unité minimale. Cette notation symbolique s’est efforcée de respecter les réquisits syntaxiques et sémantiques établis par Nelson Goodman (Langages de l’art, 1990).
Les profils dynamique et rythmique :
Une boîte décrit à la fois les différentes dynamiques possibles et supporte les éléments de rythme et de grain. Sa longueur est égale à la durée du son.
une barre verticale à gauche indique un son décélérant, à droite un son accélérant.
exemples
Le même codage en pointillés et tirets peut s’appliquer à la ligne supérieure pour décrire le grain
Le profil mélodique
Nous décrivons 5 tessitures : surgrave, grave, medium, aigu, suraigu.
Exemples:
La hauteur aléatoire (ou irrégulière) désigne des sons dont la hauteur varie de façon discontinue.
Nota bene : d’une façon générale, dans ce codage, les triangles ouverts signifient irrégulier, quel que soit le profil auquel il s’applique ; les pointillés signifient serré, les points/tirets moyen et les grands tirets large.L’allure se note par une légère ondulation qui se substitue aux traits droits représentant les profils mélodiques, et en adoptent toutes les variations (tessiture, calibre, aléatoire). L’amplitude se note par le nombre de courbes : 1 courbe = faible ; 2 courbes = moyenne ; 3 courbes = forte.
L’allure génère aussi un rythme. Sa notation sera donc prise en charge par la base de la boîte.Le profil harmonique
Sa codification respecte les différentes catégories définies par Schaeffer, mais décrit également les processus.
Les signes + et – placés près des indications harmoniques désignent des sons dont le spectre s’enrichit ou s’appauvrit.
Cas particuliers
Les sons impulsifs, qui ont une durée très brève sans s’inscrire dans un processus ou une réitération, se notent par un trait vertical.Quelques exemples de sons complets:
Les accents peuvent se noter à l’aide du clavier avec les touches < et >.
L’acousmoscribe peut noter toujours le même son sur chaque piste ou mettre en valeur les figures qui associent des sons différents. Dans ce cas, les sons différents sont disposés sur la même piste.
Chaque son est fabriqué dans une « palette » en combinant les différents profils pour obtenir une description complète. Ce nombre élevé de combinaisons permet de décrire des sons proches en montrant leurs ressemblances et leurs différences, ce qui est utile pour l’analyse musicologique.
Chaque partition sera imprimable.
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Arne Eigenfeldt - Future Intelligence in Live Electroacoustic Music
Arne Eigenfeldt
School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University
As a composer of live electroacoustic music, I continually ask myself even though the answer is fairly clear) why so much live electroacoustic music has become limited to sample playback and live processing? The answer, it seems, is that it has become relatively easy to produce complex timbres in performance through available DSP algorithms, using a seemingly limitless supply of sound-making devices/instruments as source material. The availability of the technology, both software and hardware, has allowed many nascent composers to produce engaging works that have found favour with audiences and teachers alike. However, compared to the long history of live electroacoustic music that began with Cage in the 1930s, the necessary experimentalism has, for the most part, been lost. For the present, live EA, like jazz several decades ago, has entered the mainstream (which can only be considered positive). But where is the future of such music?
An earlier branch of live electroacoustic music (calling itself interactive computer music), though limited timbrally by early digital synthesizers and conceptually by MIDI, was forced to have some understanding of the music it was creating. Rather than simply recording an instrument’s sound and processing it, the audio had to be translated into MIDI representations of pitch, velocity, and duration, and the software was required to make decisions based upon an understanding of this information. See [1] for a discussion of the evolution of such music.
Electroacoustic music, and live performance within it, has evolved since the 1980s, and the author does not advocate a return to the days of MIDI and Yamaha TX-802s. However, there is a great deal of exciting research being done of which we composers of live EA are not taking advantage. Composers of acousmatic works are incorporating complex timbral analyses; machine learning has provided tools for artificial agents that can be taught to react in performance like musicians; the field of MIR has contributed research into timbral analysis and classification, beat tracking, and database searching.
The future of live electroacoustic music will one day incorporate this research, and return to an effort to understand both its environment and the software's response to it, albeit with an even greater knowledge, given the augmented technical resources that will become available. As such, live EA can once again “bring the studio to the stage”, as Chadabe suggested it did in earlier incarnations.
This presentation will discuss the potential of current research in the fields of machine learning, music information retrieval, and evolutionary music in their application to live electroacoustic music.
References
[1] Eigenfeldt, A. “Real-time Composition or Computer Improvisation? A composer’s search for intelligent tools in interactive computer music”, EMS 07, DeMontfort University, Leicester, UK, June 2007
Simon Emmerson - Personal, local, universal – where are we?
Simon Emmerson
Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre. Faculty of Humanities, De Montfort University
At EMS08 in Paris I presented a paper entitled ‘Pulse, meter, rhythm in electro-acoustic music’ which sought to place these issues back in the foreground of discussion of electroacoustic music materials and perception. It seems there is a tension within electroacoustic music between those approaches which consciously exclude rhythmic working and those which are more inclusive. I contrasted works from early musique concrète and Steve Reich with 1980s works from Latin American composers then resident in London (Alejandro Viñao (Argentina), Javier Alvarez (Mexico), Julio d’Escrivan (Venezuela)), further with recent ‘post-dance’ electronica. That paper raised questions as to whether rhythmic working somehow distracted attention from a purely spectromorphological perception of the sound objects in the sonic flow.
This paper takes up where that one left off. I will develop a more detailed examination of the electroacoustic works of the three Latin American composers mentioned along with works of others. The questions asked will, however, be more cultural. There is a tendency too easily to group them together (of which this author has also been guilty!) where much separates their approach to metric and rhythmic materials. Some aspects may or may not be icons of ‘Latin American’-ness, others indicators of European connections and history.
The demise of a Eurocentric art music agenda has been clear in recent decades. But what has taken its place has been called ‘postmodern’ but may in fact be better described as ‘distributed modernism’. That is materials may be generated ‘locally’ but with little changed in the deeper ideals and aims from their modernist precursors.
At another level this is hardly a recent argument at all – and may have been around for centuries. It reduces to ‘what is an authentic voice’? something ‘local’? or something (claiming to be) ‘universal’? and how does this relate with something ‘personal’? and of course the paradox – trying to be one may result in the other.
Electroacoustic music has a special place in this discussion because ‘material’ is not just a melodic, harmonic and rhythmic reference reconstructed on standard westernised instruments (as it might have been early in the 20th century) but can now, of course, include recorded ‘field’ sources. But this does not guarantee any ‘authenticity’ – the possibility that we can be tourists in our own culture cannot be excluded. Electroacoustic music is also a unique development in its mediatised form, its potential for new kinds of construction and dissemination across boundaries, personal, cultural and aesthetic. Far more so than in instrumental music – which demands a universal instrumentation for performance – electroacoustic music is plural and inclusive, can accommodate local variation and personal creativity at all stages, yet is ‘transportable’ in the crudest sense of being potentially available anywhere. I will discuss the consequences of this for the ‘personal, local and universal’ in our work.
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Alireza Farhang - Electronic Music in Iran: Tradition and Modernity
Alireza Farhang
Université Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV
The particular sociological and political context of Iran, a country whose strong cultural structure doesn’t allow for simply adopting new values, has always been considered a problematic environment for composers. On the one hand, there is an increasing orientation towards Western science, art and technology, on the other hand, the rich values and importance of traditional music remains unaffected. This ambivalence presents a permanent challenge to a composer in search of a suitable language to express his/her musical ideas. The attempt to use traditional elements have not only been present in the work of the earliest electro-acoustic Iranian composers in the 1960ies, like Alireza Mashayekhi and Darius Dolatshahi, but also in the work of the youngest generation of composers who have the opportunity to take advantage of the internet to update their knowledge and skills.
After the invasion of Arab, due to certain religious considerations, the practice of music remained uncomfortably suspended between acceptance and rejection. In the history of Persia, during the latter half of the thirteenth century the theoretical aspect of music became one of the most important issues for scientists. After the revolution of 1979, however, the position of music became again ambiguous. The music Department of Tehran University had to undergo changes that would benefit the needs and preferences of an Islamic society. Only in 1988, after a gap of 10 years, the music Department of Tehran University, emphasizing on the theoretical aspects of music, re-opened its door to musicians. Today, both traditional Persian music and electronic composition is taught in this department. It is the only academic institution in Iran that was recently equipped with a small and limited studio for the creation of electro-acoustic music.
The history of electronic music in Iran is an ongoing process of confrontation and reconciliation between modernity and tradition. The first performances of electro-acoustic music in Iran took place in the late 1960ies, when prominent figures like Xenakis, Cage, Tudor, Mumma and Stockhausen were invited to compose and perform pieces at the yearly Shiraz Arts Festival. This “golden period” opened new horizons to the artistic and intellectual milieu in Iran and attracted many composers to the idea of working with synthetic or processed sound. Inspired by these new influences, most of the first generation of Iranian electro-acoustic composers went abroad to acquire experiences in electronic music.
This communication aims to offer a general outline of the past, the present and the future of the development of electronic music in Iran, which has always been involved with the tradition. After giving a review of the history of electronic music before and after the revolution of 1979, I will discuss in more depth the social, political and musical context in which three generations of composers have been developing their language. With regard to the phenomenon of multiculturalism that evolved in this context, the role of universities, of the internet and of the use of personal studios will be taken into consideration. Most importantly, however, the text will explore the aesthetics, philosophy and technique of a number of current approaches that Iranian composers adopt in order to integrate elements from traditional Persian music into compositions that they create with new technologies.
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Yann Geslin
INA - GRM
Le Projet européen de préservation au long terme CASPAR
Que deviendront nos créations numériques dans cinquante ou cent ans ?
L'irruption de la technologie dans la création contemporaine et plus particulièrement dans les musiques électroacoustiques a complètement bouleversé les modalités de production et d'archivage. Aux problèmes de conservation déjà bien connus : sauvegarde des partitions, des instruments et des techniques associées, est venu s'ajouter le problème général de la sauvegarde d'un ensemble hétérogène – voire hétéroclite - d'éléments contribuant à la réalité des œuvres. Dans ce contexte, et dans la perspective de pouvoir représenter les œuvres dans le futur, il devient nécessaire de développer des stratégies nouvelles de préservation permettant de restituer dans futur inconnu les composantes des œuvres et les œuvres elles-mêmes.
Le projet européen CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrivial - 2006-2009) c’est attelé à cette problématique en modélisant le standard récent d’archive OAIS (Open Archival Information System) sur un choix d’archives scientifiques, culturelles et artistiques (musique faisant appel aux nouvelles technologies). Au-delà des aspects déjà connus de perte/migration des supports et de données, émergent les questions de la transmission de l’intelligibilité des informations en vue de leur réemploi, y compris pour leur étude académique, ainsi que de l’authenticité du contenu transmis.
L’atelier abordera dans une première partie les concepts généraux explorés dans le projet Caspar, avant de développer les aspects spécifiques de la musique électroacoustique, modélisés par l’Ircam, l’Ina-Grm et l’Utc dans le prototype de serveur d’archives Musticaspar.
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Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner
University of North Texas
“Part of the problem of our medium is the ephemeral nature of the music we do, especially non-standard performances like Scaletti's. I really hope that some mechanism for preserving, replaying, or re-performing this work can be found … I urge all of us to see this as one of the central questions facing the ICMC and ICMA.”
Review of the 1995 International Computer Music Conference – Brad Garton (Array – Winter 1995)
The heritage of electroacoustic music has included repertoire and resources which present unique problems in terms of preservation and archiving due to technical and non-technical materials utilized, unique performance and presentation venues needed, and lack of planning and consideration of the possible significance of the works. This has lead to a loss of historical content which may be invaluable to future generations of electroacoustic musicians. The author of the paper has encountered the disadvantages of this lack of preservation in her own research of the works of Carla Scaletti, Ruth Anderson, and Annea Lockwood.
A discussion of the merits of archival preservation of inter-media compositions, happenings, and other electroacoustic events such as installations and web-based compositions with emphasis on work already completed in this area and the tools available for future and further activity will be presented. The majority of options and opportunities available for the preservation of significant electroacoustic repertoire and events are already in use by libraries and museums for the archiving of non-musical media objects. Specific examples of this type of research will include work being done by the University of North Texas in their Digital Projects Lab. Additionally, groups actively working in performance re-creation of significant but problematic aspects of electroacoustic heritage include Newband and the Russolo Ensemble and this aspect of preservation will also be considered.
Specific works explored as case studies for the paper include John Cage’s HPSCHD and Carla Scaletti’s Public Organ. In the case of HPSCHD (1969), both analog and digitally-remastered recordings of one instance and aspect of the event are available as well as an extensive paper and lecture (1999) by Johanne Rivest on the University of Illinois premiere presentation of the project. A few photos of the original event exist in the University of Illinois archives and many memories and anecdotes remain in minds and hearts of the (fewer and fewer) living persons who participated in the piece. HPSCHD was occasionally performed on a grand scale after the UIUC premiere including one such re-creation at the University of North Texas.
Carla Scaletti’s Public Organ (1995) was commissioned by the International Computer Music Association for its 1995 Digital Playgrounds conference at the Banff Centre. An interactive internet piece, the actions of the viewer determined the current state of the installation. Public Organ also existed for awhile on the web after the conference but the site hosting the event went off-line some time ago. Currently some documentation of Public Organ exists on the composer’s website: www.carlascaletti.com. For both of these cases and for works of this nature in general items to be assessed include what criteria can and should be used to determine whether a piece is ‘worth preserving’, to what extent should this preservation and archiving be taken, and technical and non-technical tools can and should be used to accomplish this task most effectively.
Bryan Holmes - Spectromorphology in Instrumental Music
Bryan Holmes
Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO).
One of the most influential paradigms in contemporary music is the so called “liberation of sound” (LALITTE, 2005) or “aesthetics of sonority” (GUIGUE, 2007), by which music came to be composed not just with notes but with sound itself. Exploration of timbres, acoustics and the movement away from twelve-tone compositional processes are well illustrated by futurism, microtonalism and the music of Varèse, to name a few examples in the first half of 20th century. However, electroacoustic music can be considered the height of this historical and aesthetic development. Composers who passed by the proliferating studios were noticeably inspired and some of them didn't return to instrumental non-recorded means (for DELALANDE, 2001, the invention of recording was music's “second technological revolution” after the first one, music notation). Nowadays almost every western musician is, at least indirectly —and very often unconsciously—, influenced by these “spectromorphological structuring processes” (SMALLEY, 1986 and 1997).
Pierre SCHAEFFER (principally 1966 and SCHAEFFER & REIBEL, 1967) unveiled a possible typomorphology of sonic objects as his most successful achievement (PALOMBINI, 1993; THORESEN, 2006), and adaptations of typomorphology have worked especially well as pertinent methodologies for the analysis of electroacoustic music. Most of these adaptations ignore the difference between musical objects and sonic objects, placing analysis in a more neutral position. Lasse Thoresen proposed at EMS06-Beijing a graphic analytical tool, very close in its base to Schaefferian typomorphology, appropiating that of Smalley's original term spectromorphology. It makes use of a specially-designed computer font called Sonova, which is one of the leading illustrative means for this paper. The font was already “tested” in HOLMES (2008).
Non-recording-based music has not been researched, in a consistent way, under spectromorphology's optics, considering what was said about aesthetics of sonority. Some instrumental written works have been interestingly reviewed through their recordings (Thoresen has, in my opinion, written convincingly about this), however those approaches use to “put between brackets” the written score, that “privileged witness” of composer's intentions (GUIGUE, 2007). This may be explained because of sonic object's non-written nature, once Schaeffer showed how defective traditional music notation can be —especially when faced with new sonic materials— and proposed solfeggio's reinvention. But many instrumental music composers and analysts have learned from reductive listening's “lessons” and today it is perhaps possible to extend the original concept of sonic object, or otherwise use new terminologies, for “sonic” analysis not only through recordings and spectrograms, but also by using the score as a valuable guide. This is what Guigue calls “desconcretization of sonority”. Schaeffer himself explained most of his categories through instrumental music and Traité des Objets Musicaux shows a few score-based examples.
This paper is an abstract of my Masters thesis to be defended in march 2009 at UNIRIO, Brazil. It aims to set a precedent for an eventual contemporary orchestration treatise based in spectromorphology, while also providing evidence of the feedback between electroacoustic and instrumental music by using the concept of technomorphism, or, maybe less specific, technographic signals, as defined by CAESAR (2008). Because it is not possible to cover a wide exemplification in one paper, I have limited my analysis examples to one subject regarding a technographic signal: reverb. This is for not limiting spectromorphological criteria. Thus, using the Sonova for graphic analysis, I reviewed several fragments of music (i.e., micro to medium-structures, just as traditional orchestration treatises do) which present an emulation of, or even a more “poetical” analogy to, reverberation, describing their spectral typology and morphology. I observed solutions taken from the most “classic” contemporaries (Debussy, Stravinsky, Varèse) to newer ones (Malec, Grisey, Romitelli).
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Gary S. Kendall - Listening to Art: Aural Cognition in Electroacoustic Music
Gary S. Kendall
Sonic Arts Research Center. School of Music & Sonic Arts. Queen’s University Belfast
We want to consider the question of what listeners do when listening to electroacoustic music. How do they make sense of it and, most importantly, how do they understand it as art? But before focusing in on electroacoustic listening, we should consider the broader question of what listeners do in everyday life when making sense of the world around them. This question is far more important for electroacoustic music than for traditional acoustic music because its expansive acoustic palette incorporates the sounds of the everyday world. Not just the sounds, but by immediate extension, the listening strategies, knowledge of auditory patterns and history of auditory associations that are inextricably connected with listening to the everyday world. There is, in fact, no line of distinction between listening to electroacoustic art and listening to the everyday world, rather a continuum in which new experiences constantly expand connections. Even so, there are important observations we can make about the idioms that typify electroacoustic art and which give shape to artistic meaning.
What listeners do is perceptual thinking. It is largely invisible to them and to us as observers, part of the activity of the cognitive unconscious. Nonetheless, we can make strong inferences about these mental activities based on both general and specific knowledge of human cognition. In his great elucidation of visual art, Visual Thinking, Arnheim enumerates the activities of visual perceptual thinking, “active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplifications, abstraction, analysis and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison, problem solving, as well as combining, separating, putting in context.”
Clearly listeners make associations among things. From moment to moment auditory experiences are related to typical patterns, and an effort is made to grasp the current situation. We can codify the recurrent patterns among things as cognitive schemas. Along with these schemas we can also discern and describe the referential structures or mental spaces (Fauconnier) that hold the on-going information and associations that are relevant to us. In the process of listening, new spaces are created when content requires making connections that reach outside of the existing framework. For example, hearing familiar things in unfamiliar contexts, causes us to build maps of the relationships of these things to their new contexts.
In particular, artistic content emerges from the novel blending of information recruited from different domains. This blending often involves artistic abbreviation that intentionally leaves slots in the listener’s frames open for the imagination, a common characteristic of acousmatic works. The temporal organization of an electroacoustic artwork is layered with events that blend our associations with sound content (sources of sound, locations, styles of composition, etc.) with the schema, EVENT, and thus with the temporality of the composition. Consider the novel way that Dhomont’s Novars blends our associations with Mauchaut to decidedly electroacoustic textural events. Artistic content also arises in the use of frame-shifting (Coulson), when existing content is reevaluated in a new context. Consider the famous continuous shift from pitch/timbre to rhythm perception in Stockhausen’s Kontakte. Then too, when listening to the entrance of the Northumrian bagpipes in Smalley’s Pentes, the listener’s entire sense of the preceding content is thrown into a new light.
The construction of meaning is part of the cognitive unconscious, a product of the relationships and connections formed by perceptual thinking. This happens as the network of mental spaces involving direct perception, context and background knowledge is connected and re-connected to produce an on-going sense of meaning. In electroacoustic art, these combinations are particularly rich in novel content that depends on the imaginative capacities of the listener to create meaning. The artistic meaning is what we make of the electroacoustic artwork.
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Leigh Landy - Increasing Access to Sound-based Music – www.e-EMS
Leigh Landy
Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, De Montfort University (UK)
This paper’s subject matter is based on work I am involved with aligned with both of the key themes of this year’s EMS Network event, heritage (in this case, the focus is education) and the future. I have recently proposed what I have called the sound-based music paradigm, something strongly associated with other developing new media arts. In this paper, I shall combine my views on this subject with those that have arisen in my work creating the original ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS, www.ears.dmu.ac.uk) and another project focused on access and appreciation that I have been working on for several years with Rob Weale, the Intention/Reception project that is now being ‘re-engineered’ so that it can be applied within a new pedagogical environment currently nicknamed EARS II. This multi-year pedagogical project is investigating how to teach music holistically within an e-learning environment, that is, integrating appreciation, theoretical and historical knowledge, relevant technical skills and creative application. EARS II is being developed at two levels concurrently: for entering Higher Education students and for inexperienced listeners, that is children aged 11-14 as well as people of all ages who have little to no previous knowledge regarding this body of work.
The paper will be structured as follows: a context will be presented focusing on marginalisation issues and perceived imbalances in music education systems internationally. By way of data collected in the Intention/Reception project indicating potential interest in this musical corpus, I shall suggest that studying sound-based music at secondary school level would have an enormous impact on appreciation as well as participation, emphasising which types of transferable skills might be developed along the way. Once the context has been fully presented, issues will be raised concerning the following subjects: the delineation of the field of electroacoustic music studies; differences of pedagogical approach related to users with varying levels of experience; methodological concerns for the least experienced; integrating repertoire (including issues related to copyright) with theoretical concepts as well as with creative application. Other interesting challenges include: variable navigation within e-learning environments; how to collect and report upon diagnostic information concerning sound manipulation tasks; how to combine learning with appreciation as well as enjoyment; and how to relate this approach to other forms of music. Examples will be presented from a variety of web pages/environments currently under development and will illustrate how tests are being undertaken with students and children, how all sorts of multimedia can be used and how the completed system will work. A brief discussion will follow concerning the cultural adaptation of EARS II for national/regional needs. The paper will come full circle in its conclusion suggesting that access starts by offering people a greater musical choice than what mass media and most schools are currently offering. Once people are aware of this music and have been introduced to it through appropriate concepts, sound examples and the ability to make this type of music on their own, the awareness surrounding sound-based music will increase significantly and gain its rightful place alongside many other types of music in today’s societies. In short, sound-based music will have a brighter future when more people are drawn to it.
alcides lanza - ...I saw Henri Chopin dans la rue Saint-Laurent...
alcides lanza
EMS Director Emeritus
Schulich School of Music
McGill UniversityThis paper deals with heritage, our common memory, and the many phases that we have passed through during this last half century of electroacoustic music. One concern is the rapid pace of our changing technology. Is it truly necessary to have to adapt to these constant and accelerating changes? Could we make an effort to extend a little the validity of earlier technological triumphs? Are composers doomed to see their works performed only once, in an ideal set-up, then never to be heard again?
The paper scans some significant steps that have taken place since Pierre Schaeffer began using the new technology of recording on disc in 1948 - paste discs and turntables – 78 rpms – 33 and 45 rpms; mono to stereo conversion; the early multitracks with 4 or 8 channels, then 16 or more; analog tape; DAT recorders; MP3s; sample-to-disk; voltage control and MIDI; diffusion and multichanneling; 5.1, 9.1, and 16.2 sound; Multi-Channel Digital Projectors – well, the list is long.
Focusing for a moment on analogue tape recorders, this paper makes reference to the last time the author saw Henri Chopin playing one of his last concerts. He was taken into the concert hall in a wheel chair, but courageously, he stood up in front of his two open reel Revoxes for the duration, and proceeded to perform, just with a hand- held microphone. He performed part of his 'audio poems', composed with different layers of consonant and guttural vowels with Chopin speaking in a nonsense language... utilizing all the time the most simple of technologies... what a memory...
The paper touches on the piece by Swedish composer Sten Hanson, Hallo piano....hallo room..! The pianist – and technicians – creating a sound that is actually bouncing from the four corners of the performance space... all done with two tape recorders. It is based on a simple but innovative use of feed-back acoustics. When the accumulated sound mass reaches a desirable critical thickness... the pianist leaves the stage, with the audience left immersed in the thick sound fog, intriguingly still with traces of harmonic/nious content.
Subsequently the paper refers to the piece that Bruce Pennycook wrote in 1994, Praescio VII [Piano... and then some], for piano and interactive computer system. During the premiere, two desktop computers were required, CD-ROM drives , an array of 8 loudspeakers, and Pennycook's own MIDI TIME CLIP system. This unit allowed by-directional communication between the computer system and the performer. The system included a digital display for the pianist, having a six character display for cues and other alpha-numeric information.
A comparison follows between the practical problem of performing that piece in the original format and with the required gear - now subject to obsolescence – and that of a newer version having all digital and analogue sounds stored on an audio CD.The essay suggests that the preservation of older technologies, machines and performances practices is as important as the compulsive need to always be looking toward the next step in technological advances. Also, there is a need to preserve older recordings which are deteriorating quite fast, as well as the need to have specialized archives to preserve them, which would ensure the preservation of the above- mentioned technologies, gear and documentation on digital performance practices.
Claudio Lluán, Gabriel Data and Luis Tamagnini
School of Music. Faculty of Humanities and Arts. National University of Rosario
This work originates in the need to encourage the interaction between students of composition of the highest courses, who have to carry out their first practice in electronic music, and performers of wind instruments of advanced level with an interest in the new music languages. This interaction is meant to happen within the university scope in which we usually develop our teaching and creative activities.
In the first place, our players’ general education does not include much of the recent musical production, say, the past 50 years. Players have, in fact, little contact with the problems arising from the use of new musical notations and extended techniques. Secondly, composers learn the creative use of new technologies in relative isolation.
For this reason, the first stage of the research develops a learning method where composers and performers are trained in electronic music with mixed media. This method seeks to guide composers and performers in different modalities that range from fixed electronics to the different types of real time processing and control.
As this practice is a branch of the art of sound in constant development nowadays, our method consists of a series of applications implemented in MAX MSP software, that is, open study materials meant to be updated on a permanent basis. This permits adding future exercises and several types of contributions and customizations, focusing on the notions of time, rhythm, tone, texture, and its artistic and aesthetic application, given the change of meaning that such concepts experience with the contribution of new technologies.
The exercises assessed originated new research -at present under way-, where composers and performers focus their study on three main directions: the special problem of musical gesture in this genre, the influence of the production environment and various aspects related with the representation of the sonorous fact itself.
The method developed so far is based on a series of exercises aimed at the interrelation between the player and an electro-acoustic device made up of a personal computer with a basic system of amplification and a conventional microphone (for use even in high background noise). This system will be controlled by the instrumental actions and by interactions with a composer responsible for electronic production. This method contemplates exercising different difficulty areas: timing the instrument with electronics, acoustic signal processing, and control of the electronic device from the acoustic properties of the instruments.
Moreover, care for the musicality of the exercises raises awareness among players about the aesthetics of these languages.
Exercises as diverse as “smooth time modules”, “the morphology of electronic sounds”, “the extended techniques of instruments”, and “analog or space notation”, among others, are addressed in a systematic and progressive manner.
Carlos López Charles - Transduction between Image and Sound in Compositional Processes
Carlos López Charles
Mexican Centre for Music and Sonic Arts (CMMAS)
The ontological differences between sonic and visual materials have set complex polemics about the correspondences between their properties. Artists and theorists from diverse backgrounds and times (like Wagner, Kandinsky, Eisenstein, Schoenberg, Cage, McLaren, Viola and others) have approached this situation from diverse angles. Nevertheless, the relationships between sound and image follow complex logics that are not easy to formalize.
This article introduces the concept of transduction as a tool for describing and analyzing the processes that enable the circulation of properties between visual and sonic elements. Its main purpose is to present a conceptual framework in which the elements of sound and image interact on different levels of compositional processes by means of transduction. Several practical and theoretical disciplines (composition, cognition, visual arts and musicology, among others) could profit from focusing on the concept of transduction between image and sound in compositional processes. Previous research that supports this idea (Sedes, Courribet, Thiébaut and Verfaille 2003; Budón and Vaggione, 2000) is reviewed.
Different but complementary meanings of the word “transduction” in three fields of knowledge (biophysics, genetics and semiotics) are also described in order to reflect upon the pertinence of each of them in the context of sonic arts. This ideas and concepts are illustrated with examples drawn from Bernard Parmegiani, Javier Álvarez, Rodrigo Sigal, Bret Battey, Carlos López Charles and others.
I-Transduction in the context of biophysics
Transduction is understood here as the conveyance of energy from one electron (a donor) to another (a receptor), at the same time that the class of energy changes. A parallel form of circulation/transformation of energy is achieved between the elements of sonic and visual stimuli through mapping processes: the spaces in which we can “shape” the energies that will be transformed from one modality to the other. These mappings can range from the establishment of poetic correspondences (imaginary and subjective, yet relying on “embodied” experiences) to more measurable ones (rule-based energy transfers). Mappings of different types may develop simultaneously, converge and interact on many levels within the same compositional process, creating the basis for interaction between visual and sonic elements.
II-Transduction in the context of genetics
In genetics, transduction is the process by which DNA is transferred from one bacterium to another by a virus. It also refers to the process whereby foreign DNA is introduced into another cell via a viral vector. This is a common tool used by molecular biologists to stably introduce a foreign gene into a host cell's genome. This process implies transference of genetic traits from an element to another one of a different nature. The presence of this kind of transduction in the audiovisual domain reflects in concepts used for describing, analyzing or operating on visual and sonic morphologies (motion, growth, texture, behavior, spectra, noise, density, space, etc.), providing us with insight on the way in which the elements of both modalities relate “genetically” between them.
III-Transduction in the context of semiotics
In this field, the concept of transduction is described as the transformation of signs from one field of knowledge to another one that keeps an original connection in its phenomenological deepest level. How are signs shaped and transformed when they transit between sonic and visual domains in relation to the cognitive processes and the social life from which they emerge?
A topic for further research is suggested: the application of the concept of “transductive inference” (as understood in the field of machine learning) to the development of systems in which observed (training) cases of image-sound transduction serve as a basis for generating new specific ones in response to either sonic or visual input.
Theodore Lotis
Lecturer, Music Department, Ionian University
On October 5, the music community celebrated the 60th anniversary of the first electro-acoustic music concert. The heritage of the last six decades imbued with new ideas, methodologies, and ways of listening and sound understanding has been thoroughly examined and appreciated. However, at this time of reflection one should think not only the course of electro-acoustic music during these years, but also some aspects related to its perception by the audience. Often, our audience is puzzled and confused because of the noisy character of the music, the complex extra-musical methodologies that are often used by composers, the difficulty of recognizing the sound sources, or the absence of visual elements especially in acousmatic music. Although concrete music started as an empirical experience, the obsessive preoccupation with the sound material leaded to complete abstract boundaries and directed a large number of listeners to identify electro-acoustic music with elitism and often “autism”. For many of them, la musique electro-acoustique became synonymous with la musique “electro-autistique”.
It is time to think and propose adequate methods of approaching and educating our future audience. If the future listener is the pupil of today, these methods need to be clear and comprehensible, embodied in a systematic and complete educational methodology, which simplifies and explains empirically the ideas of electro-acoustic music.
This paper proposes a method of musical education, which combines the seven criteria, as described by Pierre Schaeffer, with soundscape experience in order to get the basic ideas of electro-acoustic music over young children. The method, based on collected soundscape material from rural and urban areas, derives from a project entitled “Research and Analysis of Greek Soundscapes”, carried out by the Electroacoustic Music Research and Applications Laboratory of the Ionian University, during 2004-2006.
Our proposition is that before trying to educate children (our future audience) or even students about the abstract notions of electro-acoustic music, we should teach them how to perceive the sounds of their environment and extract information from them. The seven criteria elucidated by soundscape paradigms can be a helpful tool in our effort to develop children’s power of observation through empiricism.
We shall present sound examples which can be described by the seven criteria and related to notions of electro-acoustic music, such as the definition of the source and its spatial position, the importance of the attack, the periodicity and the rhythm, the perception of dynamics, the relation between space, distance and sonic mass, and the awareness of time and duration. Our experience so far with young children in one primary school has made clear that these sound examples should be immediately recognized and therefore, they should be collected from environments within which the children live. The information extracted from the examples will be associated with the perception of the sonic environment, as well as the ideas and practices of electro-acoustic music.
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Jorge Martínez Ulloa
Sección de Musicología, Facultad de Artes, Universidad de Chile
La musique « a priori » á été l’objet du réflexion du « Traité des objets musicaux » de Pierre Schaeffer :
« A partir de la musique sérielle dont les règles, déjà, se formulaient comme une algèbre, se sont élaborées des « musiques a priori », dont le souci dominant parait être celui de la rigueur intellectuelle, et d’une totale emprise de l’intelligence abstraite….«(1966, p. 20)
Cette définition peut être appliqué à une bonne partie de la musique tel que nous l’étudions dans nos conservatoires et écoles de musique.
Cette musique « a priori » est écrite et transcrite comme une façon du pre-voir et représenter sous une forme graphique et spatiale des donnes qui sont de nature temporelle. Ce control opère avant et au delà du fait musical en tant que « événement vécu ».
Le control de ces traits « discontinus » et des structures ainsi construites peuvent donner l’impression de pouvoir pre-determiner la musique et ses dérivations. Cela est vérifiable dans l’analyse estructuraliste tout comme dans l’expérimentation cognitiviste. Dans cette perspective il n’y a pas lieu pour une pensée du continuum, étant donne que la réalité musicale doive être reconstruite a partir de ces donnes initiales discontinus. Cette combinatoire abstraite laisse dehors maintes aspects dynamiques et temporelles du mouvement musicale, de cet élan qu’anime tout structure musicale des son intérieur et qui va au delà de tout réduction analytique a des traits discontinus.
L’hypothèse de cet essai est que cette conception de la musique « a priori » permet un statut biopolitique dans certaines musiques contemporaines. Un status biopolitique est vérifiée lorsque la materiae organique et vitale est converti en « dispositif », faisant part d’un système inorganique. Cela est rendu possible pour une manipulation et juxtaposition des organismes vivants avec des logiques non organiques.
Cet état de choses est vécu dans une société dite « post-humaine », dont on nous parle les écrits des nombreux philosophes contemporaines, tels que Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Toni Negri. Quand Martin Heidegger énonce que la essence d’une société technique n’a rien de technique, fait justement allusion a cette capacité de penser la « terre » (la vie) de façon discontinue, comme des « donnes » déjà disposées (gestellen). N’est pas l’appareil ou la machine que fait la différence sinon une certaine forme de penser la nature et les faits vécus comme « un étant déjà donné », caractérisée par des traits discontinus.
Pierre Schaeffer eu la possibilité, merci a des innovations technologiques, de comprendre la distinction entre une musique « a priori » et une musique « a posteriori ». C’est à dire, les relations avec le fait musical comme événement réellement vécu ou pas.
Comment peut être possible que la même technologie qui a permis ces constatations puisse aujourd’hui nous rendre difficile la distinction entre une musique produite à partir d’un événement vécu et une musique sans événement sensible à son origine?Cet état des choses peut déterminer, aujourd’hui, des conditions biopolitiques dans les modalités de fruition de certaine musique electroacustique, non pas parce que elle soit faite avec des ressources technologique sinon parce que elle est construite et conçue avec des critères « a priori », critères abstraits basées sur des traits discontinus. Tandis que dans les arts de l’espace il y a une certaine conscience du statut biopolitique des œuvres contemporaines, rien de pareil n’arrive chez les musiciens.
L’essai propose quatre « paradigmes biopolitiques » possibles pour classifier ces musiques électroacoustiques contemporaines, avec des références a des exemples tirées des œuvres.
Flo Menezes - New means, old meanings
Flo Menezes
Studio PANaroma de Música Eletroacústica da Unesp
State University of São PauloThe purpose of my exposal is to discuss the relationship between both “new means” and the constant invention of new technical resources and the permanent musical meanings necessary and indispensable to every musical language, independently if music is produced or not by the upmost recent technical equipments.
Stockhausen said once that old analog systems leave behind us sound qualities that will never come again with the new resources, which in turn bring their own contribution to new aspects of sound organization. Despite of this attempt, which seems to me to be very truthful, a composer deals with certain aspects of musical language that are relatively independent of the means with which his compositions are conceived and realized.
Beyond these independent, general aspects of musical language, one may quote: structuring of musical material; degrees of variations; plans of directionality; musical craftsmanship; laws of connections. Even if new means interfere substantially in the manner through which the composer conceives his/her work, the articulation of those aspects reveals that they are essentially independent of the employed means. The lack of one of those 5 elements inevitably implies a musical deficiency.
On the other hand the fetishism toward new means may imply the partial election of one of those elements, forgetting the others and disregarding perceptual laws as they were so well proved by the Theory of Information. In this sense there can be two opposite risks: on one hand we can have pieces in which sounds are manufactured in a rather elegant and meticulous way, revealing a great sense of sonorities, but in which the formal elements of composition are simply ignored; on the other hand, extremely elaborated language routines can reveal interesting aspects of sound perception – such as illusory states – which nevertheless do almost never integrate themselves in a musical formal context, as a new kind of “serialism”.
My attempt will be to examine how far new means can create new musical aspects, but also how far the composer should hold old aspects of the compositional organization in mind.
Raúl Minsburg - Gestalt laws and sound simultaneity in electroacoustic music
Raúl Minsburg
Universidad Nacional de Lanús – Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero
The word 'Texture' has a common use among spanish and english spoken musicians. However it seems to have a precise musical meaning for not a long time ago. For example: it didn´t appeared as such until 1954 in the Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians edition, and it didn´t has a reference in the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. And there´s a very similar situation in Spanish.
Despite this teminology lackness, texture, or sound simultaneity, is a central feature in music history. For example, the stilistics changes given in different historical moments gave place to a change in the textural treatment of the works. Furthermore, we can find different kinds of textures in the popular musical genres nowadays.
By means of an intuitive use, or by what is teached in institutions or by what is published in every book of musical language, we called texture to the study of sound simultaneity. The texture of a musical piece is related to the behaviour of it´s voices. The amount of voices and their different functions play an important role in the study of texture and it´s able to be heard and analyzed, but with certain limits basically due to the nature of our perception.
¿And which are those limits? I have observed that many times our hearing gets hard or just “lost” when we listen to music with certain complexity. I used the word complexity basically regarding sinultaneity and I´m going to link it with the amount of voices. For example: when we listen to a four voices polyphony we are not able to follow each one of the voices in particular.
So we come to the following question: if it´s difficult to listen certain amount of voice simultaneity ¿how can we tackle with the great amount of musical works that has a further complexity? We can think in electroacoustic works and also many instrumental works from the XX century or from the polyphony of XIV and XV century.
But our auditory system can perceived a great amount of sounds in simultaneity. It can determinate which is the most important or it can choose in a “sound chaos”, a situation where we listen to multiple sounds sources, the one to pay attention. As an example, there is the so called “Cocktail Party” effect, where we can follow a conversation sorrounded by multiple sounds.
Taking all these considerations into account, I believe that a deep research on the nature of our auditory perception should be done, in order to understand how does it works in the simultaneity field and, with the idea of determinate hearing strategies for the listener.
I will try to show that some of the Gestalt laws can be very fruitful, but with some care specially due to the fact that they were conceived for the visual perception. I will try to show which of the Gestalt laws can be applied to sound simultaneity, specially in electroacoustic music, and and in which neasure it could give place to a better description and analysis of musical textures.
Rosemary Mountain - Auditory Scene Analysis and Electroacoustics
Rosemary Mountain
Music Dept., Concordia University
The author discusses the suitability of Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA) for conceptualizing and articulating our experience of music. She reports on two decades of her own incorporation of ASA into both the practice and teaching of music analysis and composition; and proposes some strategies for its integration into electroacoustic analysis. The talk begins with a brief overview of the field, referring to the two-page summary produced by Al Bregman, pioneer of the area and author of the 790-page book Auditory Scene Analysis (1990) and key concepts in two articles by Stephen McAdams ("Spectral fusion and the creation of auditory images" [in Music, Mind, and Brain, 1982] and “Music: A science of the mind?” [in Contemporary Music Review 2, 1987] ) which help clarify the relevance of ASA for music. It is argued that ASA, like similar psychological research, had a particular relevance for musicians involved in electroacoustics (such as Meyer-Eppler, Stockhausen, and Ligeti) because it provides us with concepts that aid in musical imagery and memory, thus helping replace the concepts like pitch and sequence which were increasingly less relevant. The author then traces her own involvement with ASA, first as an ideal analytical tool to explain the rhythmic complexities of some 20th-century orchestral works, and then as a way to stimulate creative design ideas in composition classes, whether electroacoustic or acoustic. In addition, she outlines some simple methodologies she designed for helping advanced theory students incorporate the basic principles of ASA into their analyses; they applied them to major works by Stravinsky, Ives, Varèse, and Messiaen to help distinguish the various component strata. The students identified the different strata aurally, then made an "inventory" of the components of each one (pitch collection, range, dynamics, durations, etc). They examined factors which seemed to promote cohesion within each stratum, and those which led to the perception of segregation. The author then identifies a few factors that hindered the transfer of this analytical usage into the electroacoustic domain: not only the challenges of adapting a score-based method for a more strictly aural one, but also a sense that the composer's layering of material into different tracks already led to enough differentiation that the challenge of identification was less marked. Now, she is ready to report on further reflections on these issues. In particular, it is suggested that the principles of ASA could easily be integrated with research such as 'les Unités Sémiotiques Temporelles' (UST) developed by the group MIM (Laboratoire Musique et Informatique de Marseille), and the set of terms, musical examples, and classifications delineated by Marcelles Deschênes (Univ. de Montréal). Through the use of flexible notation tools such as the Acousmographe, these characteristics can be more clearly identified. In conclusion, the author gives a couple of audio excerpts as examples.
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Robert Normandeau - La musique électroacoustique sur la place publique
Robert Normandeau
Université de Montréal
Quelle est aujourd'hui la place de la musique électroacoustique sur la place publique? Quel est le rôle des institutions — studio de production, centre de recherche, institutions d'enseignement — dans le portrait général de la musique électroacoustique? Combien y a-t-il de sociétés de concert électroacoustique professionnelles dans le monde? À qui s'adressent les musiques électroacoustiques d'aujourd'hui? Autrement dit, pour paraphraser un titre utilisé par le GRM dans les années 70, L'électroacoustique du futur a-t-elle un avenir?
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Lorsque la musique électroacoustique est apparue sur la scène musicale dans les années cinquante, mais encore plus dans les années soixante et soixante-dix, elle a bénéficiée de l'engouement des avant-gardes.
Le public assistait alors en masse aux différentes manifestations de l'art contemporain: danse, performances, happenings, concerts-événements, exposition d'art contemporain, etc.
La musique électroacoustique n'y a pas échappé, heureusement, et nombre de concerts produits entre 1960 et 1980 ont attiré un public nombreux et diversifié.
Les groupes de recherches sont alors apparus un peu partout — surtout en Europe continentale — ainsi que les studios institutionnels, notamment universitaires — surtout dans les pays anglo-saxons.Comme tout était alors à construire, ces lieux de création se sont aussi imposés comme lieux de diffusion.
Le public a suivi et de nombreux spectateurs-auditeurs ont assisté aux différentes propositions artistiques.
Qu'en est-il aujourd'hui?
La situation socio-culturelle de la musique électroacoustique a changé considérablement depuis le milieu des années 90'.D'une part, la pratique musicale s'est étendue à une frange de la population qui n'avait pas accès aux outils sophistiqués indispensables jusque là à sa réalisation.
La démocratisation des équipements analogiques au début, numériques ensuite et enfin de l'ordinateur personnel ont permis à tout-un-chacun de s'adonner à une création hors de portée jusque là.
Les studios institutionnels ont vu chuter de façon progressive leur fréquentation car les compositeurs n'avaient plus besoin de s'y présenter pour faire des œuvres.
De plus, leur équipement s'est peu à peu standardisé, ce qui fait qu'il n'y a pratiquement plus aucun intérêt à aller travailler au GRM, à l'IRCAM, à Bourges ou à l'Institut de sonologie, puisque l'équipement de ces studios est à peu le même que celui auquel on a accès chez soi.Là où autrefois, on trouvait le SYTER, la 4X, un système analogique maison ou un ordinateur ultra puissant, on retrouve aujourd'hui le même ProTools avec les mêmes plugiciels, accessibles à tous.
Et encore ProTools ne constitue-t-il qu'un cas de figure puisqu'à l'ère des fichiers mp3, le surcroit de qualités sonore que celui-ci offre n'est plus valorisé par les jeunes compositeurs.
Les studios institutionnels — autant ceux consacrés à la production que ceux destinés à l'enseignement — ont donc perdu progressivement leur rôle d'animateur d'une scène créative d'avant-garde.
Et cela s'est accompagné d'un autre phénomène, plus social cette fois-là, qui est passé presqu'inaperçu dans les hautes sphères du savoir électroacoustique: la scène musicale était en train de changer.
D'une scène exclusivement occupée par les centres de recherche, la représentation publique s'est déplacée progressivement vers des lieux d'exploration plus marginaux, en dehors des organismes fortement subventionnés, et en dehors d'un certain «académisme».
Aujourd'hui, il faut bien admettre que la scène musicale «electronica» est bien plus vivante et davantage fréquentée que la scène électroacoustique, essentiellement limitée à des concerts intra-muros pour quelques étudiants et happy few.
Et toujours gratuits.Quel est donc le rôle des institutions — de production et d'enseignement — sur la scène publique?
Avons-nous oublié collectivement l'un des pans essentiels de l'activité de création, celui de la communication?
Combien de sociétés de concert professionnelles sont elles dédiées à la musique électroacoustique?
C'est-à-dire d'organismes dont le rôle est la promotion et la diffusion de cette musique sur la scène publique, et non pas sur la scène institutionnelle, et qui doit rendre des comptes par le biais de billets vendus et de promotion efficace afin de remplir ses salles.Combien existe-t-il de festivals de musique électroacoustique équivalents aux grands festivals de musique contemporaine comme Huddersfield (Angleterre), Musica (France) ou June in Buffalo (États-Unis)?
Combien de jeunes, qui ne sont pas étudiants (et encore...), assistent régulièrement aux concerts proposés par nos institutions?
En d'autres mots, pour paraphaser un titre utilisé par le GRM dans les années 70, L'électroacoustique du futur a-t-elle un avenir?J'essaierai d'établir un bilan de l'état des lieux, notamment en Europe et en Amérique du Nord mais aussi en Amérique latine et en Asie.
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Garth Paine and Jon Drummond
School of Communication Arts and MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney, Australia
This paper presents the current state of research undertaken as part of an Australian Research Council Linkage project titled “Performance Practice in New Interfaces for Realtime Electronic Music Performance”. This research is being carried out at VIPRe/MARCS Auditory Laboratories, the University of Western Sydney in partnership with Electronic Music Foundation (EMF), Infusion Systems and The Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL) at McGill University. The project seeks to develop a unified theory of practice for the application of new interfaces for real-time electronic music performance. Key developments of the TIEM (Taxonomy of realtime Interfaces for Electronic Music performance) research to date are the creation of an online questionnaire (1) consisting of 72 questions examining the practice and application of new interfaces for real-time electronic music performance and a publicly accessible online database (2) of the interfaces/instruments submitted to the survey (if they elected to be listed publicly).
The questionnaire consisted of a mix of textural and numeric, qualitative and quantitative, arranged into six sections – 1. General Description; 2. Design Objectives; 3. Physical Design; 4. Parameter Space; 5. Performance Practice; 6. Classification. Since launching the online database in September 2008 the web site has had over 1900 unique visitors (500 per month) and 6400 page views (1800 per month). The TIEM database has also been referenced on (amongst others) WIRE (3), CNN (4) and Electroacoustic Resources (5).
There is little clarity or consensus in current approaches to developing an ontology of digital musical instruments (DMI). The prevalent accepted taxonomy of acoustic instruments focuses on the initial vibrating element in an instrument that produces its sound. Developed by Mahillon [1] and later expanded by Hornbostel and Sachs [2] the taxonomy consists of four top-level classifications—Aerophones, Chordophones, Idiophones and Membranophones. Each of these top-level classifications is broken into numerous sub-categories creating over 300 basic categories in all. In 1940 Sachs expanded the classification system to include a fifth top-level group, electrophones for instruments involving electricity. In Sachs’ classification system the electrophones were separated into three sub-categories—instruments with an electronic action; electro mechanical, acoustic sounds transformed into electric through amplification; and radioelectric, instruments which are based on oscillating circuits. This classification system is of course woefully inadequate to capture the richness, diversity and trends of current digital musical instrument design. By placing the focus on the initial sound making device, the differences, similarities and relationships between new digital musical instruments such as the eShofar [3], tooka [4] and T-stick [5] are lost.
More recent approaches to developing taxonomies of DMI have focused on the sensor types used, the nature of the interface, the way gestures are captured and the mappings between interface and sound generating functions [6]. Pringer [7] compared DMI with respect to expressivity, immersion and feedback. While Pressing [8] and Birnbaum et al. [9] have proposed multi-dimensional spaces to represent DMI, incorporating their interactive potentials.
The TIEM project, although still in its infancy, presents a wide range of innovative approaches to electronic music performance. Whether seen as an instrument or interface (a more detailed discussion about proposed definitions will be presented in this paper), it is clear that their principle focus is live music making. Underlying all of the instruments currently listed on the TIEM web site (http://vipre.uws.edu.au/tiem) is a foundation concept of ‘Instrument’. It is useful to unpack that concept to illuminate the influence it has on design and development.
Daniel J. Levitin [10] discuses musical schemas in his book This is Your Brain on Music. The relevance to this discussion is his discussion of perceptual expectations and how these inform musical expectations and establish constraints and limitations in musical practices. They also form the basis for idiomatic writing for any instrument. Organologies [6] [11] present a method of categorising musical instruments, but they do not explicitly detail an underlying schema, a generic concept of musical instrument. A musical instrument schema clearly exists, however an examination of organologies fails to illuminate such a schema. An examination of their application through musical performance is very helpful, as it essentially forms a design brief.
[1] I, second edition. Paris: Gand, [1880] 1893.
[2] E. M. Hornbostel and C. Sachs. Systematik der Musikinstrumente : Ein Versuch. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie Translated by A. Bains and K. Wachsmann under the title “A Classification of Musical Instruments.” Galpin Society Journal, [1914] 1961.
[3] R. Gluck, “eShofar as a Culturally Specific Live Electronic Performance System.” Journal SEAMUS, Vol. 19, Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States, Fall, 2006.
[4] S. Fels, L. Kaastra, S. Takahashi and G. McCaig. “Evolving Tooka: from Experiment to Instrument.” In Proceedings 4th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME04). pp.1-6, 2004.
[5] J. Malloch and M. M. Wanderley, “The T-Stick: From Musical Interface to Musical Instrument.” In Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on New interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME07), New York, USA, 2007, pp. 66-69, 2007.
[6] E. R. Miranda and M. M. Wanderley, New Digital Musical Instruments: Control and Interaction Beyond the Keyboard (The computer music and digital audio series; v.21). Middleton, Wis: A-R Editions, 2006.
[7] J. Piringer. “Elektronische musik und interaktivität: Prinzipien, Konzepte, Anwendungen.” Master’s thesis, Technical University of Vienna, 2001.
[8] J. Pressing. “Cybernetic Issues in Interactive Performance Systems.” Computer Music Journal, 14(2):12-25, 1990.
[9] D. Birnbaum, R. Fiebrink, J. Malloch, M. M. Wanderley, “Towards a Dimension Space for Musical Devices.” In Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME’05), Vancouver Canada, pp. 192-95, 2005.
[10] D. J. Levitin, This is your brain on music: the science of a human obsession. New York, N.Y: Dutton, 2006.
[11] M. J. Kartomi, On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments, (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.(1) see http://tiem.emf.org/survey (viewed 29/01/09)
(2) see http://vipre.uws.edu.au/tiem (viewed 29/01/09)
(3) see http://www.wired.com (viewed 29/01/09)
(4) see http://edition.cnn.com (viewed 29/01/09)
(5) see http://ressources.electro.free.fr (viewed 29/01/09)
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Jøran Rudi
The article discusses that electroacoustic music has developed, and develops rapidly, with technology and the societies that nourish it.
Core values, aesthetical directions and artistic concerns have changed over time, as has public interest and focus on the various aesthetic iterations of technology-based music.The dramatic changes in networks for communication and exchange that has taken place over the last 15 years, have resulted in new market conditions for music technology, the manners in which it is distributed, and how it has become integrated in nearly all types of music-making. This democratization of distribution has also given impetus to a number of new art practices, and attracted new artist groups to electroacoustic techniques.
In sum, the development has put great challenges to the more traditional genres of electroacoustic- and computer music, in terms of education and market presence in concerts and other arenas that meet the public gaze. The article discusses this situation, and proposes an approach of integration and cross-disciplinary ollaboration to strengthen both education and public interest in the onic arts.
Mungo Zhang Ruibo
China’s Electroacoustic Music Center, Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing, China.
Composition Department, Shenyang Conservatory of Music, Liaoning, ChinaCHEARS is an abbreviation for the China ElectroAcoustic Resource Survey. This research covers an analysis of the categories that have been included in the EARS index (ElectroAcoustic Resource Site, the original can be found at www.ears.dmu.ac.uk; EARS is a scientific, integrated internet portal focusing on electroacoustic music terminology and resources) as perceived of from a Chinese musicological point of view. During the last three years, including the full-text translation plan that started in early 2008, CHEARS has become a bilingual internet-based collaborative research resource (the prototype can be found at http://chears.info) for people interested in the studies of electroacoustic music in China. The information concerning authors, translators, proofreaders and consultants regarding terminologies and bibliographies are all available on it.
The CHEARS.info site is not a simple web-based presentation; instead, it has converted the research from a translation and adoption of EARS to a Web 2.0 site. The term first became notable after the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004, which refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design that aims to facilitate communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. In contrast to very old traditional websites, the sort which limited visitors to viewing and whose content that only the site's owner could modify, Web 2.0 websites allow users to own the data and exercise control over it (Wikipedia). Accordingly, CHEARS.info is not only trying to builds up a relevant electroacoustic music classification system, that is, an EARS site in Mandarin, but in general it is trying to provide a peer-reviewed framework (one-to-many, many-to-many relationships in its database) for the development of all aspects related to Chinese EA music research.
Firstly, by beginning to work with the organisational structure of EARS, CHEARS.info will not only contribute its Chinese resource, but also contain the whole story of the diachronic and synchronic evolution by having a bilingual-multi-user Comment system and Reader system related to terminology and the bibliography respectively. Secondly, besides offering its bibliography of sources, CHEARS.info will be go further as it will be able to collect relevant events that are held in China, such as lectures, concerts, etc. and share this with its users. Thirdly, it will be collecting, sharing, analyzing and coordinating more news and information related closely to Chinese musicians and musicologists in the electroacoustic field around the world, as well as overseas musicians and musicologists who visit China both in terms of the past and the future. In short, CHEARS is becoming a national resource, something that is certainly going to be of great value given the rapid developments in China. However, how much will the Chinese electroacoustic music society benefit from it?
Chinese academic and non-academic societies seldom communicate with each side; even academic societies in the different locations do not have sufficient communication with each other. CHEARS intends to help remedy this problem.
This paper will offer an update on Chinese electroacoustic music developments as well as explain its new expanded vision through a description of the traditional yin-yang concept lies at the heart of many branches of classical Chinese science and philosophy; from this point of view (yin-yang), this paper will also try to define the relationships between the EARS framework and the rest of elements in CHEARS, between Web 2.0 and the contents of CHEARS as well as between English and Chinese texts and so on thus for helping musicians and musicologists to have a clear view on this academic symbiosis.
David Rylands - Concrete Abstraction: Reflections on Sound Recording for Acousmatic Composition
David Rylands
University of Auckland
This paper presents a threefold study on the subject of sound recording for fixed acousmatic composition withinoctophonic loudspeaker environments. Three key stages in the recording-playback chain are identified and reviewed for the purpose of drawing attention to the aesthetic and epistemological implications of disembodying sound. These stages are summarised as the inscription, dislocation and the transmission of sound (Weiss, 2002, p xii).
The term inscription is used to liken the recording process to that of a pen to paper, associated here with the 19th century poetic fantasy of preservingthe voice beyond the grave. The ability to disembody a sound from its origin has profoundly altered the way composers work with sound. This section detailsthe use of the microphone as both a performance instrument andpassive observer, informed by the spatial characteristics of proximity and reverberation.
The term dislocation is exemplified in the first sound recordings made by Edison, which were “for the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family” (Harvith, 1987, p 1). The process of recording dislocates a sound from time and space by fixing its character and allowing it to resonate long after its ephemeral mater dissolves. This section investigates how the eternal perpetuation of sound made possible through recording has changed our relation to disembodiment, death, and nostalgia (Weiss, 2002, p xiii).
The third term, Transmission, concerns the process of sound-space projection. Two prominent streams have been identified (Emmerson, p147, 2007). The ‘idealist’ believes the function of the loudspeaker is to present a sound field as near as possible to the studio environment in which the work was composed. The ‘realist’ argues that such an ideal cannot exist, and favours ‘active diffusion’to interpret a work to suit a variety of performance spaces.
The creative work that has inspired this research is based on an idealist’s octophonic sound-space, which is still the favoured environment for many electroacoustic composers. Although this approach is disadvantaged by the limitations of the ‘sweet spot’, it is posited that composing a work within the intended performance space (or one that closely resemblance it) adds rigour to the composition and research process. To test this supposition, Smalley’s (1991, p.121) notion of spatial consonance and dissonance will be used to review the transferability of the idealist listening space under study to a range of similar and dissimilar transmission environments. The purpose of the study is to presentapproaches to sound recording that can deliver the sonic complexitiessuitable for sustaining spatial imagery, and to unveilideas on the suggestive undertones of meaning found within the art of disembodied sound
References
Emmerson, Simmon. Living Electronic Music. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
Harvith, John, and Susan Edward Harvith, eds. Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph: A Century in Retrospect. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987.
Smalley, Denis. ‘Spatial experience in electro-acoustic music’, in Dhomont, Francis (ed.), L’Espace du Son II. Ohain: MusiqueetRecherches, 1991.
Weiss, Allen. Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and The Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 2002
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Daniel Schachter
National University of Lanús (UNLa), Department of Humanities and Arts, Center for Studies in Sonic Arts and Audiovisual Production (CEPSA) - Audiovision Degree career.
The evolution of recording media technology and the advances on physical data storage formats and logical data structure have had a strong impact on the electroacoustic music discourse since the early times of the analog magnetic audio tape, to the present digital domain. As time went by, each step forward in this technological evolution path brought with it some important changes in the way of listening, thinking, composing and performing, being therefore a decisive factor to define the final form of a sonic arts composition.
During the second half of the XXth century we may recognize some key milestones which had such an important role, as for example the transition from stereo to the early experiences in discrete multichannel sound, trespassing the borders first to quadraphony and later on to octophony.
In fact, the confirmation of quadraphony and octophony as new standards was undoubtedly a big step forward for the composers of acousmatic music, but it came together with the need to obtain the final output of each new piece not only in four or eight channels as it was thought for the concert, but also in a necessary stereo reduction which should be available for normal distribution on audio CD and also for radio diffusion.
The evidence that it is not the same to think on a two channel universe or in multiple discrete loudspeakers does not only have an aesthetic side, but also has to do with the ability to work with a multi channel environment in mind and to distinguish among different models of these, being able of course to identify the more suitable for each project.
This paper will try to demonstrate that the recent most widely and generally accepted physical and logical standard data formats designed for multi channel surround sound may assume an almost paradigmatic role in acousmatic composition, just as the octophony has been in the 90’s. It will analyze the influence of those first multi channel models in the electroacoustic discourse and will compare those influences with the new ones related to more recent technologies including some possible alternatives for converting already existing composition from stereo to multichannel formats and vice versa.
In this sense a work of sonic art thought for a bigger loudspeaker system should provide a wider dynamic range and then allow the composer to manage a more deeper use of sound Gesture, including even some innovative strategies related with the use of Texture and also an expanded or more complex use of Trajectory. The recent surround system models, originally designed for the cinema, may be at a time a new way of thinking the sonic arts discourse and their influence may also be stronger than that and perhaps will tend to unify the commercial distribution and concert formats into one compatible and available for both.
Margaret Anne Schedel - Dodge’s In Celebration: The Composition and its Analysis
Margaret Anne Schedel
Stony Brook University
In Celebration, Charles Dodge’s electronic music realization of the 1973 poem by Mark Strand was realized at the Columbia University Center of Computing Activities and the Nevis Laboratories in 1975. The work belongs to Dodge’s Speech Song series, where he explored making music out of the nature of speech itself. The piece is well-documented in Dodge’s own article “In Celebration: The Composition and its Realization in Synthetic Speech.” While Dodge includes a score, and analyzes the speech synthesis and electronic music techniques extensively, he does not present a musical analysis of the work. This paper seeks to further Dodge’s analysis. This task was greatly simplified by the ability to reference Dodge’s musical score. Although it is not a perfect representation of the music, his notation does convey a great deal of information about the piece, and gives valuable insight into which aspects of the work's structural elements Dodge considered important. By building upon Judy Lochhead’s work in examining the musical object, evidence, subjectivity, representation, and goals of another of Dodge’s Speech Songs, Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental, in her article "How Does it Work?": Challenges to Analytic Explanation,” this paper offers an complementary critical methodology for a musical analysis of In Celebration.
Michelle Stead
University of Western Sydney, Australia
The dwindling audience for electroacoustic music appears to be the driving force behind much of the discourse within the field. Some claim that the lack of interest is attributable to the high level of concentrated listening required to navigate the music. The research undertaken by Leigh Landy suggests that the average listener can come to achieve a concentrated mode of listening if given ‘something to hold onto’.[1] Robert Weale tested this hypothesis by conducting an experiment which aimed to understand the impact of using composer’s intentions as ‘something to hold onto’ and whether this enhanced listener receptions.[2] Through repetitive listening and the introduction of the composer’s expression of intention (title, inspiration, compositional elements, etc.) listening responses are examined by means of a questionnaire. The grounding of Weale’s experiment relies on a variation of Nattiez tripartitio [3] which augments the tripartite to include a fourth element of dramaturgic information. Dramaturgic information, according to Weale, is concerned with the communicative intent of the composer and includes all the components that have influenced the production of the work.[4] In this sense, Weale is using dramaturgical information provided by the composer as SHF.
This paper is a report on my research which explores the relationship between electroacoustic music and its reception by listeners, utilising two contrasting approaches. The first approach is the replication of the intention/reception experiment undertaken by Weale in order to ascertain whether similar results could be achieved. I begin by outlining Weale’s methods and describe how I adopt those methods to recreate the experiment. I review various practical problems namely those associated with ethical conduct and the recruitment of participants. Lastly, I discuss the results achieved by the experiment and provide a summary of the possible conclusions.
The second approach draws on the post-structural philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari for the purpose of deconstructing the experiment and its results. Traditionally, scientific empirical models of analysis have resided in opposition to post-structural critical theories because post-structural theory systematically dismantles the idea that generalised conclusions can be drawn from such an approach. The deconstruction allows one to dismantle various elements of the experiment through a Deleuzio-Guattarian lens. I will reconceptualise the composer, work and listener through the concept of ‘machinic assemblage’ in order to suggest a way of thinking that allows the mobilisation of the identities of the listeners and the composers. In doing this it is possible to foresee alternative ways of thinking about the listening experience. Ways which do not rely on the stability of identity and inherent meanings in composers, listeners and works. Deleuze and Guattari offer a set of conceptual tools to expand the understanding of the issues raised by Weale and others. My research provides a model that applies philosophical complexity to issues of practical relevance. Such an approach opens up a space for new applications of this model. It is possible to foresee a relevance to various other kinds of music but also to a variety of other phenomenological studies. Given that science and post-structural theory are constantly seen as oppositional forces, I have illustrated a new becoming. Thisbecoming shows how the two fields might legitimately work together in order to dissolve the seemingly oppositional relationship. The philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari are revolutionary in that they make this connection possible. ‘Doing Philosophy’ is therefore less about providing answers and more about creating new problems and new questions.[5]
Reference:
[1] Leigh Landy, "The 'Something to Hold on to Factor' in Timbral Composition," Contemporary Music Review 10, no. 2 (1994).
[2] Robert Weale, "The Intention/Reception Project: Investigating the Relationship between Composer Intention and Listener Response in Electroacoustic Compositions" (De Montfort University, 2005).
[3] The semiological tripartite is comprised of the poietic process, the esthesic process and the trace. See Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, c1990). 3-41.
[4] Weale, "The Intention/Reception Project: Investigating the Relationship between Composer Intention and Listener Response in Electroacoustic Compositions", 35.
[5] Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2002), 72-76.
Ian Stevenson - Towards an Understanding of Confusion
Ian Stevenson
University of Sydney, Faculty of Architecture, Design & Planning
University of Western Sydney, School of Communication ArtsThis paper details initial findings in an investigation into the experience of auditory confusion arising from a listener’s inability to identify or resolve the source or identity of a sound. This type of confusion may arise due to ambiguity in the sound itself. Ambiguity is often included amongst the compositional concerns of electroacoustic and acousmatic composers (Wishart 1996; Smalley, 1997). Many authors assume that we know how ambiguity operates or theorise it in terms such as gestural surrogacy (Smalley 1997) or association. The research described here attempts to discover what the experience of auditory confusion is like and what types of ambiguity can cause it.
An initial survey of the possible ontologies of sound is presented. This includes ontological distinctions such as objective, event, subjective, perceptual, type, token, and mental image. These ontologies find relevance in one or more of the fields of study or sound recording technologies that are subsequently addressed. These include anthropology (Feld 1982), acoustics (Crocker, 1997), musicology (Nattiez and Abbate, 1990; Schaeffer, 1966; Smalley, 1997), literature and poetry (Eagleton, 2007; Empson, 1930), psychoacoustics (Bregman, 1999; Moore, 2003; Neuhoff, 2004), soundscape studies and acoustic ecology (Schafer 1968, 1977, Truax 1978), phenomenology and post-phenomenology (Ihde 1979, 1993), acoustic communication (Truax 1984), and sonic effects (Augoyard et al., 2006). Speculation on and possible models of confusion arising from these technologies are considered.
The original research presented includes data from semi-structured phenomenological interviews with twenty experienced and naive listeners, an analysis of twenty-five works of literature including poetry and novels, and a self-reflective and documentary journal.
Key themes from this data are presented as a precursor to more formal analysis. These findings highlight the broad range of features associated with the experience of auditory confusion.
D. Andrew Stewart - Digital Musical Instrument Composition: Limits and Constraints
D. Andrew Stewart
Digital Composition Studios
Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology (CIRMMT) McGill University, Montreal [Canada]This talk investigates the importance of understanding and establishing limits on the following three areas during the compositional process of creating music for a digital musical instrument (DMI): sound-gesture combinations; concert protocols; group paradigms. Audio and video examples are drawn from performances featuring a variety of different DMIs, as well as a small selection of ensemble music combing digital with acoustic instruments. These examples serve to assess the implementation of limits and constraints in the compositional approach of different composers.
Interfacing with our wide-open sound world, with the purpose of composing and performing a piece of music, requires the implementation of limits from the get-go. In particular, creating an original musical composition for a digital musical instrument demands constraints on aspects such as instrumental voice (i.e., sound) and instrumental action (i.e., gesture). By looking at aspects of technology that are embedded in our culture, we inform ourselves on how to go about combining the sound and physical ‘playing’ gesture of an instrument; thus we establish guidelines for constraints. Any user of new technology must bear in mind that ‘an’ equipment is best viewed as a implanted artefact, outfitted with its own set of culturally constituted values and processes.
Contextual protocols are another form of constraint that must be taken into consideration; for example, composing for music technology demands, foremost, reconciling electronic sound with concert hall protocols. Listening to acoustic instruments, filtered by the room acoustics of a hall, is the normative experience (in Classical music), despite a rich history of experimental loudspeaker music.
A composer benefits tremendously from the interaction with the musicians who will eventually interpret the composition. Feedback from musicians often takes the form of musically intuitive and intelligent reactions that immediately confirm the need for limits. We observe, for example, the musicians’ initial reactions to the space (acoustic and poetic), created by their interfacing with technology. Moreover, a composer receives firsthand knowledge, from musicians, regarding the effectiveness of written symbols or graphical interfaces for music notation. The relationship between composer and performing musician sets up a paradigm that can be followed in order to establish fundamentals, from which evaluative statements can be made concerning digital instruments. With clear boundaries in place, armed with musicians’ insight, and considerations from a philosophy of technology, the composer goes about developing appropriate mapping constraints for physical ‘playing’ gestures, such that the physical gestures combine successfully with a sound, and subsequently have an impact on the structure of a composition in a musically meaningful way. Consequently, and perhaps inadvertently, constraints help to limit the musical materials that make up a composition.
During my talk, I will propose a compositional model in which composing for and performing on a DMI requires rigourous technique attained only by proper training; thus, the proposed model advocates physically active on-stage music-making in the field of computer music―rather than typical, and current static representations, which must be remedied in an effort to reconcile electronic sound with concert hall protocols. Furthermore, I will exemplify how the DMI musician functions equally with acoustic instrument players in terms of musical sound production and stage presence. I will also illustrate how aspects of interactive technology influences compositional thought, and visa versa, and how the implementation of technology leads to a new invention (or reinvention) of composing music.
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Lonce Wyse - The musical significance of objects
Lonce Wyse
Communications and New Media Programme, National University of Singapore
Along with all the new sounds welcomed into the realm of music in the twentieth century came their less well-received sources. The undeniable presence of sources is largely responsible for all the new names (e.g. sonic art) that we give to the art of sound that distinguish, yet at the same time show its affinity to music. But is sound the only common element responsible for the affinity and continuity we sense between the old and the new arts, or are sources themselves also functioning in a way that we can identify as musical? This paper considers sound sources and related objects from several different perspectives and discusses how their very objecthood posses certain essential musical qualities.
The transgression of sources is that they do not fit in to the hermetic structures of formal relationships between sonic qualities from which traditional western music is by and large constructed. Objects that make or influence sound come with a variety of qualities that can include size, shape, weight, momentum, and material textures. They can be alive, and some can bite. Many objects make a variety of sounds that bear little sonic relationship to each other (consider the bark and a whine of a dog, or the different sound of a metal plate that Schaffer used in Solfège de l’object sonore (1967) to illustrate this particular point). Because there is no standard collection of objects that composers use, they cannot help but call attention to themselves when their sounds first enter a piece of music. In so doing, they are often received as external to the “music proper”.
As Bernard Mache’s (1992) collection of examples illustrate, music has in fact always accommodated a certain degree of external reference. However, with the exception of “program” music, it was only in the 20th century when they take on a clearly intrinsic and structural role in the formation of whole genres of musical works. Luc Ferrari’s 1964 Hétérozygote is an early example explicitly recognizing the life of objects behind the sounds comprising the surface of the work.
Today there is broad acknowledgement about the need to theoretically integrate musical material that is too often still dichotomized as intrinsic and extrinsic (Atkinson, 2007; Windsor 1995). The notion of source bonding that Smalley (1986, 1997) developed provides us with some formal tools for analyzing ways in which sources themselves can play a musical role, although Spectromorphology is, as the name suggests, more oriented toward understanding the dynamics of sound than of sources.
To see how sound sources as objects can play a traditional musical role in electroacoustic music, we consider two key aspects of music restated here in note-free form. The first is that music involves understanding the relationship between sounds. In traditional music it is harmonic and intervallic contexts that constitute these relationships. The second is that music involves the perceptual dynamics of expectation. At least since Leonard Meyer’s 1956 book Emotion and Music, it has been generally accepted that much of the emotional experience of tonal music comes from the manipulation of expectation based largely on shared cultural experience. Rather than detracting from the music of sounds, sources may be the key to how these two fundamental aspects of musical experience still work when tonality is no longer the medium of support.
Listening as active and engaged
At about the same time Schaffer was directing our attention away from sound sources, the ecological psychologist J.J. Gibson (1966) was developing a theory of the “direct perception” of objects unmediated by cognitive processing of surface perceptual features. With the essential ecological notions of structural and transformational invariances that reflect relevant object structure, and affordances that reflect interactive possibilities, objects are rich in musical potential because they create relationships that do not exist between disembodied sounds.Composers often design algorithms (or “patches”) for parametrically synthesizing a class of sounds that are then used in compositions and in performance. These virtual objects also posses the musically potent qualities of objecthood by virtue of the constrained class of sounds a given model can generate, and the structural and transformational invariances that become apparent through parametric variation. They too define relationships between sounds within their range which can even be quantified based on the parameterization of the model. Thus objects, both physical and virtual, can fill the role of creating relationships between sounds where tonality no longer does.
Musical expectation is built upon shared knowledge and experience, but there is yet no established canon of electroacoustic music that large cultures of people have been on anything like the scale that we see in traditional musics. However, we are all grounded in physical environments surrounded by sounding objects that behave in consistent and rule governed ways.
One musically relevant feature of worldly objects is that they persist even when they are not sounding. This is analogous to Jean Piaget’s (1952) notion of object permanence in the visual domain that infants acquire during a sensorimotor stage of development. Source persistence is also necessary in Bregman’s theory of sequential streaming across events in time. The significance of source object persistence is not only that it groups sounds together over time, but that it allows us to discuss a role for these objects even when they are not sounding. They define potential sounds present in the musical environment, and thus influence classical types of musical listening engagement such as expectation and surprise (Huron, 2006).
Listening as an active and engaged process implicating motor systems and object representation was termed vicarious performance by Cone (1968). In the 1990’s, neurological support for this notion was found with the identification of “mirror neurons” that fire both when an action is performed and when the same action is observed being performed by others. This has also been observed in specifically musical contexts such as listening “passively” to sequences of notes played on a piano (Lahav, Saltzman, and Schlaug, 2007). Recent interpretations of EEG data (Winkler, 2008) also suggest specific neurucognitive mechanisms linking sound organization and expectation with sound sources.
From compositional practices to psychology and neurophysiology, the last 60 years have seen a growing focus on the role of the source in the experience of sound. A comprehensive musical theory needs to address the role of objects from the musical perspective informed by practice and rooted in sciences of human engagement in the world through mind, brain, and body.
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John Young - CNarrative, Rhetoric and the Personal: Storytelling in Acousmatic Music
John Young
De Montfort University
This paper sets out ideas for the differentiation of formal designs that can be found in acousmatic ‘storytelling’. Barthes (1977: 79) regarded narrative as an ‘international, transhistorical, transcultural’ phenomenon, ‘simply there, like life itself.’ Its potential in acousmatic music to carry meaning through narrative in original ways is the catalyst for this paper.
The capacity for acousmatic electroacoustic music to incorporate the recognition of sound sources as a structural element has been widely acknowledged (Wishart, 1996; Truax 2001). The potential to project and mix sounds from environmental and everyday contexts in the purely aural ‘acousmatic’ space leads naturally to the evocation of narrative. Techniques of sound transformation and manipulation used in electroacoustic music, along with the tendency of acousmatic listening to invite highly imaginative responses from its audience, provide a very fertile ground for exploration of the relationship between precise narratives, highly personal content and the more open rhetorical framework of musical discourse. The latter—incorporating repetition, variation and transformation of the evolution of gestural and harmonic figures over time—can be woven into the construction of narrative which might also incorporate spoken language and realistic auditory scenes. Consequentially, the acousmatic genre has been successfully used in ‘telling stories’ in ways that extend beyond simple sequences of events, inviting the kind of multi-levelled interpretation often encouraged in musical forms.
A conventional view of acousmatic music tends to reduce the function of the sound recording medium to that of a ‘support’ mechanism—making sound available for transformation processes that therefore need not be executed in real time. But sound recordings can also be regarded as documents that project traces of experience. Adapted from the work of Walter Benjamin (2002) the idea of the experiential aura is used here to show the way acousmatic music is able to present soundscapes that range from the meaningfully fictional to the documentary. This has the added significance of making recording itself an essential feature of the genre by virtue of the way it dislocates, but does not disassociate, sound from its ‘here and now’. In addition, a parallel is drawn between our capacity for memory and the capacity for recording media to reflect aspects of our experience directly back to us. Extending from the work of Casey (2000) a distinction is made between, on one hand, the idea of sound recording as a means of simply projecting an image of realism and, on the other hand, recording as a vehicle for capturing or representing different forms of the process of remembering, such as the re-engagement with experience through reminiscing. The perspectives developed from Benjamin and Casey intersect in the way time is presented in acousmatic storytelling. For example, a focus on personal experience can deal with ‘literal’ time, such as in the shape of a gradual unfolding of a specific memory, or in the free-ranging temporally disembodied memory-associations of the imagination.
In using these ideas to characterise forms in acousmatic music, a parallel is drawn with the linguistic features of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships. These are used as perspectives on the evocation of narrative, whereby meaningful fictions can be constructed through an understanding of the components of a referential syntax. In the case of acousmatic music this is through the hybridisation of literary, musical and ‘soundscape’ models of representation. For instance where the directness of verbal content may be used alongside associative and connotative use of environmental or cultural sounds. Examples given in the paper demonstrate that the illustrative capacity of sound is able to function at literal and symbolic levels—animating imagery around a narrative, or steering apparent temporal and emotional contexts around it.
In summary, it is shown that there are different formal mechanisms inherent in the way materials are shaped, ordered and developed in works that deal with acousmatic storytelling. Analytical examples include the following acousmatic works: Francis Dhomont’s Fôret profonde, John Cousins’s Doreen, Jonty Harrison’s Hot Air, Luc Ferrari’s Presque rien no. 2 and Rachel Mcinturff’s By Heart.