- In sum, Wiggen's and Schaeffer's method, they both proposed a way of thinking for making electroacoustic music. Pierre Schaeffer's method for concrete music composition is most commonly favoring the listening side whereas Wiggen's method aims at producing sounds / making sounds favoring
the usage of apparatus.
- As for Wiggen's project in collaboration with GRM, one of the main reasons, which couldn't make possible the idea, was the inability of technological possibilities during the beginning of 1970s at EMS. The second reason as defined Daniel Teruggi, was that Schaeffer's description system can not be operational for a general computing system, since his research is directly related to the human perception (Teruggi 2007, 221).
- Aside from Syntom Project and some inspirations by Pierre Schaeffer's method, Knut Wiggen realized a hybrid studio at EMS having one of the most recent technical equipment among the electroacoustic music studios in Europe. However, his studio installation made extremely difficult to practice the sound composition for a large number of composers during the 1970s, which provoked serious conflicts with the composers. As for Schaeffer, he left quiet quickly his research presented in the Traité without really proposing any connection between the descriptive level (typology-morphology- charactherology) and the practical level (analysis-synthesis) that François Bayle explained (Bayle 1976, 28):
Le Traité est une étape. Même pour la notion d'objet, il n'a pas voulu apporter un point final.(...)le Traité ne parle pas des objets en fonction, il considère les choses sous l'angle de l'observation et non sous l'angle de l'activité2.5.
Hence, the reception of Wiggen's and Schaeffer's method in EMS and GRM, was quite different from what they expected from composers. As a further step, this research will examine the reception of their proposal at those institutions drawing attention to the relativity of artistic achievements according to the technology, the research as well as the culture.
Footnotes
- ... l'activit\'e2.5
- The treatise is the first step however it didn't make a final point for the concept of sound object.(...) the treatise doesn't talk about objects in practice, it considers them into the perspective of observation, the object is not situated in an operational context.
adrian
2015-06-03