Abstracts 
A -B - C - D - E - F - G - H - K - L - M - N -P - R - S - V - W - Z
A
M. Adkins - The Electronic Music of Roberto Gerhard
M. Adkins
University of Huddersfield, UK
Roberto Gerhard was a pioneer of electronic music in England creating a number of substantial concert, theatre and radio works from as early as 1954. However, for various political, cultural and personal reasons Gerhard's electronic music has not been published or received the performances it deserves. Gerhard's electronic music is one of the richest repositories for understanding the development of the composer's late compositional technique as well as the early development of electronic music in the UK. As a result of study of the fragments of mixes, submixes and compound mixes in the Gerhard archive at the Cambridge University Library it is possible to understand the composer's compositional technique and how it evolved as his work with magnetic tape became more and more refined. This paper will provide a brief overview of Gerhard's electronic music and discuss specific aspects of it by means of an analytical critique of sections from Audiomobiles (1958-59), Sculptures (1963) and the incomplete Vox Humana (1967).
Chris Anderson, Arne Eigenfeldt - A New Analytical Method for the Musical Study of Electronica
Chris Anderson, Arne Eigenfeldt
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver
In the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, the analysis of popular forms of electroacoustic music, such as electronic dance music (EDM), has widely been over-looked within electroacoustic music discourse. To further develop the growing field of electroacoustic music studies, new analytical methods are needed to help gain a better understanding of the theory and contexts of many newer forms of compositional areas, such as EDM. From the baroque gavotte to ballet, dance music has been historically analyzed for many years and since many other popular forms of traditional dance music such as jazz or swing have been the subject of complex rhythmic and timbral analysis, the study of EDM offers many new possible analytical approaches to the understanding of new sophisticated interactions between timbre and rhythm in popular forms of electroacoustic music.
The Generative Electronica Research Project (GERP), a collaborative research group within Simon Fraser University's (SFU) Metacreation Agent and Multi-Agent Systems (MAMAS) lab, have been working on a new method to analyze electronica that involves a combined human and machine-learning approach. In this paper we propose to explore the similarities and differences between human and machine based electronica analysis.
For the purposes of our research, we have chosen to analyze four popular sub-genres of EDM: Breakbeat, Drum and Bass, House and Dubstep. In our initial stage, we have analysed at least 25 compositions within each genre, using a method of human analysis to quantify the commonalities and differences of electronica song forms and beat structures. Through this analysis method we are able to distinguish which timbral and rhythmic qualities are typical of each sub-genre as well as how the various song forms are constructed. By analyzing each isolated beat structure or loop, we are also able to quantify the defining timbral complexities of the many rhythmic structures within each song.
At the same time, we have created a MaxMSP patch that uses an FFT analysis to automatically extract beat patterns from song selections. Additionally, we have created a symbolic representation for both human transcription and machine transcriptions that allows us to compare both methods, and attempt to isolate unique identifiers between styles.
This paper focuses on identifying the basic musical structures that exist within these EDM genres; the next stage of our research will involve multi-agent systems using this data for generative purposes.
The new analytical methods from GERP can be used to further our research into the less explored areas of electronica analysis and will hopefully help broaden the scope of electroacoustic music research.
Steve Antosca - crossingPoint: connecting music with technology, architecture, and the arts
Steve Antosca
National Gallery of Art New Music Ensemble, Rosemont, MD, USA
One of the more challenging and enticing aspects of concert production today is the integration of technology-based music and architecture in non-traditional performance spaces. The lecture will discuss integral issues relevant to concert practice as a composer and ensemble director. This is part of a larger concept called crossingPoint: "events connecting music with technology, architecture and the arts. crossingPoint presents the work of musicians who adapt traditional ideas and content to contemporary circumstances using computer technology, showcasing their efforts in a series of singular presentations that join innovative music, technological resources, and non- traditional spaces."
Three concert projects will be discussed: SANCTUARY -- November 2007, with Roger Reynolds, Steven Schick and red fish blue fish percussion ensemble; the lecture and concert series CHANGES: SEASONS -- Feb/March 2010, the inaugural concert of the National Gallery of Art New Music Ensemble. Both events included concerts in the Atrium of I. M. Pei's East Building of the National Gallery of Art; and the 70th Anniversary concert for the Rotunda of the National Gallery, March 16 and 17, 2011. Issues include collaborative efforts, implementing technology, the placement of the performers, their interaction with existing architecture and documentation and dissemination efforts in the face of evolving media.
Petrá Bachrata
University of Aveiro/INET-MD researcher, Portugal
In the novel context of modern world after 1950's the search of new compositional concepts and alternatives in complex electroacoustic music and contemporary music in general, no more related with assumption of parametric independence from the relations among themselves, but concerned with the perceptual processes and complexity of listening, brought up the importance of other strategies in structuring musical material, such as gesture and texture. These new organizational strategies represent today the main interest not only in electroacoustic and contemporary instrumental composition but also possible perspectives for current analysis.
In the evolution of electroacoustic music the dialogue between acoustic instruments and electroacoustic sounds became an important area of creation that many composers have explored. In mixed music, which connects two distinct worlds each based on materials of different nature, in my opinion, musical gesture with all its complex qualities and potential in structuring music represents a 'point of contact', one of the possible connections between these two worlds.
This presentation will show several aspects how the phenomenon of musical gesture can be understood as a structural element in perception of musical interaction in mixed music, through examples of analysis, systematization, classification and categorization of different interactive musical gesture relationships between instruments and electronics. The main goal is to establish a group of theoretical models of interaction that can be applied as a method for analysis, as well as a compositional tool.
My research departs from variety of different perspectives and approaches to gesture and interaction in electroacoustic, contemporary music and music in general (Schaeffer, Wishart, Smalley, Delalande, Ferneyhough, Xenakis, Hatten, Lidov, Menezes, etc.) to include the relations between two sound events with different characteristics - the electronic and the instrumental. The analysis has been focusing on works for different formations (from solo instruments to larger ensembles and electronics) from early times till the present, using either prerecorded, real-time processed electronics or their combination.
To approach and explore mixed electroacoustic piece and constitute the relations between two sound events with different characteristics, a multidimensional analytical perspective is desired. Collaboration of several concepts and perspectives, such as aural analysis, score, together with flexible utilization of various listening strategies and "cross-application" of the viewpoints from one area to the other (to see electroacoustic part from instrumental point of view -- for example recognition of pitch, rhythmic or timbral organization and the instrumental part from perspective of electroacoustic music -- for example recognition of morphological units and their special characteristics) were the main techniques that I have used throughout the research. Different methods of analysis (traditional, parametric, phenomenologic, gestaltic, comparative, etc.) were used to select features and criteria important for the analysis, that have been studied in 5 levels: elementary musical characteristics, such as pitch/frequency, rhythm/temporal organization, timbre and dynamics/intensity (parametric level), tripartite model of structure (gestaltic level), contrapuntal characteristics, certain spectromorphologic- semantic characteristics, such as direction and energy (direction in pitch space, direction as evolution in time and energy as a sum of intensity, velocity and density) and spatial context, considering the diverse space relationships of gestures, due to their motion characteristics during spatialized performance. The final categorization corresponds to the five levels in which I have examined different gesture interactions. Each category is subdivided in several subcategories and some sub-subcategories, in total, there are more than 70 different models of gesture interactions.
Establishment of theoretical models of different interactive gesture relationships illustrates useful and interesting tool for analysis of mixed music, or even music in general. Awareness and application of these relationships under personal perspective as one of possible compositional techniques in mixed music may help composer to create perceptually interesting, dynamic and variable events in the musical discourse. Furthermore, the knowledge of different interactive relationships and their perceptual recognition may represent an efficient listening tool and may help understanding better the mixed work.
In the novel contexts of nowadays music, establishment of interactive perceptually recognizable musical models and their systematization fits with the need for specific more in-depth research in the field of music that combines rich instrumental potential together with endless sonic possibilities of electroacoustic music, bringing the focus on interaction as an innovative solution not only for analytical and compositional theory, but also a possible direction for listening strategy. This all brings musical theory and praxis (analysis, composition and perception) in much closer relationship than ever before.
Leah Barclay - Sonic Art: Shifting Paradigms in Ecological Crisis
Leah Barclay
Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Australia
Today's global ecological crisis challenges creative practitioners to devise new processes that can contribute to cultural change. There is an urgent need to listen to our environment and reconnect remnants of self, culture and place. 'Sound' is undoubtedly one of the most powerful means to stimulate this shift in consciousness.
The dramatic advancement of digital media and information technology has truly cultivated a paradigm shift in how we collaborate as artists today. These changes have evolved and expanded the tools of expression but most importantly they have opened the ability to communicate at a higher level in an interdisciplinary context. Sonic art is integral to this process and has a profound ability to ignite an awareness and connection to the environment.
This research seeks to identify the role of sonic art in the current ecological emergency through a series of case studies and experiments. Sonic art, particularly acousmatic music, is a powerful medium to inspire change, but can this genre extend beyond purely expression? What are the implications of environmental soundscapes designed to stimulate growth and converse with ecosystems?
This paper presents case studies outlining the impact of three contrasting projects recently implemented in regional Australia and New Zealand. These include; Sonic Babylon, a global project planting interactive gardens of sound; Blue Gold, a hybrid performance installation by Ros Bandt exploring water as the commodity of the 21st Century, and the sonic art initiatives of the Remnant/Emergency Artlab, a team of artists forging new processes targeting the roots of our collective ecological crisis.
Adam Basanta - Tracing Conceptual Structures in Listener Response Studies
Adam Basanta
Concordia University, Canada
Studies concerning listener responses to electroacoustic music are surprisingly rare, with such scholarship characterized as "an exception rather than the rule" (Landy 39). The major contributions to this area of research (Landy 2007, Weale 2006, and McCartney 1999) center on the relationships between composer, work and listener with respective regards to accessibility, tensions between intention and interpretation of narrative development, as well as the cultural constitution of the listener. The term culture is used in the widest sense. The electroacoustic community, for example, is "constituted as a culture," which in turn affects "what kinds of interpretive routines are acceptable," and "how aesthetic discourses are established in this community" (McCartney 2008, 2). While these studies, as well as their aims and methodologies, are of great value to the scholarly understanding of listener engagement with electroacoustic music, I would like to suggest a complementary aim and methodology to these previous efforts, which focuses on tracing the conceptual structures governing the relationship between listener and work. This approach will be illustrated through discussion of an online pilot study conducted in November 2010.
The pilot study in question can be briefly described as an online survey, in which participants – varying in age, sex, physical location, as well as degree of familiarity with electroacoustic music – were provided with an open, largely unguided forum in which to respond in writing to excerpts of electroacoustic music specifically composed for this purpose by the authour. Although the study bears several methodological similarities to McCartney's inquiry (notably, the lack of direct questions in favor of an open forum for responses), as well as Landy and Weale's project (an emphasis on the use of "real-world" sound materials in the compositional excerpts), it departs from the aforementioned studies in several respects.
One major methodological difference is reflected in the construction of excerpts of electroacoustic music specifically for the purposes of the study, as well as the length of said excerpts (20 seconds to 3 1/2 minutes). However, a larger departure is evident in terms of the study's analytical aims and methodologies. While Landy and McCartney both address high-level interactions between composer, work, and listener (such as narrative development, sound identification, enjoyment, and accessibility), the conceptual underpinnings of the relationship between the listener and the liminal space afforded by the work is assumed, and is thus largely unexplored. I would like to suggest an examination of responses by familiar and unfamiliar listeners in terms of the underlying conceptual structures from which these higher-level responses arise; that is, to uncover the processes through which listeners construct the relationship between themselves and the work.
Listening, like all perceptual activities, is not neutral, but rather is made possible and constrained by "conceptual understanding across a multitude of cognitive domains" (Varela 16). For a discussion on the active nature of listening, see Krueger 2009, or Iyer 2004. I will suggest that some of these underlying conceptual structuring processes can be gleaned from the language found in listener responses. Language, according to the experientialist approach, emerges from "the structured nature of bodily experience and... our capacity to imaginatively project [structured bodily experience] to abstract conceptual structures" (Lakoff 121). In turn, the syntax of language can be regarded as both providing and manifesting "semantic and functional motivations," as well as "indicating...relationships based both on form and on meaning" (Lakoff 122). In this sense, the linguistic investigation of a listener's reported experience -- the use of personal pronouns, tenses, metaphors, and sentence structure -- can reveal the manner in which this experience has been cognitively structured, in turn shedding light on the processes which comprise the listener's negotiation of meaning.
Within this approach, the emphasis remains on structural tendencies, rather than the exploration of specific responses. I will particularly concentrate on several repeating motifs in listener responses that emerged in the pilot study: subject positioning, place images, movement metaphors, cultural references, bodily affect and musical-analytical schemas.
Using Davis and Harré's concept of "subject positioning" (46), I will reflect on the most basic factor on which the interaction between listener and work is founded: the positioning of the listening-self in relation to the sound media, from which "a person inevitably sees the world... in terms [of] particular images, metaphors, storylines and concepts" (Davies and Harré 46). I will suggest three major types of subject positioning in pilot study responses: external, internal and double externalization.
Following subject positioning, I will examine the articulation of place images in listener responses, as well as the various motivating factors leading to this articulation. I will explore the use of various movement metaphors to account for changes in place images using Lakoff and Johnson's "location-event structure" metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 179). This metaphor has been recently explored in relation to the perception of electroacoustic works by Gary Kendall (Kendall 2010).
Subsequently, the use of cultural references as an aid in the listener's negotiation of meaning will be explored using an ecological perspective (following Windsor 2000), extended to the realm of cultural production. Specific focus will be placed on the relationship between cultural references and the negotiation of role and meaning of pitch-based sound materials. Finally, I will contrast unfamiliar listeners' use of bodily affect as a process of meaning negotiation with the familiar listener's use of musical-analytical schemas.
The contemplation of these structural underpinnings of listener responses will provide a complementary view with which to reflect on existing listener response studies, as well as provide insight with regards to issues of listening behaviour, accessibility, narrative development, and the sociology of electroacoustic culture. Works Cited
Iyer, Vijay. "Improvisation, Temporality and Embodied Experience." Journal of Consciousness Studies 11.3-4 (2004): 159-173. Print.
Kendall, Gary. "Meaning in Electroacoustic Music and the Everyday Mind." Organised Sound 15.1 (2010): 63-74. Print.
Krueger, Joel. "Enacting Musical Experience." Journal of Consciousness Studies 16.2-3 (2009): 98-123. Print.
Lakoff G. "Cognitive Semantics", in Umberto Eco et al., eds. Meaning and Mental Representations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Print.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Print.
Landy, Leigh. Understanding the Art of Sound Organization. London: MIT, 2007. Print.
McCartney, Andra. Sounding Places: Situated Conversations through the Soundscape Compositions of Hildegard Westerkamp. PhD Dissertation. Toronto: York University, 1999 (Unpublished). Print.
McCartney, Andra. "Reception and reflexivity in electroacoustic creation." Online Proceedings of EMS08. Available at: www.ems- network.org/ems08/papers/mccartney.pdf
Varela, Francisco J. Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Print.
Weale, Rob. "Discovering How Accessible Electroacoustic Music Can Be: the Intention/Reception project." Organised Sound 11.2 (2006): 189-200. Print.
Windsor, Luke W. "Through and around the acousmatic: the interpretation of electroacoustic sounds." In S. Emmerson (Ed.), Music, Electronic Media and Culture. London: Ashgate, 2000. Print.
Marc Battier
University Paris-Sorbonne
Electroacoustic music has followed very different paths of growth around the world. From a musicological perspective, some regions had been well documented. Early on, by the mid sixties, Hugh Davies had achieved the enormous task of gathering information on electroacoustic music in the world, with a strong emphasis, due to the nature of access to information at that time, on Europe, North America and Japan. The works and the composers from Europe have been and are still being compiled in large databases such as the International Documentation of Electroacoustic Music now maintained by Inventionen in Germany. The documentation project on music from Latin America undertook by Ricardo Dal Farra had led to good knowledge on the repertoire from that region which, otherwise, would have, for a good part, been left in the dark.
Launched by the electroacoustic music research unit MINT at the university of Paris Sorbonne, the EMSAN project focuses on a wide region, East Asia. Its foundation lies in the fact that knowledge on the repertoire, practices and trends of electroacoustic music in East Asia have been little studied and that it is therefore difficult to have a broad view of its history and of the works produced in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, South Korea and Japan, for instance. Born in 2007, the EMSAN project was built around a methodology aiming at gathering knowledge from a musicological perspective. Thanks to bilateral agreements between France and East Asian countries as well as institutional funding from various countries, several meetings have taken place since its inception. Among the first was a funded meeting in Taiwan where a general methodology was discussed and adopted. Thanks to the meetings which took place in China, France, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, an international team of composers and scholars have been formed to collaborate in discussing how the EMSAN goals could be implemented in the various countries and regions. Other countries have expressed the desire to work with the EMSAN team, such as Malaysia and Singapore.
The paper presents the current state and outlines the projects of development in the coming years, as it is important for EMSAN to receive comments and advices from the electroacoustic music community gathered at EMS. The main topic discussed is the database of works, composers and documentation which is being built at the National Taiwan Normal University by Chunzen Huang, director of the Music Digital Archives Center. This constitutes a turning point in the life of the EMSAN project.
Alex Bennett
University of Auckland, New Zealand
"[Phenomenology] is a transcendental philosophy...all its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world" - Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Does electronic music project the physical aspects of music in a visceral sense? By drawing knowledge from phenomenology, we can begin to examine this question. Phenomonolgy is defined as, "the study of essences, defining essences... the essence of perception" (Merleau-Ponty, 2009 p.vii). Pontidiyan theory has been adopted liberally in the areas of dance and performance arts for decades, but only recently (Schroeder and Rebelo, 2009) has it been considered relevant to the field of electroacoustic music, particularly within the realm of live performance.
A specific area that remains largely unexplored concerns the phenomena surrounding the performer/instrument/space relationship -- the inexplicable flux between the human body and object that shapes the experience and perception (for both performer and audience, respectively) of a work. As we know, the scope of live performance is extremely vast, hence this study will focus on performance using 'new' instruments. A new instrument (acoustic, electronic or hybrid) is a custom made or modified object, which has been specifically designed not only to access new sounds, but also to fit an individual mode of performance practice. The desire to focus on this niche stems from the nature of the instruments themselves -- often displaying an emphasis on the presence of the human body, gesture and improvisation, as opposed to rigid performance doctrines and a traditional repertoire. The instruments investigated within this study; from artists such as Phil Dadson, John Cousins, Len Lye and Akio Suzuki, highlight visceral relationships between the body, instrument, sound, space and the world in which we live.
Chris Black - Re-contextualising the human body as an electronic performance interface
Chris Black
New Zealand School of Music
An important factor to consider regarding computer based electronic instruments is the de-coupling of the control and feedback of electronic systems in contrast to the traditional instrument/player relationship where the connection is intimate and precise. In exploiting the potential for complex mapping where multiple sonic events can arise from the most minimal of performance gestures, the performer runs the risk of severing the connection between gesture and sonic result. At an extreme, the use of virtual reality systems and the internet has extended the field of performance activity beyond the physical performance space itself. Working within this technological matrix, the traditional conception of the human body as an agent of gesture has come under scrutiny leading some scholars to question the significance of the body in electronic performance. This paper will advocate a return to the centralisation of the human body in electronic performance drawing on the phenomenological writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Informed in part by the authors own performance practice, the paper will discuss the benefits of attaching transducers directly onto the performers body. This technique allows for the amplification of the inner biological workings of the human organism. Internal body sounds such as heartbeat and breath cycle can then be used as raw compositional material during performance. The author will claim that this approach establishes the material body as a focal point from which additional technology can then be applied. The paper will conclude by suggesting that the traditional notion of the performer and instrument as being separate entities can no longer be universally assumed and that a re-contextualisation of the 'human body' as an electronic performance interface is worthy of consideration.
Manuella Blackburn - Importing the sonic souvenir: issues of cross-cultural composition
Manuella Blackburn
Liverpool Hope University, UK
Sourcing sound materials from distant and foreign locations has become a relatively common and elementary practice for the electroacoustic music composer to engage with. The ease and frequency of traveling has been responsible, in part, widening the availability of sound choice and collection and in turn providing a vast 'acoustic palette as wide as that of the environment itself'.(1)
This practice of cross-cultural sound sourcing may be understood by our attraction to the exotic, and the unadulterated soundworld sonic souvenirs can yield. The need for originality as a consideration for the electroacoustic music composer can be addressed through seeking out new and unique sound materials in this way.
With reference to terminology, 'sonic souvenirs'(2) are discussed in an authentic sense and may be characterised by their environmental, instrumental or verbal origin. It is their significance and association with a unique place or culture that defines them. This paper attempts to make the distinction between elusive sonic souvenirs and more locally sourced sound materials, readily available within a composer's vicinity.
In many respects, the analogy of the keepsake souvenir picked up on a holiday presents a point of departure. Souvenirs are attractive mementos, but also tend to be mass marketed items, symbolic of an original object, lacking genuine status. They provide a memory or representation of our personal traveling history, acting as trophies of our accomplished globetrotting. While in practice importing sonic souvenirs into the studio remains unchanged from ordinary recording work conducted around and on our immediate doorstep, the significance of those materials can present a challenge in terms of their integration, consequence and reception of the finished work. The use of these sounds and the artistic endeavors that transform and sculpt these sounds into music raises a number of issues of ownership, integrity and appropriation. The need to be respectful in sourcing materials from outside ones own cultural home is often high on the composer's agenda, but what does respectful borrowing entail? How do insiders and outsides of a given culture receive this practice? What are the benefits and positive outcomes of this hybrid format? And how does this practice relate to common areas of investigation within ethnomusicology?
To answer these questions my paper will discuss a range of sonic souvenirs exhibited in electroacoustic works from the contemporary repertoire (Caspian Retreat, Pippa Murphy (2003); Ho, Ricardo Climent (2008); Gagaku, Mark Wingate (2006) and Galungan, David Berezan (2010), and aims to identify the issues arising from this cross-cultural practice.
My own compositional work has been influenced by this concept and on several occasions I have incorporated sonic souvenirs into my acousmatic music (Karita oto, Sonidos Bailables, Cajón! and Dance Machine). This research builds upon previous investigations into the cross-cultural borrowing in electroacoustic music3. Cross-cultural issues are also discussed with reference to a new compositional project in conjunction with the Milapfest Indian Arts Organisation (currently based at Liverpool Hope University, UK) where sound materials are sourced from entirely from musical instruments typical to the South Indian carnatic music tradition.
1) Simon Emmerson, Relation of Language to Materials. In Simon Emmerson, ed. The Language of Electroacoustic Music, London, 1986, 18.
2) Manuella Blackburn, The term 'sonic souvenir' was first mentioned in: PhD Commentary, Portfolio of Electroacoustic Music Compositions, The University of Manchester, p57, 2010.
Per Bloland
Oberlin College Conservatory, OH, USA
The Electromagnetically Prepared Piano device allows for direct control of piano strings through the use of an array of electromagnets. Created several years ago at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), the EMPP differs significantly from previous instruments based on similar principles in that each magnet is controlled by an arbitrary external audio signal, resulting in a much higher degree of control over pitch and timbre. The resultant sounds range from simple sine tones through complex, often ethereal textures. For the most part, these timbres are more evocative of electronically synthesized sonorities than of the acoustic piano strings from which they emanate. This paper has three primary goals: 1) to examine the compositional implications of such a hybrid instrument, 2) to describe several of the compositions that have utilized the device, and 3) to provide a detailed mechanical description for others who may wish to experiment with such a device.
A previous paper (Berdahl and Backer) has already described many of the technical aspects of the electromagnets and their interactions with metal strings. This paper will take a more compositionally oriented approach, describing some of the resulting timbres and the roles they have played in several compositions, and discussing practical issues of implementing and utilizing such a device. In doing so, the author hopes to describe in more general terms the applications to which the electromagnets have been applied thus far.
Tatjana Böhme-Mehner
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, GR
Everybody knows this situation: Coming back to a - somehow loved - place, we enjoy the recurrence of the familiar, using all senses. We smell the South, feel the wind coming over the hills, see the other way of lightning ... and we listen; we have the impression to find even in the silence of the place something specific; we are convinced to hear a somehow special, a characteristic silence. This silence may bear associations.
But can such associations be common and thus somehow associative? How to understand the silent? How to interpret it?
Who -- as a sound artist or composer -- ever tried to integrate this special "sound of silence" into a soundscape composition, probably felt a kind of "sound of silence paradox". Honestly reflected, this silence is not really silent, living from subliminally appreciated sound beyond our recognition threshold. On the other side of the technological question, whether this "sound of silence" could be transferable, we are first of all interested in the question of the receptive transfer of the silent.
But, what about a silence, being really silent, representing -- seen on a binary scale -- the "O" to a sounding "1"? Can silence as such been transmitted as more than the counterpole of sound? No, of course not, because the case represents an ideal type. Every performance, every loudspeaker, every audience and so on negotiates the silence by producing its own sound. Thus, the silence of the reception has not much to do with the silence of the recording. It seems to be just this moment of the non-sounding, which reforms the performance in a way. Apart from the technical impossibility, how to deal with the non-sounding in electroacoustic music?
The paper offers a dialectic discussion on the phenomenon of silence, proposing some possible approaches to the non-sounding in the study of electroacoustic music, adopting ideas -- first of all -- taken from the communication and media sciences.
A lot has been written on silence by musicologists, on its role and function, on the phenomenon appearing in production, interpretation and reception of traditional music; especially on silence in the form of rest.
But can this be adapted to electroacoustic music? Yes, but only partly: especially to all fields of live electronic music, to all fields, in which the listener gets a complementary visual impression. But what about acousmatic music? What about everything coming out of nothing than loudspeakers?
There is not much which radio makers are more frightened about than the silent. And they usually do a lot to avoid silence. There are few experiences more unsettling the public then an absolutely silent scene in a movie. (This has been used from the 70th onwards as aesthetic effect.)
The silent loudspeaker always appears as a kind of paradox: Not per se as an aesthetic paradox, keeping its expressive character such as the non-sounding in John Cage's "4'33" -- keeping the frame of the art work by the appearance of the interpreter representing somehow an action, and thus dealing with this frame. More as a kind of social paradox: the silent loudspeaker appears as just not fulfilling its function. The function of a loudspeaker is to reproduce sound, not to be quit. Other, than in the case of a resting violinist -- keeping somehow the dramaturgic bracket, in the case of a silent loudspeaker there should appear even more doubts.
Silence in the acousmatic situation appears as a sforzando as mentioned in the description of the general conference topic. We will show approaches to the silent from three perspectives -- a phenomenological, a hermeneutic and a communication oriented one, using examples from different periods and styles.
Bruno Bossis - La musique électroacoustique: des sons du monde à une poétique de l'unite
Bruno Bossis
Sorbonne-Paris
L'enregistrement des sons du monde et la musique sont-ils deux catégories distinctes? La réponse à cette question mérite réflexion. Certes, Ruttman a exploré les bruits dès 1930 pour Wochende, et Schaeffer en a proposé une étude systématique à partir de 1948, dans le cadre de la musique concrète. L'enregistrement a ainsi ouvert la musique aux sons qui entourent l'homme. Cependant, le lien entre sons du monde et musique ne peut se résumer à une extension du domaine des sources sonores de l'art.
Certains ont lié la manipulation des sons du monde à leur engagement ou leurs idées socio- politiques. Burroughs a ainsi montré le pouvoir révolutionnaire de l'enregistrement dans son texte Electronic Revolution, Cage s'est inspiré des théories de Thoreau dans une vision libertaire de la musique, et Nono a voulu donner à sa musique une dimension militante, comme dans Fabriccata illuminata, pour voix et bande, dédiée aux ouvriers en grève de Gênes. Pour d'autres, la musique est simplement utilitaire. La notion d'art est même parfois annexe ou absente (chants de métier, rituels africains). Enfin, le rapport aux sons du monde peut être beaucoup plus difficile à cerner.
Il convient donc dinterroger les liens quentretiennent la musique et les sons du monde en parcourant les questions de la poétique, du sens et de la culture, jusqu'au dépassement de la dialectique entre quotidien et art, en s'appuyant sur des éléments d'analyse musicale et des références aux écrits théoriques.
1 - Praxis et poesis
Dans la Poétique, Aristote établit une distinction entre praxis et poesis, une production humaine se suffisant à elle-même ou non. Cependant, dans la tradition platonicienne, il présente l'art comme une imitation. La mémorisation de la réalité sonore s'apparente à la praxis. La manipulation et l'intégration des sons du monde dans une structure musicale les hissent au rang de poesis. Cette distinction entre le bruit ambiant et la musique soulève cependant une première difficulté : la détermination du seuil à partir duquel l'intervention de l'artiste arrache le phénomène sonore à la trivialité. La définition de la musique n'est pas absolue, mais relative à la connaissance que l'auditeur en a. L'établissement d'une frontière très nette entre les sons du monde et la musique reste incertain, surtout lorsque les technologies de l'enregistrement et de la manipulation des sons sont convoquées.2 - Le signe et le sens
Les sons du monde ne sont pas le monde lui-même, mais une trace de la réalité qui reste à interpréter. La correspondance entre signe et sens n'est pas univoque. En effet, contrairement au langage, le lien unifiant le signifiant et le signifié n'est pas arbitraire pour les sons du monde. Le signifiant, c'est-à-dire le son produit, est entièrement déterminé par l'objet qui en est la source. Par contre, le signifié, l'aspect conceptuel du signe, n'est fixé, ni par l'homme, ni par la nature. Ce que signifie un son du monde dépend de celui qui l'écoute, d'autant plus si l'enregistrement a été intégré à une oeuvre musicale. La musique, comme l'écoute du monde, est avant tout une expérience intime. Les sons enregistrés ne sont pas de simples figuralismes. Ils troublent encore davantage la ligne qui sépare les sons du monde et l'art des sons.
3 - Nature et culture
Face à cette complexité, François-Bernard Mâche propose de se référer à une pensée latente révélée par la pensée consciente. Il revendique un mysticisme athée, un irrationnel contenu dans la nature, pour lesquels l'art procure une clé d'accès. Appliqué à l'enregistrement, comme dans L'Estuaire du temps, ce mysticisme athée est un moyen de transcender les bruits du monde en une esthétique ancrée dans les profondeurs de l'humanité. L'échantillonneur transforme la trivialité des sons de la nature en une distanciation tendant à l'universel. La métamorphose musicale des sons de la mer, du vent et de langues rares les faits basculer du monde physique à la métaphysique. La dualité entre nature et culture est le lieu d'un intense dialogue. Elle fait parfois place à une unité d'un ordre supérieur.Conclusion : dvaita et advaita
Chez Pierre Henry la foi du charbonnier s'exprime à travers les cris des âmes dans l'Apocalypse de Jean: de véritables aboiements. Rien de tel dans le catholicisme mystique de Messiaen. Au-delà de la religion, l'idée d'une transcendance universaliste parcourt l'oeuvre de Jonathan Harvey. L'absence d'implication inspirée du Rig Veda, la distanciation phénoménologique formulée chez Hegel contribuent à l'éloignement des aspects physiques des sons du monde. L'esthétique musicale se confond alors dans toute scène auditive, qu'elle soit celle du quotidien ou produite par la musique. Les technologies d'enregistrement et de manipulation, loin de coller une esthétique particulière des bruits du monde sur la musique, favorisent au contraire leur fusion. Les écrits et la musique de Harvey montrent comment la musique intègre les sons du monde dans une unité, une advaita.
Michael T. Bullock
Boston, MA, USA
Analyzing any form of improvised music is uniquely challenging; the contingencies of the moment must be taken into consideration, and the issue of the performer's motivation is always present. With freely improvised music that involves elements of electroacoustic music, self-made and modified instruments, and non-pitched or noisy sound material -- what I call "self-idiomatic music" -- the conundrum only deepens. How does the nature of the instrument influence the nature of the music and the choices of the musician? Is a sense of novelty important? Should the analysis of the music emphasize its structure, its frequency content, its perceived level of interactivity or virtuosity, or the transformation of sound material over time?
In his article "L'improvisation comme processus d'individuation," musicologist Christian Béthune frames the understanding of improvisation in the context of the reality of people improvising: "[M]usic does not exist independently from the act of music-making."(1) In Béthune's framing -- drawing on another scholar, Filippo Bianchi -- he refers to improvisation as a continuous flow of action and process in daily life, including but not limited to music: "In our daily practice, improvisation ultimately constitutes: 'the only weapon in our possession against the caprices of chance.'"(2) If self-idiomatic music is born at the nexus of material contingency and the practitioner's management of unpredictability within a range of practical control, then improvisation in this context is not random or undisciplined action, but rather the controlled navigation of potentially chaotic fields of possibility.
Conceptually, self-idiom is simply "you are your own musical idiom." I have found it productive, both for this study and for my own musical work, to think about improvised music as a meeting place for sets of processes enacted through the use of instruments and sound palettes, and through the interactions of individuals, Trombonist, composer, and scholar George Lewis calls improvised music a "sociomusical location;"(3) I find this description supports my conception ofself-idiomatic music as a confluence of social conditions, personalized musical processes, and decision-making.
Individuation and transformation in time
The defining characteristic of much self-idiomatic improvisation is its treatment of time, or rather its effect on time perception for both performer and listener: the stratification of sounds, their transformation and becoming-other, and the emergence of a whole form that cannot be deduced from constituent parts.
Individuation is the becoming and becoming-other of musical material that occurs as part of a continuous, organic flow of action experienced in the flux of duration rather than in structured time. "[S]onorous time," says philosopher Jean- Luc Nancy,
"...exists in waves on a swell, not in a point on a line; it is a time that opens up, that is hollowed out, that is enlarged or ramified, that envelops or separates, that becomes or is turned into a loop, that stretches out or contracts, and so on." (4)
In other words, the time of sounding is not rigidly structured according to abstract principles, even if -- in the case of composed, notated music -- a composer used such principles in the realization of his/her ideas. Sonorous time is treated by Nancy not as an ordered progression but as a material, whose behavior in time is experienced non-linearly.
Musicologist Christoph Cox's approach to contemporary sound work -- including free improvisation -- shows affinity with the organic flow of becoming that Nancy describes. He suggests that the analysis of such work should "...not concern itself with the examination of forms (the organization of pre-given, pre- individuated entities: pitches, scales, meters, works, etc.) but with the investigation of fluid matter distinguished by different speeds, forces and intensities."(5) In my analyses, I attempt to understand the sound matter of self- idiomatic improvised music, and to discuss it in terms that give the reader a feel for both the emergent transformations on the waves of sonorous time, and the emergence of aesthetics for the individual musicians who are changed by their participation.
I have found that the overall form that emerges from a given performance or excerpt is a constant transformation of the musical material -- of sounds into other sounds, groupings into other groupings -- and fluctuations of loudness, density, and texture. Nonetheless, individual moments and distinct, sometimes sudden, changes can be identified as influential moments that give momentum to the emergence of an entire section or piece.
Transformations may be gradual or sudden; it may be based around changes in one or several sonic or temporal parameters. They may involve a change in who is playing and who is not playing. They are almost never pre- determined, though they may reflect certain recurrent tendencies of the ensemble or individual.
The overall perception of time in a piece of self-idiomatic music is determined in part by the nature of the transformations: they may be mainly sudden, mainly gradual, or a mixture. The density of transformations also plays a role. In fact, the nature and density of transformation can have a greater effect on the sense of time of a piece than the nature of the sounds themselves.
For EMS 2011, I plan to present a series of analyses made from of recordings of self-idiomatic music. I will use spectrographs, timelines, and hand- drawn graphs to demonstrate how each performance's character is determined by the continuous process of transformation.
1) "...la musique n'existe pas indépendamment de l'acte de musiquer." Béthune, Christian. "L'improvisation comme processus d'individuation." Critical Studies in Improvisation, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2009. p. 2. http://www.criticalimprov.com/ (last accessed 24 June 2010)
2) "Dans notre practique quotidienne, l'improvisation constitue finalement: 'la seule arme en notre possession contre les caprices du hasard.'" Béthune, p.1. See also: Bianchi, Filippo. "Improviser." L'art du Jazz. Paris: Editions du Félin, 2009. p. 389. There has been an increase in writing about improvisation in recent years, in part due to the efforts of programs such as Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice, a joint effort of several Canadian universities. Its online journal, Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études Critiques en Improvisation, has published several articles that may have an impact on future work relative to improvisation.
3) "Improvised music may be usefully characterized as a sociomusical location inhabited by a considerable number of present-day musicians, from diverse cultural backgrounds and musical practices, who have chosen to make improvisation a central part of their musical discourse." Lewis, George. 2000. "Teaching Improvised Music: An Ethnographic Memoir." In Arcana: Musicians on Music, edited by John Zorn, 78-109. New York: Granary Books. p. 78.
4) Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening (2002). New York, New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. p. 13.
5) Cox, Christoph. 2006. "From Music to Sound: Being as Time in the Sonic Arts." In Sonambiente Berlin 2006: Klang Kunst Sound Art, edited by Helga de la Motte-Haber, Matthias Osterwold, and George Weckwerth, 214-223. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2006.
Ian Burleigh, University of Lethbridge, Alberta, CA
Friedemann Sallis, University of Calgary, Alberta, CA
This paper will present AMP ("Ambisonic Mapping Player"), an experimental software tool that we have developed to assist with objective detection of virtual sound sources that are present in many performances of electroacoustic music. The tool tracks the mobility and trajectories of these sound sources in space. AMP is written as a C++ cross-platform program that runs on MacOSX, Linux, or Windows.
At the EMS08 conference we reported on a planned project to make a detailed digital recording of Luigi Nono's A Pierre. Dell'azzurro silenzio, inquietum. A più cori (1985) for contrabass flute, contrabass clarinet, and live electronics. The main objective of the project was to capture the sonic results of a representative performance of the work for future study, in particular for a study of those aspects that cannot be notated conventionally -- notably the microtonal and spatial manipulation of sound. The recording phase of the project was successfully completed (Banff Centre, February 2009) and the analytical phase is currently under way.
In A Pierre, the direct live sound of the two instruments is combined with its amplified version that is electronically processed and diffused through four speakers situated around the listening space. Sound intensity is controlled and panned, as prescribed by the score, between the front and back pairs of speakers. The amplified, processed sound field consists of both immediate and delayed sound images. The result is a complex texture of real and virtual sound sources that are mobile: that is, from the perspective of the listener, their points of origin change in time, creating the impression that they move through space. These trajectories of virtual sound sources are only implicit in the score: they are prescribed in performance directions, but are not indicated explicitly. This sound mobility was envisioned by Nono and is an important part of the performance. AMP was developed to visualize this aspect of the performance so as to better understand the work in its entirety.
The performance of A Pierre was recorded using conventional microphone technology, as well as with a Soundfield MKV ambisonic microphone. The microphone was placed near the centre of the room where a listener's "sweet spot" would be. Through several subsequent ambisonic playbacks of the recording, using various speaker configurations (hexagon, octagon; also in the periphonic listening space at CCRMA), several listeners, who were present at the original live performance, have confirmed that the ambisonic recording captured the spatial nature of the sound quite truthfully.
Ambisonic sound signals can be post-processed to create "virtual microphones". That is, by mixing ambisonic channels it is possible to obtain a signal that is identical to that captured by a microphone with an arbitrary directional pattern (omnidirectional to cardioid to figure-eight) pointed in any chosen direction. It is this feature of ambisonics that allows an objective, computational analysis of the directionality of sound sources. AMP combines an ambisonic decoder-player with a module that computes a visual map of sound intensity in real time (i.e. while the ambisonic recording is being played) as it is coming from various surrounding directions.
For every time frame, the surrounding spherical space is probed by a computed "virtual microphone" and peak intensity levels of the sound are determined for a number of values of azimuth and elevation. Computed level values are colour-coded on an intensity-to-colour scale, and plotted as a visual map on a spherical surface. The sequence of static frames creates a moving image (that resembles the film of an aurora in the night sky). The sphere itself is shown in various cartographic projections on a computer screen; the listener can hear the sound (ideally played back in an ambisonic environment) accompanied by live visual map of sound intensity in space. Such visual maps aid with listening to and apprehension of spatialized sound, just as sonograms help to guide ears that listen to frequencies.
AMP has been tested on a variety of recorded and synthesized ambisonic sound files (in addition to the A Pierre recordings). The results depend on the nature of the recordings; for some we found the results very promising.
Higher-order ambisonic signals increase the resolution and focus of computed visual images. While the live maps created from first-order ambisonic sound recording are satisfactory, images computed from second-order signal equal or even surpass the spatial resolution of the ear. This spring we will be testing our method on a signal recorded by the Eigenmike® (mh acoustics), a 32-capsule microphone array that purports to yield ambisonic signal of up to third-order. As well as reporting on results achieved with first-order technology, our paper will look ahead and describe improvements we believe we will obtain with this new microphone, using second and third order ambisonics.
C
Bruno de Chénerilles
Université de Strasbourg, France
L'initiation à une écoute active est la base même d'un travail exigeant d'éveil musical par les musiciens- intervenants français à l'école. Dans ce contexte, différentes situations, parcours, protocoles d'écoute, permettent aux enfants d'entendre, de (re-)connaître et d'analyser les paramètres du son. L'enregistrement permet de décupler ce potentiel : la production et l'enregistrement des sons, suivi de la réécoute sur haut-parleurs (situation acousmatique) intensifie le processus et multiplie les allers et retours entre faire et entendre.
Le musicien-intervenant peut élaborer une composition électroacoustique à partir de ces sons. Souvent, la pièce est mixte : les enfants chantent et jouent sur des corps sonores, par dessus cet enregistrement. Pour aller plus loin, un nouveau dispositif exploitant ces ressources et des interfaces midi, l'Etoile de Mixage, permet à un groupe de 8 à 16 enfants de jouer en temps réel avec ces sons et d'interpréter des pièces électroacoustiques, élaborées par eux sous la direction d'un musicien-intervenant et/ou d'un compositeur.
S'inspirant de la théorie de l'écoute initiée par Pierre Schaeffer, cette démarche d'éveil musical ouvre l'horizon des enfants et des jeunes à l'école sur la musique concrète par l'expérimentation de la prise de son, de l'écoute acousmatique et réduite, des traitements du matériau sonore dans la composition et du jeu en temps réel (donc du geste musical) lors des concerts, des notions d'improvisation et de composition. Du point de vue plus général de l'éducation, les apports pédagogiques sont importants: l'apprentissage de l'écoute, de l'analyse formelle, d'une pratique collective, la réalisation d'un projet en équipe, l'insertion et l'épanouissement de l'individu dans le groupe, la prise de conscience de l'environnement et des sons du territoire de vie de l'enfant.
Première expérimentation du dispositif : dans les écoles de Mulhouse (F) en 2007/2008 -- production Audiorama et Ville de Mulhouse.
Mise au point : projet (2008/2009) dans une école de Strasbourg (F), avec le CFMI et le studio de création Audiorama.
Développement en 2009/2010 : dans le cadre de la création d'un opéra multimédia, l'Opéra des Trois Pays, un projet scolaire avec des écoles française, allemande et suisses a permis de concrétiser le dispositif, l'Etoile de Mixage, sur lequel a été joué un concert trinational d'enfants au Théâtre du Triangle (Huningue-F), rassemblant 150 enfants-interprètes de 9 à 14 ans. Production: Audiorama en partenariat avec 4 écoles à Basel (CH), Lôrrach(DE) et Huningue (F).
En cours, un projet 2011 à Strasbourg : dans le quartier populaire de la Meinau, le compositeur dirige des ateliers électroacoustiques qui aboutiront en mai 2011 à une première série de concerts joués sur l'Etoile de Mixage par des enfants et des jeunes de l'école et du collège du quartier, pour se prolonger par d'autres créations en fin 2011 et en 2012. Production Audiorama, Ville de Strasbourg, en partenariat avec les écoles et le Centre Culturel du quartier.
Afin de continuer cette exploration, un programme de commandes à des compositeurs est à l'étude et verra le jour dans les années à venir. Plus que des pièces terminées, il s'agirait là de compositions ouvertes, donnant à un groupe d'enfants une mission de réalisation qui mette en jeu leur créativité.
On peut citer en exemple ici l'initiative d'un enseignant français qui utilisa le répertoire de sons de la pièce électroacoustique Don Quichotte Corporation: Dulcinée, composée par Alain Savouret, afin de créer à l'école avec un groupe d'enfants de nouvelles versions de cette pièce. Ou bien encore l'esprit de bon nombre de pièces de John Cage, comme les Variations, Cartridge Music..., dont les partitions proposent un processus de composition aux interprètes.
Sous la direction d'un musicien chevronné, des groupes d'enfants ou de jeunes musiciens mettent en chantier la réalisation des pièces en suivant les instructions des compositeurs, depuis les prises de son jusqu'au mixage final en temps réel, puis les répètent et les jouent en concert sur le dispositif de l'Etoile de Mixage.
Ce programme de commandes pourrait voir le jour sous forme d'un appel à projets ou d'un concours de composition. Les pièces pourront être réalisées et jouées en concert dans un premier temps à Strasbourg.
Codie Childs - Exploring a multi-modal electroacoustic music model
Codie Childs
The University of Auckland, NZ
This paper takes inspiration from the theme Sforzando, meaning "with force, emphatically" to explore a multi-modal electroacoustic music model that emphasizes the importance of a listenerʼs personal experience of sonic art works. A commonly discussed issue within this field is the reception, appreciation and dissemination of the genre beyond the immediate electroacoustic music community. Scholars such as Professor Leigh Landy, Dr Rob Weale and Dr Andra McCartney have developed and applied methodologies of audience analysis to better understand accessibility issues of electroacoustic art music (Weale, 2005 and Landy, 2005). This paper explores how the composer/audience divide may be bridged quickly in the presentation of an electroacoustic work by engaging the listener in a process of personal discovery. By understanding fundamental human cognitive processes and memory mapping, composers can make use of new interactive technologies that extend beyond the acousmatic and recital- hall listening modes to encourage a greater comprehension and appreciation of their work.
Insook Choi - The playability of Sounds in Playable Media and the Loci of Virtuosi
Insook Choi
City University of New York, USA
The theory of play in music history has been mostly implicit through the development of musical instruments and its corresponding heritage of virtuosi to master them. The essence of play in music is in the tone production where the production mode of tone is tightly coupled with the anatomies of instruments. The stylization of musical tone production is informed by a community of practices guided through the music literature and repertoire developed over time, and musical attributions are specific to the instruments or the ensembles of instruments. Coupled with human anatomy, musical instruments are made with various foreign materials (woods, metals, clays, or bones) and crafted into the shape of resonating bodies and tangible interfaces to introduce human initiated energy and manipulation of its passages. Therefore virtuosi are those who demonstrate the mastery of how to govern their own energy with respect to particular instrument and produce signature tones at each instance creating a trace in an overarching musical memory. Instrument in this sense is a tangible medium of expression that affords playability through the passive responsiveness by its properties. In this regard, vocal virtuosi hold a unique position as their own bodies are utilized for both faculty, resonance and excitation. Vocal tone production creates a more intimate performance feedback loop compared to other modes involving musical instruments. In that tight circuitry, vocalists' bodies are active agents functioning as musical instruments.
Music, as known as Classical music has a deep history of evolution in tandem with virtuosi culture. This strength, however, is becoming more an isolating factor that contrary to standard wisdom undermines a path to reach its audience. The contemporary audience constitutes a wide range of audiences from diverse backgrounds and preferences reflecting socio-cultural dynamics in motion, fundamentally alternative to the well documented and well established genre mostly from western-European regions. The 18th and 19th centuries' patronage model for sustaining music practice no longer applies in the new millennium's audience landscape. Many literatures address this issue focusing on dissemination aspects. This paper presents three missing links: 1) playability and related (compositional) design research, and 2) a path to new loci of virtuosi, and will conclude with 3) a possible production model presented as example cases.
Implied from vocal tone production to instrumental tone production, there are varying depth and granularity in the feedback loop in the interaction circuitry among tone producing components: this is at the heart of the search for goals for playability in contemporary context. The contemporary context offers novel devices and new performance configurations which can leverage more modern approaches for studying use context, requirements, and playability informed of usability studies. However, one should note that there has been always three-way co-evolvement in music history: the development of instruments, the development of repertoire, and notation. Musical notation has been evolved to common practice notation as we know now from medium- specific notations. Over time, a notation system has been generalized at the cost of casting out one system for another but still depending on a certain degree of oral tradition to execute the notated instruction to tone production. In emerging music practices, we are faced with ruptures in ecosystems and the lack of references due to the dominance of novelties. Consequently we are thrown back to the dawn of how to instrument, notate, and rehearse with emerging opportunities. While some community practices are sustained centering on certain software and synthesis methodologies, little attention has been devoted to new perspectives on playability. This author foresees a wealth of opportunities for illuminating the new perspectives and establishing related performance ontologies.
Having defined virtuosi, is the role of virtuosi transferrable in emerging music practices? And how can its definition be tested and examined with new definitions of an audience with more participatory requirements? Traditionally, music is classified as performing arts; players are called performers. Originated from perfornier, the term performer carries the meaning of skillful executioner with authenticity and acknowledged entitlement that distances it from the meaning of the term player. The context in which virtuoso take its role comes with the context that defines skills and authenticity, and the recognition of community which endows the loci of virtuosi. This paper seeks for a pathway from players (also from participating audiences) to virtuosi through examining the very notion of playability in playable media while mining missing links to help to obviate the possible pathway, the role of virtuosi listeners.
Playable media encompasses play experiences with or without direct hands-on interaction with devices and play configurations. Playability is defined on the production of play experience. Whether or not an audience's direct interaction is part of the work has been much discussed in new media studies, but it is less critical than the design problems of making things and sounds playable such that play experiences facilitate the coming into a being of a virtuoso listener. Performance ontology and ontology of listener must co-evolve. The dual listening capacity of vocalists - interior to and exterior to their bodies as instruments, offers a functional metaphor for engineering these two sides of ontology. Enactive interface projects have been helpful in this direction and can only benefit from extending the context towards a larger domain of playable media.
The final section of this paper introduces a case example of the playability of sounds engineered through the integration of a novel interface, an evolutionary algorithm and interactive visualization as an enactive and listening score, and a performance score. The paper will present two implementations, one for an interactive installation, the other for a performance venue. Both implementations employ the same computational architecture, algorithm, devices and hardware, and installation configuration. Play experience is designed differently because one supports solo player and the other multi-players. Concluding reports will address the challenges and outlooks in cultivating listening experience at the heart of play experience. Departing from this author's previous sonification projects, the goal of current projects is to design play experience with evolving structure of graphics and sounds through computing the dynamics of self organizing system and interacting with them. We also note the current social media trends leverage on a young generation's native talents in playing and sharing games and mastery sequences. The new generation is already tuned into the notion of virtuosi. As for the mission of the music community, in order to cultivate new listeners, we must appeal to this generation.
Michael Clarke - Analysing acousmatic and mixed media works: an Interactive Aural approach
Michael Clarke
University of Huddersfield, UK
Following a presentation at EMS 2009 which reported on work then just commencing to develop Interactive Aural Analysis (IAA) in new directions, this paper will present later developments and reflect on the final outcomes of the project. Extending Interactive Aural Analysis beyond its original use in analysing Jonathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, the intention was to explore the challenges posed in studying different types of work using this approach. Two works were chosen: Denis Smalley's Wind Chimes and Pierre Boulez's Anthèmes 2, the former an acousmatic work depending to a large extent on spectromorphology for its structure, the latter a mixed media work, combining acoustic performance with live computer processing.
In each case the underlying principle was the same: to present the analysis of a work in terms of sound (using software alongside text and diagrams) to enable the reader to engage with the work in its original medium and interact with the sonic materials. Another important part of the analytical process is introducing the reader to the techniques employed in the work and demonstrating their musical significance. Throughout, the software is intended to be accessible even to those who are not music technology specialists.
Each work presented different analytical challenges both in terms of the musical materials and structures employed, the technical means used and the availability of information and resources. With Wind Chimes, for example, the software used to create the work was no longer extant and it was necessary to find ways of emulating as far as possible the techniques used. The significance of spectromorphology for this work also meant that it was important to develop ways of showing the spectromorphological relationships between materials and how these appeared in the work. The analysis of Wind Chimes resulted, for example, in the creation of an aural taxonomy and an aural genealogy, and of technical exercises demonstrating the evolution of the materials. The latter combined hearing examples of the composers original working materials as they developed with opportunities to experiment with similar processes as a way of coming to understand the composer's methods better. As in the first IAA, an aural paradigmatic chart was produced, but this time developed in three dimensions to enable segmentation in both time and frequency. An interactive sonogram was also developed as part of the software package to enable readers to explore the sound world for themselves, as if putting the work under an aural microscope.
For Anthèmes 2 the aural paradigmatic chart was again developed in three dimensions, but this time to enable the structure of three different versions of the work to be compared: the original solo violin version of the work (Anthèmes), the violin part alone from Anthèmes 2, and Anthèmes 2 complete with processing. In this way the articulation of an identical underlying structure (even though the two works are of very different length) is clearly shown and heard, and the contribution of the electronics to the structure demonstrated. The criteria for segmentation were also different from those used for Wind Chimes. Whereas in that work spectromorphological aspects of sounds determined classification, with Anthèmes 2 the initial segmentation was determined by the playing techniques used by the violin with further classification based on assessing segments according to their degree of directionality. Although superficially different, the criteria used for each work in fact have much in common: both take into account the quality of the sounds and their morphology. The division of the work into different segments, and the grouping of these segments, is presented aurally along with explanatory text. The aural paradigmatic chart shows how the work is shaped out of these materials.
A range of interactive exercises allows the reader to explore the software techniques used to transform the violin and try out parameter settings and discover their significance. The role of these techniques in various different combinations in each section of the work is then examined and the reader has the opportunity to experiment with the different combinations of processing and the parameters in the context of the work. It is possible for the reader to examine the contribution of each layer of the processing to the whole.
The presentation will include a demonstration of the software for each of the analyses (focusing on those aspects, especially the Boulez, not presented in 2009). It will discuss what has been learnt from undertaking these two analyses and compare the different ways each was approached and the reasons for this. The significance of this way of approaching the analysis of electroacoustic music will be discussed and its potential for further development.
D
Kevin Dahan - The Ecology of Electroacoustic Music
Kevin Dahan
Université de Marne-La-Vallé, France
Electroacoustic music has been around for about a century. While brief, this period has seen numerous technological changes that impacted music, music making and therefore music thinking. From analog studio to digital workstation, composing habits changed at a steady pace, and personal composing habits (allowed by the growing sophistication of computer tools) made the field all the more complex. Several problems should be addressed in order to find strategies to deal with the complexity of our field.
Ecology comes from the Greek words for "habitation" and "study of", and by definition an household is a compendium of many different things. Electroacoustic music is not different in that respect, as it requires knowledge ranging from physics to computing, from psychology to (of course) music -- most of the problems we address in this article are somehow related to these fields. The first issue is the quantity of information produced by the whole community of electroacoustic composers, leading to archival problems. From analog tapes to hard drives (and maybe in some time, clouded data nodes), sources can be multiple, difficult to track, and hard to translate from one medium to another (without loss of data).
This translation problem constitutes in itself another complex problem. Technological changes implied the evolution of sound and music hardware (and later, of software). These changes led to the fact that compositions written at a certain time, for a certain system may also be made obsolete by newer technological systems. To a certain extent, it is possible to reconstruct obsolete piece, but it is costly in terms of time consumption and imply that the archiving of the piece is complete -- both as an aural source, but also with all technological notes (source code, unaltered master tapes, and so on).
Working on trying to resolve these issues has consequences on the way we envisage electroacoustic music. In fact, to tackle those issues, both a philology (as pioneered and demonstrated by Laura Zattra) and an epistemology of electroacoustic music are needed. Those two aspects are both sides of a same coin, the syntactic and structural dimensions of our domain.
We will use an ecological approach, as exemplified by Bateson, to develop through precise examples the steps needed to define an ecology of electroacoustic music.
Ricardo Dal Farra
Concordia University, Montreal, QC, CA
We are living in a world reaching a critical point where the equilibrium between a healthy climate environment, the energy our society needs to maintain or improve this lifestyle and the interconnected economies could pass more quickly than expected from the current complex balance to a complete new reality where unbalance would be the rule and human beings would need to be as creative as never before to survive.
Have the arts a role in all this? Have artists a responsibility in this context? While listening to scientists, politicians, engineers, philosophers, sociologists, technology specialists and policy-makers reflecting and debating about the fast changes of our environment seems to be something almost natural today, artists voices are not that prominent and present around these matters. It is also noticeable how different societies react to this problem. Relatively similar problems are seen under a different perspective in Montreal and Buenos Aires, for example, considering the mid- and long-term confidence in "the system" of most people in the first place, and a major general disbelief in the second one. The same could be observed in the artists' concerns regarding environmental issues. These are not the same in all latitudes.
The arts could play a major part in helping the global society to understand the magnitude of the crisis we are facing, and in promoting the awareness around environmental matters. And it could also be a very good vehicle to disseminate proposals that could produce changes in our behavior and decisions, influencing our chances for the future. Artists could promote interdisciplinary actions focusing on the global environmental crisis and our responsibility regarding the turning point we are living in defining the future of life on Earth.
Electroacoustic music/sound art and related technologies could be a key point in the network of creative actions to help each of us find reasonable and peaceful strategies of survival (and empowerment). This is not a minor role for the arts and the artists. It is a substantial one. Sound field recordings, soundwalk practices, soundscapes, biomusic, sound ecology, musique concrète and soundmaps are just a few examples; the possibilities are endless if we think not only of sound-based artistic pieces but on inter- and multidisciplinary works relating electroacoustic music both with other art forms as well as with a multitude of scientific fields.
Before we used to talk about the four basic elements of nature: water, earth, air and fire but now we are talking more about matters such as: climate change, biodiversity, water supply, air quality, food chain and even geo-engineering, among others.
Could we be so arrogant as to pretend to be apart of all changes in the world and their consequences? Scientists and engineers, politicians and policy-makers, workers and sociologists are all doing their job considering and focusing on a larger group of people who "needs" their intellectual and/or factual contributions. Who are we working for? Being artists, composers, musicians, creators: do we have a responsibility to society or should we only produce what we want, without considering anyone else? Are we (artists) so different from everyone else? Do we feel sometimes like part of a "superior caste" or being the "misunderstood children" or maybe an abandoned and "out of the system" (elite) working class?
The "What electroacoustic music (and musicians) has to do with the surrounding world?" presentation will be focusing on SOCIO-ACOUSTICS considering mainly one of the proposed questions for the conference: Given the democratization of art, what is the changing role of artists, virtuosity, expertise, creative excellence? but will be also addressing SONOSPHERE issues, such as: Can we use sound to further our understanding of real-world issues? and Can we use creative networks based on music technology to lead us towards world peace?
The world is changing faster than we can -individually- perceive it. Music and musicians have a lot to do with the surrounding world but we need to build the bridges, to open the communication channels and to develop the dialog strategies. Electroacoustic music has many faces, and one could be to become a powerful tool of awareness and transformation, to the benefit of us all.
Jean-Louis Di Santo - Profil harmonique: typologie et notation
Jean-Louis Di Santo
SCRIME, France
Pierre Schaeffer, dans le TARSOM, avait déterminé 7 catégories de sons du point de vue de leur richesse harmonique: pur, tonique, groupe tonique, cannelé, nïud, groupe nodal et frange. Il leur ajoutait les qualités de sombre ou clair et de riche ou pauvre. Ces catégories avaient été établies en partant de l'expérience sensorielle et répondaient aux exigences d'une démarche de pionnier. Elles constituaient la première tentative de description et classification du son d'un point de vue phénoménologique. Cela représente une trentaine de possibilités de ce que j'ai appelé "profil harmonique" (EMS06).
J'ai repris ces catégories en les symbolisant graphiquement dans la notation servant d'interface à l'acousmoscribe (EMS09), mais la nécessité s'est faite sentir de les affiner pour augmenter la précision de la description du son, favoriser leur écoute intérieure et leur utilisation comme paramètre de composition. Dans un premier temps la méthode perceptivo- analytique, si je puis dire, semblait être la seule voie possible: réaliser une collection de sons, les trier et les classer afin de définir une typologie. Mais la transcription diasémique n'est pas neutre: le signe libère la pensée et porte en lui sa propre logique. Il permet de s'abstraire des contingences empiriques. De cette façon, la démarche se renverse et, au lieu de partir du son pour arriver au signe, avec le risque de multiplier les symboles au point de les rendre illisibles ou difficiles à mémoriser de par leur nombre même, il est possible d'explorer le signe de façon systématique, de le pousser dans ses potentialités, et d'y accoler ensuite les sons qui lui correspondent. Mais ce n'est pas tout: le signe, libéré des contraintes de la perception et atteignant le concept pur, devient un outil performant pour concevoir des sons qui n'existent pas dans notre environnement et qu'aucun synthétiseur ne peut actuellement produire, des sons inouïs suivant la formule consacrée.
Je présenterai, lors de l'EMS, le résultat de mes recherches: plus de 1.000 possibilités de signes très simples et faciles à comprendre qui représentent uniquement le paramètre profil harmonique, dont un tiers environ de sons inouïs. Ces signes serviront de base symbolique à la future version de l'acousmoscribe (logiciel ayant pour visées principales la composition, la notation et l'analyse musicale). A la manière du solfège, ces signes découpent le continuum sonore de façon scalaire ; à sa différence, en définissant des catégories et non des points, ils le recouvrent entièrement.
De même que toutes les combinaisons de syllabes ne donnent pas forcément des mots qui ont un sens, certaines combinaisons de symboles peuvent ne pas renvoyer à un son: s'il s'avère par la suite que les occurrences du signe dépassent les performances de l'oreille humaine, cela sera la garantie d'une extrême précision dans la notation du son.
Barbara Jillian Dignam
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
The publication of The Language of Electroacoustic Music (Emmerson (ed.), 1986) gave rise to an international debate on both the existence of an exclusive language of electroacoustic music, and the utilisation of musical language in the production of electroacoustic works. For the first time in the twentieth century, musicological discourse centred on the specific application of musical language in electronic- /electric-based composition, its relationship to sound material and the potential of discrete sonic content to form languages. In addition, contributors contemplated the concept of a universally accepted language, classification system and lexicon of electroacoustic music and the need for a basic framework to discuss such complex issues. Twenty-five years on, these issues are still pertinent to the tradition and an increasing number of musicological and analytical studies are being conducted in the hope of practically addressing, or at least partially confronting, some or all of these issues.
The heterogeneity of language and its coalescence in electroacoustic composition has been central to the musical oeuvre of Roger Doyle (b. Dublin, 1949). Ireland's most prolific composer of electronic and electroacoustic music, Doyle is renowned for the stylistic diversity of his output, primarily a result of his wide-ranging musical tastes (classical, pop, rock, jazz and experimental music) and theatrical collaborations (Operating Theatre, I-Contact, Druid Theatre, for example), all of which have had varying degrees of influence on a compositional career spanning almost four decades, culminating in the Bourges Magisterium Award in 2007.
His large-scale, self-professed 'life's work', Babel (1989-99 with some raw material having been produced in the early 1980s), focuses on the celebration of language, in particular the multiplicity of musical languages and the exploitation of numerous technologies to create a multifarious work. From the one hundred and three individually crafted pieces, Doyle has constructed an expansive labyrinthine sonic arcology, comprising representations of real-world rooms and places, and imaginary dream spaces, presented through a multitudinous conglomeration of styles and generic hybrids, with inferences to a variety of World cultures, all internally connected through hundreds of aural links and connections.
This paper will present some of the salient aspects of Doyle's language in Babel as uncovered during my extensive analytical study of the work. It will incorporate his use of an 'Imposed Babel Structure', individual compositional devices and techniques, and the explicit existence of a unique multi-stylistic 'Babel-language', through the examination of a number of musical examples.
Frédéric Dufeu
Université Rennes 2, FR
Created on October 11th, 2003 at the Maison de Radio France in Paris, GRM Experience is a work signed by three composers coming from different electronic-related musical horizons. Whereas both Christian Fennesz and Mika Vainio usually perform in popular spheres of diffusion -- the former's processing of instrumental sources by digital means being largely marked by the aesthetics of pop and rock music, the latter's analogue methods inheriting from his experiments among the techno duo Pan Sonic -- Christian Zanési's art belongs to electroacoustic music as it has been produced in the Groupe de Recherches Musicales since 1977. Their collective creation was based on a first session of individual work from preliminary exchanged sound material, followed by a confrontation stage which led to the final composition, performed live in several European concerts and edited on CD.
Although many musical events attempt to bridge the gap between electroacoustic music and popular culture, actors from these two general spheres most often play jointly rather than through intimate collaborations. Furthermore, if musicology provides a wide range of approaches to technology-based creation made inside institutions, popular electronic music is generally regarded as a global phenomenon and few detailed studies have aimed at particular works or artists yet.
As GRM Experience constitutes a significant instance of an accomplished collaboration between artists sharing an extensive use of sound and music-dedicated technology but evolving in distinct aesthetic and socio-cultural domains, the main issue of this communication is to evaluate the musical contribution of each composer to the resulting work, in order to raise the influence of their personal background as well as the way their different strategies of creation may have been transformed by such a heterogeneous context. While some materials can clearly be recognized as being provided by one particular artist, other sequences are more ambiguous and reveal a careful work of collective development, which actually addresses the interactions involved in the compositional process.
Since no documentation subsists from the working sessions, such a study has to lean on a comparative analysis of the sound materials included in the published version of GRM Experience on the one hand and those found in the compositions by the three musicians as soloists on the other hand. This will usefully be completed by a direct account from some of the composers themselves. By investigating the interactions between different compositional methods and aesthetic influences involved in the creation of a unique and coherent work, this contribution leads to further considerations on the musicology of technology-based activities from popular origins, which may benefit from the analytical tools dedicated to electroacoustic music.
Max Giteck Duykers - Quantifying MIDI Use for Instrumental Composers [POSTER PRESENTATION]
Max Giteck Duykers
Stony Brook University, NY, USA
Very little has been written about the use and effects of computer tools by composers. In the most in-depth study on this topic, Watson (2006) argues that the discourse has tended to take the form of blaming the tools for flawed output of some composers. He suggests that this discourse overlooks the potential power the tools have and the necessity for a proper critical analysis. Watson's study is a critical first step toward understanding the use of these tools and the attitudes about their use, though it is focused mainly on music notation software. The present study adapts a wider definition of computer tools and their place among composers' multi-faceted creative processes.
Using a 50-question, anonymous web survey that I created and which had 196 participants, this project examines the use of MIDI samples, MIDI instruments, and computer music software, collectively called "computer tools", by instrumental and vocal music composers, both in their own music and in teaching composition. This study does not look at the use of computer tools to create fixed media music, or music which relies solely on sounds generated by computer devices or software.
Analyses included looking for trends based on age, computer experience, experience with composing, mediums of composition, types of tools used, and the stages of the creative processes in which the tools have the greatest impacts, positive and negative. Results suggest that there are no significant differences between ages, levels of computer experience or experience with composing, or medium. However, the most compelling indicator of attitudes and positive wisdom about the tools appears to be the processes in which they are used, with 64% of participants "bouncing" between the tools and acoustic methods of auditioning musical ideas, rather than strictly at the computer or strictly at an acoustic instrument.
These and other findings suggest that the definition of musicianship is changing drastically and very quickly, as composers use computer tools extensively throughout their composition processes. The power the computer tools have is now a potent force to be reckoned with, as they can guide and assist composers in invaluable ways, and also greatly mislead. Music educators may be faced with a young generation of inexperienced composers who rely heavily on the tools and whose aural conception of acoustic instruments is forming while they are also listening to MIDI mock-ups. These educators may find they have the most success by teaching students to "bounce" between the tools and acoustic auditioning methods, a process which should be focused on mastering the inner ear's reconciliation between live instruments and their MIDI representations.
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Travis Ellrott - On the Paradoxical Interlinking of Soundscape and Environmental Acousmatic Music
Travis Ellrott
Stony Brook University, NY, USA
There have been two articulated approaches to fixed-media music in which environmental sounds play a dominant role: Soundscape Music, which attempts to place the listener in a specific environment and Environmental Acousmatic music which, although it uses specific environmental sounds, encourages the listener to ignore contextual aspects and instead appreciate the inner substance of what they are hearing. (Environmental Acousmatic Music is a term borrowed from Francisco Lopez's article 'Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter' in Audio Culture: Readings on Modern Music.) Acousmatic music per se (as opposed to Environmental Acousmatic music), of course also uses recognizable environmental sounds, but they are often treated as symbolic, non-referential material within a real to abstract continuum.
Soundscape music is by now widely recognized as a unique style within electroacoustic music. Two soundscape composers who have written extensively about their music and the theories of soundscape composition are Hildegard Westerkamp and Barry Truax. Environmental acousmatic music meanwhile is not as widely recognized and is the singular approach of Francisco Lopez. Though Lopez has a broad catalogue of works that uses environmental sounds, the primary example of Lopez's use of environmental acousmatics is his Trilogy of the Americas.
Soundscape and environmental acousmatic music are formulated on differing approaches to environmental sound. Even though both use recognizable environmental sounds, the material is to be appreciated either for its outward, contextual qualities, as in the soundscape music of Westerkamp and Truax, or for its inward, abstract qualities, as in the environmental acousmatic music of Lopez. Comparing and contrasting the recording techniques of Westerkamp, Truax, and Lopez, however, reveals paradoxical aesthetic similarities. Because environmental sounds figure so prominently in their works, the main point of comparison is the first step in the recording chain, the microphone. The main point to consider is the way the microphone is positioned in relation to the sound source. This affects how the microphone 'listens' to the intended sound and accordingly affects the quality, or type, of sound the listener will eventually hear.
Regardless of the aesthetic approach, decisions must be made about how to record a sound, or more specifically how to position a microphone in relation to its sound source. This decision becomes the composer's fingerprint on the sound; it reveals what they think and how they think about a sound. Westerkamp and Truax allow for an approach that helps to create a musical experience of the environment. But it also, because of the transformational nature of the microphone, enables the listener to hear the inner matter of the environment in their compositions. Lopez, however, disavows the transformational nature of recording in order to create a purely acousmatic framework for his trilogy, which paradoxically creates the more realistic of the two approaches.
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Kenneth Fields
University of Calgary, CA
The major frameworks of network music to date are comprehensive in their emphasis of physical network properties, latency and topology, as well as network affordances, interactivity and collaboration. The above also address issues related to synchrony and presence, though here missing an opportunity to connect with a broader, more critically oriented media discourse, revolving as it does around the televisual. "The term 'liveness' has long been recognized in media discourse and in academic writing on media as a central feature of television and certain other media."[1] The present discussion attempts to extend a definition of network music, discussing liveness as a defining value of real-time research network music performances of late - mentioned in Schroeder.[2] While early television programming included live spectacle, "the shift from live to taped programs which occurred in the USA in the 1950s did not end the narratives about television liveness and belief that television viewers participate in synchronous and geographically situated events."[3] In the same way, early live radio art preceded the now predominant art form of manipulated/organized sound. "There is a relationship between television and internet notions of liveness but this discourse did not begin with television. Radio conventions, earlier technological devices... have also influenced the narratives about internet liveness" (Ibid).
Liveness diminishes with the imprinting of an event in a medium -- writing, painting, photography, phonography, film and video. While the hard drive is the more significant recorder in the computational medium, buffers are the key component of real-time network systems. Buffers are insidious (micro) imprinters of the telematic; larger buffers raise the mediational value. Large and redundant buffers offer clean audio, free of the gritty packet loss of unpredictable networks. Buffers mediate between liveness and the more intrusive algorithms that are becoming associated with smart networks (deep packet inspection).
[1] Couldry, Nick. 2004. Actor Network Theory and Media: Do They Connect and on What Terms. Ed. A. Hepp, Cultures of Connectivity.
[2] Schroeder, Franziska, Alain B Renaud, Pedro Rebelo, and Fernando Gualda. 2007. Addressing The Network: Performative Strategies for Playing APART. In Procedings International Computer Music Conference.
[3] White, M. 2006. Television and Internet Differences by Design: Rendering Liveness, Presence, and Lived Space. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 12, no. 3 (August): 341-355.
Jean-Charles François - Pratiques musicales, technologies, institutions PFL Traject Gerhard
Jean-Charles François, Pascal Pariaud,Gilles Laval
former director of Cefedem Rhône-Alpes, FR
Les technologies électroniques, loin de remettre en question les pratiques déjà existantes, les confortent au contraire et leur permet de co-exister avec de nouvelles formes d'interactions et d'utilisations des outils mis à disposition. Cette forme de co-existence égalitaire tend en même temps à effacer les classifications et hiérarchies héritées des dix- neuvième et vingtième siècles. Si les pratiques musicales aujourd'hui semblent continuer à se référer à des identités sociales et culturelles spécifiques (les "classiques" le jazz, telle ou telle musique traditionnelle, les musiques populaires, ...), les frontières entre les genres sont de plus en plus difficiles à déterminer Aucun genre ne peut plus prétendre à l'universalité ou à une suprématie sur tous les autres, aucun mode opératoire ne constitue plus le passage exclusif vers la reconnaissance de valeurs professionnelles. Chaque genre musical se trouve éclaté aujourd'hui en groupuscules valsant les étiquettes, dans une variation infinie de pratiques différenciées qui chacune convoque des combinaisons d'outils et des rapports sociaux spécifiques.
Les institutions -- notamment celles liées à la transmission, à l'enseignement et à la recherche -- ont des difficultés à faire face à la diversité du monde qui les entoure. Face à l'inquiétude qu'elles éprouvent par rapport à l'éventualité d'une perte de valeurs sûres, elles ont tendance à se recroqueviller vers ce qu'elles ont l'habitude de faire avec excellence, sans prendre la mesure des changements fondamentaux de notre société. Les pratiques directement liées aux technologies électroniques et aux nouveaux modes de communication peuvent, elles, se développer en dehors des institutions. Elles peuvent ainsi se targuer d'être "libres", en dehors des contrôles et des régulations, d'être au centre d'une nouvelle forme de démocratie "en actes". Les valeurs portées par les institutions ne sont plus en effet opérationnelles dans le contexte de ces musiques. Des réseaux informels tendent à remplacer alors l'organisation rigide des institutions.
Plusieurs questions se posent alors:
1) Peut-on se réjouir de l'évolution actuelle menaçant directement les programmes d'études dans les universités concernant les humanités, les arts et les sciences sociales ? Que risque-t-on de perdre dans la perte de ce qui a été si long et difficile à mettre en place?
2) Les réseaux informels ne sont-ils pas des "institutions" dans le sens dur de clubs exclusifs? Comment s'organise concrètement la rencontre des pratiques? Comment cette rencontre peut-elle se formaliser dans le respect mutuel et l'interaction, sans la présence de lieux spécifiques pensés à cet effet?
3) Le débat sur les valeurs a-t-il pour autant disparu au profit d'une liberté où tout se vaut également, ou bien au profit de valeurs purement marchandes ou techniques ? Quels sont les mécanismes permettant à un tel débat d'avoir la moindre chance de pouvoir s'exprimer de manière approfondie et sérieuse?
Dans l'espace urbain lyonnais (en France), deux institutions d'enseignement de la musique ont tenté de répondre de manière originale aux questions posées par la société des technologies électroniques. L'école de musique de Villeurbanne, créée en 1981 par le compositeur Antoine Duhamel, est un lieu unique accueillant en son sein toutes les pratiques importantes de notre monde musical. Gilles Laval et Pascal Pariaud qui enseignent dans cette institution depuis sa création, sont deux acteurs majeurs dans le développement des rencontres entre les genres musicaux et entre l'intérieur et l'extérieur de l'institution. Le Cefedem Rhône-Alpes créé en 1990 en vue de la formation des enseignants des conservatoires, a été développé par une équipe de recherche multidisciplinaire autour de Jean-Charles François (Gilles Laval et pascal Pariaud en font partie). Le programme de formation est centré là aussi sur la rencontre des diverses pratiques musicales, sur les rapports entre l'enseignement formel et informel, sur le rôle de l'artiste dans la Cité, et sur le soutien aux projets personnels des étudiants. Les deux institutions accueillent des étudiants utilisant exclusivement les instruments de la technologie électronique, dans toutes les esthétiques, et ils participent à part entière au débat en confrontation avec les autres.
Le trio d'improvisation PFL Traject, formé des trois noms auteurs de cette proposition, présenteront les termes du débat en prenant pour exemples d'une part leur expérience de formateurs et leur propre pratique d'improvisation basée sur la rencontre d'esthétiques et la co-construction des sonorités en utilisant tout moyen pour y parvenir, mélangeant ainsi tous les outils mis a disposition par la société électronique (ceux des sociétés anciennes et ceux plus spécifiquement électroniques).
Lee Fraser
University of Manchester, UK
This paper aims to arrive at some conclusions as to the essence of listening and discourse in acousmatic music. It provides a summary of the scope to which each of these responsive modes function, whilst trying to explain the unique relationship they share within the field. To this end, a set of listening attitudes is posited based on personal observations and the accounts given in Leigh Landy's study on the subject. In order to get some idea of what is fostered through an acousmatic training, and grasp what is readily available without such preparation, a number of common acousmatic considerations are measured for their relevance in and out of context. This provides the basis for a further investigation into the attraction of developing an interest in the acousmatic, and prompts a discussion about the prospects of making evaluative judgments in the field by enquiring into the very nature of value in the acousmatic arena.
Koichi Fujii - Reception of Elektronische Musik in Japan
Koichi Fujii
Keio University, Tokyo, Japan
In the 1950s and 60s, electroacoustic music was key to the development of modern Japanese music as well as other Western influences, such as serial technique.
This paper illustrates the early period of electroacoustic music in Japan focusing on the stylistic issue through music analysis of the Japanese elektronisch Musik pieces realized at the electronic music studio of NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai; Japan Broadcasting Corporation) in the late 1950s and early 60s. This paper is based on research and examination of source material presented in the previous paper at EMS03 and the article in Organised Sound 9 (1) 2004 by the author of this paper.
Generally speaking, in the earliest period of electroacoustic music in Japan, the stronger German influence can be seen not only in the elektronische Musik pieces discussed in this paper but also even in earliest Japanese musique concrète pieces, such as Les oeuvres pour musique concréte x, y, z (1954) and music from the film Akasen-chitai (Street of Shame or Red-light District) (1956) by Toshiro Mayuzumi (1929-97) and Musique concrète en sonore stéreophonique (1955) by Minao Shibata (1916-96). This can be pointed out as a result of the hasty and simultaneous reception of German elektronische Musik and dodecaphony. While most of Japanese composers, except Mayuzumi, had not listened to French musique concrète pieces before 1957, they had obtained information about the German techniques enough to embark on the production of elektronische Musik from the earliest stage. Besides written information from articles in Melos and the technical report from NWDR (Technishe Hausmittelungen des NWDRs), Mayuzumi and Makato Moroi (1930-) travelled abroad several times and visited Darmstadt and Donaueschingen. They directly experienced the German pieces through these travel.
However, soon after Shichi no Variation (Variations on the Numerical Principle of 7) (1956) coproduced by Mayuzumi and Moroi, the Japanese electroacoustic works came to a wide range of the characters and tendencies. Above all, the composers' interest in Japanese aesthetics should be noted. They are keen on employing Japanese specific subjects and/or materials not only in the other repertoire but also in the electroacoustic pieces, whilst American influence, particularly indeterminacy by John Cage (1912-92), can be seen in several works in the 1960s. They were struggling to establish their own musical idiom pursuing the originality and uniqueness of Japanese avant-garde music.
This paper principally discusses the reception process of German influence through examination into the source materials including Mayuzumi and Moroi's travel reports, and the stylistic issues through music analysis comparing the Japanese works with the German ones such as Elektronische Studien (1953/54) and Gesang der Jüngling (1955-56) by Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007). The Japanese works discussed in this paper include: Elektronisch Musik (Music for Sine Wave by Proportion of Prime Number, Music for Modulated Wave by Proportion of Prime Number, Invention for Square Wave and Sawtooth Wave) (1956) by Mayuzumi, Shichi no Variation, and Variété (1962) by Moroi. Graphic transcriptions of the Japanese works have been produced through aural analysis with the help of spectrum analysis with computer. All quotations from the source materials in Japanese are translated into English by the author of this paper, unless otherwise stated.
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Denise Garcia - Estúdio da Glória in the 1980s: an electroacoustic production center in Brazil
Denise Garcia
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, BR
In the sparsely reliable literature on electroacoustic music in Brazil (Neves 1977, Linz-Maués 1989) there is the statement that electroacoustic music began late in this country, either for lack of laboratories and equipment, either for lack of interest from radio stations and music schools. It is still not adequately studied the destructive role that the brazilian military dictatorship took over the pioneering efforts of some schools that approached the experimental music, like the interventions and resignations at the University of Brasilia (1965) and the Instituto Villa-Lobos in Rio de Janeiro (1969, 1972), when their teachers have been pushed out of the country, to other cities or out of his musical activity [1]. Nor is it coincidence that the first electroacoustic institutional music studios -- LLS of PUC-SP (1993), Studio PANaroma of UNESP (1994) and LAMUT of UFRJ (1995) [2] -- were implemented in Brazil only after the Brazilian government opened the market for import of audio equipment and computers.
Despite these facts are not contemptible in Brazilian history, contemporary experimental music flourished in the '60s and electroacoustic music with it as far as possible, following the trends and influences from the music developed in Europe and the USA. Reginaldo Carvalho composed the first musique concrète in 1956 (Si bemol), Jorge Antunes composed the first electronic work in 1962 (Valsa Sideral), Gilberto Mendes first conceived the work for mixed choir and tape in 1963 (Nascemorre) and Rogerio Duprat and Damiano Cozzella formed the first computer-assisted work in 1963 (Klavibm II) (Linz-Maués, 1989; Garcia, 2007b). And if it was not possible to deploy a well-equipped laboratory for electro-acoustic composition in the 60 and 70 despite several attempts in Rio, Brasilia and São Paulo, the role of pioneers composers in this period sowed the experimental spirit in the younger generations of composers who might have better material conditions of work in the following decades.
We can then divide the history of electroacoustic music in Brazil in three phases: the first experiments in the 60s, the commencement of an effective production in the 70s and 80s and their institutionalization in the years 1990 and 2000.
The 'Estúdio da Glória' was a production center of electroacoustic music and cultural entrepreneurship in Rio de Janeiro in the 80s and 90s, whose initiatives gathered that we might call second-generation pioneers of electroacoustic music in Brazil: Rodolfo Caesar, Vania Dantas Leite, Tim Rescala and Jocy de Oliveira [3]. Estúdio da Glória developed extensive work in spheres of cultural life in Rio, from commercial productions that gave them a living, to the most experimental projects involving electroacoustic music, improvisation and sound installations. Likewise, it was a place without a fixed configuration of occupation, where several composers and other musicians worked and is currently the personal studio of Tim Rescala. How did it start? Estudio da Gloria got from the meeting between Rodolfo Caesar and Tim Rescala. The first had returned from France a few years ago, after studies in electro-acoustic music at the Paris Conservatoire and was a pupil of Pierre Schaeffer. He sought a work space in their city where he could develop his artistic research in the area. The second was a young musician in the university, who had an area of study in the atelier of his father. Besides them, two other young musicians participated in this studio: the composer Tato Taborda and the flutist Sandra Lobato. It is no coincidence that they all had their initial training at the Instituto Villa-Lobos, the school which, under the direction of Reginaldo de Carvalho was completely directed to experimental music and that even after being dismantled by the military dictatorship still had a direction for modern music. Rodolfo Caesar was a student there during Carvalho's period and abandoned his studies when there was military intervention. Tim Rescala, Tato Taborda and Sandra Lobato studied there in the early 80s, having been students of composition in Vânia Dantas Leite classes [4].
The participation of each member of the studio was sealed with a contribution of equipment needed to run the studio. Moreover, they were joined by other collaborators: the luthier José Eduardo Nascimento, who made the acoustics of the studio setting with the design by Conrado Silva, the studio technician Luiz Cruz, who performed there personal recordings and in collaboration with composers, and the engineer José Augusto Lima, who solved technical problems and developed electronic applications for the group. These collaborations did not involve any employment relationship (but some commercial activity), but was the result of a confluence of common interests and fraternal affinities.
This group of composers also formed partnerships with other composers, such as the composer Vânia Dantas Leite, who already had his own studio in the seventies. Together they were cultural entrepreneurs in order to organize concerts in which they promoted their work together. As Vânia Dantas was not linked directly to Estúdio da Glória, they firmed these partnerships with the names of musical groups that have been discarded, and reopened under new names over the years: first in the 80s, the 'Conjunto Vazio' (empty set), formed by Vania Dantas, Rodolfo Caesar, Tim Rescala and Tato Taborda; in the 90 appears the GME -- Electroacoustic Music Group of Rio, made up of Aquiles Pantaleão, Jocy de Oliveira, Rodolfo Caesar, Rodrigo Cicchelli, Tim Rescala and Vânia Dantas Leite (Pedroso, 1990); in the late '90s was founded Numexi - Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia.
From the year 1990, when Caesar left for his doctoral studies in England, two young composers were working in Estúdio da Glória, Aquiles Pantaleão and Rodrigo Cicchelli, considered the second generation of composters of the Estúdio. With the spread of personal computers and development of computer audio, the need to work in the studio declined and composers naturally built their personal workstations. Thus Estúdio da Glória is no longer a cooperative.
Importantly, only in the 80s, composers of Estúdio da Glória produced, undertook or participated in more than 40 documented arts events, 27 of which were concert of electroacoustic music in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Brasilia. Other important works developed by these groups is given in conjunction with the visual and performing arts and they worked with leading artists such as Tunga, Iole de Freitas, Waltercio Caldas, Milton Machado, Regina Miranda, Eliane Carneiro, Celina Joseph and Angela Leite Lopes. The Group spread their activities also in Europe and Latin America with the cooperation of CIRM and CDMC/Brasil.
Perhaps for this large scale of operation, these composers have developed especially in the '90s an interdisciplinary art work, named by Vania Dantas Leite music-video, a production that was typical of the Carioca culture in the '90s and then spread in the younger generations of today.
[1] Claudio Santoro left Brasilia for Germany, Reginaldo de Carvalho left Brasilia for Rio de Janeiro and from there to Piauí, Lins Jaceguay left Rio de Janeiro and music, Jorge Antunes went from Rio de Janeiro to Argentina, Rogério Duprat Cozzella and Damiano left Brasilia for São Paulo, interrupting their activities in experimental music.
[2] LLS -- Laboratório de Linguagens Sonoras of Catholic University of São Paulo; Studio PANaroma of State University of São Paulo; LAMUT -- Laboratório de Música e Tecnologia of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
[3] Jocy de Oliveira has not worked in the 'Estúdio da Glória' but participated in various cultural projects with the composers of EG, and is considered a composer of first generation pioneers of electroacoustic music in Brazil.
[4] Instituto Villa-Lobos was former the Conservatório Nacional de Canto Orfeônico fundado em 1942 por Villa-Lobos; under the direction of Reginaldo de Carvalho the school changed completely the direction and took a new name IVL; after the militar intervenction it integrates the CLA- Center of Art and Literature of the UNIRIO -- State University of Rio de Janeiro.
Krystal J. Grant
Stony Brook University, NY, USA
In a lecture from the Conferencia Festival Visiones Sonoras (Conference of the Festival of Sonic Visions) in November 2007, Mexican sound artist Israel Martinez says, "The education or the sensitization [of the public to electroacoustic art music] is simpler than it appears, but in order for this to be realized, we have to begin to convince ourselves that our work has to go out to the streets and abandon academic and/or experimental egocentrism. We have to return to society what we have 'sucked' from her through the daily experiences that feed our creation, that are a fountain of inspiration, we have to ennoble these disciplines, however avant-garde they may appear."
For the second biennial Transitio MX International Festival of Electronic and Video Art in Mexico City, Martinez created a piece that exhibits the ideals of which he speaks: Pieza en tres movimientos para compartir con desconocidos o amigos en un paseo por la metrópoli en automóvil (Piece in three movements to share with strangers or friends on a drive through the metropolis). In this work, "daily experiences" are sounded as a chorus of blinkers contrasted with a shouting crowd, a personal ad compared with two couples vocalizing sexual intercourse, and radio static conflated with tires moving on pavement.
The arrangement and processing of this collection of sounds does not by itself constitute the piece. Pieza en tres movimientos literally "go[es] out to the streets" with a drive that begins at the contemporary art museum Laboratorio Arte Alameda and ends in the hub of the historic district, El Zocalo. This journey from present to past is intensified by the piece concluding with the recorded shouting of masses of people as if they were participating in the century-old Mexican tradition of protesting from this location. The phrases they yell are void of meaning without an understanding of the site's role as a commercial, religious, and tourist center during the Aztec empire (1325-1521), the Spanish colony (1521-1821), and the Mexican state (1821-present). The automobile is central to the work not only as the means of motion but also as an invitation to reflect on the role of cars in contemporary urban society, specifically that of Mexico City. Martinez' Pieza en tres movimientos goes beyond site-specificity to interpellate Mexican history and identity in a culturally specific work.
M. Adkins - Listening to the unheard
Sanne Krogh Groth, University of Copenhagen
Mats Lindström, EMS Stockholm
"The present (...) is ongoing, but once inscribed in ethnography, it is marked by the syntax of pastness. The past, in contrast, is frozen in a timelessness, from which it must be wrenched to be synthesized into the presentness of history. The disjuncture between past and present makes it increasingly difficult for fieldwork to examine either, but necessary to examine both. (...) History, too, forms in a temporal space, contested because fragments of the past remain in the everyday of the present." (Bohlman 1997, p. 249)
With Bohlman's thoughts in mind, the paper intends to discuss the dialogue between past and present at today's artistic institutions. Digitalization of tape archives followed up by various research projects are going on at many places. With the electronic music studio EMS as a case, this paper will question which -- if any -- effect such initiatives have on today's artistic and administrative work.
The paper will be presented as a dialogue between music historian Sanne Krogh Groth (DK) and director of EMS Mats Lindström (S). Groth has recently finished her dissertation on the EMS' early history (1960s and 1970s) in which new information about the institution was conveyed. Along with this research, EMS has also started to digitalize its tape archive, by which many pieces that was forgotten, now becomes accessible.
The dialogue will take its point of departure in Lindström's first reaction after reading the dissertation: "When I came to EMS in the beginning of the 1990s, I thought we were neutral. But now I realize we weren't. We were carrying on a tradition without knowing it." Groth will go into dialogue with Lindström and ask further into this statement -- if this new realisation would have made or will make any changes to his choices as both composer and director at EMS. She will also ask into his thoughts on if and how the digitalization of the archive will effect the music that is produced at EMS today.
After the conference the discussion will be transcribed and published.
Bohlman, Phillip 1997: Fieldwork in the Ethnomusicological Past. Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley (red.): Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, New York 1997.
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Christopher Haworth - Against Time: On Visual Aesthetics in Sonic Art
Christopher Haworth
Queens University Belfast, UK
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno employs music to critique philosophy, drawing attention to its dynamism: its non-static, non-totalizable nature which, he says, performs a 'critique...of the presence of the content in the here and now'.[1] The total musical fact is never fully disclosed to present perception due to music's immutable evolution in time, and the lack of an absolute position from which to perceive sound. His thinking - and others like his, that resists absolutes in favour of a processual, negative unveiling of truth - has influenced contemporary discourse in the field of sonic studies greatly. The absolute speaks from visual culture; it reminds us of the linear perspective of classical painting that literally positions the viewer in space, apart and at a distance from the object of consideration. Sonic experience is expressed, not in the essentialized, flat result of the artist's work but in the process of its coming to be, where colours constantly change, nature is animate and experience is multi-modal. We might say it is captured in Hans Namuth's film of Jackson Pollock working, rather than in the finished painting itself. But what this discourse fails to account for is the music and sound art that, whether knowingly or not, covets a kind of 'pure instantaneousness'. It is my contention that, in certain incarnations of sound art, noise, drone and techno music, an aesthetic is at work that exercises no less than the continual evasion of time and all its effects, via the pure artistic medium of time itself.
The main body of this paper considers, not how this might be achieved particularly, but how and why it should come to be. It follows an affectual ontology of sound experience outlined by Steve Goodman, whose notion of the 'audio virus' describes a sonic entity that literally 'records' phenomenal experience onto the body, and then proceeds to 'play it back' each subsequent time we hear it. These are traces, negatives of the here and now that are unrepresentable in thought; it is only through music that this profound feeling of anamnesis is produced. And whilst this effect is seen to contribute to music's emotive power -- indeed, discussion of it spans expertise, from academic writing to overheard conversations in the street -- it can equally be felt as an intrusion; as the past invading the present and pulling us away from our immediate focus.
Music as pure instantaneousness harbours the promise of an ideal: an absolutely present sonic encounter that is unbeholden to time and memory, able to be completely forgotten outside of the time of its performance. It recalls the visually-biased modernist aesthetics of Clement Greenberg or Michael Fried, who described the experience of standing before a painting by Kenneth Noland or Jules Olitski as having '...no duration at all...as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it.'[2]
I will conclude by putting these ideas to work in a brief discussion of Catherine Christer Hennix's 'digital infinitary composition': Zero Time (2010); a piece that purports to sound exactly the same forwards as it does backwards.
References
[1] Adorno, T.W., 1990. Negative Dialectics, Routledge.
[2] Fried, M., 1998. Art and objecthood, University of Chicago Press.
Jaclyn Heyen, Deep Listening Institute, Kingston, NY
Iris A. Hodgson, University of Guelph, Ontario, CA
What motivates us to seek musical expression? People with disabilities face unique barriers when it comes to creating and performing music, and when attending musical events. As disability theorist and activist Simi Linton notes, "disabled people seeking pleasurable experiences are thought to be searching for something to soothe, to comfort, or to take their mind off their troubles, rather than something to activate the imagination, heighten awareness, or to spur themselves on to social change."
The assumption that people with disabilities are passive and dependent leads to the tendency for artistic institutions to accommodate people with disabilities as audience members, without making allowances for disabled performers. The medicalization of disability tends to result in the perception that people with disabilities who do make music do so only for therapeutic or rehabilitative purposes. This presentation will focus on going beyond these stereotypes and provide theoretical and applied solutions aimed at opening the 'dancefloor' of collaboration and music making to people of all abilities.
Elizabeth Hoffman
New York University, USA
As artist Richard Lohse has written, in "Art in the Age of Technology" (1982): "Systematic creative forms represent a parallel to the instrumental structure of present-day reality in civilization. Although identical...they simultaneously question the social reality of these structures. By using objective means, transparent methods which can be calculated in advance,...constructive art is destined in its philosophy and working methods to further our quest of changing society and the environment."
While extra-musical social commentaries of new electroacoustic and computer musics are often quite palpable, it is typically less obvious how aesthetic choices themselves might be seen to pose questions and proposals regarding our environment. This paper will offer some observations about this in the context of diverse contemporary practice; and it will consider simultaneously the value of applying such standard terms as "language," "style," and "genre" toward this end. In passing, the paper will present disparate views of electroacoustic composers themselves on the meaning of the term "language."
Hu Xiao, Bai Xiaomo, Lu Minjie, Han Yanmin, Chen Dacang, Yang Wanjun
Sichuan Conservatory of Music, CH
The electronic music has developed from the single mode to multimedia art including interactive music, algorithmic composition, new soundscape art and real-time music making, etc,. The installation art work is one kind of the interactive music which is also an synthetic and new kind of multimedia art. Usually, it combines the video factor, audio factor with the multi-culture. The interactive computer technology and realtime control of electronic music are often applied in the installation art work. Furthermore, the commercial use of installation art works in public environments and society is not only possible but also will be popular in the future. Therefore, how to design the installation art work is a hot topic in recent years.
How to conceive the art idea of an installation art work? How to design the experiments and schemes? The paper discusses about the questions. Besides, it summurizes the concrete methods and new approaches from some installation art works including the Finally, the composition mode of interdisciplinary group collaboration is becoming more and more important. The New Media Art Research Group of SCCM by six teachers from computer music labatory of Sichuan Conservatory of Music collaborate to design the multimedia art projects. During some works' experiments, they tried some methods and meanings in the composition. The collaboration include the overallplan, 3D modeling and Animation, the sound design and programming, the Video/Visual design and programming, the coodination with architecture and testing, the MCU (microprocessor control unit) design. From this angle, this paper also introduces how does the group get the succesful collaboration in designing the installation art work.
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Gary S. Kendall - Bridging a Shamanic Worldview and Electroacoustic Art
Gary S. Kendall
Queen's University Belfast, UK
Much of my compositional effort over the last ten years has been directed toward creating works that bridge the world of Peruvian shamanism with the world of technological music. These works have included two sound installations, Wayda (wind) and Unu (water), and two multi-channel concert works, Qosqo and Ikaro. All of these works emerged out of a need to re-conceptualize my musical practice in the face of the personal changes I experienced during years of study with Peruvian shamans. My first contact with the shamanic world occurred in 1990. After I had read every book I could find on Andean and Amazonian shamanism, one of the authors came to Chicago to give a workshop. It was at this workshop that I had my first unmistakable encounter with the non-physical world. After that, I pursued shamanism with a total commitment. I began work with a series of Peruvian shamans, some of whom were training me in the traditional way to do what they did while others were re-fashioning their practices for westerners like me. My experiences thoroughly undermined my old identity and totally reshaped my worldview as I moved deeper and deeper into the shamanic world. And now, I am an active energetic healer and I travel around the globe conducting the ceremonies to which my guides have led me. It seems that my reshaped life is the produce of a world in which an Andean shaman can fly a few hours to Chicago to conduct a ceremony.
One of my goals when I started this journey was to understand the shaman's use of sound so that I could apply this knowledge in my own compositions. At this stage, it is total shift of my whole worldview that informs my approach to composition. The influence of this shamanic worldview is probably best discussed through Ikaro, my most recent effort at bridging these worlds. In the traditional of the indigenous people of the upper Amazon, Ikaros are the sacred healing songs sung by medicine people during ritual ceremonies. My composition, Ikaro, is based on a collection of Ikaros sung by the Amazonian healer don Felipe Collantes Sinakay, a master of the Ayahuasca plant medicine. I became familiar with Don Felipe's songs during numerous all-night ceremonies in which I directly experienced how he used his songs in healing. The particular songs used in my piece were recorded by Mauricio Ardila in the Amazonian jungle in the summer of 2008.
The single most important thing to know about the compositional process of Ikaro is that the vast majority of the compositional decisions were made by divination. The divination was performed by holding a small crystal pendulum over my personal collection of sacred objects, a practice that I learned from my very first Peruvian teacher. During the initial divination of Ikaro, I held the intention to just let the music come as it will, but to me it ended up mirroring specific aspects of Andean and Amazonian ceremonial practice just the same. In particular, it mirrors the stages of an Ayahuasca ceremony. One of my teachers had taught me that an Ayahuasca ceremony had three stages. The first was an encounter with the lower world, a world of less refined spirits. For many people this becomes an encounter with their own demons and issues as spiritual entities. The second was an encounter with the middle world, the world that humans inhabit. In this short part of the ceremony, people see themselves with great clarity and receive information about how to improve their lives. In the third part of the ceremony, there is an encounter with the upper world, a world of highly refined energies and spirits. In my own mind, there are three major sections in Ikaro associated with these.
So besides these references to aspects of ceremony, what is the essential nature of shamanic composition? Ikaro is not about the soundscape of Peru nor is it a kind of soundscape composition. Ikaro was never for me about the sound of the shaman's voice and I have avoided fetishizing don Felipe's voice as I have avoided signal processing that would have treated his voice as sound to manipulate. Ikaro is not ultimately about sound or sound structure. It is not about the don Felipe's songs per se. On a very important level, all these things provide a focus for the mind while something else is happening. But it is ultimately not even about the listener's mental activity. It is about consciousness and how a listener's energetic field is affected by the sound. Viewed from this perspective, shamanic composition carries with it a great responsibility for its impact on the unseen world.
Christine Sun Kim - Listening with One's Eyes
Christine Sun Kim
Bard College, NY, USA
Considering the fact that I was born deaf, my learning process is shaped by American Sign Language interpreters, subtitles on television, written conversations on paper, emails, and text messages. These communication modes have often conveyed, filtered, and limited information, which naturally leads to a loss of content and a delay in communication. Thus, my understanding of reality is filtered, and potentially distorted. This is part of the core of my practice as an artist and I am now taking ownership of sounds after years of speech therapy. Instead of seeking for one's approval to make "correct" sounds, I perform, vocalize, and/or visually translate them based on my perception.
As a visual and performance artist, it is always my intention to approach sound by constantly pushing it to a different level of physicality, and despite my complex relationship with Deaf culture, I attempt to translate sound while unlearning society's views and etiquettes around it. Using my conceptual judgment and compromised understanding, I challenge and question its visual absence and sometime tactile presence. Fortunately, with today's advanced technology such as computer programs and high bass speakers, I have been given alternative access to sound. It does not necessarily mean that it's a mere substitute or replacement of sound.
I am currently pursuing my MFA in Sound at Bard College in New York. My work consists of recurring themes of extremities and a strong juxtaposition of the embodied and disembodied pieces. More specifically, I have created sculptures that produce sounds powered by an electric source. These sculptures express a reflection on my artificial relationship with people that do not know sign language via text messages, email and other forms of written communication. Additionally, I have performed with my own voice through a transducer that was placed on my throat and used a delay pedal as a means of translation that resulted in my vocalization with a ten second delay. This awakening experience allowed me to recognize the limitations within languages, in particular written English and American Sign Language. Moreover, this was also an opportunity to put my cultural identity aside and study my own internal vocalization, thereby offering a new tool to signify my presence from within. Also, it presented a delayed vocalization as a memory. This formed an internal and closed feedback system, expanding the distance between the audience and myself.
In December of 2010, I developed a two part performance with two collaborators titled "In Out Mind; Out In Space," which took place inside a former convent's prayer room. During the first segment, my partner and I collaboratively danced to the beats in our heads without any real sound, creating the incentive for the audience to listen by looking at our rhythmic movement. The pews were set up in a polygon shape to surround and confine the audience while our performance took place outside the polygon. The pews supported a line of strong head lights facing inside, culminating in an uncomfortable setting. These bright white and color lights were intentionally beamed on the audience to blur the view of our performance. Confronted with the absence of sound, this pushed them to 'listen' with their eyes. Before the second segment, our places with the audience were switched. The audience had the opportunity to contemplate the relationship and distance between them and us. It also gave an odd sense of voyeurism and curiosity as the lights faced us. The segment included our acts of exploring reflective sound and embodying the polarity of our communicative modes. There were three basic tools that included a two-sided mirror, a guitar amplifier, and a microphone. The dancer used the mirror to direct the light towards the stained windows, walls with peeled paint, ceiling, floor, and audience. The moving light symbolized live sound akin to a visual language; it was intended to metaphorically manifest sound, not directly or literally. I used the microphone not to vocalize but to use as a painter's brush to scratch, trace, rub, or hit the surface where light was focused on. When the light moved onto the ceiling, I threw the microphone up against it a few times until it hit the surface. A similar experiment was done with the participation of the audience. I used the microphone on a person; I rubbed his wool coat and hair with the microphone and dropped it to the floor. A few audience members and I spontaneously kicked it around, in a very ironic way of communicating with physical sounds. Overall, I found it to be an act of attempting to unconventionally experience interiors of the space with surface sound instead of using other senses.
Performance art is an excellent tool to go beyond the vehicle of language without the ability to hear and to eschew traditional composition of listening. While dealing with the interferences of deaf culture, linguistics, and sound restrictions, there are many factors to consider: participation of audience, improvisation, space/architecture, and electric instruments. Overall, I find it critical to invite communities to view, participate, and discover the hidden aspects of sound, creating multi-jointed perceptions.
Volkmar Klien - The artist and the listening machine
Volkmar Klien
Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Wien, Austria
In recent decades machine listening and related areas of research like computational auditory scene analysis and music information retrieval have been very active fields of research. As ready to use tools stemming from this basic research are slowly becoming available to sonic artists for use in digital instruments for performance purposes or in software driving installative setups, it is important for artists and researchers alike to continuously reflect on the conceptualisations of human listening underlying these machine listening approaches and their potential implications in sonic art practise.
From the point of science listening at first glance might be interpreted as dealing with the perception and interpretation of sound pressure waves. But much rather than that it is one form of human interaction with the environment as a whole. It is this quality of human listening that enables sonic arts to be such powerful media for the exploration of human perception and interaction with his or her world.
Contemporary sound arts do not exhaust themselves in providing audible objects in time by making use of traditional musical instruments or loudspeakers. Sonic artists strive to create situations and experiences allowing listeners, the fellow artists, to not only explore their world aurally in new ways but aim at suspending engrained listening habits to expand and sharpen individual listening practise. Machine listening research can hence be seen as not only a provider of potentially powerful tools to the sonic artist but as a neighbouring, if methodologically rather distinct, discipline in the study of human listening in its multitude of contexts.
The paper proposed here aims at outlining some of the possibilities as well as problematic issues relating to the use of computational listening systems with their third person descriptions of the acoustic environment and their potential roles in artistic contexts.
Yuriko Hase Kojima - Live Electronic Contemporary Music in Japan: History and Aesthetics
Yuriko Hase Kojima
Shobi University, JP
Since "Imaginary Landscape" by John Cage, various types of live electronic music have been created all over the world. Among several different categories within this vast field, for Classical trained composers, live electronic music has been one of the most interesting area of studies, where composers can combine electroacoustic music to their traditional contemporary instrumental/vocal writings real-time. However, due to the necessity of advanced compositional techniques and extensive knowledge of both acoustic music and electroacoustic music, this area of creation has not been proliferated yet.
Japan is no exception. We may not neglect serious problems such as a deficiency of educational and creational environments and a lack of performance opportunities. In the first place, we may have to clarify what can be done musically with this kind of technology, and at least pay attention to the aesthetical values, the historical influences, and the musicological significance.
As Japanese music industry flourished in the second half of the Twentieth Century, the Yamaha, Roland and Korg, have become the world's leading companies developing modern synthesizers and other electronic music devises. However, there has always been a considerable gap between the field of music technology and that of music composition, and it has caused retardation of the development of musical creation with technology in Japanese art music scene. As a non-Western nation with a long and distinctive history, Japan has to admit the slowness of adaptation of new methods to our culture. In fact, it took extra twenty years or so for Japan to realize there is a new trend in art music with technology, such as spectral music.
There are only a small number of Japanese composers who studied live electronic music for Classical instrument(s) or voice(s) at the institutions outside Japan and experienced the performance practices around technology. In order to promote a new possibility in art music in Japan, it is necessary for the predecessors to transmit their knowledge to the next generation. I would like to research particularly on live electronic music in Japan and approach some essential questions: how this kind of music was brought in to Japan, how it has been accepted by the composers and researchers of contemporary Classical music, and how it has contributed to Japanese art music scene as a whole.
Marinos Koutsomichalis
Contemporary Music Research Centre (KSYME), GR
What makes a live performance aesthetically intriguing or meaningful? How can a performance be essentially site-specific and in what ways a work can manifest itself in a particular space? In turn, why would this be of any interest to an audience? What are those qualities that make a location suitable to accomodate a work? Is improvisation still meaningful at all and in what extend? Should a work remain live at any cost? What level of interaction and control should the performer allow to himself? What is communicated in a performance and why would it be of any interest? Does a performance necessarily aim to some sort of expression?
Such are the questions the author attempts to answer via his artistic output. In this paper he describes his main goals and practices, pinpointing down all those key elements that make them substantially live, site-specific and (hopefully) aesthetically intriguing. It is further shown how these originate from a profoundly rooted exploratory attitude to form a unique aesthetic ethos. It is of paramount concern for the author to address the technical challenges a live electronic music paradigm poses while remaining faithful to his aspirations.
Aesthetically speaking, the author describes his general strategy in terms of three interrelating goals: 'Ekstasis' (out-of-stasis in Greek); that is to bring a location out of its usual way to be. 'Gelassenheit' (as introduced by Heidegger); the state where sound lies blurred in uncertainty and mystery -- its phenomenological quintessence. 'Psychagogia' (literally meaning 'soul-leading' in Greek); that is to create some sort of profound engagement between the work and the audience and have it 'moved' in some sense.
Various techniques have been keeping actual artistic output consistent with all the aforemen- tioned. Selected examples will be discussed with references to the relevant compositional techniques. It is further suggested that substantial site-specificity is essential for a successful live performance as far as electracoustic music or sound-art is concerned.
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Cathy Lane - Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP)
Cathy Lane
University of the Arts London, UK
This paper will consider spoken word composition as a distinct area of artistic practice and research within an interdisciplinary context by considering the work of a selection of contemporary artists whose creative work is part of an intermittent ongoing tradition of artistic investigation of the spoken word. Although they come from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds including music composition, sound art and performance poetry for each of these artists sounded language and the spoken word provides the materials and often the means by which they carry out their artistic investigations.
In this paper I will identify and discuss some similarities and differences between the various cross- disciplinary approaches to playing with words which run through their works. In many cases their concerns relate back to their historical antecedents such as the poets, performers and other artists working with sound in the early part of the twentieth century, including the Futurists, Zaum poets, Dadaists and Lettristes who sought to invent new languages and new words in order to express their vision of reality and to deconstruct and reduce the power of language. Other artists are examining and revealing the experiences and complexities of contemporary society by engaging with how spoken language works and manifests itself. These works reflect more recent developments in linguistics and the psychology and philosophy of language revealing how meaning is negotiated and transmitted between individuals and groups, across cultures and through languages and their translations.
Most of the sound works mentioned in this paper can be found on a curated audio compilation Playing with Words: an audio compilation freely available online at www.gruenrekorder.de. A double compact disc is also available from Greunrekorder. This compilation features works by over forty artists including Tomomi Adachi, Jaap Blonk, Lars-Gunnar Bodin, Sten Hanson, Mikhael Karikis, Brandon LaBelle, Leigh Landy, Paul Lansky, Katharine Norman, Nye Parry, Amanda Stewart , Barry Truax, Michael Vincent, Trevor Wishart and Pamela Z. Their works negotiate potential oppositions such as semantic play and abstraction, musical and narrative structures, speech and song, one voice and many and draw their influences from many sources including poetry, music, song, theatre, typography and graphic art, philosophy, radio, performance art, linguistics, fine art, literature and the observation and experience of every day life. Many of the artists on these compilation have also contributed to an edited book entitled Playing with Words: the spoken word in artistic practice which is available from Cornerhouse Books at www.cornerhouse.org.
Mats Lindström - Working with gender issues within the field of electroacoustic music
Mats Lindström
EMS Stockholm, Sweden
The electronic/electroacoustic music field was heavily dominated by men during the pioneer years. The unbalanced situation remains and is still obvious. There are some explanatory models that aim to describe this as a fact that cannot be influenced, such as technology/electroacoustic music being a male area for instance. Such explanations involve an acceptance of the current situation and represent a threat to the future relevance of the art form. To achieve a balance, active work must be done. One of the most important actions in order to renew this artistic field is to recruit female artists. It is therefore necessary to find models to work for the normalization of gender balance. It may also be necessary to question our current approach and our definition of our field and its borders to other artfields.
This presentation describes some of the measures Elektronmusikstudion has taken lately to improve gender balance. The tools used at Elektronmusikstudion for statistic monitoring is presented as well as an overview of activities outside Elektronmusikstudion that have affected the gender balance such as festivals and general funding policy.
In order to change the situation a number of measures can be applied. Some strategies used by Elektronmusikstudion will be presented such as:
Recruiting new users from other institutions than conservatories and music colleges, such as art schools, media universities, radio/TV colleges, film schools etcetera.
Running your own courses and start with improving gender balance with teachers and lecturers.
Creating statistic tools for monitoring the results. Striving actively to create gender balance in high profile public presentations.
Commissioning works from female composers.
Levy Lorenzo
Stony Brook University, NY, USA
With developments in technology during the middle of the 20th century, composers in the Western Classical tradition have attempted to incorporate the sound worlds enabled by electronics into avant-garde music. New sounds can be electronically synthesized and sequenced. Existing sounds can be recorded, electronically processed and then played back. Additionally, electronic sounds can be used in conjunction with acoustic sounds. Thus the sonic dimensions for composition have drastically been widened. However, there are implications of the use of such technology on the performance practice within the Western Classical concert tradition in which this new music exists. Primarily, the live performance element is affected as electronic sounds do not come from the manipulation of acoustic instruments, but originate from loudspeakers in the concert hall. The relationship between audience and performer in live performance is affected by the introduction of this alternative, disembodied sound source and it is this relationship that will be the focus of this paper.
Before examining in detail the new aspects of performance with electronics, let us state the existing relationships between performer and audience in the Western Classical concert tradition. The role of the live performer is to bring a musical composition to life by being responsible for the technical execution and aesthetic intention, to allow for the realization of music in the present sonic medium. Positioned on the concert stage, the performer embodies the music by acting as a medium for the composer's ideas, and manipulates a musical instrument to play the music to the audience. Located in the audience area of a concert hall and facing the stage, the concertgoers are visually and sonically engaged by the performer. The audience associates the music that they hear with the performer's visible actions. The audience does not have to understand exactly the physical techniques of the performer, but simply has to believe that the performer has complete control over the sounds and is deliberately creating the music. Thus, there is a sense that the music is being created at that particular moment in time by a source that is very alive. This is the satisfaction of attending a live concert -- to experience the live realization of music. In this highly ritualized event, the excitement is elevated by the awareness of an element of risk. The performer's tasks are highly complex and it is possible that he/she might make a mistake (he/she is human after all). The result of a successful performance is amazement and awe from the audience perspective, that this incredible physical feat yielded music, for which the audience holds the performer directly accountable. Thus, there is a metaphysical connection between performer and audience, which exists in a musical communication channel informed by sight, sound and emotion.
This paper will examine some of the first instances of the introduction of electronics onto the concert stage and the resulting affects on live performance. Consequently, new roles will emerge in the performance practice of electronic music. In particular the audio engineer will enter a non-traditional performer role. Ultimately, after considering the issues associated with the use of various configurations of electronic sounds in live performance, I will continue the argument, that Joel Ryan has made clear, that the traditional satisfaction of live music can be preserved by the use of Electronic Musical instruments.
"The future of electronic music, of computer aided music, in fact of new music in general, lies in its developing an instrumental approach This includes inventing ways to effect sounds and for the "playing" of more abstract musical material. Without a respect for the musical touch, contact could be lost what is uniquely musical intelligence."[1]
Thus the electronic musical instrument designer will play a key role in the performance of electronic music.
I will make my argument with the following assumptions in mind. First, the goal of the use of electronic sounds is to explore new sound worlds that were not previously available. The intention is not to replace acoustic sounds and thus it is not the goal to make acoustic instruments obsolete. Second, the intangible emotional satisfaction of creating and receiving live music is appreciated and acknowledged as very real. Therefore, the live performance of music is something that the musical community intends to preserve.
[1] Joel Ryan. "Touch, Music and Computers." Accessed December 18, 2010. http://www.xs4all.nl/~jr/Music%20and%20Touch.htm
Theodoros Lotis - Tribalism and Local Structures in a Music and Video Installation
Theodoros Lotis
Ionian University, GR
In a world of globalisation, where economic borders are suppressed whilst national and racial barriers are erected higher, the notions of tribalism and tribal behaviorism remain as dominant and indicative as always. Although tribes no longer exist, in the western world, these notions are nowadays related to groups, such as political or athletic associations, economic factions, trade-union organisations and professional guilds, religious teams, social networks on the Internet, etc. These groups often have simple structures with few significant distinctions between their individuals. Tribalism describes the loyalties that individuals feel towards their group/tribe and the way these loyalties affect their behavior and their attitudes towards others. It also refers to the strong cultural identity that characterises oneself as a member of one group/tribe. These characteristics shape the tribal consciousness and loyalty to the tribal values and to the customs and beliefs of a tribal society. Each time a tribe is in danger of corruptive influences from external sources (other tribes), these values provide for strategies of defense.
This paper describes the strategies and methodologies for creating and evolving local structures in a music and video installation. The fundamentals for creating these structures derive from the application of basic tribal rules. The installation -- whose mechanism is developed in MaxMSP -- consists of four sound groups, which will be referred to as tribes. The first three tribes reproduce a recorded saxophone sound, whilst the fourth tribe reproduces a recorded voice. Each tribe has its own local/tribal rules and values, as well as mechanisms for defending its identity from external invasions. An external invasion is defined as an attempt of a tribe to degenerate the local sonic parameters of another tribe. The local rules and values of each tribe are related to sonic parameters, such as amplitude, playback speed and panoramics. At a higher-level structural order, numerical values and attributes are binded to and influence different parameters, which control the overall sound transformation and the playback speed of the video. Thus, a self-evolving network of tribes is created, in which each tribe adjusts its structural development accoding to external influences and its own limitations. At the highest structural level, a time machine controls the temporal development of the installation by producing cycles of predefined durations. Through successive cycles, the tribes evolve influencing both music and image.
Hugh Lynch and Robert Sazdov
University of Limerick, Ireland
Presenting musical composition on a multi-channel loudspeaker configuration has now been practiced for over 60 years. Pierre Schaeffer in partnership with Pierre Henry composed a number of works, one of the works was Symphonie pour un Homme Seul (1950). The composition was presented on a tetrahedral configuration, which consisted of a frontal pair, a single rear and one elevated loudspeaker (Zvonar, 2004). This is an example of one of the first presentation of a music composition on a three-dimensional (3D) multi-channel loudspeaker configuration. From that point onwards, many composer began to present their works on multi-channel loudspeaker configurations. One such composer, Karlhenze Stockhausen composed a number of works, which were presented on 3D speaker configurations. At the 1970 World Expo in Japan, Stockhausen helped design a spherical concert hall, which included 50 groups of loudspeakers set up in 3D (Normandeau, 2009). At this event a number of commissioned electroacoutic composition were presented through the 3D setup.
As presenting electroacoutic music over 3D configurations became more common, the establishment of a number of multichannel loudspeaker spatialization systems began to emerge. An example of one such diffusion system is Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) founded in 1982 (Harrison, 1998). This system has the capability to mount up to 100 loudspeakers within one single configuration, including the possibility of positioning speakers at an elevated position (Harrison and Wilson, 2010). Other systems recently build specifically for 3D spatialization include Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) in Belfast and the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Germany (Normandeau, 2009).
Even though humans perceive sound in three dimensions and the above mentioned systems have hosted various festivals and composers, the majority of electroacoutic works are still presented on two-dimensional (2D) loudspeaker configurations (Sazdov, 2007). According to some, the creative possibilities of presenting electroacoustic music in three dimensions have not been adequately investigated (Normandeau, 2009; Sazdov et al, 2007). The need to investigated how sound moves and how music is perceived in an immersive environment is required in order to fully realize the creative compositional possibilities of 3D loudspeaker configurations (Sazdov, 2007).
This paper outlines spatial compositional techniques currently used by electroacoutic music composers. Some of the techniques include Timbre spatialization (Normandeau, 2009), spectral delays (Kim-Boyle, 2008), frequency domain processing (Yorchia and Lippe, 2004) spectral splitting (Harrison and Wilson, 2010), Granular spatialization with boids (Kim-Boyle, 2008), swarm spatialization (Davis and Rebelo, 2005), swarm granulation (Wilson, 2008), Vector Base Amplitude Panning (Pulkki, 2001), Distance based amplitude panning (Baalman, 2010) and, decorrelation (Kendall, 1995). The mentioned techniques will be discussed and accessed for their 3D spatial compositional capabilities. Having reviewed theses spatialization techniques, there is evidence to suggest that further investigation in the area of 3D spatialization is required.
References
Davis, T., Rebelo, P (2005) 'Hearing emergence: Towards sound based self-organization' in Proceedings of the 2005 International Computer Music Conference, Barcelona, pp. 463-466
Harrison, J. (1998) "Sound, space, sculpture: some thoughts on the "what", "how", and "why" of Sound diffusion." Organized Sound vol. 3, no. 2, pp 117-127.
Harrison, J. "Diffusion: theories and practices, with particular reference to the BEAST system" http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/diffusion/beast.htm
Harrison, J., Wilson, S. (2010) Organized Sound, Volume 15, Issue 03, Dec, pp 183-184
Kim-Boyle, D. (2008) 'Spectral Spatialization - An Overview', Proceeding of the 2008 International Computer Music Conference, Belfast.
Normandeau, R. (2009) 'Timbre Spatialization: The medium is the space', Organized Sound, 14: 277-285 Cambridge University Press
Pulkki, V. (2001) Spatial Sound Generation and Perception by Amplitude Panning Techniques. ScD dissertation, Sibelius Academy, Helsinki.
Kendall, G. (1995). The Decorrelation of Audio Signals and its Impact on Spatial Imagery. Computer Music Journal 19(4): 71-87
Singer, E. "Boids for OSX" Available Online: http://ericsinger.com/cyclopsmax.html. [03, 05]
Sazdov, R., Paine, G., Stevens, K. (2007) "Perceptual Investigation into envelopment, spatial clarity, and engulfment in reproduced multi-channel audio", AES 31st International Conference.
Wilson, S. (2008) Spatial Swarm Granulation. Proceedings of the 2008 International Computer Music Conference, Belfast, UK: 1-4.
Zvonar, R. (2004). "A History of Spatial Music", contact, vol. 7, no. 4. Retrieved, June 7, 2005 from http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/index.htm
Eric Lyon - The Voice of Noise: Performing Randomness
Eric Lyon
Queen's University Belfast, UK
Noise has been an element of fascination for composers since at least the early 20th century. With the arrival of computer assisted composition (Xenakis) and digital audio synthesis (Mathews), noise became an important driver and "spice" for algorithmic music of various sorts. More recently noise has become a specific marker for the performance of live electroacoustic music, sometimes even proposed as a substitute for music (Merzbow). In this paper I will trace the use of noise in electroacoustic music from its earliest applications up to its use within algorithmic improvisational environments such as George Lewis's Voyager. I will proceed to discuss aspects of the performance of algorithmic improvisational pieces in which noise is in the foreground, based on my recent experiences working with the Noise Quartet, a Belfast-based ensemble. Of particular interest is the intersection of compositional intentionality, apophenia, and improvisational interpretation in a chamber music context. Noise is seen as both formally constitutive and radically destabilizing, enhancing the emergent properties of improvisational performance at the ever-present risk of sabotaging the moment. Finally I ask if noise has a voice, if that voice has become louder in our current information-deluged historical context, and what, if anything, that voice may have to say to us.
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Clayton Rosa Mamedes - Electroacoustic Music in São Paulo State, Brazil: The Second Generation
Clayton Rosa Mamedes
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, BR
The electroacoustic music in Brazil have been developed in small groups of composers with an inconstant production and with a experimental character since its early works composed in '50s until its consolidation thirty years later during the '80s. A rigorous political control of the artistic production and restrictions on the importation of technological equipments have provided a inhibition on the formation of music studios -- either public than private -- resulting in a production characterized by deprived material resources (Lintz-Maués 1989, Neves 1977, Garcia 2006).
Composers of these early generations have searched and refined their skills out of the country [1]. Igor Lintz-Maués (1989) has realized an extensive study of it and appoints that the principal destinies of Brazilian composers were Europe, USA and Argentina. Just after their return started in Brazil groups with a constant production on electroacoustic music, commonly associated to State Universities.
The Brazilian musical production on electroacoustic music grew up after the '90s, reflecting the political and economical overture after a dictatorial politic period. The reduction on the expenses needed to implement computer audio systems and their technological developments to audio production have improved a fast formation of academic studios and soon after particular studios. (Iazzetta 1997, p.10)
Concerning the grown on the number of composers actually working with electroacoustic music and its subgenres, we focused our study (Mamedes 2010) on composers that are established in Sã:o Paulo State. We present an introduction to composers that have consolidated themselves in the Brazilian musical scene during the last twenty years, with some names that were mentioned as young promises by Lintz-Maués as well new names. All of them are composers who have a large creation between the '90s and the 2000s.
Concerning the multiplicity of the electroacoustic music developed in Sã:o Paulo, the solution that we have found was to group the composers between the prominent media used in their works -- observing that almost all composers studied here developed compositions in more than one group of media. We have grouped the composers among electroacoustic music for fixed media, electroacoustic with live electronics and composers who develop their own computer tools.
This multiplicity of the electroacoustic music created in São Paulo also manifest itself in the poetic proposals of each composer, individually. We found among their works extra-musical purposes which fundament the creative process. To reach an adequate result we have established a theoretical corpus flexible to the works ensemble of each composer, studied individually. We have selected a representative group of works showing their artistic trajectory through the analysis of excerpts from their compositions that we present here resumed.
Comparing this multiplicity among the composers we could observe that some common resources, stylistic characters and tools are the same, but applied in an individual way. We have observed, for example, that José Augusto Mannis and Denise Garcia use referential recorded sound as a basis for the creative process. However the way that this material is applied in Mannis's works approaches his works to the radiophonic compositions, while Garcia tends to an extensive listening of the sound materials what approaches her works to the soundscape compositions. Behind this apparently common materials we have observed in Mannis works the development of gesture characters, while in Garcia we have found a poetical and long narrative listening of sound materials.
Flo Menezes, Jônatas Manzolli, Edson Zampronha and Rodolfo Coelho de Souza present in their writings (Menezes 2006, Manzolli 2004, Zampronha 2000, Souza 2006) attention to structural aspects of their works: while Menezes develops serial methods to structure his creative process, Manzolli implements stochastic fractal structures to organize his sound materials with overture to performer's interpretation. Zampronha and Souza develop theories about the musical discourse based in a semiotic approach; while Zampronha explores the musical discourse through his deconstruction, Souza looks for a discourse centered in the unification of the musical materials and in a postmodern intertextual approach.
Fernando Iazzetta and Sílvio Ferraz's works are characterized by the use of live- electronics with improvisation; Iazzetta's formation as a percussionist stands out gestural characters in the organization of the sound materials contributing to the articulation of the musical discourse. In Ferraz's works the electroacoustic resources are developed together musical instruments, intensifying gestures presented in the instrumental performance, enlarging the sound space and modifying its timbre. Ignacio de Campos [2] worked with live-electronics and multimedia installations; he has developed the concept of Timbre's Interaction among the sound materials of his works. This concept explores the approach of characteristic details in sound materials that are intensified through sound processing.
Wilson Sukorski and Lívio Tragtenberg developed together the proposal of 'Musical Demolitions' and both present a work characterized by experimental music. While Sukorski explores the creation of new timbres, employing synthesis and processed sound materials with few references to the recorded source, Tragtenberg develops the deconstruction of rhythmic patterns from popular music. Lelo Nazário starts his artistic trajectory with compositions near to the works developed by GRM composers in style and procedures; he actually produces works that mix electroacoustic procedures with instrumental popular music.
We conclude our study believing that the diversity on electroacoustic music in S&actilde;o Paulo is a result of the multiplicity in poetical proposals. The use of common tools and processing of sound materials don't present themselves as aspects to merge the production of this group of composers, despite his geographical proximity. The multiple implements of tools and the development of an individual theoretical corpus for organizing the creative process are, instead, reasons to individualization.
[1] We have localized two groups that influenced the generation here presented: the Musica Nova during the '60s formed by Gilberto Mendes, Willy Correa de Oiveira and others, and also the work of Conrado Silva in the end of '70s at the Universidade Estadual Paulista. Concerning the similarities between his initiative works, we localized them as the first generation of electroacoustic composers in São Paulo.
[2] Ignacio de Campos died in December 2009.
REFERENCES
GARCIA, Denise Hortência Lopes. Faces da música eletroacústica: o Grupo Música Nova e seu pioneirismo na utilização de recursos tecnológicos. Relatório de pesquisa. Inódito. 2006.
IAZZETTA, Fernando Henrique de Oliveira. Sons de silício: corpos e máquinas fazendo música. Tese de doutorado. PUC-SP. São Paulo, 1997.
LINZ MAUÉS, Igor. Música eletroacústica no Brasil: composição utilizando o meio eletrônico (1956-1981). Dissertação de Mestrado. São Paulo: Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo, 1989.
MAMEDES, Clayton Rosa. Música eletroacústica no Estado de S&aatilde;o Paulo: segunda geração (1981-2009). Dissertação de mestrado. Campinas: Instituto de Artes da Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2010.
MANZOLLI, Jônatas. Compondo com o mundo real: paisagem sonora de labirinto sentrelaçados. Tese de livre-docência. Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2004.
MENEZES, Flo. Música Maximalista. Ensaios sobre a música radical e especulativa. Ed. Unesp. São Paulo, 2006.
NEVES, José Maria. Música contemporânea brasileira. São Paulo: Ricordi Brasileira, 1977.
ZAMPRONHA, Edson S. Notação, representação e composição: um novo paradigma da escritura musical. Ed. Annablume. São Paulo, 2000.
Cédric Maridet - The heterogeneity of listening intentions as a framework for sound practices
Cédric Maridet
City University of Hong Kong, CH
Through the revisited Shaefferian concept of acoulogy, as being the study of the listening experience, putting the notion of a raw object at its center, from which many intentions can be articulated, the concept of heterogeneity of listening intentions emerges as being essential to frame our listening of environmental sound. Whether it is real or imagined, in everyday listening or in composed works, our listening result from a co-relation between what the composer gives to listen and the listener's intention, which may vary according to his/her cultivation of listening.
The shift of intentions in the flow of perception engages the listener in multiple modes that acoulogy can help to identify as a way to map different sonic art practices along the continuums of the recognisability of the source or not, of found sound versus processed sounds, the relationship to context, or the degree of fiction. Acoulogy as a model brings out potential links between various practices and is valuable for their description, analysis, or composition.
Alison Mattek
Dartmouth College, NH, USA
Gestures are fundamental to music, and much research has been done to explore the significance and meaning of musical gestures. Gestures are elusive, but it is undeniable that they encode meaning and intention. Due to the development of recording technologies, most individuals experience music in a setting where they are detached from the originating musical gesture. Since we know that a gesture is a meaningful act, moreover an act that is visual in nature, the listener's detachment from the gesture essentially deprives him or her of the meaning that is embodied in that gesture. That is, the listener is denied full access to critical information that is expressed in musical performance.
But is this really the case? Our perceptual abilities are powerful, due to our brain's tendency to force continuity. Our mind can often "fill in the blanks" when it is presented with only pieces of a signal, and music is no exception. So the question that is necessary to ask is: what meaningful information contained within a gesture is actually missing in a music recording? That is, is the meaning of a gestural expression entirely contained within the sonic event it produces? And if not, is the brain able to determine the shape of a gesture based on sonic information alone?
In order to move towards answering these questions, this paper will discuss current research on both musical gesture and perception. First, there will be an analysis of the meaning and significance of musical gestures. This section will try to define what information is passed from the performer to the audience through musical gestures. Second, the information encoded within musical gestures will be dissected into two components: visual and auditory. A gesture is inherently a form of visual expression. However, musical gestures are also auditory, since the consequence of a musical gesture is a sonic event. By dissecting a gesture into these two components, we can attempt to determine what information is lacking in acousmatic sound. Third, there will be a discussion of our perceptual ability to predict information that is not received via our senses. It is true that humans have an extraordinary ability to identify the source of an acousmatic sound. However, being able to identify the source in a sound recording as a "piano" is different than being able to determine the precise gestural motion that occurs when a piano is played. This section will attempt to determine how important this exact gestural motion is in terms of interpreting gestural meaning. Finally, there will be a discussion on our ability to translate between the visual and auditory domains. Current research suggests that there is a physical mechanism in the brain that causes the occurrence of cross-modal congruencies. It may be possible for artists to take advantage of these congruencies in order to convey visual information in the auditory domain.
Dugal McKinnon - Sound, Music and the Aesthetics of Autonomy - UNABLE TO ATTEND
Dugal McKinnon - Sound, Music and the Aesthetics of Autonomy
Dugal McKinnon
New Zealand School of Music, NZ
This paper will directly address the theme of Sfz/Sforzando, understood as an assessment of the relationship between sound-based art music created electroacoustically and the wider contexts -- comprising both human and natural worlds -- in which it is situated and understood. The key lines of argument that will be pursued are twofold:
Firstly, that sound-based art music, despite the rise of practices (those with a basis in phonography) which evince a close relationship to the life-world, remain distanced from the world by virtue of both the technological means used to produce it (electroacoustics as an estranging technological assemblage) and a history suffused by aesthetic autonomy, whether Boulez's infamous "Music: Concrete" or Schaeffer's use of phenomenological bracketing as a means to strip sound of its referentiality, which has given rise to an aesthetic domain in which abstract formal values are privileged. Such a situation, it will be argued, can be understood as having given rise to a creative community and set of practices which are 'self-referential' because they remain primarily concerned with 'creative purity', that is, with the construction of hermetically enclosed and formally robust works even when materials derived from the real world are deployed in their creation.
Secondly and followingly, I propose that if we are to "we use sound to further our understanding of real-world issues?" and thereby create beneficial social change, that contemporary art music must critically reassess its origins in aesthetic autonomy and, in the case of practices with a basis in electroacoustics, also devote attention to generating a broader understanding of the role and effects of technology on the production and reception of art music. This however, is not to suggest that aesthetic autonomy and electroacoustic technology must be abandoned. Rather I will argue that aesthetic autonomy, and the forms of cultural production closely associated with it, must be considered as parts forming a more "democratic" whole, in which formalism plays a vital but non-dominant role. Similarly, in terms of electroacoustic technology, it will be argued that the ongoing fascination with cutting edge technology, both in hard and soft forms, is closely linked to the notion of aesthetic autonomy, a link codified in Smalley's notion of "technological listening". Again, it will be argued that valorisation of high-tech should be reassessed, placing it alongside older and even obsolete forms of technology, as a means of establishing a creative community which is as much concerned with progress as it is with conservation.
Finally, I will make a closing argument that such a reassessment of aesthetic autonomy and technology in art music constitutes the beginnings of a new approach to arts praxis in at least two senses: on the one hand, that by de-privileging the dominants described above, the enclosed domain of contemporary art music is opened to the possibilities of a much broader set of practices, including those that feature direct socio-political engagement; on the other hand, it will also be argued that it remains necessary to retain aesthetic autonomy as a key component in a transversal practice (one which favours heterogeneity and dissensus [Guattari]) which itself resists instrumentalisation and allows for a non-instrumental engagement with and appreciation of the so-called life-world, which can be facilitated by a critically tempered understanding of technology.
Mikako Mizuno
Nagoya City University, JP
This presentation will discuss the concept of live in the history of Japanese electronic music by referring to Group Ongaku, Toshi Ichityanagi and some younger composers. The younger composers include the sound arts and performances that could be categorized as interactive music.
In 1960's the term live was often used in the phrase , a sort of live electronic music to indicate the electronic music in which electronic sounds were produced or modulated in front of the audience. Minao Shibata and his pupils used a sort of, and did not define the word live electronic music. For the composers of 1990's, realtime sound producing and processing also include opening digital sound file which in former days should be called tape music. Since the high speed realtime signal processing became possible, the term live mostly equals realtime processing. Of course the difference came from the technological change but aesthetic tradition and evolution should be discussed. The important thing to be discussed is that realtime signal processing style was introduced in Japan only after MAX for macintosh had appeared. In place of live electronics with the realtime signal processing, the style which had been called live electronic music in 1960's continued. In addition, especially in the new millennium, live has been replaced performance, which is not necessarily including electronic devices. Performance should make an answer to the question that what is the meaning of presence of the performer on the stage. Such general survey may lead to an alternative perspective towards the history of Japanese electronic music.
In the presentation the term live electronic music will be historically tested with some examples. The situation of 1960's will be started with the influential lectures by Stockhausen. He came to Japan in 1966 and created Solo fur Melodie instrument mit Ruckkopplung and Telemusik in NHK electronic studio.
Toshi Ichiyanagi wrote in his program note for his piece Situation (1966) that the style of tape music was only one part of electronic music and that manipulating electronic machines in front of the audience was thought to create new possibility to electronic music. He also thought that creating electronic music in Studio was only a small part of music producing. His main aesthetic point at that time was indeterminacy in performance as that of John Cage, so new possibility of music should be in performance or in improvisation. His idea resulted in Appearance and Up to Date Applause.
Another example of making sound in front of the audience was newly created musical instruments. An original instrument called multi-piano was developed in NHK electronic music studio in 1967 and used for Toshiro Mayuzumi's campanology for multi-piano (1967), Maki Ishii's Kyo-o (1968) for multi-piano and orchestra. Multi-piano had some objects on the strings of the piano like prepared piano.
As symbolized in these pieces, Japanese situation of electronic music just before Expo70 was singular in the point that electronic music both in the sense of musique concrète and the sense of synthesizer based electronic music was deeply concerned with the special concept of performing. It was not the sound itself but the human action concerning sound that was to be essential element for music. And the aesthetic meaning of the performance was discussed in an event called cross talk intermedia held in Yoyogi Olympic Studium. Ten thousand people came to this three day symposium, and that gave the decisive direction to Expo70. It featured Ichiyanagi's Tokyo1969 with visual design and Group Ongaku's 0474.82.2603 as well as Yoriaki Matsudaira's Assemblage and Takemitsu's Kwaidan.
The keywords were intermedia, improvisation and ordinary life (or environment).
Mieko Shiomi, famous as a Japanese Fluxus, indicated that the live electronic music was a style of boundary art as well as event, concrete poem, film event. She compared the live electronic music with the happening or the event in the sense of Cage, referring to the concept of media and technology. In her pieces like Amplified Dream 1968 #1 and 1969#2 the performers should be the precise manipulators They must be the media for the technology. In other words, in her live electronic pieces, live did not mean the opposite to the tape media but making the special performer as an element for intermedia.
As for improvisation, I will talk Takehisa Kosugi, a member of Taji Mahal Travellers. His piece mano-dharma,using an electric fan to make indeterminate wind, realized to recover our total experience by taking the ordinary tool in the intention to get the environment of the tool into our feeling. The fan is also a media. And live, again, did not mean the opposite to the tape media. Kosugi made a special situation in order to experience total environment. Here live electronic tools were deeply relating with the ordinary life.
The pieces of the younger composer of 1990's will be discussed in the presentation. Those are pieces by Formant Brothers and Masayuki Akamatsu. Some are using ironically the new technology, another attracted contemporary style of laugh. Here in 1990's pieces the human action concerning sound, again, was the essential element for music.
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Marilyn Nonken - The Reality of Musical Listening: Environment in Lucier's Music for Piano...
Marilyn Nonken
New York University, USA
This presentation considers the perception of works combining electronic and acoustic elements from an ecological-psychological perspective, using Alvin Lucier's Music for Piano and Pure Wave, Slow-Sweep Oscillators as an example. James J. Gibson, the father of ecological psychology, was primarily concerned with visual perception, and his philosophical perspective was strongly rooted in the radical empiricism of William James as well as the American realist tradition. In past decades, Gibson's ideas have been compellingly applied to the perception of art, notably painting (Topper 1983), film (Stoffregen 1997), and architecture (Keane 2008). When evoked in discussions of musical listening, however, they have often been applied in a highly, if unintentionally, metaphorical way. This is the case in an important recent work (Clarke 2005) which seeks to adapt the ecological-psychological model to demonstrate how we find meaning in music. There is some merit to this approach. Yet the diluted application of the term "environment" is problematic, as it contributes to the characterization of the musical environment as more imaginary than real, and musical perception as primarily passive and indirect.
The ecological-psychological approach to perception is concerned with the awareness and activities of organisms in a vital, living environment. The objective qualities of the musical stimulus (what Gibson would term its "affordances") and the subjective nature of interpretation are the live components in ecological perception. The position and orientation of the listener determine what is perceived, how, and why. In laying the foundation for a realist, rather than idealist or materialist, theory of human perception, Gibson (1966) described the physical world at length, rigorously detailing its mutual relation to the organism; its materials, substances, and surfaces; and the opportunities for perception afforded. An ecological-psychological perspective on music sees the sounding environment as part of this physical world and its perception just as direct. There is no reason to maintain that the arts exist in a "virtual" environment, and that the musical experience is constructed post-sensation via inferences, memories, associations, and schemas. We need not assume that mental representation -- abstract conceptualizations and the "mental gymnastics" associated with them -- play a primary role in meaningful music perception. (Chemero 2009)
Adopting a realist approach such as this allows us to focus on the objective characteristics of the environment and explore the unmediated relation between the listener and "real sounds that do something." (Lucier 1983) It encourages us to consider how perceptual learning takes place in the aesthetic context. From this perspective, we can see works such as Lucier's as providing listeners the opportunity to think in purely musical terms (without language, beyond the symbolic), free themselves from the mental obligation of assigning structural-thematic significances, and turn away from the formal metaphors and abstractions often associated with the interpretation of conventional genres. In the environment of Music for Piano..., we do not piece together the larger form by connecting the dots of telltale motives or harmonic progressions, but linger on individual notes and resonances, sensing something of their inner life and engaging with the sound not as a part of a goal-oriented progression but as part of a world rich with information, which exhibits certain tendencies, traits, and invariances.
Chemero, A. (2009) Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Clarke, E.F. (2005) Ways of listening: An ecological approach to the perception of musical meaning. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gibson, J.J (1982) Reasons for realism: Selected essays of James J. Gibson. Eds. E. Reed and E. Jones. Hillsdale, NJ; Lawrence Erlbaum.
_____. (1979/1986) An ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
_____ (1966) The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
Heft, H. (2001) Ecological Psychology in Context. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Lucier, A. (1998) Origins of a Form: Acoustic Exploration, Science, and Incessancy. Leonardo Music Journal, 8, 5-11.
_____. (1983) Alvin Lucier in conversation with Thomas Moore. http://userpages.umbc.edu/~tmoore/interview_frame.html?/~tmoore/lucier.html
Nonken, M. (2008) What do musical chairs afford? On Clarke's Ways of Listening and Sacks's Musicophilia. Ecological Psychology, 20, 283-295.
Stoffregen, T.A. (1997) Filming the world: An essay-review of Anderson's "The Reality of Illusion." Ecological Psychology, 9, 161-177.
Topper, D.R. (1983) Art in the realist ontology of J.J. Gibson. Synthese, 54, 71-83.
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Kevin Patton
Brown University, USA
Through centuries of instrumental performance, curiosity, and a need to be heard, musicians have developed a physical connection to the things they play. From idiophones and percussion to vibrating columns of air or vibrating strings, the physical characteristics and audible result of these instruments have been developed for hundreds of years, as have the techniques and scholarship surrounding them. Certain assumptions have almost always been true from this perspective: the timbre of the instrument is repeatable and predictable, and is determined by the technique used to play it; physical exertion is almost always directly correlated to amplitude and timbre; the sound emanates directly from the body of an instrument in contact with the body of a performer (the mouth, the hands).
New technologies that allow instruments to be built with sensors and/or software destabilize and decentralize the procedure of music making in a way that challenges traditional instrumental practice precisely because this destabilization occurs at the point of intersection with the body. This is because instruments that are built around a computer operate as a networked system, an assemblage, that connects at least three distinct, but separated parts: an interface, a mapping algorithm, and some kind of sound generating output connected to speakers. These instruments are tactile, yet the musician must negotiate a virtual-physics response defined by software. The way in which these virtual physics can be composed has become the focus of a particular music practice that combines instrument design, composition, and performance.
This paper explores different ideas about how the musician is connected to the object that generates sound. It posits all musical instruments operate as a kind of spiritual and a virtual extension of the human voice. But in the particular case of Gesturally Controlled Computer Instruments (GCMI), the border between the musician and instrument becomes less clear because of the technology it uses. There are two linked concepts I will use to build a theory of gestural computer instrument practice: the prosthesis and virtuosity.
As Peter Szendy argues in his book Membres Fantômes [2006] (Phantom Limbs) the border between musicians and instruments becomes particularly blurred when considering how virtuosos are able to extend into their instruments with their spirit and their bodies. However, because of the dependence on gesture -- which incorporates more of the musicians body than traditional acoustic instruments -- and the sensor and software technology of GCMI -- which requires that musicians internalize a physical resistance -- the musician enters a reciprocal relationship with the instrument.
Furthermore this integration with the materials of the instrument extends to the musicians intellectual understanding of the way in which the instruments operate.
Because GCMIs genuinely decouple performance gesture and sound, the musician must understand the musical decisions about the mapping of the instrument. Because there is a virtual physics that must be understood and the potential for and reality of reconfiguration, musician's assumptions about the instruments themselves must combine physical intuition with intellectual understanding. Certainly all musicians must have an intellectual understanding of the music they play, hence the years of study of music theory as well as physical practice. However, the relationship of the physical gesture to the sound generated is clear and predictable. The violinist does not need to choose which sound will go with bowing an open string.
Central to my argument is that the presentation of music creates a spectacle that focuses attention on the act of the live creation of sound through physical control. New instrument technologies do not change this fundamental relationship, in fact, they heighten awareness of the exact intersection of the musician with the instrument itself because of their idiosyncrasy as well as their newness. Furthermore, gestural instruments are by far the most physical of all the new methods of controlling live computer music. Thus the form of the ancient practice of presenting music is unchanged: human-object- sound in real-time.
Thus I hope to demonstrate that gestural instrument virtuosity operates as an ecstatic prosthesis where a virtual physics is absorbed in the moment of performance; that there is an inherent instability in these instruments based upon the potential for reconfiguration as well as the need to negotiate multiple time-scales with respect to latency and the physical response of a distributed system; This instability creates a secondary subjectivity that is best negotiated by an improvisational awareness of the entire system during performance.
Isabel Pires
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
La carte n'est pas le territoire, mais la partition est-elle la musique? Même faites après coup [...] selon des symboles plus ou moins grossiers, les transcriptions graphiques de musique électroacoustique ont de quoi fasciner l'auditeur. Elles sont outils, en tout cas, pour diffuser la musique, en permettant d'en étaler le profil général -- ou les micro-détails -- sur l'espace. Donc de l'embrasser d'un coup d' œil, ou de le précéder.
-- "Cahier de partitions" in Cahiers recherche/musique. INA/GRM. p. 159.
Les transcriptions graphiques, ou "acousmographiques" de la musique électroacoustique sont des représentations subjectives réalisées à partir d'une écoute individuelle d'une œuvre particulière. Pourtant, la subjectivité de ces représentations n'amoindrit pas leur utilité et leur fonctionnalité.
Ces partitions d'écoute, comme elles sont fréquemment appelées, ces graphismes intentionnellement choisis par celui qui les réalisa, et malgré la subjectivité implicite dans l'acte individuel d'écouter, rendent compte de certains aspects de l'œuvre acousmatique, et peuvent avoir des fonctions spécifiques dans des contextes particuliers. La musique électroacoustique étant essentiellement un produit de l'interaction entre "le faire" et "l'écouter" n'a nécessairement pas besoin d'une partition prescriptive réalisée avec des symboles permettant sa reconstitution. Nous constaterons que la pratique de la représentation graphique de sensations auditives permet de saisir, d'un rapide coup d'œil, certaines particularités de l'œuvre. Et que, malgré l'individualité de chaque perception, l'usage d'outils informatiques tels que l'Acousmographe ont une pertinence dans la pratique des représentations imagées de la musique acousmatique devenant en conséquence des auxiliaires d'analyse importants et utiles.
Dans le cas particulier de l'acousmographie de La fin du bruit qui nous occupe ici [1], nous exposerons de quelle façon les graphismes choisis, selon notre propre perception de l'œuvre, permettent de représenter les principales images-de-son y présentes. Nous montrerons également la fonctionnalité de ces représentations graphiques en autorisant une compréhension aisée de la structure formelle de l'œuvre, ses particularités, complexités, originalités, singularités.
[1] Cette acousmographie accompagne l'étude analytique de La Fin du bruit de François Bayle publié en 2010 dans le livre Érosphère.
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Wiska Radkiewicz, Andrea Cohen - Soundson Project
Wiska Radkiewicz, Andrea Cohen
De Monfort University, UK
Today the role of technology in music education defines most pedagogical methods in this area. In this context we have created an experimental arts-in-education programme SoundSon, which utilizes tools of electro acoustic music (sound recording, editing and mixing). This programme is a web-based environment in which students living in different countries create a common sound composition through an ongoing exchange of sounds. The students use sounds captured from the real world as raw sound material, including spoken word, sounds produced by objects, environmental sounds or any captured sound event coming from the audible world. This practice creates musical results which break the boundaries of traditional electro acoustic music, blending in the elements from radio art, audio art and sound poetry.
This project was created as experimental approach to audio sharing and collaborative composition. The exchange of sounds does not take place in real time, but allows the composition to develop in a building process over a period of time. The educational benefits of the project are threefold: musical, technological, and cultural. In a pedagogical context the goal of the SoundSon project research is to explore the educational potential of shared composition through sound exchanges between groups having different cultural backgrounds. The cultural/musical interaction takes place in all the stages of the project and in each one of them the students are confronted with the ideas provided by their partners. During the course of the project we study the effects of learning through interaction between international partners.
It is possible to distinguish two stages in the process of exchange. Each of these stages has different aims:
1) Exploration of Sound Environment: in the early stage of sound collection, students become aware of their own sound environment 'as sound' for the first time. Students learn 'how to listen', while also listening to the environment of others. By exploring their own sound world students discover the representative and expressive qualities of sound and become aware of its multidimensional aspects: signal, clue, indication, musical object.
2) Process of Sound Composition: the students combine their own collected sounds and edited fragments together with those of others in their shared compositions. In the process of exchanging composed fragments, the students become aware of the variety of different ways in which the same sounds can be organized or composed. They also discover the possibilities of montage, not only as a technique of editing, but also as an composition tool.
In short, our programme is an initiation to sound environment, sound recording, sound editing and mixing, and to music composition, through the process of sound exchanges between the participants. The SoundSon project was created in 2000. Initially we conducted a semester-long exchange between two schools (in France and in the USA). Since then the SoundSon programme has been implemented in different countries (USA, Mexico, Argentina and Europe) in the form of sound exchanges between elementary, middle school, high school and university students. The activities were conducted by Dr Wiska Radkiewicz, residing in New Jersey, USA and by Dr Andrea Cohen residing in Paris, France. In 2008 we have conducted a European project in which seven schools from five countries have been involved. In the future, we will conduct the programme with schools from all continents and will develop a teacher training methodology on line.Our site is hosted at Columbia University, New York, USA (www.music.columbia.edu/soundson).
Since 2008 the IOCT (Institute of Creative Technologies) from De Monfort University, Leicester, UK has included the SoundSon programme among their research projects to promote its development. (http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/projects/soundson.html).
Taina Riikonen, Sibelius Academy, Finland
Antti Sakari Saario, University College Falmouth, UK
In this paper, we will listen to touching the sound making in the context of the improvisational coupling of the technology with the amplified microphone-recorder-monitor assemblage. In this frame, the technology is understood as one embodied layer of reciprocal activity unfolded alongside with other diverse socio-material layers of fleshly signification. The irreducible tensegrities with the technology shapes the listening interaction inherently into cyberbodied replaying. It draws from the concrete embodied sound making in the circuits of listening as sensing. Replaying is an interactive and sensual practice of being in the intense and immediate contact with the recorded past-present-future sound flow in its multiple tactile-aural forms that are closer to the corporeal than the structurally demanding visual domains. By working with the post- acousmatic fixed media sensibility, and focusing solely on the aural qualities of the sound replaying with its respective socio-material networks, the intimate pragmatics, registers and dynamics of the touch-sound interaction can be signified in a tactile-corporeal field of reference. The micro-practices of sound making are both extended and excavated via tactile-listening based, recording and feedback techniques.
The authors aim to elaborate further the ongoing methodological discussions on signifying performative bodies through examining the activity of listening and the social articulation of sound-making practices. The central themes of the paper -- touching, recording, replaying and listening -- are epistemologically intertwined within the wider scholarly discussion on the relations between sensory experiences and technologies, and the socio-material roles of the recording in the performances.
The recording technology as a whole (without separating the 'technology' and the 'culture') will be conceptualised as the organic tactile-aural co-inscription of sound making. Given the extensive theorising of recording that often emphasises the rhetoric of disruption, isolation and dislocation, the authors suggest the re-framing of recording technology so that the results of the recording process are not copies or reproductions of something, but unique performances and practices of their own. Furthermore, it can be assumed that the modes of listening and touching cannot be described or predetermined before the actual sound making, and that they do not negate the cultural-boundness of the tactile memory. These activities could rather be understood as generated in diverse interaction with the participants of the sound-making process. At the moment of listening, recording is always a live activity: it is tactile-aural co-creating of the present sonic flow.
In sound explorer/researcher Riikonen's and composer/researcher Saario's Frequencies of Touch 2010 resonant tube based improvisation recording sessions, the diverse layers of epidermal resonances of sonic events were re-articulated, remembered and replayed through cyclic recording and listening processes. The researcher-composer-performers unearthed layered memories, media artefacts, theories and past resonances, by employing various media tools, instruments and methods at their chosen 'dig' and interact with the findings and their associated histories through processing, recording and playing-back the remains on-site.
Jøran Rudi - The Integra project
Jøran Rudi
NOTAM (Norwegian Center for Technology in Music and the Arts), Norway
Attention to archival and preservation issues have been growing with the heritage of technology-dependent music, and the steady progress in development of tools for composition and performance, often leaves musical works impossible to perform. These issues have given rise to several initiatives, as for example the Caspar project, which was presented two years ago at the EMS-network conference in Buenos Aires.
This paper will present the EU-funded Integra project, which contains 11 musical commissions, more than 20 migrations of older works into new technology, and has involves 8 research centers and 7 contemporary music ensembles during its (now) 5 years of existence.
The project has been developed from several aims:
- to lower the threshold for use of technology for composers who combine composition for instruments with electroacoustic techniques -
to bring key works of historical and musical interest into performance-ready condition through migration away from obsolete technology and into current technology -
to commission new works
- to engage and train composers and performers, and develop their technological skills
- to perform a significant number of concerts across Europe
- to actuate international collaboration between research centers, ensembles and composers
The key to reaching several of these goals has been a development of technology that serves as a front-end to several synthesis- and DSP engines, and is a much easier tool for real-time stage use. There has been particular challenges in developing a system that can sustain the music, also considering future generations of hard- and software, using open standards and namespaces.
The paper will describe the Integra project, its development and results, and taking the EMS network conference's focus into consideration, not go deep into the programming issues that have had to be solved during the process. The presentation will include a short demonstration, in the section of usability for musicians.
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Donal Sarsfield - Mirrors and Windows: Dhomont's Forêt profonde and Ferrari's Far-West News
Donal Sarsfield
University of Manchester, UK
The author will explore how the coherence and sensibility of the subject matter explored/expressed in Dhomont's Forêt Profonde and Ferrari's Far-West News creates an internal intelligence within a large cycle.
The critical framework for this paper is based upon an essay by John Szarkowski from his 1978 book Mirrors and Windows, American Photography Since 1960. Szarkowski, reviewing the field of photography at that time suggested that there was a "fundamental dichotomy in contemporary photography between those who think of photography as a means of self-expression and those who think of it as a method of exploration". The Mirrors and Windows of his title are the metaphorical axes of an imagined continuum. Each end of the axis is characterised by its own sensibilities: formal coherence, vantage point, subject matter, and personal concern, the latter broken down into two halves: autobiographical or auto-analytical and a more esoteric, unfamiliar, stubbornly subtle approach.
The intention of the paper is not to supplant a photographic analysis onto these works but to explore the possibility that discussion of the works in this light will illuminate more than it will obscure.
Jenny Spark
University of Waikato, NZ
In 2009, Dr. Lisa Perrott of the Department of Screen and Media at Waikato University invited composer Lizzie Dobson and myself to participate in an experimental project for 'The Sounds of Aotearoa/New Zealand', a symposium looking at the meaning and importance of sound in a New Zealand cultural context. Lisa had put together a series of short clips which combined abstract imagery with identifiably real-world footage (e.g. body parts, plants). She wanted to explore ways in which we could evoke a sense of place by the addition of sound ('place' being specifically Aotearoa/New Zealand), that is, she wanted to create collaborative works of 'visual music' with a focus on the local.
Lisa Perrott explains visual music thus: "Visual music is a cross-platform, interdisciplinary mode of artistic expression that dates back to the colour organs and light projection instruments of the 18th Century, and has developed through two dimensional painting, photography, abstract cinema, music video, installation art, dance and live performance. Through these various manifestations of visual music, artists and academics have explored a number of theoretical concepts such as; synaesthesia, kinesthesis, colour theory and visual poetry." (from 'Sonic and Visual Expression in the Creation of Visual Music: Exploring the Relation Between Abstraction, Referential Memory Triggers and the Locating Sounds of Aotearoa,' a paper presented at 'The Sounds of Aotearoa/New Zealand' a symposium held at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand on 27th & 28th November 2009).
These explorations gave us some interesting insights into the essential role sound plays in creating or enhancing a sense of space and place when combined with visual images. As well as the difficulties involved in locating the works geographically, we were surprised at the powerful and often unexpected ways in which sound could add layers of association and emotional inference which were not present in the original image, and which were less strong or even absent in the sound alone. Our final series of works ended up focusing strongly on the 'haptic', the sense of touch, and on bodily intimacy, in the context of the natural environment of New Zealand, as this seemed the most effective way of locating the works in space and place. This paper will detail our experiments and explore the ideas of audio-visual synergy, visceral responses to sound and image, and issues around situating works locally.
Volker Straebel
Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Besides the well known "Williams Mix" (1952/53) by John Cage, three more works were produced in the New York "Project for Magnetic Tape": Christian Wolff's "For Magnetic Tape" (1952), Earle Brown's "Octet I" and "Intersection for Magnetic Tape" by Morton Feldman (both 1953). While the 20 minute work by Wolff was scored in three to five layers to indicate the overlapping material and produced in mono, the 3'30" long pieces by Brown and Feldman were, like "Williams Mix", produced in eight tracks, making use of the same material that had been prepared for their predecessor.
In their (unpublished) scores, Brown and Feldman established different conceptions of musical space, time, and density. Earle Brown took a bird eye's view to the score which, just like the one of "Williams Mix", functions as a pattern for cutting and splicing the eight tracks of tape. But while Cage added sounds and silences in time (in additive progression), Brown used random numbers to place incidents of sound in time and space. The density of sounding occurrences this way is the result of layered sound active in different channels at the same time.
Morton Feldman, on the other hand, scored "Intersection" using graph notation, like his series of chamber works with the same title; in this case indicating the length of tape, number of sounds and number of channels on which those sounds should occur over the given duration. In this way, the horizontal and vertical density, as well as the spatial extension of the sounds, are closely interwoven. As much as the score might distinguish between the three parameters (i.e. a small number of sounds in a short length of time might result in higher sounding activity than a slightly larger number of sounds in a way longer length of time), all parameters together determine the composite density of sounding material. Indeed, it is not the location (that is: the channel) in which a given sound occurs that is composed, but the number of locations, to which a certain number of sounds is distributed.
Peter Swendsen
Oberlin Conservatory of Music, USA
In the fall semester of 2010, I offered a new course at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music called "Electroacoustic Interpretation and Performance Practice." Participating were ten conservatory instrumentalists, all of whom had a nascent interest in performing pieces that involved electronics, but none of whom had experience in working directly with electroacoustic music technology. In this paper, I share my experience of preparing and teaching this class and offer details as to its contents and outcomes.
The course examined compositions scored for instrument(s) with CD playback, instrument(s) with live electronics, and instrument(s) with other media. In addition to adding such pieces to students' repertoire, we covered the necessary technology to bring these works to life in performance, including the relevant uses of microphones, mixers, speakers, and computer software. Concurrently, we focused on important theoretical and conceptual approaches to electroacoustic performance practice, such as the relationship of physical and sonic gestures in performance and whether performing with electronics fundamentally changed or challenged this relationship for the performer(s) and/or the audience.
In an effort to give the students a sense of the wider community, the class included several guest lectures from composers and performers (especially young performers active in commissioning and performing electroacoustic works) as well as a related call for works. The call, sent initially to the SEAMUS list, and subsequently shared with related lists in Canada and Europe, generated a tremendous response that is illustrative of the diversity of work being composed for instrument(s) and electronics and the interest of electroacoustic composers in having this work reach young performers. While the creation of such work has been a part of our field from the beginning, it has often been written for, and performed by, a relatively small circle of talented performers, especially here in the US. I believe there now exists a growing interest from young, high caliber performers, especially advanced students building a personal repertoire and preparing to launch careers, that will lead to tangible increases and improvements in the realization and preservation of electroacoustic composition.
As educators, we can support this trend by reaching out to young performers and preparing them to be adaptable, thoughtful, and rigorous participants in the electroacoustic community. This paper reflects on the successes and failures of the first such attempt in the classroom here at Oberlin and discusses changes I am implementing for the course's second version, which will be offered in the fall of 2011.
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Timothy Vallier
Stony Brook University, USA
This paper presents an overview of the history of consumer level non-musical electronic devices and their use in electronic music compositions and performances. Wii, Kinect, with iPhones: Creating Music With Non-Traditional Electronic Mediums is a historical journey beginning with the creation of the laptop orchestra and ending with use of video game peripherals reworked as midi controllers. This paper addresses the following questions: (1) What inspired the musical use of these devices? (2) What have these devices given back to the field of electronic music? (3) What will the future of these devices mean for consumers, composers, and audiences?
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Ian Whalley
The University of Waikato, NZ
Internet2 through real-time digital audio provides the opportunity for electroacoustic music practitioners to connect with, bridge, amalgamate, and lead diverse sound-based music traditions; facilitating new hybrid sonic art forms. This may also give wider exposure to more abstract electroacoustic music. Some issues arising are discussed, and a working model/example put forward to illustrate the proposition.
From a technical perspective, Follmer (2005) outlines a three-dimensional schema for NMP (networked music performance). His matrix includes Interplay with Network Characteristics, Interactivity and Openness, Complexity and Flexibility. In a subsequent analysis of diverse musical practices he identifies hypermusic (made from hybrid instruments), real-virtual/space sound installations, and algorithmic/generative installations as being best suited to telemusic space.
A limitation of Follmer"s analysis is its basis in a compositional/producers perspective. In tandem, consideration might include communicative concerns such as the phenomenology of sound making, music/sound as a means of exploration of real/virtual space, and social interaction in music making. The communicative dimension lends itself well to an improvisational/generative approach to aspects of form/content, involving both people and machines.
In the first instance, the EA technical production decision space remains similar to that of interactive systems (Whalley 2006) taking into account concerns with Goals, Language/Knowledge and Machine Role. But decisions made within the schema require an accommodation of NMP2 space in line with Follmer"s technical analysis. Moreover, the decision space is expanded as EA/NMP2 music must also consider the social dimensions of music making, such as negotiation and relationship building through what goes in real-time. In addition, participants might consider the phenomenology of wider audience reception, considering a worldwide audience through internet broadcast, and audiences at any real station that takes part in a telemusic event.
Taking all into account, the traditional role of the electroacoustic music composer then shifts to one of concept designer, director and perhaps participant. How does one accommodate compositional flexibility, musical and social elements in a work in the NMP2 domain? In tandem, how does one control complexity, make a cohesive sonic statement, and consider diverse inputs?
A pragmatic response involved linking with some sound-based performers, reflecting, extending and combining organic music practices as a starting point. This involved using geographically dispersed players who might draw on regional or other aesthetics, combined with EA music and machine inputs, to make a new work.
Mittsu no Yugo (Whalley 2010) included input from three different countries over the new IPv6 internet format, using multiple audio streams and digital video connections. The concept/score was by the author. Performers at Waikato University, New Zealand, included Ian Whalley -- Max/MSP patches, wind synthesizer/controller, effects; Lara Hall -- violin gestures (non-tonal) and looper; Hannah Gilmour -- spectral beds, rhythm and effects, and Richard Nunns -- short traditional Maori instrument samples. At Calgary University Canada, David Larsen played Buffalo drum. At Beijing"s Central Conservatory of Music, Bruce Gremo played Shakuhachi at the MUSICACOUTICA10 event.
Aspects of the work will be played to illustrate points put forward in the paper.
Navigating complexity in sonic terms proceeded on the educational principle of moving from the known to the unknown (Whalley EMS 2010), making sonic streams where some parts were familiar and others unfamiliar to participants and audience. The method considered gesture, sound, language and player semiotics. It was achieved through a layering and balancing of musical practices and traditions distinctly associated with the body and "instrumental"/extensions; known environmental and organic sounds and gestures; and abstract gestures and sounds. Combining these approaches resulted in a work that was texturally diverse, and evolved interactively in real-time.
Structurally, the composer prescribed the general shape and broad motives for the work for each player. Performers then generated and amalgamated sectional content and could edit larger shapes as they wished. This allowed for different outcomes from each performance, and performer/"instruments" to negotiate new outcomes with each rendition.
The work adopted aspects of Paine (2002) concept of a conversational model of interaction. To do this, it took a generative/improvisation approach (Whalley 2006) allowing people and machine agency to create content based on the dynamic interplay of parts. Logistically, agent interaction was between one performer and computer - Max/MSP and real-time input. But there was also extensive interaction between "players", players and sound making equipment, players and effects manipulation, and players and audience at each country node.
While one can sometimes identify individual parts in the work, the process also explored both the juxtaposition and synthesis of a variety of inputs. Many of the real instruments acted as both pitch/duration and textural/spectral sound makers, and could also be manipulated through effects to add to the combined outcome. It is then difficult to discern at times who contributed what to the final texture.
Technically locating the approach in broader NMP2 practices, the work involved a Mixed Peer to Peer and Star Approach (see Alexandra & Akoumianakis (2010)) to the network infrastructure. To compensate for network latency, it was based on a non-realistic paradigm (Carot, Rebelo Renaud: 2007) involving a Recording Studio/Remixer approach where latency is accepted and the work built around its limitations, so musical timing is not absolutely critical.
The Waikato node had the greatest telepresence here - the footprint of the biggest action. Machine input to contribute to the electroacoustic music aspects beyond sample triggering and performer input triggering was confined to this node. The infrastructure/model here could however be extended to include intelligent machine dialogue at different nodes, or between people and machines at other nodes.
To conclude, while net space generally expands the multi-dimensional elements made available to composers by single computers, its complexity here was made subservient to extending organic musical practice through improvisation, to which electroacoustic practice adds to and extends various traditions. Rather than adopting a modernist experimental approach to NMP2, the model here attempts a creative synthesis by using some robust templates in a unique way, exploring one way that electroacoustic music practitioners might engage with this new medium, and engage with different communities.
Lonce Wyse, Sudarshan Balachandran - Visual Strategies in Computer Supported Music
Lonce Wyse, Sudarshan Balachandran
National University of Singapore
Hand-in-hand with the sounds and practices of music, notational systems over the past century have escaped the confines of the bars, keys, and jailhouse staff of traditional western music. Cage's book Notation (1969), and the more recent Notations 21 by Theresa Sauer (2009) capture some of the variety of visual strategies for printed scores developed by composers, but computer and networking technologies have opened up a new world of possibilities for composers to represent, communicate and facilitate new musical performance practices. Graphics, now endowed with dynamic and interactive capabilities, are central to many of these practices. This review focuses specifically on the use of graphics for notation and communication in performance.
Networks enable performers to share a graphical workspace facilitating symbolic visual communication between possibly distally located musicians. Crossovers by Yang, Siwiak, and Renaud, for example, is based on a graphical representation of the physical location of performers in disparate spaces, and is used to make musical decisions in an improvisatory environment while at the same time providing a visual element to the piece for the audience.
Fencott and Bryan-Kinns (Fencott & Bryan-Kinns, 2010) describe a system for musical collaboration inspired by environments for Computer Supportive Cooperative Work (CSCW) spaces. The shared graphical space provides multiple views with different levels of accessibility to information about the activity of their coperformers such as instruments they are preparing before they are heard or seen by the audience. There is also a chat mechanism for "backchannel" communication between performers. Frequencyliator (Rebelo & Renaud, 2006), is a collaboration tool designed to provide "situation awareness" for laptop musicians such as countdown meters that inform musicians about upcoming musical segments.
Computer graphics have also been exploited for a new kind of coupling between a musical score and an instrumental interface. In mobile device applications such as Magic Fiddle and Magic Piano from Smule, an animated piano-roll representation of the score flows into the instrument interface. This strategy relieves novice performers from some of the burden of score interpretation enabling them to achieve levels of performance not otherwise accessible to them.
Three-dimensional visualizations commonly establish a mapping between space and time, and use a navigation paradigm as the basis for performance interactivity. Musical material can be composed and visualized in space, and played when a performer navigates to the location of specific material. This technique can be seen for example in Flou by Jason Freeman. Various navigation strategies have been used to provide performance options in some printed graphics scores as well (e.g. Sockhausen's 1956 Klavierstuck XI), but the 3D representation has established itself as a fundamental paradigm in computer supported works, and establishes a very particular type of relationship between the compositional determination and performance-time choices.
Multiple-scale views on the same material have also become more pervasive and capable with computer technology. This technique has been used in printed scores, for example that of Victor Adan's 2006 Multiplexor III which shows course-grain temporal information (an "aerial-map") alongside fine-grained temporal information. However, the use of multiple scales in Jason Freeman's 2005 Graph Theory depends on the dynamic capabilities of the computer where the particular fine- grain temporal information available is tied to the navigational choices made on the course-grain 2D representation of the graphical structure of the piece.
Symbolic notation can now encode musical information in dynamical behaviour, not just static features of symbols such as shape or position. An example of this kind of score is found in Animated Graphic Scores for Quartet composed by Luke Harris where the behaviour of flying notes and rotating staffs in a pre-recorded video is used to guide improvisation. Similarly, Shane Mc Kenna's Graphic Score Experiment uses text animated in position, color, and shape, designed for free-interpretation by unpractised audience/performers.
Three basic strategies can be identified in computer graphics for visualizing time – the piano roll, the film view, and the 3D view. The piano roll generally provides a sliding window of musical material extending for a short time in to the past and into the future on either side of a representation of the present moment. Scores visualized this way tend to be pre-composed, though there are exceptions such as Multimodal Interaction for Musical Improvisation (MIMI), (François, Chew, & Thurmond, 2007). The film view tends to represent only the present moment across its two dimensions, and is associated with both precomposed and dynamically generated material. The 3D view is commonly used to visualize potential futures and pasts and is often simultaneously used as a performance interface.
Computer based graphics dramatically expand music notational possibilities. Many current practices have roots in printed notation while others push in entirely new directions. We have begun to assemble and organize these techniques and compositional examples to lay the foundation for an ontology of visual strategies for computer supported musical practices.
Acknowledgment: This work was supported by project grant NRF2007IDM-IDM002-069 from the Interactive and Digital Media Project Office, Media Development Authority, Singapore.
References
Cage, J. (1969). Notations. New York: Something Else Press.
Fencott, R., & Bryan-Kinns, N. (2010). Hey Man, you're invading my Personal Space! Privacy and Awareness in Collaborative Music. In New Instruments for Musical Expression. Presented at the Sydney, Australia.
François, A. R., Chew, E., & Thurmond, D. (2007). Visual feedback in performer-machine interaction for musical improvisation. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on New interfaces for musical expression (pp. 277-280).
Rebelo, P., & Renaud, A. B. (2006). The frequencyliator: distributing structures for networked laptop improvisation. In Proceedings of the 2006 conference on New interfaces for musical expression (pp. 53-56).
Sauer, T. (2009). Notations 21. New York: Mark Batty Publisher.
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Zhang Ruibo (Mungo) - From EARS to CHEARS
Zhang Ruibo (Mungo)
Shenyang Conservatory of Music, China
The ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS) system is run by the Music, Techonology and Innovation Research Centre at De Montfort University, an internationally peer-reviewed professional (multilingual) glossary system for electroacoustic (EA) music as well as a bibliographic resource and publisher. EARS is a scientific, integrated and dynamic knowledge system that is based on standard terminology and uses the internet as its user platform. It can be applied in all of aspects of EA Music research in the contemporary era. China ElectroAcoustic Resource Survey (abbreviated as CHEARS). It, like EARS, will include a Glossary, Index and Bibliography in Mandarin (and will also be integrated within EARS once completed). It will include a translation, adoption and enhancement of this system, which is becoming a bilingual internet-based collaborative research resource including multi-user communication area, text resource, events and music criticism sections unique to China as well as to the EARS project, itself.
This paper covers the development of CHEARS from an historical point of view. It will take EMS06 conference that was jointly held with Musicacoustica festival (Terminology and Translation, Beijing) as the initial point to cover all of the historical events in detail that has happened on CHEARS, for example, it made its first international debut as a localized research of its own kind from China at EMS07 (Leicester, UK); the master's thesis, The Application of an Internationally Peer Reviewed Professional Glossary System, the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS), was approved in 2008 by Central Conservatory of Music (CCoM), Beijing China; it brought up the EARS full-text translation plan at EMS08 conference (Paris, France) etc. After EMS10 conference (Shanghai) and EMSAN track in 2008 and 2010 (Musicacoustica festival, Beijing), CHEARS is becoming 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. Besides the information concerning authors, translators, proofreaders and consultants regarding terminologies and bibliographies, an enhanced professional project for wider impact in China to play a role of collecting and distributing a broad variety of types of information, coordinating academic and non-academic areas of the site, etc. through its multi-user Comment, Reader, Message and Criticism systems for Terminology, Bibliography, Lecture and Concert section respectively will all available on it. This hierarchical approach is typical to Chinese culture and a new approach in terms of EARS development.
Beyond the history, this paper will also discuss about how much Chinese electroacoustic music society (academic and non-academic) will benefit from an English-Chinese Bilingual Internet-based Collaborative Research, as well as how much an international conference (Electroacoustic Music Studies Network -- EMS, and its Asian Network -- EMSAN) will influence the localized academic research at EA music area in China by taking the development of CHEARS from 2006 to 2011 as an example, including the latest topic that CHEARS will get its language expanded to Japanese and Korean. Since they are E. Asian countries with strong EA music background and they have been influenced greatly by Chinese in history. The point is that Chinese terminology is very likely to get inspired from these two kinds of culture. Finally, CHEARS will be transformed into a pedagogical system (all of the information that available on it will be connected to each other according to the hierarchical structure from EARS) comparing with the curriculum for EA music that already exists in China and it is not to finalize electroacoustic music terminology in Chinese (almost impossible in next couple of decades), but instead to arouse the attention to the importance of terminology and translation.
Zhou Qian - New Trends of China Electronic Music After 2005
Zhou Qian
Shanghai Conservatory of Music, China
This paper examined the trends of composition and research in the area of China electronic music in the recent 5 years. A characteristic analysis on the trend is also provided through comprehensive study of many works that either performed on China stages or from national and cross-border cooperation.
This paper attempts to give the following three insights via case study and research of the works:
1. A variety of focuses on electronic music of different geographic areas of China
There are many composers and researchers with distinguished and unique properties from different geographic areas. They compose and research in different areas and display observable personalities and research direction. On the other hand, there is noticeable pedigree among composers, scholars and institutions probably due to extensive cooperation across the country.
2. A variety of composing techniques and methods
Composing technique and method is the representation of the thinking of the composer and will even determine the final landscape of the work. The nowadays technique and method of China is the fruit of lasting exploration and also passed the stage of mimicking and learning from the west world. Recent work and research of different genre of China is now abreast of the rest of the world. Innovative method has also been developed at application and technical cooperation level.
3. A variety of concepts of sounds among different genre of works
The concept of sounds is a fundamental issue of electronic music composition. "A contemporary standpoint, resonation of the past" is the general aesthetic standard of the contemporary Chinese electronic music. But the diversified value system of today provides many individual understanding of "contemporary" and also raises many exciting readings of "tradition". Requirements to sound are subject to open standards when the focus of composition and research varies. However, quality of sounds presented today is much more elegant and sonorous compared with that of the 90s.
Following the three traces above, this paper gives a summary to the status quo of Chinese electronic music composition and research. Innovation, originality and excitement in the composition concept, thinking, technique and development trends are also inducted. Meanwhile, some deeper issues manifest. What is the similarity and difference between the development of Chinese electronic music and that of the west world? Are there any interest topics to explore in the China vs. west world comparison of relationship between electronic music and traditional music? What will Chinese electronic music brings to the world? All the above questions will be explored in my upcoming series studies.