ANDO, Daichi

 

Efficiency of adopting Interactive Machine Learning

into Electro-Acoustic Composition

 

 

In conventional composition way for electro-acoustic music, huge size of parameter sets for synthesis electro-acoustic sounds shoud be decided by human composers.   In past days, pre-set parameter sets for synthesis had been commonly used. But the pre-set is not so usefull in artistic meaning, because using pre-set parameter sets for composition has been patterned and it produces rut. Also the changing a parameter   in the pre-set parameter sets is dengerous for synthesis. Thus appearance of ideas that adopting machine-learning techniques to generated huge parameter sets for electro-acoustic composition learning from existing sounds is natural. The machine learning technique generating huge parameter sets from existing sounds automatically.

 

On the other hand, almost machine-learning techniques require “existing teaching data, expected good and bad” (in general, correct and incorrect data) or “explicitly written functions to decide good and bad work” (in general, top-down defined evaluating functions). It is a restriction of machine learning mechanism. The restriction of creativity when machine learning is applied to art-creation is unavoidable. Musics generated as results of machine learning with correct and incorrect data, top-down defined evaluating functions are not considered a new creativity. Bacause it’s strictly based on only existing work or sensibility, that has become be already old.

 

Therefore, as a new method, the author adopting “Interactive Machine Learning” as a music creation. The interactive machine learning means that the computer describes human composer’s sensibility as methods explicitly with dialogue process between human and computer. If human composers keep having new sensitibilities for their music, if it not discribed explicitly in human composer’s brain, computer explicitly states it. Thinking aesthetically, this is that it seems to be as a relationship between artificial inteligence and human composers.

 

In this paper, the author indicates summary of these actual used techniques, then discuses aesthetics meaning of the adopting these techniques and the aims of the system developing named CACIE(Computer-Aided Composition by means of Interactive Evoluation).

 

Actually the author mainly adopting Interactive Genetic Programming a kind of Evolutionary Computation into composition of all time-series medias such like electro-acoustic and noted works, also currently adopting human performer support system for real-time improvisation. For interactive creation, many techniques have been developed and tried in actual composition in this system. The main ideas of the CACIE, tree representation of S-Expresssion programming is suitable to describe music generally, to place electro-acoustic sounds or musical notes, to describe envelopes of synthesis parameter sets, and all parameters in time series in a work. Typical representation examples are researches and works of David   Cope, Common-Lisp Music and Open-Music system.

 

An electro-acoustic work named “Vedana” by Masahiko Inada accepted in ICMC 2008 concert had been composed with the CACIE. The author had interviewed the composer about the feeling of use of the system and his creativitiy with the system in his composition for this work. In summary of his answer, composition with the interactive machine learning is not only that it is very similar to his conventional electro-acoustic composition thinking way but also that the his conventional method had been expanded strongly with new ideas by computer-aid, also that his creativity   is not restricted with the  system.

 

In aesthetics meaning, as mentioned before, the property of restricting creativity of   the ordinary machine learning, generates new works with inputted existing works or top-down define evaluation function, is not suitable for the art creation. However, as    a result, the my proposed method, composition with the interactive machine learning, expands the human’s creativity, especially electro-acoustic musical   works.

 

 

-  Daichi Ando

 

Ph.D in Science, Born in 1978 in Japan. He studied composition and computer music under Takayuki Rai and Cort Rippe at the Sonology Department, Kunitachi College of Music,   Japan. Then he studied computer music with Palle Dahlstedt and Mats Nordahl at the Art & Technology, International Master Program from IT-University of Göteborg, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden. In addition, he received a Ph.D. in science from Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan for studies in the application of numerical optimization methods to art creation. Currently, he teaches and conduct researches as Assistant Professor in Division of Industrial Art, Tokyo Metropolitan University.

 

dandou@tmu.ac.jp

 

 

ASKA, Alyssa

 

Evaluating the need for unified notation: conceptual and creative consequences of communicating electroacoustic music

 

 

Electroacoustic music has been one of the most dislocating forces upon traditional western notation, challenging our concepts regarding what music is, as well as our ideas regarding how to express composed music in a manner so that others can reproduce it later. This paper, then, explores the concerns surrounding musical documentation of electroacoustic works, and some of the challenges faced in documenting these works that do not conform to conventional systems of documentation. It also discusses the influence that documentation systems have on the music that is created, and some of the ways in which the means of musical expression influence composition.

 

If we begin our discussion around the early medieval period, we can see rudimentary forms of notation emerging, beginning with neumes that depicted musical trajectory and gesture. Guido’s later developments in notation allowed for the pitch element to be notated such that performers could learn a piece of music without ever hearing it. This was an important breakthrough for both documentation of music and performance, but it also made a singular parameter of sound, that of pitch, the most important element, the musical substance, with all other elements being determined attributes (Kelly 2014, Lang 2016). This contributes heavily to how we have thought about and how we have written music in western society for several centuries, and even presently, this notational system and expansions of it are still used. The concept of pitch as substance also translated well to musical instruments developed in the following years, which were primarily pitch-based, and therefore a very consistent paradigm of notation and performance could be relied upon.

 

Electroacoustic music has served a very liberating role, both to the determination of substance, as well as the means of musical expression used. Other parameters of sound, such as timbre and space, can now be used as compositional elements. However, as both of these qualities are multidimensional, they are not as easily represented by notational symbols on a page. This has resulted in a variety of attempts to create unified notation systems and even systems of classification for these parameters. The notation of spatialization, for example, has been a major research focus in the last several years, especially as spatialization systems become more elaborate (Schacher et al 2014, Ellberger 2014).

 

It is also much harder to notate for electronic instrumental performance because many of the instruments do not have consistent and reliable expected behaviour. We can predict the behaviour of acoustic instruments because they are constrained by physical parameters of sound; however, without some kind of electronic extension, a string instrument, for example, can only make those sounds that are enabled by its physical components vibrating. This is not the case in computer music systems, or in acoustic music in which sounds are pre-recorded and modified. A computer music system can behave any way that a programmer tells it to, which prevents a (completely) universal paradigm from being established for composition or documentation.

 

Additionally, more electroacoustic works are beginning to draw from “the expanded field”, incorporating things such as visuals into a work (Ciciliani 2016). I have, for example composed works in the past which use the performance aesthetic as a compositional parameter (Aska 2015, 2016).

Therefore, even as we still have not established a unified means of expressing electroacoustic music, the material from which we can draw on continues to expand. It is simply changing too fast for scholars and composers to keep up with. The other issue is the 3-dimensional nature of parameters such as space, and timbre (and multi-dimensional elements present in the expanded field).

 

These parameters can't be represented on paper, but multimedia can be implemented; score reproduction was performed on paper because that was the resource they had available, there are now other options, such as video, and even interactive tools. Such tools have been extremely useful in other art forms such as video games, which also do not have a predetermined universal functionality. There is always a common input across consoles, the controller, but in each game a different function is performed by all of the buttons. A player has to re-learn this for every different game, but yet there are in-game tutorials, and a written book. This could Therefore prevent a valid starting point for gesturally-controlled music, for example.

 

The lack of unified notation results in two primary concerns: the sustainability and future performance of EA works, and the lack of a commonly understood notational system for electronic music. This lack of unified notation system for electroacoustic works has led to a certain compositional effect; most works are performed by the composer, and most primary documentation systems end up consisting of a video of the performance. Performers aren't usually trained to perform other people's electronic works, and even diffusion tends to be done by the composer. This affects the style of the works considerably, as performers are often writing for themselves and therefore, will rely upon gestures, techniques, and procedures that they are accustomed to.

 

This places electroacoustic music in the very same realm as pre-Guidonian era western music: there were several types of rudimentary notation systems that could generally represent the music, but noting unified, and a very strong lack in systems of communication that enable reproduction of works. The desire to sing works without ever having heard them before was the impetus behind development of Guidonian notation. We face very different challenges in communication, however. While it is often a goal of acoustic music composers to notate the music in such a way that the performers can read and perform it without needing to ask questions of the composer, technology enables us easy and instant communication. I can send a score from Canada to Japan in seconds, and if the performer (in Japan) had questions, they could not only write me an instant email or message, but could call me with video over the internet. This does change considerably the meaning and need behind notated music. However, I argue that the notation, or lack thereof, changes how we compose and create music. Therefore, there are elements beyond simply conveying a work for reproduction that contribute to the need for notation.

 

Notation of acoustic music led ultimately from a very general representation of pitch and loose trajectory to very specifically notating every parameter. We could therefore view the notation of electroacoustic music to be in a similar phase as late Medieval music. The question continues, of whether a unified system is even necessary, as we can see that the guidonian system had creative consequences regarding what was important musically, and this continued to affect music for centuries (and still somewhat today). It is also important to consider that the challenges faced previously, including lack of digital storage of pieces and access to recordings do not exist, and we have different media available today. Therefore, we may need to re-examine the idea of what is the best way to communicate electroacoustic music, so that it can be understood more universally.

 

 

 

- Alyssa Aska

 

Alyssa is a composer, researcher, and educator who writes both acoustic and electroacoustic works. Her current research explores the aesthetics of musical works which contain electronics, and concerns itself with the way in which new such compositional applications can be integrated into works in a musically meaningful way. She has done extensive work with translating gesture into sound, as a member of the UBC SUBCLASS and as an individual composer-performer. The results of this work has been presented at several conferences, including ICMC, NIME, SMC, and EMS. Alyssa received her B.Sc. in Music Technology from the University of Oregon under the supervision of Dr. Jeffrey Stolet and Dr. Robert Kyr and studied an M.Mus in Composition from the University of British Columbia with Dr. Keith Hamel and Dr. Robert Pritchard. Alyssa is currently a Ph.D. candidate of Dr. David Eagle at the University of Calgary.

 

alyssa.aska@ucalgary.ca

 

BLACKBURN, Andrew

 

The representation of the electronics in a musique-mixte environment: analysing some ontological and semiotic solutions for performance

 

 

There are many communication and ‘reception of idea’ (Landy, L. (2007). Understanding the Art of Sound Organization. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) occurrences which are fundamental in the process of developing musique-mixte (for instrument with electronics) works. In practice, the creative process requires a nexus between composer-creator and performer(s) operating across both the acoustic, and electroacoustic realms. Having a notation system that is commonly understood and accepted notation and even language – a common semiotic ontology – for the electronic component of a musique-mixte work, as comparably ubiquitous as the stave and stick or gestural notation within the instrumental paradigm, would assist the composition development process.

 

Presently, there is no systematised, universally accepted form of electronic notation with which to record performance details in a form that can easily be shared between performers. Whilst there are excellent softwares which can assist analysing music/performance after the event (e.g. EAnalysis or Sonic Visualiser), composers usually create individual ‘notation’ solutions to represent the electronics component in a musique-mixte work. These solutions are normally separately tailored to meet the needs of both the player’s performing score(the instrumental score) and the technologist’s score. The ontology of each solution is, initially, pertinent to the musical creation and its creator(s) and secondarily, to the performance environment.

 

Four musique-mixte works from the first years of this century provide exemplars for analysing the notation of the digital signal processing component of each work. The works under discussion are creations for pipe organ with live digital signal processing and, in each, the acoustic sound of the organ is the origin of all electronic sound emanations. The combination adds a layer of sonic complexity to the already rich sonic quality of the pipe organ, and the musical intention of the processing, and an analysis of how this is represented in the notation of each work is the core of this paper.

 

The consideration of the semiotic ontology in of each ‘system’ used to represent the digital signal processing, permit some conclusions to be drawn regarding the information which is required by each of the participants in the musical performance. With the exception of the work by Thurlow/Halford/Blackburn, the works are scored for an organist and technologist(s). Andrian Pertout’s composition also includes flutes. The electronic notation solutions in each work provide the instrumentalist with a representation of the electronic component of the work, which may have a currency beyond the exemplar works. The works under discussion are: Andrian Pertout (2007) Symmetrié Intégrante (2007) for organ, flutes and electronics Op 394, Lawrence Harvey/Andrew Blackburn Eight Panels for organ, live electronics and sound diffusion system, Steve Everett (2005)Vanitas, and Jeremy Thurlow/Daniel Halford/Andrew Blackburn (2015) Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe.. Reference will also be made to Uijenhoet, R. (2003 rev. 2009). Dialogo sopra i due sistemi for organ and quadraphonic live electronics.The background of the composers is diverse - Australian, Chilean, American, Dutch, and UK. While two of these works (Eight Panels and Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe) use Cycling74’s Max to create a software patch which serves in part as the ‘notation’ of the electronics score, the others each use different software/hardware combinations including Kyema and SuperCollider. The electronic notations in the organist’s scores are also equally variable, ranging from an indication of a ‘scene’ change to detailed gestural instructions for both technologists and organist. Every work provides quite specific ‘recipes’ for (re)creating the sound palette which the performer/technologist may follow in conjunction with the organist’s score.

 

These compositions each provide an opportunity to delve into issues that have been raised earlier (eg Morrison (2014) Graphical Music Representations: A Comparative Study Based on the Aural Analysis of Philippe Leroux’s M.É. EMS 2014 proceedings). While not intending to provide a solution to the lack of a common electronic notation (which will likely be evolutionary in development rather than imposed), the paper will identify how the issue has been approached in the selected compositions, noting both the commonalities and distinctions between each.

 

 

 

- Andrew Blackburn

 

Dr Andrew Blackburn is a Research Fellow at Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI), Malaysia, after being appointed in 2011 as Senior Lecturer in Music and, in 2015 as Deputy Director of UPSI Education Research Laboratory. His involvement in research projects include higher education training and assessment, intercultural music, and leading research projects in organ performance - particularly pipe organ and live electronic processing of sound (DSP), new forms of music representation, and musical histories in Malaysia. Andrew’s doctoral thesis is - The Pipe Organ and Realtime Digital Signal Processing: A Performer’s Perspective. Andrew has continued working with his range of expertise derived from his earlier career in Australia–music education, music creation, keyboard performance, music technology, and choral conducting.

Andrew has performed widely as soloist and with orchestras and ensembles all over the world, including Australia, Malaysia, England, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Spain.

 

terpod1@bigpond.net.au

 

BLACKBURN, Mannuella

 

Other people’s sounds: examples and implications of borrowed audio

 

 

The starting point for much electroacoustic music is the capture of audio from the sounding world around us. Recorded sound (field and studio recordings) provides the composer with pliable audio data, inspiration and impetus for the creation of new work. The content of these audio files varies widely to include sounds from musical instruments, inanimate objects, spoken languages and environmental landscapes. Composers working in the field of electroacoustic music and all its associated formats and subgenres (soundscape, live laptop improvisation, acousmatic and noise-based to name a few) are reliant on the presence of audio, whether it be from synthesized or recorded sources, in order to move forward with a new work. Sound’s fundamentality to the composition of electroacoustic music is clearly understood within this discourse, but what is less clear and defined are the finer details relating to external sound sourcing, especially when the composer looks beyond their own materials, to others and/or digital resources (eg. Sound archives, sound libraries and sound maps) for this starting point inspiration. On the surface, it can seem that by removing the sound recording stage of the process, the composer forfeits a direct connection with the physical source, along with memories of this sound-capturing act. On the other hand, for some, skipping this step is not even an option, especially for composers who pride themselves on their well-honed microphone techniques and noise-minimizing skills, since the recording of ones own sound may be viewed as the first stage of the compositional process in which a compositional imprint is firmly forged and found. A given composer may have a recording ‘style’ or pattern, and this approach to recording can seep into his/her choice of sound materials. Take the example of a soundscape artist who braves the wind and rain with their highly specialized and adapted recording equipment. Their techniques for shielding their microphone from direct gusts and torrential downpours provides a striking contrast to the composer who inserts lavalier microphones into a bottle of fizzy water to capture the liquid’s microscopic effervescence within the calm, acoustically dry recording studio. In short, a composer can choose and create what sounds they want to work with in order to achieve specific, personalised end results. Chris Watson’s recording expertise comes to mind in this instance with his skillful use of ‘super compact particle velocity microphones’ to capture minute, barely-there caterpillar sounds[3]. Sound recordings can be in some way a reflection of the composer’s personal aesthetic, demonstrating creative planning at a very early stage in the compositional process. Contrary to this, there are a number of instances where composers choose not to work with sounds they directly collected, some in fact never record their own sound, as found in the numerous cases of sampling or plundering. Composers who seek out existing pre-recorded sources juggle their own creative integrity with the often-requisite sense of homage or respect assumed in these situations. This paper chooses to take on this issue, searching for specific examples, circumstances and outcomes of sound borrowing. Issues of sound quality, personal preference and dealing with dated or cultural remnants all undoubtedly arise when examining viewpoints and musical outputs of composers using other people’s sounds.

 

The paper considers the aspect of originality and how this can be lost when other people’s sounds are sourced and used in a composition. Adrian Moore talks of achieving originality through sound recordings: “how to make your work original? …record your own… they are immediately personal to you and the playback of these sounds comes with the guarantee that ‘you were there’. It is immediately easier too, to be able to re-trigger the emotions felt as you recorded the [sounds].”[4] With this in mind, we can start to see personal attachments and connections with sounds that we might miss out on if we make use of other people’s material. Sound recordist, Antye Greie supports this viewpoint regarding her own field recordings “they [field recordings] were my memories and my property and that meant a lot to me, like a bass drum made out of the pop of my lips recorded in Belgrade, or the hi-hat sounds made of snow I was crushing… these sounds made the songs more meaningful to me.” [5]

 

This paper will challenge the notion of originality loss and instead searches for the potential benefits and upsides of using externally sources sound. The paper will present perspectives on the intricacies and nuances of borrowed sound through a collection of case studies where composers have looked to others for sound materials. These include:

 

-          The ‘Prize Presque Rien’ competition (questionnaire responses from Daniel Blinkhorn and James Andean).

-          Cormac Gould’s CoreCore (2105) demonstrating exclusive use of sound archive sources along with only freeware software used for the construction.

-          Compositional responses to the The European Space Agency (ESA) Estrack 40th Anniversary Sound Contest.’  Nikos Stravopoulos’s work, Metakosmia (2015).

-          Pete Stollery’s Three Cities Project’ (2013) and the sharing of sound recordings from foreign cities (Stollery, Kim and Whyte).

-          Instruments INDIA composition project (2106-17) – three composers commissioned to work with the Instruments INDIA sound archive.

 

Examining case studies of sound borrowing aims to demonstrate the variety of perspectives and motivations composers have in selecting and integrating these materials into their own aesthetics. Seeking sounds from archives and libraries can be viewed as advantageous in the accessibility this affords the composer, however adopting these sounds also means adopting the quality issues the sound may carry with it.

 

Following the perspectives of composers and audiences for works that borrow culturally significant sound is a further perspective the paper will introduce through the author’s own experience in establishing the Instruments INDIA composition project, which commissioned three composers (Steven Naylor, Greg Dixon and Ish Sherawat, 2017) to work exclusively with a sound archive of Indian musical instrument recordings. Introducing composers to foreign and unfamiliar sound sources had educational and creative impact upon the composer’s compositional processes and their preconceptions of instrument sounds and capabilities.

 

 

 

-  Manuella Blackburn

 

Manuella Blackburn is an electroacoustic music composer who specializes in acousmatic music creation. She has also composed for instruments and electronics, laptop ensemble improvisations, and music for dance. She studied Music at The University of Manchester (England, UK), followed by a Masters in Electroacoustic Composition. She became a member of Manchester Theatre in Sound (MANTIS) in 2006 and completed a PhD at The University of Manchester with Ricardo Climent in 2010. Manuella Blackburn has worked in residence in the studios of EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Art Centre, New York) Miso Music (Lisbon, Portugal), EMS (Stockholm, Sweden), Atlantic Centre for the Arts (Florida, USA), and Kunitachi College of Music (Tokyo, Japan). Her music has been performed at concerts, festivals, conferences and gallery exhibitions in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the USA. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Music at Liverpool Hope University.

 

blackbm@hope.ac.uk

 

 

BOSSIS, Bruno

 

Electroacoustics as transcultural dialog

in Jonathan Harvey’s music and thought

 

 

On one hand, beyond the obvious qualities of the music of instruments or voices, technology gives access to another level of expression. Albeit the power of timber in instrumental music and the strength of words in vocal music, the infinite possibilities of simulation and treatment procure stronger and subtler possibilities at the same time. In the history of the last seven decades – analog then digital electronic technologies – have been used in different musical styles in a wide range of writing techniques, esthetics and goals.

 

On the other hand, since Le Désert by Félicien David and even before, European composers have been fascinated by the Orient, its cultures, arts, myths, religions and philosophical trends. From Debussy to Murail or Mâche, a lot of occidental composers have understood the unbelievable resources and richness of a multicultural approach. In addition, Tōru Kakemitsu, Yoshihisa Taira and plenty of other Asian composers show us more than a simple interest for occidental culture. All of the greatest composers aim at a sort of hybridization or fusion of oriental and occidental cultures, without any tendency toward self denial or impoverishment due to a worldwide standardization.

 

My purpose is to demonstrate how impressive technologies are to facilitate and deepen the communication between different cultural areas. Multiple examples can be found in the domain of art and especially in musical composition. However, I’ll concentrate my investigation on a composer who considered the powerful possibilities of technologies in order to improve the subtlety of expression. In fact, far from spectacular effects, computers are able to give the right tools to explore delicate frontiers in the art of composing. I already wrote about the efficiency of technologies to deliver refined and sophisticated emotions but this time, I’ll explore the role of electronics concerning the intercultural relationships inside composition.

 

The English composer Jonathan Harvey, born in 1939 and dead in 2012, was particularly interested in both domains: electronics and the Orient through Buddhism. Early in his career he discovered – thanks to Milton Babbitt at Princeton university – the ability of computers to comply with all sorts of compositional and expressive ideas. One of the great qualities of Babbitt was his excellent knowledge of extended serialism. He taught his students the means of controlling all sorts of variables in the composing process. Or to put it on a higher and more accurate level: Babbitt was one of the best authorities on structuralism. Thanks to him, Harvey combined in Timepoints (1970), the power of computational processes with the concepts resulting from structuralism. This was before Harvey’s real interest in the elevation of mind through art and music.

 

Then Harvey developed a deeper and deeper curiosity for oriental cultures and especially Buddhism philosophy. Born and raised in England, his family cultural background was clearly linked to Christianity and more specifically to the Church of England. However, before long, he enlarged his cultural interests, as many other artists did, toward other cultural areas. Fascinated by both the freedom and the intensity provided by Buddhism – a philosophy of life more than a real religion in the occidental meaning – he tried to understand this different world. His goal was to assimilate the two different approaches in his art. Reading, practicing meditation, even traveling to observe and dialogue with monks, he built his own spiritual world.

 

From the 80’ to his death, Harvey’s music has used the strength of electronics as a tool to express this enlarged “spirituality”, as he put it. His pieces that were composed at Ircam prove how the supposed coldness of technologies can actually be useful in creating subtle expression. I will take precise examples from this period to demonstrate through short bits of formal analysis how technologies are more than just a means to enhance trivial sound effects or a resource to better control different formal variables. In my presentation, I’ll base my arguments on Ritual Melodies, Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, the String Quartet #4, Speakings and other pieces. Not all the pieces are related to the Orient, but the means used in his general research are there. My book on Harvey, which is currently going through the editing process, will also show this triple duality (dvaita) transformed into unity (advaita): technologies/poetic creation, control/refinement, Christianity/Buddhism, and the Orient/Occident. His main idea, which he wrote about, was to musically intertwine various cultures and their different ways of dealing with the mysteries of life and death.

 

 

 

 

-  Bruno Bossis

 

Bruno Bossis is a Professor in musicology, analysis and computer music, director of the Musique laboratory and permanent researcher of the research team Arts : Pratiques et poétiques, EA 3208 at the University of Rennes 2 (France). He wrote the book La voix et la machine, la vocalité artificielle dans la musique contemporaine. Editor of several books, he is the author of numerous articles on contemporary music, analysis and electroacoustic music. Currently, he is working on a book on Jonathan Harvey (Symétrie).

 

bruno.bossis@univ-rennes2.fr

 

 

 

CHEN, Hui-Mei

 

The cross-use of electroacoustic music and traditional funeral ritual music of Taiwan in a dance performance The End of the rainbow

 

 

Performed by the “Mauvais Chausson Dance Theatre” group from 09 to 11 December 2016 at Song-Shan Cultural and Creative Park, Taipei, the dance performance named The End of the rainbow（《彩虹的盡頭》）took its inspiration from one of the popular funeral performing art arrays in Taiwan - 牽亡歌陣 (Qian-Wang-Ge-Zhen, according to the local believe in Taiwan, is a ceremony leads the death soul to pass through the chthonian path and the netherworld gates with gods’ blessings and protections, for arriving at the nirvana with Buddah). Doing a research of the Qian- Wang-Ge- Zhen during several months through field investigation in the south area of Taiwan, the choreographer and fours dancers learn with a master of this art and participate themselves as performers of ceremony for family of deceased. Although the dancing movement inspired from Qian-Wang-Ge-Zhen, the music based also directly on the recording of the singing of the master, yet the main part of the dance performance used mixed electroacoustic music. According to the music designer for this performance, while she received the indication of the choreographer to insert electroacoustic music into such a performance, she felt so confused. Yet from a point of view of an audience, the result of this cross-use may not disturb each other, on the contrary, I think this use interesting.

 

Actually, in Taiwan, one can find from decades the insertion of digital technology and visual art during the ceremony of the popular folkloric ritual that calls out to divine spirits. Although inspired from the funeral ceremony of folk’s belief in Taiwan, yet the choreographer as well as the dancers, not just reproduce the body movment of folk rituals, but develope it as the basic motive of the body vocabulary into the performance. The End of the rainbow transformed the folk rituals into a new and original artistic performing art, and provides a different experience to the participants. For the excellent performance, The End of the rainbow is renowned by the Taishin Art Reward 2016.

 

This paper aims to present the cross-use of electroacoustic music and traditional funeral ritual music Qian-Wang-Ge-Zhen of Taiwan in the dance performance The End of the rainbow, and try to discuss the socio-cultural ramifications of electroacoustic music through the performance.

 

 

 

 

 

-  Hui-Mei Chen

 

Hui-Mei CHEN began her professional career at the age of twenty as flutist of the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan and acquired her official teaching post just about the same time. After her study in CNR de Paris, she assumed an even more active role in Taiwan’s musical scene, as a pedagogue as well as a performer. She obtained her DEA degree at the University of Paris IV/Sorbonne and the IRCAM during 1996-1997, which launched her new career as an academic researcher. In her third venture to Paris, she obtained her Ph. D. degree with highest honours in Music and Musicology of Twentieth Century at the University of Paris IV/Sorbonne on 2007 with her dissertation on the Japanese composer Yoshihisa Taïra (1937-2005). Since then she was engaged as a very active researcher and invited to participate to conferences in Taiwan as in foreign countries. After teaching at several universities in Taipei, since August 2017, she begins a full-time assistant professor position at Shih Chien University in Taipei.

 

hmflute@gmail.com

 

 

CHEN, Yi-Shin / CHEN, Kuan-Ting / LIU, Hsien-Chi Toby / SARAVIA, Elvis

 

Automatic Beatmaps Generation for Electroacoustic Songs in Rhythm Games: an Audio Data-driven Approach

 

 

Introduction

 

The demise of art music, such as classical music and most recently jazz music, as most famously argued by Neil (2002), has to do with the inability of composers to incorporate popular culture elements and demands. Neil further establish disputable evidence that our newly discovered interest for electroacoustic music is due to the rhythmic complexity and sound dynamics that this type of music offers. The composition of electroacoustic music through the incorporation of new aesthetic approaches, makes such music more favorable and pleasurable as compared to music without rhythmic structure. There is no denying that the artistic nature through which electroacoustic music is composed makes it an interesting source of inspiration for music-based applications. Therefore, rather than understanding the social reasons for the demise of classical music and its decrease in audiences, we combine modern techniques—electroacoustic composition and gamification—to help revive interest in traditional and classical type of music. In other words, we envision multimedia applications, with human-gestural interaction, that can influence users, regardless of music taste, to sympathize with least popular musical styles.

 

This study aims to disseminate the concept of gamification applied to electroacoustic music as a viable alternative to increase outreach and engagement of falling-out-of-favor music among different cultures. That being said, we shall strictly emphasize on the technical aspect of the proposed gamified tool, which holds as basis, a composition of several popular electroacoustic pieces. Gamified tools that incorporate electroacoustic music, more widely known as rhythm games in this space, are found to bring numerous benefits, ranging from improved mental well-being to physiological improvement (Cevasco et al. 2005). Another distinctive benefit, and one which we investigate thoroughly, deals with the increase of engagement and appreciation towards classical and other least popular music. More formally, we hypothesize that higher engagement and retention time with our rhythm game will increase user likeability and appreciation towards traditional and least popular music, such as classical music.

 

Our main contributions as it corresponds to the aims of this project are as follows:

 

 the implementation of an audio data-driven approach to automatically generate beats that are powered by electroacoustic music. More importantly, through this approach we aim to address the music-genre limitation problem present in other related rhythm games.

 

 Measure the effectiveness of rhythm games powered by electroacoustic music with the ultimate goal to attract users to explore traditional and unconventional music genres. In this respect, we envision the wide-spread use of multimedia applications to revive interest in classical music and other music that has, over the years, inexplicably lost popularity.

 

As a long term goal, we plan to capture and analyze users’ real-time game-playing patterns to conduct extensive studies on the effects of electroacoustic music in the context of culture and other human aspects such as language, perception, and emotion. Moreover, with these complex datasets and multi-featured, multimedia tools, we can now begin to answer fundamental research questions about the cultural benefits and effects of electroacoustic music and the art of it.

 

Rhythm game powered by electroacoustic music

 

Rhythm games have long become mainstream in the interactive games space. In the standard rhythm game, players tap onto hints of beatmaps to score points as electroacoustic songs play in the background. Through tapping these hints, players are consciously or subconsciously interacting with audio and music features like drum beats, chords, tempo, or even melodies. With such interactive features, previous studies have shown that rhythm games, besides improving individuals’ cognitive performance, can also be applied in pedagogical scenarios (Abramson (1997); Overy (2008)). Thus, these games come with purposes beyond entertainment. Most rhythm games are confined to fixed hand-crafted beatmaps and a limited range of electroacoustic songs. These limitations result in players easily disengaging with musical games as they find no excitement in the monotonous stages, hence thedesignated missions or intended purposes of the games are easily hindered. Rhythm games built around electroacoustic music inherit the intrinsic and artistic nature through which this type of music is composed. As with many other successful interactive games, our assumption is that the unexpectedness and dynamicity of beatmaps in our rhythm game needs to be enhanced in order for players to experience positive emotion while playing it. For instance, the rhythm game must effectively embed the element of surprise, which is crucial to boost the stickiness of interactive games, regardless of genre.

 

In this study, we propose an audio data-driven approach that can automatically generate beatmaps for rhythm games. To keep players intrigued, our generative beatmaps should possess a few characteristics. First, we have to generate hints in generative beatmaps so that they are perfectly aligned with rhythm points – this increases the chance for users to experience reward sensations. In order to retain rhythm points, percussions in electroacoustic songs are transformed into note patterns. Longest common subsequences (LCS) is then utilized to extract patterns that appear frequently in songs as described by Bergroth et al. (2000). In this way, beatmaps can be composed by significant patterns of rhythm points derived from the song. Second, we have to ensure that our generative beatmaps are encouraging players by offering sufficient excitement in them. Composed of a repetition method and metrical complexity proposed by Toussaint et al. (2002), DifficultyScore evaluates complexity and intensity of generated hints. For this purpose, DifficultyScore is introduced to measure the goodness of our beatmaps. Based on the score, players can then choose what kind of difficulty levels they prefer to challenge. Finally, with such technique, automative beatmaps can now be generated based on any variety of electroacoustic songs, which indicates that the number of songs offered in rhythm games would no longer have a genre limitation problem. Moreover, any song can now be adopted as part of stages in the rhythm games. Playability and stickiness of rhythm games are also expected to boost with sufficient generative beatmaps.

 

Preliminary Conclusions

 

To avoid bias of any sort, several participants with different cultural backgrounds and gender are invited to participate in the experiment. We then validate our results and test our hypothesis of whether our rhythm game, composed by several electroacoustic pieces, increases player engagement on music with diversified genre, more specifically least popular music. Preliminary experimental results reveal that, despite the participants' preference towards particular musical styles, their listening times increased significantly as they engaged with the rhythm game, regardless of the songs that played in the background. In comparison to listening to the raw songs, where disengagement is observed to occur frequently, participants willingly spend more time on interacting with unpredictable beatmaps that were powered by the rhythm game. Overall, the proposed automatic beatmap generator is beneficial to playability and robust stickiness of rhythm games. This in turn leads to a rise in user engagement towards least preferred musical styles, which would otherwise remain unexplored. It is important to point out that one of the main challenges with this study is the difficultness to assess or validate whether our rhythm game increases likeability towards particular music genres over time. In other words, immediate engagement is easier to measure as compared user preferences over long periods of time.

 

In conclusion, the use of electroacoustic music in rhythm games presents an opportunity to revive interest in classical and other least popular music. The ability of our rhythm game to support unlimited music genres sets the stage for future studies with multi-capabilities, and the implementation of diverse music applications. For instance, with the proposed technology any type of music can now be adopted and used to automatically generate beatmaps, which is potentially useful to conduct studies that consider understudied musical styles. Besides presenting empirical evidence on the usefulness of electroacoustic music via rhythm games, our goal with this study is to discuss the importance of electroacoustic music in the revival of art music itself. This implies that we need to investigate more deeply the underlying factors and effects of electroacoustic music in rhythm games to actually begin reaping societal benefits from it.

 

References

• Abramson, R. M. (1997). Rhythm games for perception & cognition. Alfred Music Publishing.

• Bergroth, L., Hakonen, H., & Raita, T. (2000). A survey of longest common subsequence algorithms. In String Processing and Information Retrieval, 2000. SPIRE 2000. Proceedings. Seventh International Symposium on (pp. 39-48). IEEE.

• Cevasco, A. M., Roy Kennedy, M., & Natalie Ruth Generally, M. (2005). Comparison of Movement-to-Music, Rhythm Activities, and Competitive Games on Depression, Stress, Anxiety, and Anger of Females in Substance Abuse Rehabilitation. Journal of Music Therapy, XLII (1), 64–80.

• Neill, B. (2002). Pleasure Beats: Rhythm and the Aesthetics of Current Electronic Music. Leonardo, 12, 3–6.

• Overy, K. (2008). Classroom rhythm games for literacy support. Music and dyslexia: A positive approach, 26-44.

• Toussaint, G. T. (2002). A mathematical analysis of African, Brazilian, and Cuban clave rhythms. In Proceedings of BRIDGES: Mathematical Connections in Art, Music and Science (pp. 157-168).

 

 

 

-  Yi-Shin Chen

 

Professor Chen joins National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) at 2004. She has served eleven years as the director of the International Master Program of Information Systems and Applications, which is one of the two international master programs in NTHU. Professor Chen is a passionate educator and researcher, and throughout her career, 60 of students have graduated, including 16 international students and 10 students without an IT background. Two received Ph.D. degrees and 58 received master degrees. All Professor Chen’s students received one-on-one, personal advise each week, even during her three maternity-leave periods.

Professor Chen is passionate about increasing society’s benefits through her research efforts. Due to her awareness of the declining audience in classical music (through her 10-year professional training to be a pianist), Professor Chen’s research investigates multimedia applications to attract potential audience. Due to the fear of a media monopoly, she has focused her research efforts on Web intelligence and integration. Her goal is to create a social media interface that explores and visualizes the Web data easily.

 

yishin@gmail.com

 

 

CORRAL, Jeremy

 

On the difficulty to consider as a continuity the production

of the NHK electronic studio

 

 

It is known that production at the NHK electronic music studio does not exhibit any theoretical or formal unity obvious enough that we could easily resort to synchronous methods of analysis with a systematic nature, which would allow its essentialization: numerous composers worked there, none of whom stood out – or rather sought to stand out – as the figurehead around which to establish a common direction and precise features. Therefore the play of opposites used to describe production of musique concrète at Club d'essai / GRMC in France and the electronic music of NWDR in Germany cannot be applied to grasp what is created at the NHK as well – or in a more limited fashion. Beyond an analysis of the aesthetics of the pieces which we could constitute – to put it simply – around specific technological, technical and stylistic characteristics, it thus appears necessary to highlight the shared particularities from the cultural context and the work environment in which they were being produced; in other words, the idea would be to extract the core properties on which depend all the  ones previously mentioned.

 

To allow that, the development of a diachronic history of the studio's operation is an obvious tool to consider. Indeed, if the studio is where all the repertoire was created it seems natural that it would de facto represent – with high certainty for the researcher – a structural setting, a persistence of stable landmarks, encompassing and levelling the music pieces through the action of agents that we can believe to be irreducible. Yet, some archives tend to show that it cannot be considered self-evident. The purpose of this communication is to underline with a few examples backed by references how it  is proving challenging to apprehend the production of the studio in terms of continuity.

 

First of all, the most essential question is to ask ourselves what we really mean by the NHK electronic music studio: that is, which structure, in space and time, are we referring to. Was the studio created in 1954 when Moroi Makoto (the first to write about Cologne electronic music and to present its principles the same year in an article published shortly before in the journal Ongaku geijutsu) joined a team of NHK technicians to perform sound experiments with existing material? Or was it in 1955 to promote the conception, by Mayuzumi Toshirō, of the first electronic music studies based on the analysis of texts from Robert Beyer and Herbert Eimert? Or even in 1956 with the creation, by Moroi and Mayuzumi, of the first original piece titled Shichi no variēshon? Would it be possible that what is known today as the electronic music studio was a construct posterior to 1956?

 

It turns out that all those possibilities are at the same time correct and insufficient. In fact, it seems that the first mention of the existence of a "studio" appears in some writings by Moroi published in 1957 in Ongaku geijutsu to highlight the work done on Shichi no variēshon. Yet apparently, activity reports from the NHK, presented through almanacs, only report a "laboratory" after 1964, that is when the Audiovisual division was moved to a new building located in a different part of Tōkyō - fact that an article in the Asahi Shinbun highlights with its tile: "An electronic music studio. For the first time possible at the NHK" –; however we now know, thanks to an autobiographical text by Shibata Minao published in 1995, that prior to what could already be considered a studio by the enterprising and ambitious composers had only been a set of machines first stored one after the other in a corridor of the building generally only accessible after the working hours of the recording and broadcasting studios, then in the observation room of the hall dedicated to symphonic concerts. Maybe as significant is the late but continuous mention, after 1961 as sections, in those almanacs, of the production of electronic music at the NHK: 1960 being the year when Ondine by Miyoshi Akira earned the first prize at the Italia competition organized by the Rai in Italy to reward the best  television and radio programs, we can thereby think that this success initiated in fact the awareness of the value of a creative endeavour about which it is from then on necessary to communicate more.

 

Second of all, which pieces are really considered as coming from the studio? Numerous pieces produced for radio serial broadcasts, special programs, or for specific institutional use have a uncertain status and do not appear in all the inventories made over the years. Such a creation as Rittai hōsō no tame no myūjikku konkurēto for instance, produced by Shibata Minao in 1955, which casts no doubt on its origins (it is notably part of the compact disc anthology Oto no hajimari o motomete dedicated to the work of the NHK electronic music studio) is nevertheless only presented as a production of the studio after 1968, after appearing in the International electronic music catalog compiled by Hugh Davies. Lists did not refer to it before that and for a good reason: Shibata mentioned in 1995 that his piece, produced during the same period as Mayuzumi's studies, was conceived in a different recording studio to those; that studio, already established and operational, probably offered a broader stability and ease of work.

 

Those few facts – obviously far from comprehensive – illustrate how delicate a task it is to restrict the production of the studio within known markers, as it cannot be said that all production from the NHK taking advantage of electronic technologies or the technical capabilities of the tape recorder automatically becomes a piece from the electronic music studio. It is all the more perilous considering the fact that there is no official archives of the studio, and that the only available resort for the researcher to treat the data is to rely on scattered documents and discographies. In this way, to achieve simplicity and clarity, it is not surprising that we would need to rely on a rational and quickly workable classification as made available by the inventory produced a posteriori. Although  convenient and allowing us a direct entry into the repertoire under scrutiny, this could however not suffice to extract the potential characteristics of the aesthetic identity of the production of the NHK electronic music studio; nor can it help determine the stakes of its positioning within the international production. Finally, it is therefore about managing those difficulties that a method yet to be defined should attempt to minimise.

 

 

 

- Jeremy Corral

 

Currently a doctorate student in Japanese Studies at Inalco in Paris and a researcher in Ōsaka University of Arts, I’m writing a thesis about the first years of activity of the NHK Electronic Music studio. My research interests include the history of contemporary music and experimental music in Japan, as well as Japanese cinema and media.

 

jicor73@hotmail.com

 

 

 

 

DI SANTO, Jean-Louis

 

“Six Japanese Gardens” by Kaija Saariaho:

eastern and western temporalities

 

 

“Six Japanese Gardens” (1994), before its existence, was fundamentally an intercultural work: its composer, Kaija Saariaho, is both from Finland and France, and this piece was commissioned by the Kinutachi College of Music of Tokyo. It also was written in memory of the japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. Does this work reflect this interculturality? To answer this question, I chose to look first for relations it is possible to find between sounds themselves and what can reflect a way of thinking or a symbolic part. Then can these two aspects be intercultural? It is easy to hear that an intercultural dimension lies in the very choice of instruments: their timbre sounds both occidental and oriental, with similar functions. Concerning the symbolic part, I will study the relation beetween formal analysis and philosophical analysis, using eastern and western philosophy. According to K. Saariaho herself, “Six Japansese Gardens is a collection of impressions of the gardens I saw in Kyoto during my stay in Japan in the summer of 1993 and my reflexion on rhythm at that time.”

 

The first movement, titled “Tenju-an Garden of Nanzen-ji temple”, can be considered as an electroacoustic piece because it contains an electronic part and because its instrumental part only consists in the pulse of different percussions used one after the other, creating variations of timbre. Since it is the first movement, it can be considered as an introduction that contains and exposes the purpose of all the work. The method to analyse this movement will be based on two steps.

 

1) Formal analysis

 

On a first step, I will make a formal description through a transcription made with the acousmoscribe, a system of signs describing sounds from a phenomenological point of vue, and that enables the analysis of the relationships between instruments and tape with the signs.. Tape and instruments are considered using reduced listening, and can be compared. More: the description of shape and matter of sounds enables to see stuctures that present some isomorphisms with structures of time. But it also enables a comparison between the electronic part and the instrumental part. At last, there is both an opposition and a link between the tonic timbre of the instruments and the inharmonic timbre of the tape.

 

This work is obviously a symbolic work and is speaking about time throught different kinds of rhythm. A strong opposition exists between the instrumental part and the electronic part. Actually, this work opposes two temporalities radically different: pulsed and oriented time with the instruments, and smooth and static time at the tape. The analysis of this work with the acousmoscribe allows both a formal and a symbolic analysis, and so it allows to study the semiosis, the way the plane of contents works with the plane of expression.

 

2) Symbolic analysis

 

If musicians can easily speak about rhythm from a formal point of vue, philosophers are more indicated to analyse concepts and to speak about temporalities with words: how is this piece speaking about time, and what is time? Can music be a way of thinking the world and can it have an hermeneutic function? I will try to answer these questions using time analysis by western philosophers, and more particularly Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, and a japanese philosopher, Nishida Kitarô. The approach of K. Saariaho herself allows this comparison. She says: “Music is a pure art of time, and the musician – composer or not – builds and controls the experience of the flow of time. For music, time is material, and by this fact, to compose is to explore all the forms of time.” (Saarihao, 1997). “Tenju-an garden” exposes different kinds of time.

 

2.1 In this piece, there is an opposition between pure instant and duration of time, which is a problem very deeply studied by these philosophers. Of course, on a basic level, this opposition is

materialized par short percussive sounds and long files of sound flowing. But, on a more elaborated level, we can easily hear that percussive sounds are repeted and create duration, while long sounds maintains the listener in a perpetual instant. This opposition creates a dialectic studied by Kitarô: “It [time] must be considered as continuity of discontinuity.”

 

From a western point of vue, Derrida expressed the same idea in a different way: “The impossible co-maintenance of several present maintenants is possible as maintenance of several present maintenants.”

 

2.2 The superposition of instruments that appends sometimes and the interleaving and the recovering of sound files at the tape make each moment turned both to the past and to the future, what philosophers thinked. Kitarô wrote: “… we are touching the infinite past […] But at the same time [...], we are also confronted to what determine us from the infinite future...”

 

In a different way, Heidegger was speaking of “the ekstatic horizontality of time”, that is meaning that in each moment past, present and future coexist.

 

2.3 These oppositions co-exist with an other opposition: individual temporality and historic and social temporality. This dimension egally exists in Saariaho's work: the aspect very ritual of the instrumental part responds to the gregorian song we can hear in the electronic part. Even the sound correspondances between instruments and tape can be heard in this meaning. These two temporalities refer to time that exceed individual time, the time of the creation and the time with the others. These aspects are studied both by Kitarô and Heidegger.

 

2.4 The repetition of patterns (the association of smooth and granular timbre, for example) can be linked to what Heidegger called individual repetion: “In the being-toward, Dasein repeats itself in the most proper for-being by early. The proper Gewesene, we call it repetition.”

 

2.5 At last, according to them, time structures are linked to being. Kitarô says:

“The “you” as the absolute other that the “I” sees deep inside himself must be a “you” who, as an infinite past, determines the “I” in an internal way from its deep inside, i.e. a “you” who is past.” This opinion is very near from what Derrida called “differance”, the things that become different when they are differed in the time.

 

In other words, the consciousness of the other is directly linked to the perception of time. So “Six Japanese Gardens” can also be considered as a reflexion on human being.

 

Tenju-an Garden of Nanzen-ji Temple speaks about complex temporalities that can be analysed from an estern or a western point of vue. These points of vue very often are converging, and one can think that interculturality can be universality. The divergences can be thinked more as complementarity than as opposition. But music, with its own langage, can reflect our perception of the world and reach a certain universality.

 

 

 

-  Jean-Louis Di Santo

 

Jean Louis Di Santo studied classical guitar and electroacoustic composition. He is the recipient of several awards in composition competitions and has played in several festivals. He is especially interested in the relations between sound and meaning. He has discovered the sound minimal unit (EMS06) and has created a notation for sounds based oh reduced listening called “acousmoscribe”. He has participated in many conferences in France and abroad.

 

 

ESCANDE, Marin

 

The   tape   music   of   Jikken   Kôbô   実験工房  (Experimental    Workshop): Characteristics and specificities in the 1950s

 

 

Active during the 1950s in Tokyo, Jikken Kôbô is a collective of fourteen young artists, both musicians and visual artists, working together on works such as experimental ballets, concerts/exhibitions or audiovisual productions. Major group of the   renewal   of   the   avant-­‐garde   after   the   war,   it   inaugurated   original   forms   of performance   based   on   the   idea   of   artistic   collaboration.   Concerning   its  musical production, composers such as Takemitsu Tôru 武満徹 (1930-­ 1996), Suzuki Hiroyoshi 鈴木博義 (1931-­ 2006)  or  Yuasa  Jôji  湯浅譲二 (1929-­ )  early  experienced  potentialities of tape music and became pioneers of it in Japan, alongside other composers like Mayuzumi   Toshirô   黛敏郎  (1929-­ 1997)   or   Akutagawa   Yasushi   芥川也寸志  (1925-­ 1989). Contemporaries of the first tape music experiments in Europe, they developed their own way of apprehending this new medium, from an intermedia perspective.

 

In fact, in their explorations of new interactions between medias, the members of Experimental Workshop have been interested in technologies of sound and visual reproduction. In 1953, they created works for an automatic slide projector (ôtosuraido オートスライド).  It was an educational purpose device, developed by the company Tokyo Tsûshin Kôgyô 東京通信工業 (TKK), later renamed Sony, that made possible to synchronize a slide projector with a sound tape. Subsequently, the group continued its audiovisual experiments with Mobile and Vitrine (1954), which is the first film in Japan using electronic music, and GinRin 銀輪 (silver wheel) (1955) made under the supervision of  filmmaker  Matsumoto  Toshio  松本俊夫  (1932-­ ). Some composers of Jikken Kôbô also created radio dramas in collaboration with the Nihon Hôsô Kyôkai (NHK) 日本放送協会 (japan broadcasting company) which opens its experimental sound studio in 1955. For instance, Honô 炎 (flame) by Takemitsu Torû was diffused in November  1955  and  will  become  later  the  raw  material  of  the  piece  Relief statique ルリェフ・スタティク  (Static  Relief).  The tape music of the group is also used as accompaniment for stage performances such as ballets or even for art exhibitions.

 

The outcome of all these experiments in the 1950s will take the form of a concert in 1956 at the Yamaha Hall, jointly with two composers of the group Sannin no kai 三人の会 (Society  of  three)  –  Mayuzumi  Toshirô,  Akutagawa  Yasushi  –  and  Shibata Minao 柴田南雄  (1916-­ 1996). Entitled Musique  concrète/electronic  music  audition, it marked a turning point in the development of tape music in Japan and outlined the different directions taken by Japanese composers concerning this medium – between a French influence (musique concrète) and a German influence (constructivist electronic music).

 

Nevertheless, apart from the Mayuzumi’s trip to Paris in 1952 during which he attended   two   concerts   of   musique   concrète, contacts with Europe were almost nonexistent in the first half of the 1950s. We can argue that tape music in Japan has grown quite in a self-­sufficient way at that time. Composers of   the Experimental Workshop had only scattered echoes of experiments made in France and developed their own way of apprehending this medium. First of all, we notice that, unlike Pierre Schaeffer with musique concrète, they had no will to theorize or even conceptualize this new music. This is linked to the very nature of Jikken Kôbô, which has almost never sought to explicate their artistic activities by writing, evidenced by the lack of a manifesto. Even if they used the same processes of sound transformation – as reverse lectures, slowing or accelerating effects, etc. – they did not share the schaefferian thought of « objet sonore ».

 

Indeed, the tape music of Jikken Kôbô has developed from an intermedia perspective, in a relationship to images and some forms of narration. It differs from Schaeffer’s concepts because it does not necessarily avoid the anecdotal aspect of recording sounds. While Schaeffer wanted to abstract the sound in order to replace it in a musical context, composers like Takemitsu readily used sounds of nature or human voices in a dramaturgic perspective more linked to radio dramas. It was certainly more suitable for works such as autoslides and musics for films or stage performances.

 

Furthermore, other composers of Jikken Kôbô like Yuasa Jôji, Suzuki Hiroyoshi and Fukushima Kazuo 福島和夫 (1930-­ ) had worked with recordings of instrumental pieces they have composed previously and altered them by manipulating the tape as described above. Akutagawa has already done a piece using recording of instrumental music: Maikurofon no tame no fantajî マイクロフォンのためのファンタジー (Fantasy for microphone), broadcast on NHK in 1952. Considered as the first tape music experiment in Japan, it was a superposition of two orchestra recordings with shifting effects. Works like the music of the autoslide Resupyûgu レスピューグ by Yuasa Jôji, which consist of a reverse lecture of a piece for piano and flute, was certainly influenced by Akutagawa’s achievements.

 

My presentation will therefore propose to put into perspective the experiments on tape music undertaken by Jikken Kôbô with the ones of the same time in Europe. The aim will be to identify its specificities with regards to musique concrète, radio drama or even the electronic music of the Cologne studio. For this, I will contextualize the emergence of this music in Japan after the war and try to categorize and explain the different conceptual approaches of tape music inside the group. I will analyse these pieces in their relations with other artistic mediums in order to highlight how their intermedia purpose has influenced their conceptions.

 

 

 

 

-  Marin Escande

 

Born in 1992, Marin Escande is a second year PhD student in musicology at Sorbonne  University  in  Paris.  His  current  research  concerns  the  japanese  avant-­‐garde group Jikken Kôbô. His main interests are japanese contemporary music, new forms of interdisciplinarity and relations between art and society. Since October 2016, he is a scholarship student researcher in Tokyo University of the Arts. In parallel of his activity as a musicologist, he is also a composer student in instrumental and electronic music.

 

marin.escande@yahoo.fr

 

 

 

FUJII, Koichi

 

Musique concrète of Minao Shibata

 

 

A Japanese composer, Minao Shibata (1916-96) is one of important figures in the reception of the Western tendencies in the postwar period, alongside Toshiro Mayuzumi (1929–97) and Toru Takemitsu (1930–1996). In 1955, He composed his first electro-acoustic work Musique concrète en sonore stéreophonique (1955) at NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai; Japan Broadcasting Corporation) and continuously committed to this genre until 1970s.

 

Early works of musique concrète by Japanese composers such as Shibata and Mayuzumi show quite different characters from the European ones: they are not manipulated the sound materials following the concept of objet sonore by Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995). Rather, they are using the processed sound materials as substitutes of conventional instrumental sounds. Indeed Shibata’s first musique concrète work is based on a formalistic compositional plan and serial techniques. As Shibata writes in the program note of this work, they seem to have been aware of the differences from the European tendency, as Shibata wrote: “It would be the proper way to compose a musique concrète piece by handling the existing concrete sounds in the same way as objects in the plastic art. However, I started with formulating the [compositional] plan and looked for the required sounds. Then, I modified or produced them to be fitted within the musical form.” (Jikken kobo 1956: 8) Also, a twelve-tone row and sketches of musical gestures based on the row can also be found in his manuscript written in standard music notation

 

This is partly because they also had keen interests in twelve-note compositional technique in the period.  In those days, Shibata learned twelve-note compositional technique, together with Yoshiro Irino (1921–1980), firstly through Schoenberg et son école (1947) by Rene Leibowitz (1913-1972). And partly because, except Mayuzumi, none of Japanese composers, except Mayuzumi, had not listened to Frencah musique concrète pieces before 1957, as Shibata himself commented on the occasion of broadcasting Panorama de musique concrète (Ducretet–Thomson, 1956).

 

This paper will discuss an aspect of the reception of electro-acoustic music and twelve-note compositional technique, through the examination of Shibata’s writings and analysis of his early electro-acoustic pieces with examination of his manuscript. The aim of this paper is to provide resources for further investigation into this topic, particularly for concerned researchers in other language regions than Japanese. Graphic transcriptions of his works will be presented during this presentation, which have been produced by the author of this paper through aural analysis with the help of spectrum analysis with computer.

                    

 

 

-  Koichi Fujii

 

Koichi Fujii studied musicology and aesthetics at Faculty of Letters, Keio University in Japan and its Graduates School of Letters, where he earned his BA and MA. His main research interest is the history and musicology of electro-acoustic music, modernism in music and so on.

After his working experience in the music industry, he resumed his research to pursue a PhD at Keele University in UK and later Keio Universty. He has also been active in the field of creativity and education in music technology and media art, collaborating with various artists, organising workshops and presenting lectures. The projects he participated in include Moppet which was sponsored by NTT and received an honourable mention at Ars Electronica 97. Currently, he is teaching musicology and music history at Keio University and Tokyo Zokei University in Japan, while working for IK Multimedia in localizing their web, apps and documentations.

 

ko1fujii@wb3.so-net.ne.jp

 

 

GARBET, Brian

 

Navigating the noisescape: Repurposing unwanted sounds to raise awareness through sonic art

 

 

Noise pollution is a concern for industrialized cultures all across the planet. Excessive noise seriously harms human health and interferes with people’s daily activities at school, at work, at home, and during leisure time. It can disturb sleep, cause hearing loss and negative cardiovascular and psychophysiological effects, reduce performance, and provoke annoyance responses and changes in social behaviour. These effects can also occur even when the sound is outside standard levels of perception. Low frequency noise (LFN), particularly infrasound, can lead to vibroacoustic disease (Leventhall 2004, 2006) and is particularly worrisome as it is difficult both to detect LFN and to locate the source. These concerns will direct my discussion towards specific examples of noise pollution and related research involving phonography and electroacoustic-based work.

 

Over the past several decades there have been documented cases of intrusive “hums ”—also referred to as the “global hum”—that adversely impact a segment of the population, typically in industrialized countries. Some high profile cases include Kokomo and Taos (USA), Bristol (UK), and Windsor (CAN). There have also been reports of the hum in Japan including the areas of Hamamatsu and Tokyo (MacPherson 2017). Only recently have complaints about this particular type of noise pollution been taken seriously enough to warrant scientific studies (Novak 2014, Silba 2014), even though the problem in the Windsor region has similar documented cases dating back to the late 1950s. Although each affected region has unique circumstances, there are some commonalities, one of which is that the hum is heard by some residents and felt by others, but is not perceivable by the majority in any given area. The primary reports of the global hum locate the perceived frequency to be in the 30-40 Hz range, however there are some records of 50 and 60 Hz disturbances as well. There are reports of people who can only feel the hum which reinforces the possibility that infrasound is also present in some cases.

 

In addition to ultrasound and LFN, other concerns related to noise pollution research include imperceptible electromagnetic energy and the detrimental effects of noise on an ecoacoustic balance. Health concerns over electromagnetic fields continue to be controversial and polarizing (Frey 1962, 1979, 1998, 2001, 2011) This energy requires sensors and amplification to bring it into the audible domain. Although electromagnetic waves cannot generally be detected by humans without the aid of technology, they can be as omnipresent as noise pollution in large urban environments. The “hearing” of electromagnetic fields can be experienced with coil pickups. An example of this is the ‘electrical walks’ with electromagnetic headphones designed by Christina Kubisch (Kubisch 2016). Similar to victims of infrasound and global hums, there is also a marginalized segment of the population who claim to have electromagnetic hypersensitivity (World Health Organization 2006, 2014).

 

Depending on the location, there are many challenges when recording the perceived sound environment without also capturing noise that is subconsciously ignored. This scenario is a challenge for phonography in the noisescape of large urban and industrial areas, as I have experienced in my creative-based doctoral research. Examples and analysis of these recordings in addition to Hildegard Westerkamp’s A Walk Through the City (Westerkamp 1981) and Kits Beach Soundwalk (Westerkamp 1989) – works that deal with urban noise – will be presented and discussed. To capture and work with sounds at the extreme low end of the hearing spectrum in these areas requires additional considerations, particularly in terms of equipment and technique: the correct microphone capable of recording infrasonic sound sources in a specific environment, playback systems capable of recreating as much of the audible range as possible, larger nearfield monitors, and ideally a quality subwoofer. The analytical component of my own research has involved both conventional methods, such as standard FFT analysis algorithms, as well as unconventional, such as employing cymatics to visualize recordings and to detect and locate the LFN pollution within the spectrum. While the use of cymatics is typically for scientific or artistic applications, I have found the remediation of sound through liquids to be effective in the analysis of frequencies in field recordings and the determination of an infrasonic presence. Future concerns for this work involve whether a listening environment, either online or in a concert setting, has the frequency response to accurately playback the sound files. The goal of this work is to draw attention to pollution in the sonic environment, a complex problem and reality that is often ignored.

 

 

- Brian Garbet

 

Brian Garbet has composed acoustic and electroacoustic music for film, theatre, and concert. While at SFU, he was a Jeu de Temps/Times Play national prizewinner for his composition Ritual. His music has been performed by Quatuor Bozzini, Standing Wave, and Turning Point Ensemble and has received airplay and performances across Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Finland. After years of touring and recording with the rock band Crop Circle, Brian completed his Master of Music at UBC. Currently a PhD candidate at the University of Calgary under the supervision of Laurie Radford, he has also studied with Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, Rodney Sharman, Bob Pritchard, Keith Hamel, and Allan Bell. Recently, Brian returned from a research residency in the United Kingdom where he was working with Joseph Hyde, P.A. Tremblay, and Trevor Wishart.

 

bgarbet@ucalgary.ca

 

HERNANDEZ, Katt

 

Psycho-geography and Psycho-sonic Cartography through Electroacoustic Music

 

 

     “. . .I am collecting the ashes of the other possible cities that vanish to make room for it, cities that

     can ever be rebuilt or remembered.” Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, pg. 60

 

The Ephemeral City

 

As forces like gentrification and globalisation affect the fabric of city life, it grows difficult for a single individual to identify their own story, history or place, or shape any part of the cities where they live as unique from any other. How can music, and particularly electro- acoustic music, become a way to map new psycho- geographies? Can such music empower others to tell their own stories, beyond material means? Psycho-geography is a way for people to be able to tell their own stories. The ephemeral city can be a way of coming to grips with an urban environment that changes in rapid and disempowering ways. We all create a myriad of ephemeral cities, in the maps we create of the places we live- some real, some imagined. Psycho-sonic cartography affords a way for people to create an alternative city through sound- both composer and the listener.Musicians and sound artists working with spatialisation are in the business of creating ephemeral places.

 

Psychogeography

 

Saul Steinberg's picture of a New York-centric view of the city was published on the cover of the New Yorker in 1976. Although tounge-in-cheek, it deftly illustrates the power of the imaginer to suspend disbelief and shape the world And this is precisely what electro-acoustic music affords a listener the possibilty of, in collaboration with its composer to a greater or lesser degree.

 

An earlier, well known such work is Luc Ferrari's Presque i rien - built from field recordings. And Luigi Nono's La fabbrica illuminata "inhabits" a factory with its singer. The two pieces illustrate different ways of drawing places- each imaginary and evocative. The imagined city contains impossibilities- simultaneous non-concurrent histories, places that move around stationary living things, ghosts, and imagined futures.

 

Lennart A.F. Petersson's photography of Klara- a central Stockholm neighborhood, demolished for "modernisation" in the 1950s- inform generations of Stockholmers' "memories" of a city they never inhabited. They also provide counterpoint for those who identify with the environs that replaced Klara. In my interviews with Stockholmers, one described a nostalgia for the city's Culture House, at the former center of Klara, as well as the modernistic idealism of the "Five Sisters"- brutalist office buildings dominating a portion of Stockholm's skyline. One can regard these periods simultaneously, thus dwelling beyond the predominant feature of the current street- advertising and international franchises. Benjamin's treks down a single street in 1920s Weimar, and later through Paris, give us an itinerant world of tiny wonders against a backdrop of impending disaster, to seek windows or cousins to in the Now. Others like Will Self and Rebecca Solnit wander in more dystopic worlds, from post-industrial wastelands to pristine deserts, psycho-geographically cutting three dimensional chess boards out of the checker-plain landscapes they traverse.

 

Psycho-sonic Cartography

 

Music can simultaneously specify, and leave much to the listener to complete - just as the afore-mentioned psycho-geographical works yield new ways for a reader to comprehend the places they traverse. Composers who work with spatialisation share qualities with the very field many psycho-geographers seek to circumvent- architecture. Spatialaised sound is a convincing way to build an ephemeral place- one which is and is not present, compelling a listener to experience the sonic works as places.

 

Thus, psycho-sonic cartography takes or imagines sounds from an environment, and structures them to illuminate that environments' aspects, apparent or hidden in history, obscurity, powers that be or imagined futures.

 

David Prescott Steed makes a literal psycho-sonic cartography, taking a cheap violin into a system of tunnels he has trespassed under Melbourne, recording himself sawing away on the open strings while walking. This creates a spectral-sonic map of the tunnels, indicating their shape and distance in relation to his walk. An example of an electro-acoustic piece which takes aim at a place for it's banality is Negativland's A Big 10-8 Place. The piece draws a literal map through field recordings, referential music and text, and slaps an impossible story onto a mundane suburban block, interspersed with mocking songs about stupidity. A more serious and contemporary work of psycho-sonic cartography is Natasha Barrett's OSSTS, where a listener sits in a chair built to control virtual travel through a sonic version of Oslo, with both recognisable and surreal elements.

 

Sound Walks

 

Sound walks were first extolled as a way to tune in to the environment by R. Murray Schafer. They are both a capture method, and way to illuminate a place through listening, yielding materials and insights. Bill Fontana's Metropolis Stockholm! is a good example of an earlier work somewhere between a sound walk and electro-acoustic music- where simultaneous recordings were made throughout the city, brought together and mixed at City Hall, and broadcast on the radio. One might hear things that were not noticeable before, in the shuffled context offered by this kind of "stationary sound walk". In 1986, the appearance of subways and church bells in the same sonic space on one of the few radio stations available may well have been striking. But listening today, one hears a collage of cues without further comment or information, leaving little to be built in the end.

 

Offering an incomplete narrative in a musical work is a method of striding the boundary between presenting finished environments and locales the listener must complete. But sound walks presented as complete compositions give listeners little to complete. The lack of any narrative beyond the recording itself restricts the listener's own agency. Many of the pieces in The Acoustic City are field recordings without much compositional work- very different from Ferrari's early work, where careful choice of recordings and ordering offer a great deal of the implied tale of a day. Other examples include Janet Cardiff's video walks, which have instructions, or Christina Kubiches' Electrical Walks, which construction is evocative enough to offer the listener a meeting point in the ephemeral parallell world her machines psycho- sonically map.

 

Text-Sound work and Interviews

 

Interview-based Text-Sound composition straddles lines between documentary, story-telling and sonic art concerned with speech. Stockholm has a venerable history of Text-Sound composition. The majority of Swedish Sound-Text works are not about interviews or places. But there are some examples, such as Mats Lindström's Rekviem för svensk medborgare med anledning av mordet på Olof Palme, a piece created in art from interviews with school children read by well known Stockholmers, or Sol Andersson's In Memorandum, where the "place" is an array of 8 speakers playing a subtle drone-pitch, and the person speaking emanates from a wooden speaker cabinet. A large-scale work from recent years is Trevor Wishart's Encounters in the Republic of Heaven. Using local dialects as materials, Wishart masterfully weaves the voices of inhabitants in an industrial British town together into an image of that disappearing place through the everyday stories they tell, converging in an unearthly requiem.

 

Building the Imaginary City

 

Electroacoustic music is made of sounds de-coupled from their sources. To engage in psycho-sonic cartographical music through electroacoustic music is to engage in a constant interplay where the seemingly immutable can melt and transform in the blink of an eye- or at least a shorter span of time, and with a lighter burden of materials, than architectural upheavals and flights of fancy take.

 

A large share of the music I am making is an attempt to interface with and enhance this very individual way that people interact with the cities in which they live, utilizing field recordings, interviews, generative installations, transposition of field recordings with acoustic instruments and the metaphorical usage of transformational processes like frequency modulation and artefacts like beat tones as metaphors for ghosts, spirits and other possibilities.

 

In 1980, Derek Bailey and Min Tanaka made a CD. Bailey plays a sparse, acoustic guitar, while the space in which the collaboration unfolds is sonically outlined by the sound of Min Tanaka's equally sparse movements, and rain pelting a rickety roof. Psycho-sonic cartography- an evocative picture of a charged moment in time and place, long gone but brought to immediacy by its nature as music. Just as that imagined place is illuminated and brought to life, so we live in as many cities as there are inhabitants, each disappearing into a myriad more new cities which form with every new memory, to be brought forth and re- imagined in psycho-sonic cartographies the real world can only begin to imagine.

 

 

 

-  Katt Hernandez

 

Katt Hernandez moved to Stockholm in 2010, and rapidly began working with many artists. In addition to solo violin work, she co-founded The Schematics and Deuterium Quartet, and has worked with a host of artists. Katt earned a Masters degree in Electroacoustic Composition from the Royal Music Academy of Sweden in 2014. In 2015 she began a PhD program in Music at Lund university, and is also employed at the Royal Music Academy as part of Klas Nevrin's research project. Her work has been featured on the Swedish Radio, and on many festivals including Norberg, Stockholm Music and Arts, Svenskmusikvår and Intonal.

Before leaving the U.S., Katt was a 13 year veteran of experimental music scenes on the east coast, where she worked with a vast array of musicians, dancers, visual artists, puppeteers, film makers and performance artists, in venues ranging from underground urban art spaces to ivy league concert halls.

 

katthernandez@gmail.com

 

 

HUANG, Chih-Fang / YU, Yen-Yeu

 

Melodic Contour Applied for Algorithmic Composition

 

 

This article is mainly focused on the methodology of melodic contour to analyze music to retrieve the music features, in order to perform the algorithmic composition using the analyzed features with melodic contour control to alter music structure. With the proposed method, algorithmic composition can be realized in more practical way to generate music automatically into a specific style, based on the input music segment with its correspondent music meaning, hopefully. Pitch, interval, and duration are used as the main features of the music meaning, and the above three parameters can be used in a hybrid way to construct the melodic contour with the interval control of stepwise, arpeggio, and jump, to generate the variation of pitch and interval. Finally an innovated melody generator can be obtained based on the above methodology of the algorithmic composition.

 

Pitches must progress, going to up or down, otherwise the constructed melody will make the listeners bored soon. As shown in Fig. 1, the melodic contour is drawn up or down steeply while the melody is suddenly jumping to higher or lower notes. If the melodic contour is drawn with a smooth shape, then it refers to a calm music segment. Rather than an absolute pitch values, Schoenberg’s “Fundamentals of Musical Composition” (1967) shows the melodic contour into a visual shape as the supplement of the score to represent. Adams’ “Melodic Contour Types” (1976) categorizes 15 melodic contours as a criterion for melody classification. Based on the melodic line shown in the score, it provides an idea that the music meaning related to a specific psychological “gestalt” or emotion, according to Meyer’s “Emotion and Meaning in Music” (1956). The proposed method will extract the melodic contour for the input music segment based on the automated analysis. The uniqueness of the melody can be obtained by a certain melodic contour which represents a unique meaning in listener’s mind, according to the shape, direction, and range of the correspondent music segment.

 

Figure 1. Melodic Contour

 

In order to reinforce the usability of algorithmic composition, melodic contour can be used as the automated music analysis tool. Three melodic contour features including the following items:

1.     Shape: the overall contour shape can be analyzed and divided into several smaller sub-shapes as the basic music units.

2.     Direction: the melodic contour can go up or down, and the frequency and slope of the direction determines the music tension.

3.     Range: the pitch distance between the highest and lowest notes forms the range. Range change rate and its register distribution and variation will make the music have different tensions and meanings.

 

In this research, the first step is to input a MIDI file before feature analysis. Due to the polyphonic multi-channel MIDI format, the main melody shall be determined firstly. According to Uitdenbogerd and Zobel’s research (2001), four kinds main melody extraction includes All-mono, Entropy-channel, Entropy-part, and Top-channel. In the proposed method, Top-channel is used to extract the main melody track based on the averaged-highest-note channel, and the Parsons code is used as the data process for MIDI readout, to get the basic shape of the music. Parsons developed his system (1975), to denote the relationship between any two consecutive pitches into the following four possibilities:

1.       “+” means "pitch up", if the note is higher than the previous note

2.       “-“ means "pitch down", if the note is lower than the previous note

3.       “0” means "repeat", if the note is the same pitch as the previous note

4.       “*” means “first tone as reference”

 

Therefore “*++-----0+---++++++--+” is the analysis result based on the input of music in Figure 1.

 

The proposed system also uses “sieve” based on Xenakis’ “Formulized Music” (1971), to filter out the unwanted pitch class from the input music segment, to generate music using algorithmic composition, according to Eq. (1), where PC is pitch class, P is pitch, and “mod” is modulus operation.

 

                                   (1)

 

After the melodic contour with sieve function operated is retrieved, algorithmic composition is applied to generate music automatically. Hiller and Isaacson also applied the principle of Markov chains in the middle 20^th century. As shown in Eq. (2), Markov chains can be used to generate music rhythm according to the style of the music segment input through probability control. A random variable X is represented as the timing between two note-on pulses in an independent time t, and the probability of the next-state X_t+1 will depend on the current-state X_t, and the probability at a certain time t_m and t_m+1 is:

 

                            (2)

 

Finally the proposed melody generator can be performed and adjusted with the following interval control function, after MIDI data input, and music features analysis using Parsons code analysis to generate basic shape as the algorithmic music baseline:

 

1.     Stepwise: interval change is controlled within major or minor second interval. The “scale-like” stepwise melody is fluent and stable, compared to other interval features.

2.     Arpeggio: consecutive interval change is within major or minor third, and then major or minor triad arpeggios can be constructed. The “horn-like” interval seems more energetic in high spirits.

3.     Jump: if the interval change is greater than a major third, then it is “jump”. Jump interval provides the highest energy, however it should make the interval immediately change the direction most time.

 

Among the above three interval changes, it should hybrid them into certain among of percentage. For instance, if we would like to generate a piece in more energetic style, then the stepwise percentage should be low, and arpeggio and jump rate should be high. The interval control function can be used to alter or adjust the generative melodic contour. Figure 2 shows the process of the proposed system:

 

 

Figure 2. Research process for melodic contour based algorithmic composition

 

Three cases with various interval control conditions will be applied and analyzed into the proposed system to verify the melody generator. In the future rhythm and harmony will be added into the analysis process, in order to provide more diversities and possibilities for algorithmic composition.

 

 

 

 

-  Chih-Fang Huang

 

Chih-Fang Huang, the Associate Professor at the Department of Information Communications at Kainan University, was born in Taipei city, Taiwan. He acquired both a PhD in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in music composition respectively from National Chiao Tung University. He studied composition under Prof. Wu, Tin-Lien, and computer music under Prof. Phil Winsor. His electroacoustic pieces have been performed in Asia, Cuba, Europe, and the USA, such as the electroacoustic piece “Microcosmos” were selected and performed in International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) in 2006, and the composition presented in CEMI (Center for Experiment Music and Intermedia), University of North Texas in 2010, and works performed in Berlin, Cologne, Sweden, Italy in 2011-12, etc. He is also the fellow of 2012 Art Music Residency, New York. In 2013 he was selected into the International Conducting Master Class of Martinu Philharmonic Orchestra under Mr. Kirk Trevor and Prof. Donald Schleicher, performing the works of Debussy, Brahms, etc. In 2014 he was invited to conduct the Greater Miami Youth Symphony (GMYS) orchstra. His research papers include many fields, such as automated music composition and the sound synthesis, which have been published in ICMC and international SCI/SSCI/AHCI Journals. Now he is also the conductor of the Taoyuan New Philharmonic Orchestra.

 

jeffh.me83g@gmail.com

 

 

-  Yen-Yeu Yu

 

Yen-Yeu Yu, graduate student, he study in Information Communication at Yuan Ze University, and studied computer music under Prof. Chih-Fang Huang, graduated from Computer Science of Fu Jen Catholic University.

 

funny154@gmail.com

 

 

JARAMILLO ARANGO, Julián

 

Perceptualization machines: environmental data sonification based on electroacoustic music

 

 

Introduction

 

Environmental data sonification has been an inspiring topic for new media artists [1] and other researchers interested in spreading relevant scientific information across the population [2]. While computer music tools are the main resource to acoustically display scientific data, Electroacoustic Music (EAM) analysis can also play an important roll by enriching, diversifying and extending the sonic content with which these systems deal. According to Supper, “… many sonifications stress that they regard sound as a way of allowing people to emotionally connect with something otherwise incomprehensible.” [3]. Perceptualization machines presented here bridge the gap between the empirical and scientific reading of reality, which are in constant negotiation in the definition and understanding of our surroundings. Particularly, by adopting an artistic approach to sonification, I am interested in questioning the roll of scientific data about air pollution in the everyday life of my local community and enhancing awareness to environmental conditions through a rewarding listening experience.

 

I will discuss Auditory Display (AD) and sonification strategies adopted in three percpetualization machines where air quality information is portrayed by sound: AirQ jacket [4], Esmog Data [5] and Breathe! Although being inspired by electroacoustic composition concepts and insights, these projects are not pieces of music, but objects and installations and can be also considered sound design and sound art works. They are the result of a two-years postdoctoral research about urban sound design conducted along with MA and PhD students of the Caldas University Design and Creation program in Manizales, Colombia.

 

We will also discuss sound creation from the perspective of Design studies, since they give reasonable emphasis to methodology and propose project-based directions in the creative process [6]. Design thinking considers both, the aesthetics and functional dimension involving modelling, interactive adjustment and re-design [3]. The sequence of three projects allowed us to achieve partial results and conclusions and adopt them as inputs in the next prototype. By testing different AD and sonifications the same information, we find an opportunity to reflect about the implications and potentialities of each communication design.

 

Sonification aesthetics and listening

 

In our research, we discriminate between AD, which covers all the topics exploring the auditory channel as a non-verbal information conveyor, including the display environment design (the audio system, speakers, listening facilities, etc…); and sonification, the data-dependent generation of sound [7]. Although these studies are mainly informed by psychological and physiological studies, they occasionally takes into account sound design and music composition considerations. From an aesthetic perspective, the goal of sonification would be producing “...auditory representations that give insight into the data or realities they represent to enable inference and meaning making to take place”. [8]. In this concern, EAM proposes significant contributions to sonification studies by providing listening and structuring models [9], [10], [11] which informs some listening frameworks that are being currently discussed by AD scholars [12], [13].

 

Sonification listening explores the Schaefferian notion of Comprendre, which is both, objective and abstract [14].  This fourth listening mode or function comprises “…symbolic (i.e. consensual) relations between representamen and object” [15] and is activated when facing a “… structure that has a sense and meaning for those listeners who share the code” [9]. Sonification listening demands unequivocal interpretations and potential actions in the case of alarms or notifications. In the case of natural phenomena (astronomical, biological, genetic, environmental) sonification can trigger a shift of mind related to the observed object, by unveiling the relation between data and its reality.  Furthermore, grounded by Kantian aesthetics Supper [3] suggests that some artistic sonification pieces can lead to a sublime listening, in which the sense of immensity and infinity arises in the listener when the communication process let him/her witness a non-perceptible natural phenomenon.   

 

Air Quality data

 

Since the time dynamics of environmental data occurs in the course of hours or days, input data is not assumed as compositional material. Instead, the sonification machines aims to enhance environmental information by compositional resources, and should be enjoyed as sound-augmented consulting devices. In our particular context (Manizales, Colombia) the growing industry and vehicle fleet determines important factors in the environmental contamination. In addition, an active volcanic region regularly emanates toxic gases surrounds Manizales, and then air pollution is now a critic element in the everyday life of local community. Although there is significant available information about the topic, environmental data are hardly taken into account by the community. From this point of view, air quality data became a rich source of information to be interpreted and its sonification an inspiring topic for those artists who aim to call attention about environmental awareness. Moreover, It offers an opportunity to create auditory images relating the surroundings, by triggering supplementary meanings to sound according to encrypted information.

 

AirQ Jacket (2016)

 

The first project I will discuss is entitled AirQ Jacket. It is a wearable technology garment with an attached electronic circuit, which measures contamination levels and temperature and transforms this information to perceptual stimuli through light and sound. It was created along with fashion designer Maria Paulina Gutierrez whose participation in the laboratory triggered an interchange among electronic, sound and dressmaking crafting, which resulted in this unorthodox AD device.

 

Figure 1. The AirQ jacket sonification system runs in a custom-made, telephone-like sound artifact.

 

In the design process we reflected about the listening culture created around portability, which was promoted by the Walkman [16]. The AirQ wearer should be able to acoustically consult our AD device wherever he/she goes, in order to create healthy courses through the city. We also paid special attention to Johnatan Sterne study of XIX auditory devices [17], such as the stethoscope. In the medical field stethoscopic listening produces objectification, which is the “… capacity to make external and concrete, and hence situate as perceptually objective” [18]. Our wearable proposal included a custom-made artifact attached to the jacket that was built with a piezo-electric device located inside a plastic cabinet that totally kills the sound, unless you approach it the ear.

 

We faced a challenge when creating sonic content with the arduino microcontroller, since it allows a meager repertoire of sound generation possibilities. We opted to work with a couple of sound pulses of energetic attack sounds. The first one displays temperature by varying speed and contamination level by varying pitch. The second pulse acts as a grid of reference, a contextual sound [19] representing “normal” environmental conditions.

 

 

Esmog Data (2016)

 

Esmog Data represented both, an advance and a redirection in the research process. It is an immersive installation presented in the Art Exhibition of the 2016 Balance-Unbalance Festival [20] along with Christian Quintero and Vanessa Gañán. The piece displays through audio and motion graphics the temperature and the concentration of some toxic gases determining air quality index (CO, CO2, SO2 and PM10). The AD device comprises surround speaker system whose sonic content is constantly changing, since a custom-made environmental station located in the entrance of the exhibition space regularly refreshes the system.

 

Figure 2. Esmog Data immersive space.

 

While the discussion about prototyping was already reported, [21] we will focus here on the EAM criteria adopted in the sonification. The Esmog Data sonic material was produced with the Johan Eriksson EcoSYSTEM [22] pure data patch, since it offered a modular workflow of audio synthesis blocks in which sensor data can be input. Instead of mapping sensor data directly to single synth parameters (pitch, amplitude, rate, adsr), we associated each one of the sensor inputs to parameters in many synth blocks in the search of more complex intrinsic musical values. Dennis Smalley vocabulary [11] was helpful to establish the qualities of sound motion attached to each pollutant gas. NO2 was associated to the notion of unidirectional motion (ascent, plane, descent), PM10 to occupation of the spectral space (diffuseness-concentration), CO to textural growth process (agglomeration-dissipation), CO2 to multidirectional motion (exogeny-endogeny). Temperature was associated to the behavioral relationship of dominance-subordination among the toxic gases

 

Breathe! (2017)

 

BREATHE! is our current sound art project and depicts the research findings. It is conceived as a multi-channel installation with no visuals, where the visitor should be able to identify each one of the measured toxic gases as a different sound source in the space. Since we are in the prototyping process we will discuss here some insights and motivations that have been introduced as variables in our project-based research.

 

The installation displays six human breathing sound loops, which shrink and stretch according to toxic levels, from different points in the space. The AD device provides a multisource environment in which the listener can walk through the exhibition space in order to approach to each speaker. An improved air monitoring station prototype located outdoors (with a more accurate CO2 sensor, a SO2 one and a Wi-Fi module) provides six different inputs attached to pure data wavetable samplers.

 

BREATH! deliberately intends to adopt a denotative strategy to sonification, by counting on the attraction of human gesture in the meaning making process as a strategy to call attention. The metaphor of the human breathing acts both, as a collateral effect of pollution and as a source of pollution information. Furthermore, it invokes the multimodal aspects of sound meaning by dealing with the tension and relaxation of muscles and activating a sort proprioceptive listening [9]. Another implication of dealing with this material is the emergence of emotional aspects of listening. The reference of the natural pulses of the human body being affected by contamination intends to pose a critical insight about human condition in a post-human society. 

 

 

References

 

[1] Polli, A. (2014). “Atmospherics/Weather works: A multi-channel storm sonification project”. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Auditory Display 2004, Sydney, Australia.

[2] St Pierre, M., Droumeva, M. (2016) "Sonifying for Public Engagement: A Context-Based Model for Sonifying Air Pollution Data". Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2016)

[3] Supper, A. (2014) “Sublime frequencies: The construction of sublime listening experiences in the sonification of scientific data.” Social Studies of Science. Vol 44(1) 34-58

[4] AirQ Jacket (2016). https://sonologiacolombia.wordpress.com/lab/airq-jacket/

[5] Esmog Data (2016). https://sonologiacolombia.wordpress.com/lab/esmog-data/

[6] Findeli. A (2008) Research Through Design and Transdisciplinarity: A Tentative Contribution to the Methodology of Design Research. I: Focused -- Current Design Research Projects and Methods, Publisher: Swiss Design Network, Editors: Swiss Design Network, pp.67-91

[7] Hunt, A. And Hermann, T. (2011) Interactive Sonification,. In Herman, T., Hunt, A., Neuhoff, H. (ed)    The sonification Handbook. Logos-Verlag, Berlin.

[8] Barras, S.&Vickers, J. (2011). Sonification Design and Aesthetics. In. Herman, T., Hunt, A.,   Neuhoff,H. (Ed). The sonification Handbook. Logos-Verlag, Berlin.

[9] Smalley, D. (1996) “The listening imagination: Listening in the electroacoustic era”, Contemporary Music Review 13 (2), 77-107

[10] Kendall, G (2014). “The Feeling Blend: Feeling and Emotion in Electroacoustic Art.”Organised Sound, 19(2):192:202

[11] Smalley, D. (1997) “Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes”, Organised Sound, 2(2), 107-26.

[12] Vickers, P and Hogg, B. (2006). “Sonification abstraite/sonification concrete: An ‘aesthetic persepctive space' for classifying auditory displays in the ars musica domain”. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Auditory Display , London

[13] Roddy, S., & Furlong, D. (2015) "Sonification listening: An empirical embodied approach". Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Auditory Display July 6-10, 2015, Graz, Styria, Austria.

[14] Schaeffer, P. (2003) [1966]. Tratado de los Objetos Musicales. Madrid, Alianza

[15] Palombini, C. (1999). Musique Concrète Revisited. Electronic Musicological Review, 4. UFPr Arts Department

[16] Hosokawa, S.(1984) The Walkman Effect. J. Popular Music 4, 165--180

[17] Sterne J (2003) The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke  University Press.

[18] Rice T (2008) “Beautiful murmurs: Stethoscopic listening and acoustic objectification”. The Senses & Society 3(3): 293–306.ew

[19] Walker, B. & Ness, M.A. (2011). Theory of Sonification. In Herman, T., Hunt, a., Neuhoff, H. (ed) The sonification Handbook. Logos-Verlag, Berlin.

[20] Balance-Unbalance 2016. http://www.balance-unbalance2016.org/

[21] Arango, J; Gañán, V., Quintero, C. (2016) Esmog Data. Interpreting Air Quality through Media Art and Design. In: Proceedings of Balance-Unbalance International Conference (2016)

[22] Eriksson, J. EcoSYSTEM. http://www.monologx.com/ecosystem/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-  Julián Jaramillo Arango

 

Julián Jaramillo Arango is composer and researcher working in the field of new media design and focusing on experimental sound practices, multimodal communication and in the development of interactive applications and services. Jaramillo Arango`s works bridge the gap among science, arts, technology, creativity, society, community and sustainability through works that explore different modes of sonic interaction. He holds a Ph.D. in Sonology adviced by Dr Fernando Iazzetta, São Paulo University. Currently Julián conducts a postdoctoral research in the Caldas University Design and Creation program where he develops novel interfaces for the local urban space. Julián lives and works in Manizales, Colombia.   http://sonologiacolombia.wordpress.com/

 

julianjaus@yahoo.com

 

 

KIRKBRIDE, Ryan

 

Troop: A Collaborative Environment for Live Coding

Electronic Music

 

 

Live Coding is a movement in electronic audiovisual performance that emerged at the turn of the millennia (Collins, McLean, Rohrhuber, & Ward, 2003) and is now being performed all over the world through a range of artistic practices (TOPLAP, 2004). It can be characterised by the continual process of constructing and reconstructing a computer program to generate audio and/or visuals while projecting one’s screen for an audience to see (Mori, 2015). In a musical context a Live Coder creates algorithms that temporarily define the rules of their performance until they feel the need to alter them. This form of live notation is sometimes described as a kairotic practice (Cocker, 2013) wherein opportune moments are seized before they pass. Troop is a Live Coding environment that allows users connected over a network to collaborate within the same text buffer and create live electronic music together in a truly kairotic way.

 

The projection of the performer’s screen is seen as fundamental to a Live Coding performance but its reception by the audience can be divisive (Burland & McLean, 2016). Code and music are intrinsically linked during performance and this is understood by the audience who often expect to be able to follow musical events and relate what is on the screen to the consequent sonic experience (Magnusson, 2011). The downside of this is that some audience members feel that watching the screen “pulls the focus away from the human performers and the listening” (Burland & McLean, 2016, p. 10). Burland and McLean suggest that by projecting their work performers allow their code to become a representation of themselves but one could argue that this is only accessible    to a minority who are able to decipher the code’s meaning. In comparison to other styles of performance Live Coding can be relatively static; performers may move in rhythm with their music but the constraint of using a computer keyboard to compose/perform in real-time does not allow for very expressive movement. As a consequence the code becomes the outlet for self expression and without it, the audience will rarely gain insight into the mind of the performer. Research has shown that being able to see a performer in close proximity improves the experience of live music (Burland & Pitts, 2012) and Live Coders often rely on the projection of their code to develop a level of intimacy with the audience.

 

The relationship between the audience members and the projected code is not universal and even those who appreciate that its role is integral to the performance style of Live Coding believe there is room for improvement. One participant from Burland and McLean’s study stated “I really enjoy seeing the projected code. I still think the community has a long way to go in terms of stagecraft while preserving the legibility of code” (p. 10), Zmölnig (2016) suggests that a potential solution “is to provide additional information on the screen that is not a presentation of the source code itself, but instead some kind of visualisation of the running program. Zmölnig is referring to the computational processes involved in a Live Coded performance but perhaps the idea of the “running program” could also be interpreted as the cognitive processes that occur during performance, such as those involved with musical creativity, but the argument could be made that code’s projection in itself already addresses this.

 

Live coding shares many of the same characteristics that make live jazz performances so interesting in that each performance is usually improvised and therefore unique (Magnusson, 2014). Music is created in the moment and the aspect of risk and uncertainty adds excitement to the event as it does in jazz (Burland & Pitts, 2012). Jazz audiences want “to be close to the musicians, see them interact with each other and see them play as clearly as they could hear them” (Brand, Sloboda, Saul, & Hathaway, 2012, p. 9), which suggests that the creative process accounts for as much of the appeal of improvised jazz as the music itself. The concept of sharing with the audience the creative processes that emerge from the dynamic interaction between performers is fundamental to the design of Troop. In a similar manner to Google Docs (Google, 2017) Troop uses a shared text buffer (see Figure 1), which enables concurrent word processing over the internet. This allows Live Coders to collaborate directly on the same material and see, as well as be part of, the live composition. Working within the same document Live Coders not only share their immediate textual material with one another but also their cognitive workspace; traces of each contributor’s thought patterns are left in the document as each keystroke updates the code, visible for all to see. This on-screen interaction makes the collaborative process transparent and accessible to the audience and allows the performers to share their musical ideas with one another in real-time. To help differentiate their individual contributions each performer is allocated a different coloured font. This addresses the problem of “identifying how to know what is each other’s code, as well as how to know who has modified it” identified by Xambó, Freeman, Magerko, and Shah (2016).

 

By contrast a typical Live Coding ensemble will usually synchronise tempi whilst working on individual portions of code on separate screens, some, or all, of which will be projected for the audience. Without the use of a shared text buffer collaboration in Live Coding often relies on per- formers listening to one another’s contributions, which creates a latency between the instantiation of a musical idea and a corresponding co-performer’s reaction. It could be argued that this stifles the interactive processes that appeal to audiences when watching improvised music. In addition to this, the audience’s attention can be divided when performers’ code is projected across multiple screens. In some cases, a lack of projection equipment may mean not every performer’s screen is visible. In either scenario the process of creative collaboration is obfuscated by the separation of the performers’ expressive representations in their code.

 

There are several existing programs that facilitate collaborative Live Coding performance such as the popular browser-based system Extramuros (Ogborn, 2016), which attempts to address some of the issues mentioned above. It allocates each connected performer a small text box on a web page into which they can each write code. These text boxes are visible to, and can be edited by, any other connected performer. This allows them to create their own code and request and modify other performer’s code in the same window, reducing the number of screens necessary to project during the performance. However, working in separate text boxes does not encourage the joint development within the same textual material.

 

The Troop environment opens up many possibilities for research into collaborative Live Coding. I have founded The Yorkshire Programming Ensemble (TYPE) to explore the effect of different creative constraints on performance. One example of this is limiting the proportion of text that any one performer can contribute to encourage a democratically constructed performance. Through this exploration TYPE is aiming to research and develop live performance strategies that can emulate the high standards of improvisational collaboration that jazz music is renowned for.

 

Figure 1: A screen shot of the Troop interface with three connected users.

 

 

References

 

Brand, G., Sloboda, J., Saul, B., & Hathaway, M. (2012). The reciprocal relationship between jazz musicians and audiences in live performances: A pilot qualitative study. Psychology of Music, 40 (5), 634–651.

Burland, K., & McLean, A. (2016). Understanding live coding events. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 12 (2), 139–151.

Burland, K., & Pitts, S. (2012). Rules and expectations of jazz gigs. Social Semiotics, 22 (5), 523–543.

Cocker, E. (2013). Live notation:–reflections on a kairotic practice. Performance Research, 18 (5), 69–76.

Collins, N., McLean, A., Rohrhuber, J., & Ward, A.  (2003). Live coding in laptop performance. Organised sound, 8(03), 321–330.

Google. (2017). Google docs - create and edit documents online, for free. https://www.google.couk/docs/about/. (accessed: 02/02/17)

Magnusson, T. (2011). Algorithms as scores: Coding live music. Leonardo Music Journal, 21 , 19–23.

Magnusson, T. (2014). Herding cats: Observing live coding in the wild. Computer Music Journal, 38 (1), 8–16.

Mori, G. (2015). Analysing live coding with ethnographic approach - a new perspective. In Proceedings of the first international conference on live coding (pp. 117–124). ICSRiM, University of Leeds. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.19343

Ogborn, D. (2016). d0kt0r0/extramuros: language-neutral shared-buffer networked live coding system.    https://github.com/d0kt0r0/extramuros. (accessed: 13/12/16)

TOPLAP. (2004). TOPLAP — the home  of  live  coding.  http://toplap.org/.  (accessed: 08/12/16)

Xambó, A., Freeman, J., Mgerko, B., & Shah, P. (2016). Challenges and new directions for collaborative live coding in the classroom.

Zmölnig, I. m. (2016). Audience perception of code. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 12(2), 207–212.

 

 

 

-  Ryan Kirkbride

 

Ryan is a postgraduate research student at the University of Leeds in the UK. His background is in Computer Science but has recently been combining this with his interest in music through live coding and algorithmic composition. He began work on his Python-driven Live Coding environment, FoxDot, in 2015 and has since performed across the UK and internationally using it. His university research focusses on nonverbal communication in live coding ensembles and collaborative performances and developing software to explore this.  www.foxdot.org

 

sc10rpk@leeds.ac.uk

 

 

 

KOJIMA, Yuriko Hase

 

Musical Analysis of Takemitsu’s “Water Music”:

Rhythmic Interactions and Spacial Projections of the Sounds

 

 

This paper deals with an experimental analysis of Takemitsu’s “Water Music” especially focussing on its rhythmic and spacial structures of the phrases. The piece is not only regarded as Takemitsu’s one of the most innovative works with new technology of his time but also as one of the most important works for the history of Japanese electroacoustic music in its earliest period. The water sounds are recorded to be modified and projected in stereo. And yet, the piece sounds as if it has tracks with each part played by a performer in duo setting.

 

Takemitsu seems to have tried to compose this piece with experimentation of projection of the sound for 6 speakers placed unevenly surrounding the concert space. Although it has been difficult to find an evidence of performance in perfect realization, we may imagine how Takemitsu planned the piece to be heard in real space. In fact, just listening to the piece in stereo, we can still catch each sound in multi-layered auditory perspectives. In terms of the details of the phrases, the sound projection plays an important role in making the rhythms become more vibrant in three- dimensional space.

 

The musical space of electroacoustic music could be described with time, sound direction, and pitch. A certain rhythmic figure would be fixed in a certain place of the musical space in real- time. Every single tone could be placed in a certain place in conjunction with other tone(s). They are sometimes very closely placed and sometimes embedded in certain distance. The distance between the tones could be achieved by several parameters such as amplitude, time-gap, and timbral change. It is the true pleasure of composing electroacoustic pieces that composers could controll those changes in time just as real performance of music. Reversely, we may be able to more closely analyze electroacoustic music by looking into the pieces three-dimensionally. Especially, in “Water Music” has distinctive quality of elaboration of time and space to create rhythmic figures. Here, sound projection is the keyword to better understand the piece.

 

 

 

-  Yuriko Hase Kojima

 

Born in Japan in 1962. Completing her studies in piano in Japan, Yuriko Hase Kojima studied composition in the United States for ten years, and got DMA from Columbia University in 2000. She studied composition, theory, aesthetics and philosophy, with Tristan Murail, Jonathan Kramer, Fred Lerdahl, Brad Garton, and Lydia Goer, among others. Her works have been presented at the international festivals including the ISCM, the ICMC, and the IAWM, performed by the Ensemble Modern, the Pearls Before Swine Experience, the Azure Ensemble, and the New York New Music Ensemble, to name a few. Currently, Ms. Kojima serves as Professor of Composition at Shobi University, specializing in composition, music theory, and electroacoustic music. Along with her career as a composer, she conducts researches in musicological studies. She is also active as the founder and the artistic director of a non-profit organization Glovill (www.glovill.jp) aimed to introduce new music to Japan.

 

y-kojima@s.shobi-u.ac.jp

 

 

LANDY, Leigh

 

Cultural Identity in Electroacoustic Music: A Beijing Case Study

 

 

In 2015, I was invited by my colleague, Simon Emmerson, to write a chapter related to my experiences of electroacoustic music in China for a volume that he was preparing.[6] The goal was to investigate a broad repertoire of recent electroacoustic works and attempt to discover a number of binding factors. This proved to be extremely difficult. As I had been warned by the underground musician, Yan Jun, many Chinese underground musicians are not keen to communicate about their work and are thus, in a sense, shy to engage in studies regarding their artistic endeavour. This indeed proved to be true leading toward an unbalanced collection of interviews, almost all of which involved conservatoire-based or trained composers. In fact that aspect of the project involved focusing on the Central Conservatory of Music (CCoM) in Beijing and, more specifically, the work of Zhang Xiaofu and three ‘generations’ of his students. Similar discussions were held with musicians at other institutions in China and fewer still were held with those musicians not linked to a conservatoire.

 

Having visited the CCoM often since 1993, I felt comfortable speaking with musicians who had studied there having heard literally dozens if not hundreds of works created at this world-famous institution. Having visited a number of the sister institutions around China – currently, with the opening of the new Zhejiang and Harbin conservatories, they number eleven – and engaged with several electroacoustic composers from these institutions, a pattern of behaviour evolved. These discoveries led to a hypothesis that would form part of the research leading towards the book chapter. It also made me wonder about the importance, or lack of, cultural identity in electroacoustic music in general. Therefore, this issue forms the focus of the talk, although the research itself investigated Chinese works solely.

 

Cultural identity in electroacoustic works: There have been too few attempts, as I wrote a decade ago in Understanding the Art of Sound Organization (2007: MIT Press), to categorise sound-based works. Within this area, research regarding cultural elements has been relatively marginal. To name an example, although many works of musique concrète, later acousmatic music, share some basic properties with roots in France where they were produced, the broadening of the acousmatic diaspora did not particularly lead towards cultural variants. By the 1980s a certain similar quality could be found in acousmatic compositions made around the globe and this continues today to an extent.

 

That said, acousmatic works form but one cluster of electroacoustic compositions. Let’s look at a very different sort of sound-based work, noise music. Although there has been a great concentration of work in Japan, and thus the term Japanoise, are there cultural markers in noise music that, for example, differentiates a British from a Greek noise composition?

 

The first part of this talk, after the introduction regarding the background described above, will address this issue attempting to propose its importance in terms of electroacoustic music discourse regarding both composition and analysis. An early example will be called upon due to EMS17 taking place in Japan, namely Takemitsu’s ‘Water Music’ which is, in my view, an extremely Japanese/E. Asian composition.

 

The three paths discovered in Chinese electroacoustic works: Following the more general discussion of cultural aspects of electroacoustic composition, the talk will move on to the research that formed the basis of the book chapter.

 

To begin, two tendencies were noted based on the author’s experience of Chinese electroacoustic works and conversations with Chinese composers: a) the proportion of mixed music pieces appears to be higher than in most other countries, and b) the proportion of music that consciously involves aspects from the musicians’ own culture – China in general but also its diverse regions – is also higher than in most other nations in which there is an active electroacoustic music scene.

 

The former tendency may have to do with the history and demands of education at Chinese conservatoires and is much less relevant in terms of musicians outside of academe. Nonetheless, the interest in sonic quality related to Chinese traditions is an aspect that aligns well with the sonic focus of electroacoustic music. This is an interesting subject and was integrated within the second tendency.

 

It is the links with Chinese culture that formed the focus of all interviews in this project. Three stood out and were discussed with all musicians:

1)       Sampling

2)       The use of Chinese instruments and/or musical approaches

3)       Inspiration from Chinese culture (e.g., Buddhism, Taoism, poetry, philosophy)

 

Illustrations of the three will be presented through the musicians’ thoughts and sound examples. It should be noted that the third of the three is in many ways the least tangible and interestingly more difficult for younger Chinese musicians.

 

The four CCoM musicians with whom interviews were held and whose works were studied were: Zhang Xiaofu, Guan Peng, Li Qiuxiao and Qi Mengjie (Maggie). The key underground musician interviewed was Yan Jun, but materials collected since 2006 due to my friendship with Yao Dajuin, an established Taiwanese sound artist based in Hangzhou, were also used to create the other side of this portrait.

 

There is a significant gap, perhaps greater than in other countries, between the conservatoires (and universities), on the one hand, and the free-lance underground artists on the other. Indeed, the information gained was highly dissimilar but the cultural links provided an excellent discussion point in all cases. Therefore, illustrations will come from both trained and autodidactic artists.

 

Conclusion: I have often spoken of an audience’s need to connect with new experimental forms of music. Shared experience is the most efficient way of achieving this, and using cultural aspects that are identifiable to the listener exemplifies a great means to success. This project led me to several pieces using elements of shared experience as an access tool.

 

Whilst undertaking this investigation, I had to take into account China’s own history that included a dark period for the arts during the Cultural Revolution. The difference between the musicians’ knowledge then and shortly afterwards and the availability of repertoire on today’s (partially censored) internet today is enormous.

 

Thus, although the cultural links are very strong regarding many of the musicians investigated here, today’s students and younger underground musicians are involved with more international tendencies, in many ways joining the more international scene of sound-based music found elsewhere today. Is this something to celebrate or just historical inevitability?

 

 

 

-  Leigh Landy

 

Leigh Landy holds a Research Chair at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) where he directs the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre. His scholarship is divided between creative and musicological work. He is editor of “Organised Sound” (Cambridge) and author of several books including “What’s the Matter with Today’s Experimental Music?” (Harwood), “Understanding the Art of Sound Organization” (MIT Press) and “Making Music with Sounds” (Routledge) in 2012. He co-edited “Expanding the Horizon of Electroacoustic Music Analysis” (Cambridge) with Simon Emmerson and is currently completing “The Music of Sounds and the Music of Things” with John Richards. He directs the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS, EARS 2) projects, is a founding member of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network (EMS) and is chercheur associé of IReMus (Paris).

 

llandy@dmu.ac.uk

 

 

LEMBKE, Sven-Amin

 

Triangular sound shapes: spectromorphology

and its perceptual implications

 

 

1. Introduction

 

Studies on psychological aspects underpinning the listening experience of electroacoustic music are rare. This presentation offers a foundational perceptual study on the basis of Denis Smalley’s concepts of spectromorphology (Smalley, 1997). These concepts assume an important place in sound-based composition, at the same time, relying strongly on acoustical and perceptual assumptions. Musical discourse and expression are achieved by shaping the spectral evolution over time, often drawing analogies to extra-sonic gestural, motion or growth processes. For instance, in the visualizations of spectromorphological processes, simple geometric shapes are sometimes employed (Smalley, 1997; Blackburn, 2011). These visualizations commonly imply the shapes to evolve on the spectrotemporal domain: the horizontal dimension represents time; the vertical axis describes the frequency spectrum, while spectral amplitude may only be vaguely specified. Acoustical assumptions are even more clearly implied when these geometric shapes are used as visual annotations, resembling or even superimposed onto spectrograms (e.g., EAnalysis software, Couprie, 2014).

 

In probably the simplest case, a geometrical shape may delineate a spectrotemporal evolution in which two sides of a triangle diverge in frequency over time. Importantly, the notion of spectromorphology encompasses both the acoustical characteristics of the sound shape and the relevant perceptual qualities that are evoked. Given the rather literal analogy of mapping a visual triangle to the spectrotemporal domain, a number of questions arise how this visual analogy translates to being perceived in the auditory domain. Assuming a triangle like the one illustrated in Figure 1, i.e., one exhibiting linear sides, how is this ‘linearity’ best translated into the perceived sound shape?

 

 

Figure 1. Visualization of triangular sound shape used in the experiments. In terms of the  perceptual qualities, the black outline corresponds to clarity, the filled grey area to opacity, and the balance between the top and bottom ends of the triangle relative to the grey, horizontal axis to symmetry.

 

Does it depend on the scales of frequency (linear or logarithmic) or amplitudes (equal amplitude or loudness)? In an iterative, granular process, how would the influence of granular density influence perception, and would there be a difference between a seamlessly continuous spectrum as opposed to one exhibiting a spectral gap? Finally, does the perception of sound shape for the same acoustical parameters remain unaffected if the triangle were reversed in time?

 

This set of questions relates to morphological qualities that still need to be identified and associated with their corresponding acoustical factors. Although the perceptual clarity of the shape could be implied by the diverging sides’ trajectories, the spectral content enclosed therein could also bear some morphological significance, suggesting that sound shapes could involve several perceptual aspects. Addressing these issues, this study explored the acoustic factors influencing the perception of sound shapes and how they may possibly relate to different perceptual qualities. The consideration of acoustic factors was informed by prior knowledge on psychoacoustical scales for frequency and amplitude as well as principles known from auditory scene analysis (Bregman, 1990).

 

2. Perceptual experiments

 

Two experiments were conducted to investigate a number of acoustical factors influencing the perception of triangular sound shapes. Both experiments utilized asynchronous granular synthesis, with the sound shapes composed of many individual 100-ms sinusoidal grains, each of particular frequency and amplitude. As shown in Figure 1, the tip of the triangular sound shape at its beginning is centered on a single frequency (always 1100 Hz), whereas at its end, the triangle spans across a frequency range (always 2000 Hz bandwidth). Given these constraints, a triangular sound shape comprised randomized sinusoidal grains either beginning at the centre frequency and widening toward higher and lower frequencies or narrowing from the widest frequency range toward the centre frequency. The temporal and frequency density of the grains, their amplitudes, and the frequency trajectories were variable (see  experiments).

To study the influence of these acoustical factors on the perception of sound shapes, the perceived degree of three qualities was measured using rating scales. As visualized in Figure 1, these qualities concerned the characterization of sound shape, namely, the clarity of the defining outline or contour of the shape, the opacity of the therein enclosed sound material, and the symmetry of the shape relative to the centre frequency.

 

Experiment 1: density, orientation

17 participants completed a total of 144 trials. In each trial, a participant was presented a sound shape (11 s duration, via loudspeaker in mono) and had to provide ratings for clarity, opacity, and symmetry of shape. Among all sound shapes, participants listened to a total of nine different levels of granular density (both time and frequency). As shown in Figure 2, perceived clarity of the triangular sound shapes increased with increasing granular density. Notably, for sufficiently high density (above level V), perceived clarity remained about the same. Similar trends were observed for the opacity ratings.

 

Figure 2. Ratings of perceived sound-shape clarity across increasing levels of granular density. Points: mean, bars: standard error.

 

Furthermore, half of all presented sound shapes involved a widening orientation, while the remaining half narrowed in frequency towards the end. As shown in Figure 3, perceived clarity of shape was markedly higher for widening than for narrowing sound shapes, although the only acoustical difference concerned a time-reversed orientation.

 

Experiment 2: frequency gap, frequency and amplitude scales

Nine participants[7] completed a total of 64 trials and provided the same ratings as in Experiment 1. All sound shapes (7 s duration) in this experiment followed the widening frequency orientation, half of which filled the entire spectral frequency range, as in Experiment 1. The remaining half exhibited a gradually widening spectral gap around the centre frequency. As shown in Figure 4, the solid, gapless sound shapes were perceived as more opaque (less transparent) than those exhibiting gaps.

 

All sound shapes were grouped into four different conditions of acoustic or psychoacoustic scalings. While for half of all sound shapes the widening in frequency occurred along a linear scale in Hz, the remaining half followed the rate of equivalent rectangular bandwidths (ERB, Moore & Glasberg, 1983), which is a psychoacoustically derived scale related to the frequency resolution of the inner ear.  Orthogonal to the two partitions of frequency scalings, the amplitudes of individual sinusoidal grains were also determined either acoustically or psychoacoustically. The former considered equal amplitudes across all frequencies, whereas the latter weighted amplitudes based on the frequency-dependent equal loudness contours (Fletcher & Munson, 1933; ISO 226, 2003). As apparent in Figure 5, sound shapes that exhibited equal amplitudes across frequency and that widened along linear frequency were judged as most symmetric (closest to 0). By contrast, amplitudes equalized for loudness were perceived as upward or downward asymmetric for ERB rate and linear frequency, respectively.

 

Figure 3. Ratings of perceived sound-shape clarity for widening vs. narrowing orientations

Figure 4. Ratings of perceived opacity for shapes exhibiting a frequency gap or not (solid).

Figure 5. Ratings of perceived sound-shape symmetry across frequency (x-axis: linear vs. ERB rate) and amplitude scalings (y-axis: equal amplitude vs. equal loudness).
Ratings of 0 were judged fully symmetric, > 0 downward asymmetric, < 0 upward asymmetric.

3. Conclusion

 

In an attempt to shed light on how extra-sonic gestural or morphological analogies map to perception in the auditory domain, the reported experiments allowed an exploratory study into possible acoustical factors that affect the perception of spectromorphological processes. All three perceptual qualities that were derived from a visual analogy, namely, clarity, opacity, and symmetry of the triangular shape, proved to be perceptually relevant, moreover, seemingly associated to different acoustical factors.

 

While granular density seemed to affect both clarity and opacity, it is important to note that the reverse orientation of the shape mediated perceived clarity. For one, this points toward greater density and thus proximity among grains achieving stronger perceptual grouping (Bregman, 1990), whereas the latter finding draws parallels to previously observed perceptual asymmetries for time-reversed sound processes (Patterson, 1994; Neuhoff, 2001). Furthermore, the gradual insertion of a spectral gap into the sound shape was attributed a decrease in perceived opacity. As common visualizations depict triangular sound shapes as symmetric relative to a center frequency, the results of the experiment offered valuable insight into what frequency and amplitude scales were perceived as most symmetric. Somewhat surprisingly, most symmetry was achieved for the sound shapes lacking any psychoacoustically derived scales.

 

Future results upon completing the second experiment may still mediate some of the conclusions, or add new findings. As a result, the reported results should be considered preliminary. Nonetheless, the obtained findings emphasize the importance of considering both acoustical and perceptual aspects in obtaining a more comprehensive understanding of spectromorphological processes. The longterm benefit from conducting similar studies on more complex gestural or other morphological processes could lead to developing perceptually informed tools or controls for sound synthesis or processing that operate based on relevant morphological parameters.

 

 

References

 

Blackburn, M. (2011). The visual sound-shapes of spectromorphology: an illustrative guide to composition. Organised Sound, 16(01), 5–13.

Bregman, A. S. (1990). Auditory scene analysis: the perceptual organization of sound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Couprie, P. (2014). EAnalysis (version 1), software, http://logiciels.pierrecouprie.fr.

Fletcher, H. & Munson, W. A. (1933). Loudness, its definition, measurement and calculation. Bell System Technical Journal, 12(4), 377–430.

ISO 226 (2003). Acoustics: Normal equal-loudness contours. Technical report, International Organization for Standardization, Geneva.

Moore, B. C. J. & Glasberg, B. R. (1983). Suggested formulae for calculating auditoryfilter bandwidths and excitation patterns. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 74(3), 750–753.

Neuhoff, J. G. (2001). An adaptive bias in the perception of looming auditory motion. Ecological Psychology, 13(2), 87–110.

Patterson, R. D. (1994). The sound of a sinusoid: Spectral models. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 96(3), 1409–1418.

Smalley,  D.  (1997).   Spectromorphology:   explaining sound-shapes. Organised Sound, 2(2), S1355771897009059.

 

 

 

-  Sven-Amin Lembke

 

Sven-Amin Lembke has a background in musicology, acoustics, and psychology and in 2015 completed a PhD degree in Music Technology at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, where he was a member of the Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory under the supervision of Prof. Stephen McAdams. He currently holds a lectureship in Music and Audio Technology at De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom. His research seeks to describe the experiences of creating, performing or listening to music, based on an interdisciplinary approach. He recently embarked on a new research focus on the perception and cognition of electroacoustic music, conducted as a member of the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre at De Montfort University.

 

sven-amin.lembke@dmu.ac.uk

 

 

LINK, Martin

 

Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) – expression as a meaning

 

 

Background

 

Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) is maybe the only electroacoustic work ever created involving a musician and a semiologist at the same time. During their short cooperation in the Milanese Studio di Fonologia Musicale during the 1950ies at the Italian broadcasting company RAI, Luciano Berio and Umberto Eco reached it's height with this tapemusic produced in 1958. Originally intendet as a radioexperiment, this work grew out of the study of onomatopoeia from Eco and Berio as a survey using the eleventh chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses as an example. Although Ecos semiotic profession would come to full extend after this period, his fundamental thoughts on opennes and the meaning of open forms were already on the table when he published his article L'opera in movimento e la coscienza dell'epoca in 1958/59. The production of Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) included the reading of the text from Ulysses in French, Italian and English, which was then put together and treated with special procedures that were developed in the Milanese studio such as overdubbing, filtering and variation of speed and dynamic. The result was a piece with the text of James Joyce which becomes gradually difficult to comprehend because of its multi layer structure and which was now equipped with new dimension of meaning and understanding.

 

Aims

 

The intention of this paper is first to understand the creation of Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) by historical means and to find out what were the ideas behind it and especially what possible traces of the cooperation of musician Berio and philosopher Eco can be found in the project. Secondly it is the purpose to understand the work by its structure through analysis of music and text, so that together with the historical survey the full dimension of this work can be decoded. The next focus is to point out the semantic aspect of Thema, thus to find out what it expresses and its particular way of expression. Finally the results should provide an insight of the semantics of this particular piece as an example for meanings and expressions of electroacoustic music on the one hand in comparison to other works of electroacoustic music and on the other hand in this unique case of having a semiologist as one of the originators.

 

Method

 

To understand the historical background of Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) scholarly research was carried out on secondary and primary resources. Primary resources contain statements made by Lucano Berio himself regarding this project. Among these resources is the interview with Angela Ida De Benedictis, where he reflects on the work of the Studio di Fonologia Musica (1) and an interview with Barry Schrader (2) concerning the explicit project Thema (Omaggio a Joyce).

 

Because of the fact that Eco was involved, the study of his cooperation and friendship is another fundamental to this investigation. Therefore, primary resources containing Ecos's statements especially in his interview with Thomas Stauder were studied. (3)

 

As secondary resource, the thesis of musicologist Flo Menezes Luciano Berio et la phonologie. Une approche jakobsonienne de son oevre and Ulysses Annotated from Robert Seidman were regarded together with testimonies of other witnesses of the Studio in Miland such as Marino Zuccheri and Roberto Leydi. (1) The understanding of Thema (Omaggio o Joyce) regarding its structure was carried out on the basis of the interview from Luciano Berio with Barry Schrader and A.I. De Benedictis, also Berio's essay Poetry and music – An experience and Bronze by gold from Nicola Scaldaferri (1). The analysis covered especially the procedures of treatment of the recorded sound material in relation to the recorded words of the eleventh chapter of James Joyce`s Ulysses. The results of this procedure-analysis were compared to the results of the historial survey of the cooperation of Berio and Eco, especially regarding their resaerch on onomatopoeia, to see if possible relations and links between these events can be found. The results of these procedures were drafted together to get a clear picture of Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) and its meanings. Finally this was compared to the electroacoustic works Fontana Mix by John Cage and Gesang der Junglinge from Karlheinz Stockhausen to find out possible similarities and to show how unique this piece is regarding the cooperation of Berio as an artist and Eco as a philosopher as its foundation.

 

Results

 

The historical investigation could reveal, that the project of Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) actually begun already at a private occasion: Because of their mutual interest in James Joyce, Berio and Eco became friends and spent evenings at Berio's house reading out parts of Ulysses to each other. Cathy Berberian became a very important role in this project, because her voice had the unique quality that would be crucial to create recordings of the eleventh chapter of Ulysses. This contributed to get a perfect impression of the acoustic abilities of this text. According to Berio the focus layed on onomatopoeia and the idea behind that was the aspect of sound, in fact according to Berio and Eco the eleventh chapter of Ulysses could be seen with its onomatopoeia as a musical sound or even clearer: a composed fuga per canonem. But their intention was not rather to trace the classical form of a fugue in the text but to go into the deepth of the onomatopoeia to highlight the polyphonic structure. With this phonetic emphasis the project started with the recording of the english version including exaggerations of the onomatopoeia to decode the musical sound behind them such as „Imperthnthn thnthnthn“ as a trill or „chips, picking chips“ as a staccato, which has been identified by Luciano Berio himself. This recording was then added with a French and an Italian version.

 

However, the process of transformation was based in the first step on overdubbing a recorded voice twice, so three voices were heard together with increasing and decreasing the time relations and dynamic relations to highlight and to confuse the acoustic image. This procedure was repeated with the Italian version of the text read by three voices and the French read by a male and a female voice. Then the three languages were combined together and re-ordered according to a musical principle, so this text becomes a polyphonic structure. The next step of electronic elaboration was to go back to the English text recorded on tape and to classify the words into new chords according to a scale of vocal colours which was then treated with filtering and adding fundamental tones to reveal new relationships in the material itself. Finally the French text was examined again and was treated with variation of its time relations between various elements. Together these procedures created a new polyphonic structure, where it is not possible anymore to recognise meaningful words – the composition transformes the text partially into a cloud of sound where the words are not anymore audible in their original sound. However, this is not the case during the whole piece since the text is often understandable in the beginnging as it is written by James Joyce. To both Berio and Eco, it was their desire according to the interviews to explore a state of language, where the meaningful language would completely melt with the world of sounds, what they called a continuum. And it was Ferdinand De Saussure who founded the distinction between phonetics and semantics, a linguistic theory of distinction which Berio was well aware of and Eco came in touch with through him. This work investigates the border between sound and meaning as an aestehtic perception and other composers like Stockhausen with Gesang der Junglinge had the same focus in mind. The novelty in this piece lies in the contribution of a text with onomatopoeia in several languages that from the beginning was about to emerge into sound. Because of the fact that the meaning of the words as a denotative characteristic gradually disappears and emerges into pure sound, this piece has an open character since these words are not anymore restricted to a significance and are now completely open to be heard unrestricted.

 

Conclusions

 

The presented results allow to conclude that this project is based on the exclusive cooperation and private friendship of Luciano Berio and Umberto Eco. The basis of this private aspect of their cooperation lay in their common interest in the onomatopoeia of James Joyce, which lead to the distinctive characteristic of Thema (Omaggio a Joyce). Onomatopoeia as a meaning of expression did not only distinguish this work from other works in the field of contemporary electroacoustic music but was the core of its intention: To overcome the dichotomy between meaning and sound or semantic and phonetic. Onomatopoeia the text of Ulysses reached out to this intention and it was thanks to the cooperation of Eco and Berio that attention and discovery was undertaken of this special case of musical expression as a meaning. Berio and Eco established in this electroacoustic piece meaning not in the sense of the assignment of phonetic structures to certain determined denotations, but in the sense of meaning without predetermined significances and therefore open. This open charactristic would later have a magnificent influence on Umberto Eco's essay L'opera in movimento e la coscienza dell'epoca and his grand publication Opera aperta.

 

References

(1) A.I. De Benedictis, V. Rizzardi, Nuova musica alla radio, 2000

(2) B. Schrader, Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music, 1982

(3) T. Stauder, Gesprache mit Umberto Eco aus drei Jahrzehnten, 2012

A.I. De Benedictis, Luciano Berio – Nuove Prospettive, 2012

(4) F. Menezes, Luciano Berio et la phonologie. Une approche jakobsonienne de son oevre, 1993

(5) R. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated, 1988

 

 

 

-  Martin Link

 

Martin Link was born in Gießen 1989. After graduation from high school in Düren, artistic degrees of music have been completed at Folkwang University Essen (bachelor of music) and Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf (master of music). During these studies additional academic training in musicology was followed with theses about the music theory of Olivier Messiaen, the aesthetic philosophy of Theodor Lipps and systematic sociology of Niklas Luhmann. Since 2014 a doctoral PhD study course is followed at Westfälische Wilhelms Universität Münster with the thesis The friendship between Luciano Berio and Umberto Eco. Aesthetic foundations and artistic implications.

 

martinlink89@hotmail.com

 

LIU, Chenhan

 

Overview of Types and Researches of Data Controllers

in Interactive Electronic Music

 

 

In recent years, interactive electronic music is a popular development direction of electronic music. Its design and creation need not only consider the sounds, but also design or create the condition parameters to influence the occurrence and changes of music according to the requirements on works and performance. For composers, one of the ways to obtain the condition parameters is to collect data through the controller and send data to the computer, in order to have the computer influence the occurrence and changes of sounds. During the processing, creation and even the whole process of human-machine interaction, the controller has a great influence. The controller protocol could be mainly classified into OSC, eucon, AES, MIDI and so on. For example, as the most common and normative protocol in electronic music, and from the simple MIDI keyboards with output of 0&1 signals to the complicated Kinect which could realize the data mapping of 11 collection points through capture of actions, MIDI protocol could convert the input data into MIDI signals and influence the sounds. The commonly used data controllers mainly include gravity controller, speed controller, light controller, vibration controller, location controller, breath controller and so on. And the emergence of visual platform of programming language, like MAX/MSP and KYMA for musical creation and media creation, facilitates the human-machine interactive creation and performance.

 

Comparing with the traditional medium of control such as sound console, controller is a very promising tool with profound impact on how musicians create their works. With regard to the development history of electronic music worldwide, China has transformed itself from a follower in the past to the role of a creator actively innovating electronic music. Therefore, I believe that a historical perspective should be adopted to probe into the principles and technical measures of different data controllers for a better electronic music in the future. With that in mind, this paper elaborates on the principles of several controllers and how they should be applied to the future creations. The integration of technological theories and creations will enable us to spot problems and accumulate experiences. In addition, different practical situations are considered to highlight the significance of innovations in technology and art.

 

 

 

-  Chenhan Liu

 

Liu Chenhan is an undergraduate student in the Electronic Music Center of the Department of Composition of the Central Conservatory of Music, where he studies under the guidance of Mr. Guan Peng. He used to study in the Department of Music in the Affiliated Middle School of the Central Conservatory of Music where he studied under the guidance of Mr. Zhu Shijia. He is a member of the Chinese Society of Electronic Music.

His major works are as follows: electronic music including “Dance for Max”, “A Double Song of Autumn: for zheng, flute and electronic music”, “A Psalm of Grains”, “Patch 0.0.1”, “Hothworld”, “0—for GRM Tools and Timpani”; works of chamber music including “Bravo”, “Adagio” and “The Theme and Its Reflection Game”.

 

13b325@mail.ccom.edu.cn

 

 

LÓPEZ RamÍrez-GastÓn, José Ignacio

 

Hybrid Modulations: Report on the Culture of

Electroacoustic Music in Contemporary Peru

 

 

This paper makes an evaluation of the current situation of electroacoustic music in Peru. It maps the current interest (or lack of it) on part of the Peruvian musical institutions in relationship to electronic and electroacoustic music for both composition and performance. It deals primarily with the, in general, unsatisfactory, state of affairs that has kept Peruvians from producing a culture of electroacoustic music within the geographical territory of the country, and with the steps taken recently (and those not taken) to fill that historical gap.

 

1. Historical Background

 

By the end of the 1940s and throughout the 1950s, we saw the development of the ‘studio model’. Spaces for experimental, tape, and soon electronic music started to proliferate, mainly in Europe and the United States, spreading the interest for new sound techniques to the world.

 

Peruvian academically trained composers, following a traditional postcolonial attitude, were attentive to the changes the developed world had to offer. This initial stage was to produce during the 1960s some of the first electronic musical compositions in Peru by composers like Edgar Valcarcel, Cesar Bolaños and Enrique Pinilla. However scarce the production of electronic musical pieces was at the time, a new generation of Peruvian researchers and musicians have made an attempt to develop a history of Peruvian electronic music based mainly on the work of Cesar Bolaños.

 

This first chapter of our electronic music history sees itself partially truncated in 1968 by the coup d'état of Juan Velasco Alvarado and the setting up of the Gobierno Revolucionario de la Fuerza Armada. Although, the nationalist leftist government of Velasco had no official position regarding electronic music, its nationalist and indigenist ideals would play a role in the downfall of this seminal electronic music culture. For once, the Conservatorio Nacional de Musica (CNM) would be, under his government, absorbed by the new Instituto Nacional de Cultura (INC) bringing the objectives of the CNM under the umbrella of the political ideals of the government. While the work of Varcarcel and Bolaños had, in many cases, strong political and revolutionary themes, this was not enough to secure the continuity of their initial endeavours. Bolaños himself was to become the director for the Oficina de Musica y Dance of the INC while withdrawing from electronic music composition and dedicating his time to musicological research on ancient Peruvian music.

 

2. Political Climate

 

The political environment on this initial period was instrumental on the failure to develop a culture for technologically aided musical initiatives. Long before the democratization of access to the tools of the trade, electronic music required the support of private and public institutions and the adequate economical climate. The postcolonial condition, the economical predicaments of the country, the continuous class struggles, and the subaltern condition of most of the population to power elites during most of the republican times, made the electronic dream of musical modernity (1) difficult to carry out, and (2) possibly viewed as a sign of elitism and imperialistic cultural invasion.

 

Nationalism, indigenism, ethnocentrism, ancestralism, and a sense of emergency regarding the salvage of indigenous and pre-colonial cultures have been contributory elements to the manifestation of a lack of interest and sometimes-negative perception of electroacoustic and electronic music. Ignoring or disregarding the importance of electronic music in ‘opposition’ to more traditional or folkloric genres is common to most institutions of musical higher learning.

 

3. Later Developments

 

With the exception of composers like Arturo Ruiz del Pozo and Douglas Tarnaviewky who manage to promote the culture of experimental and electronic music out of the classrooms and laboratories during the 1980s and early 1990s, most academic electronic work slipped under the radar. Other academic musicians dedicated to electronic music during this period, like Rajmil Fischman, work outside of the country and participate of musical culture in Peru from afar, serving as a liaison and giving support and motivation to those Peruvians envisioning the possibility of dedicating professionally to electronic music.

 

In 1994, Jose Sosaya Wekselman founded the Taller de Música Electroacústica at the CNM after being trained in electronic music in France. This marked a new attempt to cultivate electronic music on the CNM. From this effort new composers like Juan Benavides and Gilles Mercier emerged. Both would at different points in the future be in charge of teaching classes on electronic music at the CNM.

 

The conditions of the space used for electronic music shows the precarious conditions in which the composers had to work. The lack of equipment and appropriate acoustic conditions of the space (see Figure 1) played a role on the musical output and on the motivation to continue. The space had been used for many years, mainly by these three composers, but it has, again, failed to gain a following on part of the composition students of the CNM, and at this point is highly uncommon to encounter an electronic music compositions performed or worked at the school.

 

One noticeable exception would be Abel Castro, a composition student at the CNM that works with technology and has organized two festivals at the CNM under the name La Trenza Sonora. The main aim of the festivals is to include contemporary compositions, and works of acousmatic and electronic experimentation. The last edition of the festival took place on june of 2016, and on it, most of the few Peruvian contemporary composers and performers of electronic music presented their work, including: Rajmil Fischman, Jaime Oliver, Gilles Mercier, Abel Castro, and myself. Within them, Jaime Oliver and myself belong to a new generation of musicians that have studied Computer Music at the University of California San Diego with Miller Puckette, and work for the most part with Puredata.

 

 

4. The New Taller de Música Electroacústica

 

On 2016, the Academic Director of the CNM, Nilo Velarde, considering that the teaching of electronic and electroacoustic music should not be neglected at the CNM, presented a proposal for the remodeling of The Taller de Música Electroacústica. This proposal included the acoustic treatment of the rooms, the modernization of the equipment and the purchase of software. With help and recommendations from Rajmil Fischman, Velarde implemented the new space with three areas: one for teaching, a second one with working stations including an 8-channel spatialization system, and a recording booth.

For the beginning of the academic year 2017, and with the remodelling almost done, I was contacted by Nilo Velarde and become in charge of instruction at the space, teaching Electroacustic Music 1 and

Electroacustic Music 2 to the students of the area of composition.

 

This new process has just started and it is difficult to speculate about the outcome. Historically speaking, this experience is part of a long list of attempts to bring electronic and electroacoustic music to the CNM, and in a sense to the country in general. If we could say, that many attempts to make electronic music a possible tool for composition in Peru have encounter several political and logistical difficulties, it is also true that the only academic space in existence is placed at the CNM. For the most part, the rest of the academic institutions that counts with musical training are yet to find electronic and electroacoustic music as creative options for music. For the most part the work related to technology is relegated to the role of assistance and normally done by students of sound engineering at local academies. Even thought, this separation between the creative composer and the technological assistant has been a problem wherever the culture of electronic music has been established, in the case of Peruvian musical school, the option of a creative electronic musical composer has no existence outside of the CNM.

 

Not having had a continuous history of electronic academic music in the country might play a role in the process and became a disadvantage. In any case, as an active participant in the process, and, in a sense, responsible for part of the new advances that might be produced, I will be reporting on the progress obtain and also confronting and analysing that reactions and perceptions produces on the students by the Taller de Música Electroacústica hoping to revert a tendency in the near future.

 

 

References

[1] López Ramírez-Gastón, José Ignacio. Constructing Musical Spaces Beyond Technological Eden: A Participative Initiative for Musical Interface Development Based in the Peruvian Context. Masters Thesis, University of California, San Diego, 2008.

[2] López Ramírez-Gastón, José Ignacio. “Cuando Canto Bajan los Cerros: An Initiative for Interface Development Informed by a Latin-American Contex”. In Proceedings of the 2008 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC-08), 2008, 667 - 670.

[3] López Ramírez-Gastón, José Ignacio. “Tijuana Sound Arts Project: A Nomadic Studio Report”. In Proceedings of the 2009 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC-09). 2009, 219-223.

[4] E. P. Thompson, “History from Below”. In Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 1966, 279-80.

 

 

 

-  José Ignacio López Ramírez-Gastón,

 

Jose Ignacio Lopez Ramirez Gaston is Professor of Sound Arts at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP) and the Conservatorio Nacional de Musica (CNM). Is in charge of the electroacoustic studio of the CNM and at the PUCP is a researcher at the Instituto de Etnomusicologia, founding member of the Grupo de Investigacion en Musicologia, and coordinator for the art courses at the EEGGLL of the university. He is a PhD candidate at the University of California San Diego where he holds a Masters degree in Computer Music.

 

jilopez@pucp.pe

LU, Minjie / FAN, Hongshuo

 

 Analysis on Multimedia Convergence Composition of EXTREMA[8]

 

 

In the 21st century, composers blend the elements and performing modes of dance, opera, action art, installation, visual art, etc., into interactive music, and make multimedia be based on computer and digital technique collaborate to exert integrated effect on it, and achieve to integrate different sensory messages, which form a special mode of multiple convergence composition. EXTREMA[9] stands as a perfect example which demonstrates the characteristic of multimedia convergence of interactive music, which is profoundly affected new media.

 

EXTREMA is an interactive music for Bed of Nails and 4-channel composed by Hongshuo FAN, the New-Generation Chinese composer. He used Bed of Nails which was designed basically by John Richards[10] to compose this work. (see Fig.1 )

Fig.1 Bed of Nails

 

Fan found the electricity of Bed of Nails perfectly matched his original concept. It effectively promoted composer to focus on data characteristic and application of Bed of Nails, a semi-product, then to conceive EXTREMA and basically confirm the embryonic form of dual interactivities involving auditory sense and visual sense.

 

The composition of EXTREMA is based on following system. (see Fig.2 )

Fig. 2 Equipment Link

 

The composition of EXTREMA is based on analysis of sound produced by Bed of Nails (see Fig. 3). The performer presses Nails of Bed to produce noisy sound which is used to be the basic sound material of this work. Different combinations of 8 nails being pressed at the same time and their pressure levels control high / middle / low frequency ranges.

Fig.3 Flowchart of Sound Design and Visual Design

 

The performer uses MIDI pedal to work with four sound process modules, including resonance, freezing, granular synthesis, spectrum delay and filter, to process and transform special frequency ranges of sounds. The video camera captures real-time image to be source material of visual part. The edge detection, RGB delay, luma waves, stringy sphere (three-dimension twist) twist and other video effects in Resolume Arena are used to process and transform image in real time. Neither sound design nor visual design uses any prepared materials, that is to say, both music and video of whole piece is created lively. Fig.3 shows the flowchart of sound design and visual design of EXTREMA.

 

Because of multi-interactivity, the video design was in parallel with sound design during composition. Both video part and music part develop from original states to simple transformation, to extreme complicated transformation and finally back to minimalist material. The performance in Utrecht (ICMC2016) was around 10 minutes. It has 5 sections (see Form1). For each section, the interactivity between sound and video is obvious.

When fingers touch nail, the noisy sound with low amplitude will be produced. The acoustic signal is primary frequency component between 100Hz and 1000Hz. The composer uses it to design whole work. He cut off the part of signal outside the audible range and mainly processed the energy concentrated energy. For example, the composer reconstructed the signal by superposition to strengthen the signal in certain frequency ranges. (see Fig.4) The whole music part grows from the primary material.

 

The noisy sound produced by fingers’ pressing nails is the main material which is kept in original state at the beginning of section A. Accordingly, the image captured by video camera in real time is kept in original state. With the development of music, the composer uses freeze effect to process sound material to increase the space and sonic layers. Then, the sound starts to be stretched to drive the development of sound at new stage. At the same time, the edge effect is added to video part. But for both music and video, the transformations are not complicated that original state still could be recognized. Since end of section A, video starts to change gradually from real to virtual image. Section B presents further transformation on both sound and video. The composer mainly uses granular synthesis and delay effect to process the basic signal, the video part focus on RGB delay accordingly. (see Fig.5 and Fig.6).

When comes into section C, the deepening transformation increases sonic layers by using different combinations effects of resonance, freezing, granular synthesis. Meanwhile, the visual feature——luma waves (some particle effect) is introduced. (see Fig.7) And two-dimension view is switched to three-dimension gradually in this section. (see Fig.8).

The composer designs a short silence before coming to section D. The sound design for section D features high density of sound grains (see Fig.9). The image jumps to new stage of transformation. With addition of stringy sphere and RGB delay, the level relation between sound grains is reconstructed (see Fig.10). Increasing grain density creates legato and sustainable sonic layer. The aural flavor changes dramatically. And the music reaches high point in section D.

The granular synthesis lasts until section E. But for 1’10” of section E, the composer mainly use spectrum filter and delay effect to weaken the signal of special frequency component and makes music to sound more quiet. For video part of section E, the edge effect is added to video part. Both auditory part and visual part go back to very simple state finally.

 

EXTREMA was composed for special instrument—— Bed of Nails. So Fan creates a completely new notation for Bed of Nails according to practical requirement of performance. He uses note head of 9 different pitches to represent 9 nails. (see Fig.11). While expression marks are used to show single finger touching nail or two fingers press nail and to identify pressure levels (see Fig.12). A series of special symbols, like R (repeat), (surround twist), (moving up and down), etc., shows fingers’ moving. The alphabet (A, B, C, D, E) plus number mean the sequence number of MIDI pedal for 5 sections. Time code and duration time replace time signature and bar of traditional music notation.

The unique score (see Fig. 13), computer program, electric circuit, illustration of hardware connection and software configuration (see Fig.2), and audio-video recording of performance, all are necessary.

For interactive music at present, the new media products or scientific research have inspired composers to compose unique works. Some of them even guide the composers to make subjects of works. The game controllers, X-Bod Kinect, GPS, Leap Motion, other sensors and electronic products, etc. which appeared in a few of works, have improved interactive music towards subversion of traditional style. EXTREMA is such kind of interactive music which is based on non-traditional instrument to explore the expressive sounds. Fan tried to show a kind of new and poetic multi-sensor aesthetic that interactive music gained from computer and to explore the combination of auditory sense and visual sense in interactive music composition through multimedia convergence composition. The new media has played a key role in every point of composition. The subject of work, experimental environment, music form, sound design, visual design, performance and notation, all reflect the impact from new media. New media has already exceeded the simple meaning of technology, tools or media attribute, which is an important contributor for interactive music to turn of art creation and aesthetics in old media age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

-  Minjie Lu

 

 Minjie LU (Iris Lu) received her bachelor degree in electronic information engineering and received her master's degree in Electronic Music from Sichuan Conservatory of Music. She received her Ph.D. in Art and Media from Sichuan University. Now she is the associate professor of Electronic Music Department of SCCM and Digital Media Art Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province. Her research is focused on interdisciplinary program including electronic music and culture. Her works have won the Pauline Oliveros Prize given by 28th IAWM and prize given by eARTS Digital Audio Competition. In addition, her scholarly musical essays have received awards from MUSICACOUSTICA-BEIJING. Her works were also selected to perform in ICMC/SCM, Kyma International Sound Symposium, Sonic Rain, FMO, etc. In 2012, she was sponsored by China Scholarship Council to be the visiting scholar in U.S. In recent years, she has been invited to be reviewer of ICMC.

 

24000156@qq.com

 

 

- Hongshuo Fan

 

Hongshuo FAN, born in Chengdu of Sichuan Province, China. He is the first recipient the master degree major in new media music at Sichuan Conservatory of Music. He also studied electronic music with Xiao Hu, Takayuki Rai, Zygmunt Krauze and Jeffrey Stolet. Now, he is a faculty of the Electronic Music Department at Sichuan Conservatory of Music and key member of Electronic Music Creative Research Center at Sichuan Conservatory of Music. His research and creative interests include New Media Art, Interactive art and Multimedia Design. His works have been selected to perform in China,U.S, Poland, Netherlands, Sweden etc., He is the winner of the 2015 Shanghai International Electronic Music Week "Best Works Award" and the 2016  ICMA（International  Computer  Music  Association）Asia-Oceania  Regional Award.

 

fhs.sccm@gmail.com

 

MAK, Clarence

 

Alternatives Perception of Musical Pitch:

Compositional Practice Towards Auditory Aesthetics

in music by contemporary Hong Kong composers

 

 

Is the perception of pitch a subjective response to the intellectual design of sound frequency in music within the context of an established system in relation to culture and technology? If yes, how and to what extent can it be adapted in creative music making and communicated through electroacoustic music?

 

This presentation reports the learning experiences of the author based on selected pieces by Hong Kong composers through the adoption of a compositional approach with electronic means that imply different sensations of sound frequency from the early age in 60s to the recent years. The discussion about this issue will refer to the active composers including LAW Wing Fai, Joshua CHAN, LO Hau Man, and Steve HUI (Nerve). Indigenous methods of proactive music listening are mentioned to highlight the aesthetic and functional role of pitch as it evolved in the pieces, and how attempts were made to accommodate two main types of engagement: the use of inherent precision and programmability of digital sound synthesis; the placement of perpetual motion of single tones on traditional Chinese instruments or singing practice in line with the treatment of computer generated sound. The revisiting of relatively narrow domains of scale-aligned pitched tones in traditional Chinese music adapted with a synthesized voice in context of a “digital” opera will also be discussed,.

 

The discussion of illustrative musical examples starts with the “Goodbye China” by Doming Lam composed in 60s, regarded as the first electroacoustic piece in Hong Kong in which the pitch variations of piano sound were achieved with magnetic tape techniques. It is followed by LAW Wing Fai’s Sun Soundic written for ensemble with tape. The synthesized sound in the electronic part melted into the instrumental gestures making the sonic atmosphere with eastern harmony. With the increasing use of personal computers in music from 80s and 90s in the City, local composers like Joshua Chan employed computing skills in music to manipulate specific tuned scales and tonalities to attract a number of audiences who expect melodic and harmonic projection in a more conventional way in terms of traditional and local identity. Near the end of the last century, composers even used more straightforward approach in expressing their concern of pitch characteristics in Chinese music. In The Last Judgement by LO Hau Man, the portamento of the theremin was employed to work with the Chinese instruments, simulating the perpetual motion of single tones produced by Xiao, the traditional chinese wind instrument. In the last decade, there are numerous substantive electroacoustic works in Hong Kong presented alongside the performance of traditional Chinese regional opera or folk songs. In the “digital opera” The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci and Idle Brow Shaping composed by Steve HUI, digital human voice and the singing of Kunqu (one of the oldest extant forms of Chinese opera) were mixed with electronic sound in a theatrical performance.

 

The “accuracy” of pitch produced by Chinese musical instruments or singing of traditional operas often annoys or arouses the curiosity of some western composers who make use of the intervallic relationship as an important factor in music without understanding the mechanism of the Chinese instrument and singing practice that the sound is produced in the specific styles of music. Sensation of pitch generally depends on the frequency of a periodical waveform. But if the sound of the waveform is presented with a perpetual fluctuation in frequency in particular formats of movements or direction, like the playing of some Chinese instruments or traditional singing, or if those fluctuations also happen in the amplitude of particular overtones of the sound, the recognition of the perceived pitch might be shifted to the frequency of the fluctuated tone(s), not mentioning the tone color perceived is also changed. When the tone color is enriched with multi harmonics up to a certain level, the original perceivable pitch might change because of the attraction of the tone color by the overtones especially that from inharmonic spectra. It becomes truer if the sound of the composition is performed with treatment of panning and spatialization in a theatre environment, such as Steve HUI’s Idle Brow Shaping.

 

It is addressed that the selected compositions supposedly represent our Chinese musical heritage that we reacted with suspicion and curiosity. The objective is to experiment the compositions with incorporating pitch elements in both instrumental sound and computer music, and trying to introduce creative innovations while preserving the spirit of the Chinese music in a different way. The presentation concludes with an exploration of auditory stimuli and pleasure towards the aesthetic power of pitch through understanding those diversified treatments of sound frequency in musical compositions.

 

 

 

-  Clarence Mak

 

Clarence Mak was born in Hong Kong, pursuing music training in composition and electronic music in Hong Kong and USA, studied guitar performance in Musica En Composetela in Spain, and musical acoustics and programming at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. He composes music for orchestras, drama, dance, electronic and multi-media and has been commissioned by numerous international and local professional performing groups of Chinese and Western music.

Mak actively takes part in professional services, promoting music making and related educational activities, being the key-note speaker, advisor, committee member, delegate and member of Jury, and producer of projects for international symposiums and festivals. He was the secretary, treasurer, Vice Chairman, and Council Director of the Hong Kong Composers' Guild from 1987 to 2014 respectively, a member in organizing committees for major musical events. He was invited to play the guitar as the soloist for his work “Blue Sky The Heart” commissioned by the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra in the concerts of the Hong Kong Arts Festival in 2014 and 2015.

Mak is currently the Head of Composition and Electronic Music, teaching composition and computer music.

 

cmak@hkapa.edu

 

 

MARTY, Nicolas

 

 Intention and Reception

– Listening Behaviours in Acousmatic Music

 

 

Listening to acousmatic music has been the topic of several publications in the past decades, although it has rarely been studied extensively and in a systematic way, regarding acousmatic music specifically. Acousmatic music psychology studies are quite hard to find (Dean & Bailes 2011, 2012), and a lot of proposals about acousmatic music listening are rooted in semiotics, phenomenology or cognitive theories, with few or no input from actual listeners (Schaeffer 1966, Smalley 1992, Bayle 1993, Windsor 1995, Kilpatrick & Stansbie 2010, Pasoulas 2011, Meric 2012, Kendall 2014, Thoresen 2015). Two exceptions deserve to be mentioned. Leigh Landy (2007) and Robert Weale (2005) developed the Intention/Reception project, through which they showed that listeners were more drawn in by electroacoustic music when information about the composers’ intentions were given. However, Delalande’s “listening behaviors” paradigm (1989, 1998, 2010) and its developments by Alcázar (2004), Anderson (2011) and Spampinato (2015) suggests that without being aware of composers’ intentions, unexperienced listeners can still have a rich and satisfying listening experience. According to my findings (2014, 2016), composers’ intentions or listening guides, without always being a necessity nor even helping out, may still be useful in specific situations, for unexperienced listeners to make sense of a kind of polyphony they are not used to.

 

The point of my presentation will be to show how listeners can draw more actively on their own experiences and goals than on perceived composers’ intentions, without losing interest in a piece of music. The ideas put forward will draw from my doctoral research about listening behaviors as well as my experience as a composer and composition student having been able to observe various teaching methods and various verbal reactions from the most unexperienced listeners’ to the most experts’.

 

I can thus testify to the fact that listeners as well as some acousmatic music professionals often like to be guided through a work by the sounding content of the work itself rather than having to adopt a specific perspective indicated by a text or a discourse. As a composer I am interested in silence and its role beyond the articulatory (rests) and structural (silence at the beginning and end of a work, movement or section), towards silence being a layer of polyphonic listening (closer to the Japanese 間), as a continuo or a drone. In this sense, sound is not as important as silence, serving mostly to surround silence and enlarge it. As a student, I was often told I needed to give the listener a hand, “something to hold on to” (Landy 2007). However this was not in the sense meant by Landy (with an interest for helping out listeners not only through the work itself but through its surrounding context). The point was to have me make things abundantly clear for listeners: when there was sound on the tape, the tape wasn’t silent, so I should not have been talking about silence, however relevant it could become in my own formal conception of the work.

 

Other statements related with silence were quite recurring, having to do with a capitalistic (or pragmatic) perspective: why mobilize a whole orchestra to have them stay quiet for relatively long periods of time? Why want performers to play the music if we don’t want these performers to be seen? In the case of electroacoustic music, why have such low amplitudes, when the richness of sounds would be so much more highlighted with higher amplitudes? Why compose music that seemed to ask for a still, unbreathing audience? Listeners would often prefer works including actual continuo or drones, being able to be immersed in sound, and many acousmatic works nowadays, however bare, often keep some kind of continuum, in order to grasp and keep listeners’ interest.

 

In this sense it is not difficult to find interest in common listening behaviors and the ways one can use them in a composition. However, cultivating commented concerts and specific program notes, encouraging students to engage in projects challenging our aural, perceptive and perceptual preconceptions, could be a way to make them actively wonder about the multiple relations between intentions and receptions and their consequences on the activity of the composer.

 

 

References

ALCÁZAR, Antonio (2004). Análisis de la música electroacústica – género acusmático – a partir de su escucha, Ph.D. thesis in musicology, sup. José A. S. Garcia et Francisco G. Calleja, Université de Castilla La Mancha.

ANDERSON, Elizabeth (2011). Materials, Meaning and Metaphor: Unveiling Spatio-Temporal Pertinences in Acousmatic Music, Ph.D. thesis in composition, sup. Denis Smalley, London City University.

BAYLE, François (1993). Musique acousmatique - propositions…positions, Paris, Buchet Chastel.

DEAN, Roger T. & BAILES, Freya (2011). “Modelling Perception of Structure and Affect in Music: Spectral Centroid and Wishart’s Red Bird”, Empirical Musicology Review, 6 (2), 131-137.

——— (2012). “Comparative Time Series Analysis of Perceptual Responses to Electroacoustic Music”, Music Perception, 29 (4), 359-375.

DELALANDE, François (1989). “La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune de Debussy : essai d’analyse esthésique”, Analyse Musicale, 16, 75-84.

——— (1998). “Music analysis and reception behaviours: Sommeil by Pierre Henry”, Journal of New Music Research, 27 (1/2), 13-66.

——— (2010). “Signification et émotion dans les conduites d’écoute musicale”, in Musique, Signification et Émotion, dir. M. Ayari & H. Makhlouf, Paris, Delatour, 231-248.

KENDALL, Gary (2014). “The Feeling Blend: Feeling and Emotion in Electroacoustic Art”, Organised Sound, 19 (2), 192-202.

KILPATRICK, Stephen & STANSBIE, Adam (2010), “Materialising Time and Space within Acousmatic Music”, L’Espace du Son III, Lien (revue d’esthétique musicale), dir. Annette Vande Gorne, 55-62.

LANDY, Leigh (2007). Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, Cambridge et Londres, MIT Press.

MARTY, Nicolas & TERRIEN, Pascal (2014). “Listening behaviors and formal representation of an extract of acousmatic music in non-expert listeners”, EMS14 Conference, Berlin.

——— (2016). “L’entretien d’explicitation pour analyser l’écoute des musiques acousmatiques”, in Musiques électroacoustiques – Analyses ↔ Écoutes, ed. Nicolas Marty, Paris, Delatour, 67-86.

MERIC, Renaud (2012). Appréhender l’espace sonore. L’écoute entre perception et imagination, Paris, l’Harmattan. 3

PASOULAS, Aki (2011). The perception of timescales in electroacoustic music, Ph.D. thesis in composition, sup. Denis Smalley, London City University.

SCHAEFFER, Pierre (1966). Traité des objets musicaux, Paris, Seuil.

SMALLEY, Denis (1992). “The Listening Imagination: Listening in the Electroacoustic Era”, in Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought Vol 1, ed. Painter J. et al., London, Routledge, 514-554.

SPAMPINATO, Francesco (2015). Les incarnations du son – Les métaphores du geste dans l’écoute musicale, Paris, l’Harmattan.

THORESEN, Lasse (with Andreas Hedman) (2015). Emergent Musical Forms – Aural Explorations (Studies in Music, 24), University of Western Ontario.

WEALE, Robert (2005). The Intention/Reception Project: Investigating the Relationship between Composer Intention and Listener Response in Electroacoustic Compositions, Ph.D. thesis in musicology, sup. Leigh Landy & John Young, Leicester, DeMontfort University.

WINDSOR, W. Luke (1995). A Perceptual Approach to the Description and Analysis of Acousmatic Music, Ph.D. thesis, sup. Eric Clarke, London City University.

 

 

-  Nicolas Marty

 

 Nicolas Marty is a Ph.D. student in musicology at Université Paris-Sorbonne and holds a Bachelor's degree in psychology. His musicological work is interested in the study of listening to acousmatic music. He is junior lecturer in computer music at Université Bordeaux-Montaigne. He studied instrumental composition and acousmatic composition at the Conservatoire de Bordeaux (with Jean-Louis Agobet and Christophe Havel) where he earned his diplomas in 2016. He has been nominated in April 2016 president of the association Octandre for electroacoustic music in Bordeaux. He is also a member of associations éclats, temp'óra and ACTA. He studies taiji quan with Yann Lapeyrie (IRPO). His aesthetics is founded on the contemplation of space and silence, putting aside linearity and discursive chronology.

 

 nicodria@hotmail.com

MATSUMIYA, Keita

 

Pour Adoucir le cours du temps of Tristan Murail

Local-global processes and his treatment

of computer assisted composition

 

 

In this presentation, I’ll try to examine Tristan Murail's musical style about his idea of local and global processes through his piece for orchestra and electronic, “Pour adoucir le cours du temps, literally, “To calm the course of time”, written in 2004.

 

At first, we will examine the context of this piece concerning the Tristan Murail's youthful interest in the phenomenon of attack-resonance discovered through the vibratory morphologies of Beethoven's Pastoral gathered in this piece. And then, we will see Murail’s idea of temporal structure of the piece and his treatment of attack-resonance concerning the morphology of a series, noise anacrusis, attack-derived echo, resonance’s vibration and iterative balancement, supported by harmonic manipulation varied in its temporal aspects by energetic increase and decrease. We will see, next, the metamorphosis of musical object’s profiles on his score, concerning the morphology of the phenomenon on the construction of attack-resonance’s variations, where we will discover the generating figures that cross an archetype of melody, maintained sound or iterative pattern, as well as Neume. After, we will also verify the harmonic structure concerning the sound model of gong in which this composer has discovered harmonic equality and inequality, and also the idea of modeling of the bell’s sound on instrumentations.

 

At the end, verifying the similar morphology in several works of Tristan Murail, I would like to point out that Tristan Murail develops the "relation of cause and effect" far beyond the elementary structure and the modeling of the bell’s sound on the beginnings of the spectral school, and that with his two axes of aesthetics, the local and global process, and the attack-resonance with its energetic driving of the metamorphosis on the musical objects, his music becomes an abstract, almost combinatory process while remaining organic of acoustics and it results in a style and a formal singularity.

 

 

 

-  Keita Matsumiya

 

Born in Kyoto, Japan in 1980, Japanese composer Keita Matsumiya is currently a resident artist 2016/2017 at Casa de Velazquez of French government, as a member of Academy of France in Madrid, in Spain. Previously he was a member of Cursus de composition 2011/2012 at IRCAM, where he researched computer assisted music. His principal teachers there were Kiyoshi Furukawa, Masakazu Natsuda, Frédéric Durieux, Gérard Pesson, Luis Naon, Michael Levinas and Claude Ledoux. He received Bachelor of composition (2010) and Master of composition (2013), and obtained two Prises of composition and music analysis at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. Before Paris, he studied musicology at Aichi University of the Arts and sound installation at the graduate school of Tokyo University of the Arts, where he received Master of Arts in 2006.

Matsumiya is a recipient of several honors. With his 2010 work La glace s’étoile, s’enchaîne for flute and harp, he was awarded Takefu Composition Award 2010 in Japan by jury Toshio Hosokawa and Mark André, and with his 2013 work Soliton for chamber orchestra and electronics, he was awarded honorable mention of Concours Destellos 2015 in Argentina. Other recent honors include two artistic residency fellowships from Institute Français Fez in Morocco and Tokyo Wonder Site, as well as a commission from Klangspuren Festival 2012 in Schwaz.

His catalog extends from instrumental-vocal music to mixed and electroacoustic music. In 2015, he received a commission from Dairakudakan, a prestigious dance company of Butoh in Tokyo, to write an electroacoustic stage piece entitled ASURA, and in 2017, a commission from Ensemble Regards in Paris with the support of SACEM for his choreographic-musical project, KARURA. His works have been performed by National Orchestra of Lorraine, Ensemble TIMF, Camerata Stravaganza, Musica Universalis, Ensemble Regards, Orchestra of Laureates of the National Conservatory of Music and Dance of Paris, among others, and presented at renowned festivals such as: Festival Mixtur in Barcelona, Festival Klangspuren in Schwaz, Centre Achantes in Metz, Brittany International Saxophone Academy, Tongyeong International Music Festival, Takefu International Music Festival and Ars Musica Festival in Brussels.

His scores are available at the Edition Tempéraments in Bordeaux. He is a part-time lecturer at Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music from 2017 to 2018.

 

keita.matsumiya@gmail.com

 

 

MCEVOY, Clovis

 

The audio-visual contract within multi-modal virtual reality environments: a case for re-evaluation

 

 

Introduction

 

The field of visual music has historically been constrained upon two-dimensional screens, yet recent developments in virtual reality (VR) technology have the potential to revolutionise the medium by allowing new levels of integration between multi-sensory data streams. The new domain challenges established audio-visual integration models, and in so doing offers new creative potentials to the electroacoustic composer. As VR systems proliferate, audio-visual composers, transitioning from traditional two-dimensional screens into VR, must ask a fundamental question: Does “the audio-visual relationship[11]” change within a virtual reality environment (Chion 1994; Coulter 2010)? This paper presents some preliminary observations and proposes an experimental framework to facilitate further investigation.

 

Virtual Reality: a multi-sensory experience

 

Much as the transition from mono to stereo recording introduced a wealth of spatial possibilities into audio production, so too does the transition from 2D screens to VR offer an exponential increase in how visual stimuli may be experienced. However, threedimensionality is just one of multiple factors that make the current generation of virtual reality systems (VRS) such an intriguing medium: motion tracking, haptic feedback and, of course, integrated audio spatialisation form the basis of what has been termed ‘Multi-modal VR’ (Wilson, Soranzo, 2015). It is only logical to assume that such a fundamental shift in the way audio-visual media is consumed (Ryan, 2015) must surely affect not only the way audiovisual works are experienced, but how composers should approach the development of such works (Breuleux, 2015).

 

To fully understand the impact of multi-modal VR on the human brain it is necessary to introduce two terms that relate directly to the efficacy of a VRS: immersion and presence. Immersion, in this context, refers to a VRS’s ability to render realistic, detailed virtual environments and is directly impacted by a system’s technical specifications. Presence, in this context, refers to the psychological effect of the virtual reality environment (VRE) upon a user – the greater the presence the more a user will feel and act as if they are “really there” (Wilson, Soranzo, 2015). Immersion and presence are closely related and the immersive qualities of a system have been shown to positively correlate with the sense of presence (Diemer et al, 2015; Wilson, Soranzo, 2015). Experimental research has characterised high levels of presence as resulting in an increased focus on stimuli within the virtual environment and a decreased focus for stimuli not relevant to the simulation (Burns, Fairclough, 2015). This masking of irrelevant stimuli is strong enough that it has been shown to decrease perception of acute and chronic pain and to relieve anxiety and stress in patients dealing with phobias (Dascal et al, 2017; Hoffman et al, 2014; Wiederhold et al, 2014). I refer to this masking process as ‘non-world occlusion’. Conversely, the increased focus on VRE-relevant stimuli, which results from higher levels of presence/immersion, has been shown to elicit higher memory recall, increased intensity of emotional responses, faster mental processing times and improved performance during abstract mental activities (Diemer et al, 2015; Maliński et al, 2015; Wilson, Soranzo, 2015; Keshavarz et al, 2014). I refer to this phenomenon as ‘in-world focus’. Based on the findings outlined above it is reasonable to infer that multi-modal VRS can induce a heightened sensitivity to in-world stimuli.

 

The possibility of such heightened sensitivity is of particular importance to the field of visual electro-acoustic composition – where successful works often depend upon a listener’s ability to maintain focused attention and emotional engagement while experiencing complex abstracted materials. Furthermore, though audio-visual streams may arbitrarily form relationships through the process of synchresis (Chion, 1994), the practice of creating artificial isomorphic and concomitant relationships is all too frequently hindered by technical limitations. As Kröpfl argued in 2007:

“One of the main drawbacks to integrating sound and visual image into an art form is the fact that while sound matter develops in ‘real’ space, visual image so far is projected on a bi-dimensional surface in a ‘virtual’ space. My point of view is that until a consistent development of holographic, that is to say, three-dimensional techniques are attained, integration will not be satisfactory enough.” (Kröpfl, 2007)

Now, some 10 years later, the current state of VRSs beg the question: does the heightened sensitivity offered by VR correlate to an increase in constructive synchresis? Or does it in fact lay bare and magnify pre-existing deficiencies within an audio-visual relationship?

 

I use the term ‘constructive synchresis’ to mean that the simultaneity of 3-dimensional visual materials and 3-dimenesional sonic materials will automatically form stronger and more transformative relationships than their 2-dimensional counterparts. For the electroacoustic composer this presents the possibility of creating convincing media pairs with far greater ease.

 

Initial observations: ‘Tilt Brush’

 

I will now discuss my own phenomenological experiences using an app called ‘Tilt Brush’ in VR. Tilt Brush is a 3D painting software that allows a user to create artworks either in a VRE, using motion tracked hand controllers, or using a 2D screen with a mouse and keyboard. Ostensibly a ‘visual-focused’ program, in its default setting Tilt Brush utilises only the most basic audio-visual mapping strategies: audio-visual synchronisation and panning. The human auditory and visual processing systems are highly interrelated (Talsma, Doty and Woldorff, 2007) and it has previously been shown that that audio and visual material, if congruent, can become mutually reinforcing and take on a gestalt quality, enhancing the effectiveness of both audio and visual streams (Chion, 1994). Despite the objectively simplistic audio-visual (AV) mapping strategies employed in Tilt Brush, both audio and visual streams were perceived as fully congruent and evoked a autocentrically engaging response that fits with Chion’s concept of ‘super-additivity’. Upon repeating the experiment using Tilt Brush with a traditional 2D screen, the AV streams felt less integrated and resulted in a far less engaging overall experience. Expanding upon these observations leads me to hypothesise that deficiencies between AV streams may in fact be masked by the phenomenon of non-world occlusion. This in turn suggests that weak AV relationships may be strengthened purely by being experienced in a VRE. This has significant implications for visual music composers as a lowering of technical overheads would allow highly convincing and impactful audio-visual relationships to be more easily created. Finally, given that a satisfying synchretic relationship was created using only rudimentary AV mappings in VR, it follows that, should more sophisticated strategies be employed, a highly effective visual music work would result.

 

Proposed Methodology

 

From these preliminary observations of audio-visual relationships within VREs, it is predicted that, in comparison to media consumption using traditional 2D screens, in-world focus will increase the perception of synchresis between audio and visual textures, leading to a superadditive effect. In turn it is predicted that non-world occlusion will mask deficiencies within the audio-visual relationship, allowing satisfying isomorphic relationships to be more easily attainable using VRS than using traditional media.

 

To investigate these predictions, I propose to create a series of creative studies which may be experienced in either a VRE or using traditional 2D screens. These studies will investigate three primary questions:

 

1. Will the same material produce noticeably different perceptions of AV congruence when viewed in a VRE versus a 2D screen?

2. Do satisfying AV relationships created for a 2D screen become more integrated and autocentrically arresting when experienced in a VRE?

3. Do AV relationships created for a VRE collapse upon being viewed on a 2D screen?

 

 

Study 1 – VRE vs. 2D screens

Study 1 will present audio-visual materials that demonstrate both concomitant and isomorphic media pairings.

 

Study 2 – 2D material experienced in a VRE

Study 2 will present audio-visual materials that were created on a 2D screen and then authored for VR.

 

Study 3 – VRE material experienced on a 2D screen

Study 3 will present audio-visuals that were created in a VRE.

 

Discussion

 

The results of these studies present many potential positive and negative implications for the field of visual electro-acoustic music that utilises VRSs. For example, it has been postulated by Coulter that “it may even be possible to evoke convincing isomorphic relationships through arbitrary or random assignments of three or more simultaneous parameters” (Coulter, 2010). If indeed VREs do lead to a heightened synchretic response then it may be possible to reduce the number of mapped AV parameters required to create convincing isomorphic relationships. However, if audio-visual works created in a VRE do indeed suffer from a weakening of AV integration upon viewing on 2D screens, then this poses serious problems of communicability and transference of a work.

 

In conclusion, VREs have the potential to significantly affect human perception of audiovisual relationships and, as such, may result in new compositional methodologies and approaches. My current research into the integration of electro-acoustic music, of which this paper is a key component, will form the theoretical grounding for a creative work which I am currently developing. The work is scheduled to be exhibited in early 2018 and will feature electro-acoustic music integrated with a virtual reality environment.

 

References

Breuleux, Y., 2015. VISUAL MUSIC: DISPLAY FORMATS. FULL-DOME PROJECTS. THE LANGUAGE OF A/V SPATIALISATION. In PROCEEDINGS OF UNDERSTANDING VISUAL MUSIC 2015 SYMPOSIUM (p. 7).

Burns, C.G. and Fairclough, S.H., 2015. Use of auditory event-related potentials to measure immersion during a computer game. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 73, pp.107-114.

Chion, M. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound On Screen. (Claudia Gorbman Ed.) New York: Columbia University Press.

Coulter, J., 2010. Electroacoustic Music with Moving Images: the art of media pairing. Organised Sound, 15(01), pp.26-34.

Dascal, J., Reid, M., IsHak, W.W., Spiegel, B., Recacho, J., Rosen, B. and Danovitch, I., 2017. Virtual Reality and Medical Inpatients: A Systematic Review of Randomized, Controlled Trials. Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, 14(1-2), p.14.

Diemer, J., Alpers, G.W., Peperkorn, H.M., Shiban, Y. and Mühlberger, A., 2015. The impact of perception and presence on emotional reactions: a review of research in virtual reality. Frontiers in psychology, 6, p.26.

F. Aardema, K. O’Connor, S. Cˆot´e, and A. Taillon, 2010. Virtual reality induces dissociation and lowers sense of presence in objective reality. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 13(4), pp. 429–435.

Hoffman, H.G., Meyer III, W.J., Ramirez, M., Roberts, L., Seibel, E.J., Atzori, B., Sharar, S.R. and Patterson, D.R., 2014. Feasibility of articulated arm mounted Oculus Rift Virtual Reality goggles for adjunctive pain control during occupational therapy in pediatric burn patients. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 17(6), pp.397-401.

Keshavarz, B., Hettinger, L.J., Vena, D. and Campos, J.L., 2014. Combined effects of auditory and visual cues on the perception of vection. Experimental brain research, 232(3), pp.827-836.

Kröpfl, F. 2007. Integrating sound and visual image as artform. In Relationships Between Audition and Vision in the Creation in Electroacoustic Music. (Barriére, F. and Clozier C. Ed.) Academie Internationale de Musique Electroacoustique / Bourges, Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges / IMEB, Bourges cedex, France. Volume VIII (2004-2005), 89-90.

Macedonia, M.R. and Rosenbloom, P., 2001. Entertainment technology and military virtual environments. ARMY SIMULATION TRAINING AND INSTRUMENTATION COMMAND ORLANDO FL.

Malińska, M., Zużewicz, K., Bugajska, J. and Grabowski, A., 2015. Heart rate variability (HRV) during virtual reality immersion. International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 21(1), pp.47-54.

Ripton, J. and Prasuethsut, L., 2015. The vr race: who’s closest to making vr a reality. URL http://www. techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/future-tech/the-vr-race-who-s-closest-tomaking-vr-a-reality--1266538.

Riva, G., Wiederhold, B.K. and Gaggioli, A., 2016. Being different. The transfomative potential of virtual reality. Annu Rev Cybertherapy Telemed, 14, pp.1-4.

Ryan, M.L., 2015. Narrative as Virtual Reality II: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity. Talsma, D., Doty, T.J. and Woldorff, M.G., 2007. Selective attention and audiovisual integration: is attending to both modalities a prerequisite for early integration?. Cerebral cortex, 17(3), pp.679-690.

Wiederhold, B.K., Gao, K., Sulea, C. and Wiederhold, M.D., 2014. Virtual reality as a distraction technique in chronic pain patients. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 17(6), pp.346-352.

Wilson, C.J. and Soranzo, A., 2015. The use of virtual reality in psychology: a case study in visual perception. Computational and mathematical methods in medicine, 2015

 

 

 

-  Clovis McEvoy

 

Clovis McEvoy is a 29-year-old composer, lecturer and sound engineer based in Auckland, New Zealand and completed a Bachelor of Music and Graduate Diploma in Sound in 2014.

Clovis currently lectures at Auckland University School of Music in the field of sonic arts and music production. He specialises in the field of live electronics, designing customised music software for the purpose of interactive performances and installations. In both 2013 and 2017 Clovis was selected to travel to Paris, France to study and participate in IRCAM’s Manifeste-Acadamie arts festival.

Clovis has placed three times in the Douglas Lilburn composition prize, taking first place in 2014. In 2015 Clovis’ work Conflux (2014) was selected for performance at the Seoul International Computer Music Festival in South Korea. In 2017 Clovis’ work Flaneur (2012) was selected for the Mise-en Festival in New York City, USA and the Forum Wallis Swiss Contemporary Music Festival, Switzerland

 

clovismcevoy@gmail.com

MIKAWA, Makoto

 

 Recognition of Tôru Takemitsu’s Electroacoustic Composition Outside Japan:

its Theatricality and the Vortex

 

 

Recent studies of early electroacoustic composition in Japan have illuminated the distinctiveness of its development from that in Europe or the United States. These studies also revealed the significance of early electroacoustic works by Tôru Takemitsu, which he produced before gaining international recognition through his instrumental pieces such as Requiem for Strings (1957) and November Steps (1967). This research has contributed not only to highlighting those long-forgotten works, but also to giving recognition to the importance of his compositional experiences in these works, which formed the basis of the so-called “Takemitsu sound.”^[12] However, it appears not to be widely known yet that Takemitsu’s electroacoustic works were already drawing attention outside Japan in the second half of the 1950s.

 

They aroused the interest of the sound-visual artists, who founded the collaborative organization Vortex in San Francisco. “In essence, the Vortex demonstrations represent a theatrical exploitation of spatial movement in sound and image in the architectural setting of a planetarium.”^[13] The co-founders, Henry Jacobs (1924-2015) and Jordan Belson (1926-2011), played Takemitsu’s tape music in the Vortex concerts and in Europe between 1957 and 1959. These events occurred before Igor Stravinsky discovered the outstanding musical talent in Takemitsu’s Requiem during his 1959 stay in Japan. In other words, although the world-famous Russian composer’s positive comment on the Requiem resulted in Takemitsu being given the opportunity to embark on his international career as a composer, his musical creativity had already been acknowledged by the less well-known composer and the film maker on the West Coast.

 

Initially, Vortex focused on a twofold musical aspect – electroacoustic music and world music. More specifically, the former referred to Western electroacoustic composition, while the latter conformed to the definition of Ingrid Fritsch: “The American term ‘world music’ emphasizes the simultaneous and independent juxtaposition of various musical cultures.”^[14] The program of the first Vortex concert in May 1957 clearly represented this direction, and included carnival music from Trinidad, Japanese Koto music, a Balinese Gamelan orchestra, dance music of the Middle Congo, North Indian classical raga, and Cuban percussion instrumental music, in addition to electroacoustic works by Jacobs and his American contemporaries as well as Pierre Schaeffer’s Primitive 1948. In contrast, the third Vortex concert in January 1958 no longer contained such non-Western music; instead, the program consisted entirely of contemporary electroacoustic works including Takemitsu’s electroacoustic piece. This was the first time his work was played in public outside Japan. In the following concert, Vortex 4, Jacobs attempted to expand the variety of sound characteristics in electroacoustic music, partly with his preference for world music. This was reflected in the concert program, which included Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1956), Takemitsu’s Static Relief (1955), and the tape music of Takemitsu’s contemporary, Toshirô Mayuzumi’s Aoi-no-ue (1957). Jacobs’ choice of Mayuzumi’s piece is understandable because it employed recorded sounds of Noh chant as the primary compositional material. By contrast, Jacobs did not find such an exotic characteristic in Static Relief; rather, the piece was characterized as “an interesting eclectic work where Takemitsu combines the techniques of the French ‘concretists’ and the German ‘sinusoidals’,”^[15] regardless of the appropriateness of such characterization. The Vortex 5 concert in January 1959 no longer included Mayuzumi’s work, but did present Takemitsu’s “untitled” piece (by inference, La mort de Eurydice). The program note introduced this work by “one of Japan’s leading contemporary composers” as follows:

Untitled is a very brief, but exhilarating work, which clearly demonstrates this young composer’s creative exploitation of synthetic sound.^[16]

This implies that Jacobs evaluated Takemitsu’s piece only from the perspectives of creativity and sensibility of electroacoustic composition, not taking his cultural background into consideration.

 

The other artistic aspect the Vortex artists might have paid attention to or sensed in Takemitsu’s tape music was the theatricality, one of the core concepts of the Vortex presentation. The note in the 1958 Vortex 4 program reads that the idea of theater is a central feature of the Vortex concept as “a new form of theater based on the combination of electronics, optics and architecture.” Taketmisu’s electroacoustic composition was originally associated with multimedia or interdisciplinary work in most cases. In other words, he produced tape music for film, radio plays, or theater, rather than as independent musical pieces. This was also the case with the pieces selected for the Vortex concerts: initially, Static Relief was composed for a radio play and La mort de Eurydice for a theater piece, respectively, which the composer edited to make them independent electroacoustic pieces after the events. In this regard, however, a question about the Vortex’s choice of Takemitsu’s composition arises; in what way did Jacobs and Belson sense an element of theatricality in these works?

 

As Peter Burt points out, on the one hand, Takemitsu’s instrumental compositional style in the 1950s was still conservative and remained behind the newest developments in the West.^[17] On the other hand, his experiences of electroacoustic composition played a significant role in the development of his musical ideas. In particular, his collaborations with other artistic genres enabled him to gain insight into the indispensability of visual imagination—whether symbolic, story- or word-related, unrealistic, or abstract—when composing music. Takemitsu’s engagement with radio plays gave him the opportunity for this development, for instance. According to Christopher Balme, the “influence of radio on theater above all in the realm of sound design”^[18] was a specific case of intermedial development of art, because

The mix of complex sound tracks on audio tapes was primarily developed in the radio broadcasting studios but soon found its way into the staging practice of theater and film. Dramaturgy also remained influenced by the technical and aesthetic developments of radio broadcasting. . . . No doubt modern dramaturgy shows a tendency towards episodic structure, montage, abrupt change of scene, and so forth.^[19] 

While Takemitsu had an unshakable focus on the pursuit of sound design and thus did not become deeply involved in dramaturgy, he experienced the process of intermedial work Balme describes. Static Relief, for instance, was his first independent electroacoustic piece after refining the tape music for the radio play Hono-o [Fire]^[20], his first musique concrète work for this media commissioned by the Shin Nippon Hôsô [New Japan Broadcasting].^[21] As the composer himself explains, the piece employed a surrealistic concept—collage and montage of sound elements, including both recorded and electronically generated sounds. In this way, Takemitsu intentionally avoided structural development.

 

Through such compositional experiences, Takemitsu admitted his preoccupation with musique concrète “as the best method of recognition, rather than creating a piece with this method.” More specifically, he wrote:

I myself grasp [musique concrète] almost as the sense of action. By the way of combining unrealistic sounds, I reconstruct an unexpected landscape.^[22]

The idea of a landscape of sound, which remained as one of the important concepts throughout his career as a composer, suggests the similarity to Vortex’s concept of theater. Just as Jacobs and Belson found a new artistic expression in the mixture of movable sound and continual change of visual imagery on the dome screen, so Takemitsu sought a new sound space by manipulating unrealistic (i.e., recorded) sounds. The spatial dimensions of their approaches, however, were different from one another; more specifically, while Vortex treated real images projected on the screen, the images Takemitsu had in mind were only within musical composition, literally imaginary. Nevertheless, both Vortex and Takemitsu gave importance to the conception of movement, a crucial element of theater. It is therefore possible to assume that Jacobs and Belson identified Takemitsu’s electroacoustic music as potentially theatrical in their terms.

 

 

 

-  Makoto Mikawa

 

Makoto Mikawa is currently a doctoral candidate of the International Postgraduate Program in “Performance and Media Studies” at the Institut für Film-, Theater- und empirische Kulturwissenschaft at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, Germany. He received his doctorate in Music from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and his M.A. in Music Theory from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He worked at the University of Windsor, Canada, as a sessional instructor in Music Theory. His research interests include postwar avant-garde approaches to the theatricalization of music, interdisciplinary and intercultural composition, sociocultural issues in the music of the mid-20th century, and the artistic-aesthetic significance of the connection between Japanese Nô-theater and postwar new music. His writings have appeared in Tempo, Perspectives of New Music, and The Musical Times, as well as in online archives.

 

mmikawa@alumni.uwo.ca

 

 

MOMIYAMA, Yoko

 

Acoustic Expression of Japanese Special Morae

in Singing from the Viewpoint of Word-Setting

and Reflection for Electroacoustic Music

 

 

In the Japanese language, geminate obstruent /Q/, or ‘sokuon,’ and moraic nasal /N/, or ‘hatsuon,’ have independent sounds of subsequent consonants, and each consists of an independent phoneme and constitutes a unit of one mora. In Japanese songs, each note generally has a mora set to it, but for special morae including geminate obstruent and moraic nasal, there are two cases. One is that a note has only one special mora and the other is that a note has an independent mora and a special mora. These two word-setting cases often appear in the same piece of music. It is regularly commented that this co-existence cannot be explained from a linguistic point of view. As for singing, it is thought that the selection of these cases depends on the musical characteristics, such as pitch, duration and dynamics, of the passages concerned.

 

On Japanese acoustic features, many of the previous studies investigated permissible timings and thresholds of duration in the fields of education and learning Japanese. However, there were few studies in other fields. In the field of sound information, for example, a singing voice synthesis system set a note to a mora as for all morae including special morae; and for another example, geminate obstruent was handled as staccato. Thus, there are many problems to be solved for singing voice synthesis based on the mora system.

 

On studies about acoustic features of geminate obstruent in singing, there was a study investigating whether the melody lines were suitable for expression that didn’t damage the acoustic features of geminate obstruent and the text was heard precisely. On studies about acoustic features of moraic nasal in reading texts aloud, there was a study proving that the generated duration of moraic nasal varies with preceding vowels. However, there were no studies researching the acoustic expression in singing passages including geminate obstruent and moraic nasal.

 

Among electroacoustic music, Toru Takemitsu’s Quiet Design and Joji Yuasa’s Voices Coming are works using human voice, and we can grasp the meaning of Japanese words in them. It is surmised that the works retain the characteristics of Japanese acoustic features in the process of composition. From the viewpoint of listening comprehension of Japanese, it is presumed that the treatment of geminate obstruent and moraic nasal, which are important in linguistic acquisition, plays an important role.

 

In this presentation, not only the ratio but also the duration and other acoustic features of geminate obstruent and moraic nasal in singing lyrics varied with pitch and note value are examined, in comparison with those in reading aloud the same lyrics. The aim of this presentation is to find out how to reflect the differences in the word-settings from a musical point of view by analyzing those features.

 

The acoustic expression of geminate obstruent and moraic nasal in Japanese vocal works is examined by analyzing the vocal data of seven master course students of vocal music. I extracted some passages containing geminate obstruents and moraic nasals from a Japanese hymnal, many of which are translated songs whose texts are put to the original music later. Recording was carried out at the Aichi University of the Arts. The students both sang and read aloud the passages twice, and I recorded their vocal data using the software Praat on a personal computer. These students were requested to sing in the ideal Japanese singing formula. From the resulting audio data, including sound waves, sound spectrograms and formants, on Praat, I analyzed the musical characteristics.

 

As for geminate obstruent, while in the case of two morae in the note, the formant transitions are clear in varying degrees, and in the case of only one special mora in the note, both the preceding vowel and geminate obstruent are sung in the note and the formants of the preceding vowel overlap those of the geminate obstruent. On the other hand, as for moraic nasal, while in the case of two morae in the note, the formants of the preceding vowel overlap those of the moraic nasal, and in the case of only one special mora in the note the formant transitions are clear.

 

Thus, as for both geminate obstruent and moraic nasal, differences in the word-settings are reflected in the degree of the overlapping preceding vowel’s formant, and geminate obstruent contrasts greatly with moraic nasal in the case of overlapping.

 

It is peculiar that in most cases, the duration of the geminate obstruent in singing is almost as long as that in reading aloud, while the duration of the moraic nasal in singing is unrelated to that in reading aloud. It is also peculiar that in the case of two morae in the note, the duration of the moraic nasal creates a unit for a subsequent beat.

 

In this way, I conclude that as for geminate obstruent, natural reading duration takes priority in music, while as for moraic nasal, the duration changes to create rhythm for the music. I also show the findings about retaining of Japanese acoustic features in electroacoustic music by analyzing acoustic features of geminate obstruent and moraic nasal in Quiet Design and Voices Coming based on obtained characteristics of them.

 

 

 

-  Yoko Momiyama

 

Yoko Momiyama, musicologist, was born in Japan. She graduated from Tokyo University (linguistics). She completed master’s degree course and doctorate course at Aichi University of the Arts (musicology) and received a Doctor of Music in 2013. Her Recent Main Studies are:

(1) On acoustic expression of singing special morae from the viewpoint of text-underlays in Japanese:

“Differences in Acoustic Expression of Singing between Geminate Consonant and Moraic Nasal from the Viewpoint of Text-Underlays,” The 79th National Convention of Information Processing Society of Japan. (March, 2017)

(2) On English word-settings and pronunciation in renaissance and baroque eras:

“Word-settings and Music in Handel’s Messiah from the Viewpoint of Stress Change in English,” In Fields of Research in Music Expression 2, edited by the Japan Music Expression Society. Tokyodoshuppan. (September, 2016)

She is a researcher at Nagoya City University and a lecturer at Nagoya Women’s University.

 

momiyamayk@gmail.com

 

 

OSAKA, Naotoshi

 

A structured timbre and its application to electroacoustic music

 

 

Timbre has become a very important music factor since 20th century, and ound synthesis, which creates new timbre has been an important engineering field since early years of electroacoustic music.

 

The timbres created by digital technologies in early years are mathematical functional wave timbres such as sine or rectangular function, later FM synthesis, and simulation of existent musical instruments. These are sound sources and newly synthesized. On the other hand, new effect technologies, which are modification synthesis given acoustic timbres, are also developed. Remaking of ready known analogue technologies such as reverberation and filter are representative functions. However, newly born digital technologies such as granular synthesis and modulation, pitch shift, squeeze/stretch effect have given more impacts and these give a new perspective of electroacoustic music.

 

In this paper new concept of timbre, “structured timbre” is defined and introduced in detail. This is defined as timbre which has musically distinctive factors in it. This is so to say “musical distinctive features”, which loosely corresponds to, but not as strict as, distinctive features in phonetics. An example is a musical instrumental timbre with vibrato and timbral trills.

 

Several outstanding structured synthesis technologies have been proposed. Those effects listed here are: 1) sound morphing, 2) sound hybridization and performance hybridization 3) sound by sound. We describe them in detail.

 

Sound morphing

 

Sound morphing is an effect which changes its timbre from one to another gradually. This notion comes from computer graphic technologies, and synthesis technologies were open in 90s and the technique is being investigated now and a good quality is the central concern of technical topics.

 

Jonathan Harvey’s “Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco” (1980) is an antecedent of sound morphing, which transformed the sounds of Wincester Cathedral’s great bell to a treble voice. These two voices are modified and mixed together. But at this time, technology was not enough to implement real morphing, which maintains always one stream at a time. However, in esthetics these mixture and morphing should not be old or new, and both expression should exist parallelly. Osaka’s “Mirror Stone” for flute and computer (1996) is an example of a piece in which sound morphing is used as a musical theme.

 

Sound hybridization

 

Sound hybridization is a synthesis technique that creates sound which is composed of perceptual factors from various sounds. It is also called cross synthesis when two sounds are involved. Joji Yuasa’s “Nine Levels by Zeami” commissioned by IRCAM in 89 is an early example of cross synthesis of white noise and speech.

 

Performance hybridization

 

In this effect, one particular performance style is transferred to another instrumental timbre. Osaka’s “Morphing Collage” for piano and computer (2002), Shakuhachi’s shaking performance is transferred to Sho timbre. Sho is a Japanese traditional mouth pipe organ in gagaku and as its natural attribute from its sound vibration mechanism, it cannot generate vibrato and the pitch stays uniform. On the other hand, shakuhachi can freely control the pitch without fingering and have rich shaking expression called “yuri”. In the piece, sho’s timbre has a similar expression of shakuhachi’s yuri.

 

Extended sound stream

 

We classify sound morphing and sound/performance hybridization into a category of extended sound stream. Sound stream is a psycho-acoustical term, which means sound which can be perceived as only one sound. Acoustical sound is usually easy to find, since one stream corresponds to one physical object vibration. One of exceptional examples is Mongolian throat singing, khoomii, in which you can find two different timbres from one physical source, vocal chords. These effects cannot directly be said as one stream. However, it is a border timbre between one stream and two or multiple streams. Given

two streams, sound morphing make it possible to feel an extended stream by gradually changing the timbre.

 

In electroacoustic music these sounds are computer synthesized. Similarly instrumental performers have made effort to find extended stream within the instrumental timbre of his/her own.

 

One understandable extension is pitch register extension, seen as Mari Kimura’s one octave lower subharmonics performance, a flute player’s one octave lower performance using lip vibration like brass instrument. Sound morphing is also seen in flute player from a flute sound to the player’s own voice, which is not singing. The direction of extended stream is the common target for both the music performers and engineering researchers.

 

Sound by sound

 

Sound by sound is defined as a timbre composed of other timbre. For example, a phoneme composed of music instrumental sound such as flute sound. In this example, it is very close to the concept of sound hybridization, but it has a hierarchical structure and in the top layer a speech is heard while in the lower layer flute sound is clearly heard. On the other hand, sound hybridization tries to copy and transfer the certain perceptive aspect of another timbre and not the whole sound. This notion also comes from paintings. Trompe l’oeil art of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and Yose-e in Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s ukiyoe of Japanese art. The former introduces many portraits composed of vegetables and fruits, while the latter introduces portrait composed of human. The same analogy was adopted to sound timbre. The well-known piece using this timbre is Jonathan Harvey’s orchestral piece, “Speakings” (2008).

 

In this piece, rapid change of the under-layer-timbre preserving the upper layer timbre (global timbre) unchanged such as that of trombone or strings. As the title implies, this tries to implement sound by sound effect defined here. However, the intelligibility is not very high, and although we admire that the expression imitates the speech, the audience cannot perceive the phoneneme. Now the questions arises Is it technically possible to express phoneme in the upper level in terms of instrumental timbres in the lower level. This is a technical concern, and one of the important axis of the accomplished sound quality evaluation. In general, These two axes are trade off, if the intelligibility of musical instrumental timbre in the lower level is high, the intelligibility the timbre in the upper level is lower and vice versa. Sound synthesis technology, which satisfies both aspects, is still an item of further studies.

 

On the other hand, in the musical aspect, intelligibility of the speech using an orchestra does not seem to be the very important factor in the Harvey’s piece. However, we are not sure whether this comes from technical limitations or esthetic requirement.

 

Future directions of sound by sound effect

 

Sound by sound effect is not limited to synthesized sounds. As we define, some of acoustical sounds have structured timbre, such as vibrato and timbral trill. A timbral trill can be observed in yodel and the shakuhachi’s korokoro or karakara. Contemporary flute players can perform a similar kind of shakuhachi trills. These performance make use of the timbral change among different registers of the voice or instruments.

 

Possibilities of more extended timbres.

 

One direction is to modify or emphasis of the lower level timbre of acoustical sounds. An example is the change of characteristics of vibrato, such as rate and depth of original sound’s vibrato.

 

Another possibility is reorganization of temporal structure. For example as an extension of wood instrumental timbral trill, such a timbral trill as two or more different timbres changes alternatively or sequencially with rapid movement. This might give us a different impression of overall timbre in the top level.

 

Trompe l’oeil art and Yose-e are very much related to illusions. Similarly, auditory illusions and its timbral possibilities can be an interesting music idea. In visual objects, humans tend to see special coherency within a local range and cannot detect the global special contradiction. Since sound by sound is defined as a hierarchical structure of timbres, such similar auditory illusion among short and long temporal direction can be expected.

 

We have discussed sound effects which are newly born after digital technology has become a main stream of sound synthesis. In particular, structured timbre is defined and classified into categories, and discussed in detail, introducing music pieces which not only include those effects but make them as main theme that penetrates the whole piece. Some effects introduced here are still under study in sound research field, and it is expected that more enrich timbre with a good quality will be synthesized in the near future. A new performance style, as well, based on these effects are also expected to be created by an instrumental players. These timbre will become a standard electroacoustic music vocabulary.

 

 

 

-  Naotoshi Osaka

 

Naotoshi Osaka received M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Waseda University and received Doctor of engineering in 1994. He presented his pieces in ICMC'93, ’03 and ’06. His music interest focuses on timbre synthesis from orchestral sound to computer generated sound. He has also organized computer music concerts, such as the NTT Computer Music Symposium I (1997) and II (2001). From 1996 to 2003 he led a computer music research group at NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Atsugi, Kanagawa. He is presently a professor of Tokyo Denki University. He is a president of Japanese Society for Sonic Arts (JSSA) in 2009.

 

osaka@im.dendai.ac.jp

 

 

PENNY, Jean

 

(Re)notating cultural identities through musique-mixte:

A reflection of heterotopian constructs in performance

 

 

This paper presents a discussion of performative heterotopia within musique-mixte (for instrument and electronics), focusing on the implications of the spaces between the materials of music, the performance space, and zones of interaction. Heterotopia is proposed as a performance space of connectivity; of interweaving different perspectives of experience and practice; of modes of interaction; and a place of others as seen through the self. Electroacoustic elements of performance are proposed as enablers, as mediators for cross cultural understandings in performance, and the negotiations and relationships created within the space that converge as a shared experience of cultural diversity.

 

Nicholas Bourriard recounts in his introduction to Michel Foucault’s Manet and the object of Painting (2009) that Foucault developed the concept of ‘heterotopia’ as a way of representing “a constant among all human groups, [which] can be described as ‘anti-location’. It consists of an ensemble of “places outside of all places, even though they are at the same time localizable”. The concept of an ensemble of places expands into heterotopian performance spaces where the performance may articulate diverse relationships and interactions through the integration/juxtaposition of acoustic and electronic elements.

 

The research project, The Imaginary Space: Developing Models for an Emergent Malaysian/Western Electroacoustic Music (Malaysian Government Fundamental Research Grant Scheme 2012-14) lead by this author, aimed to make artistic and cultural connections through the medium of musique-mixte, to experience contemporary and traditional music practices of Malaysia and to examine aspects of cultures and interculturality in a context of new electroacoustic composition and performance. New compositions utilized Western flute, fixed sound and live electronics. It was found that creating a sonic environment through the digital signal processing (sound manipulations including timbre, volume, sound location and spatialisation) provided a context for investigation of intercultural parameters and the potential for creative exchange. The capacity of electronic techniques to shift perceptions of sonorities, location, spatial dynamics and characters of the music challenged listener and performer expectations and responses, provoking shifts in understandings and performative identities, and activating new interchanges through a fusion of practices and cultures. Exemplars of heterotopia arising in compositions from this research will be included in the paper.

 

 

 

- Jean Penny

 

Australian flautist/researcher/educator/editor, Dr Jean Penny, returned to Australia in 2016 following four years as Senior Lecturer in Music at the Fakulti Muzik dan Seni Persembahan, Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, Malaysia and her subsequent appointment as a Fellow at the UPSI Education Research Laboratory. She has extensive experience in performance with major Australian symphony orchestras, chamber ensembles and solo recitals. Dr Penny’s work is grounded in Western art music cultures – principally new music performance, intercultural studies and practice-led research. Her Doctor of Musical Arts (QCGU 2009) study investigated the performative nexus of flute with digital technologies. In Malaysia she led major research projects centered around new music and intercultural perspectives, taught at multiple levels, and was Chief Editor of the peer reviewed Malaysian Music Journal from 2012-2015. She has presented at many national and international conferences and forums, and has won numerous awards, research and arts grants, sponsorships and university awards for outstanding service. She resides near Melbourne, Australia.

 

mjpenny@bigpond.net.au

 

 

QI, Mengjie / FIELDS, Ken

 

Network Music Performance over IPv6:

Two Year CERNET2 Project to Create a Large Scale Piece

 

 

Our presentation will be a research update on the first year of a two year CERNET2 grant (China Education Research Network) that was awarded to Ph.D. student Maggie Qi at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. It was the only project out of 100 that was in the category of arts, as we promised a sci/eng contribution of open source code to enable OSCgroups to send data over IPV6 networks. That has been accomplished.

 

We also built in a rational methodology to design, test, scale and reiterate a large network music event using only IPV6 infrastructure. In the testing phases we collect latency and QOS (quality of service) statistics scaling up from two to five performance nodes, while at the same time testing a theory of multi-tempi/polyrhythmic form to which we believe network music is well suited.

 

Our modus operandi is to not add artificial delay and to feature the irrational inter-nodal latency ratios that determine the rhythmic and harmonic features that are serendipitous to any particular configuration of participants and will be unique in every networked case. Our aesthetic hypothesis is that we will finally discover the equivalent of the Higgs-boson phenomenon in the realm of networked signaletic discourse.

 

 

 

-  Mengjie (Maggie) Qi

 

She is currently a doctoral student at Central Conservatory of Music studying with Professor Zhang Xiaofu and visiting scholar at CUNY- Brooklyn College under the supervision of Professor Douglas Geers. In 2015, she received her master degree at the Central Conservatory of Music, studying electroacoustic music composition under Professor Ping Jin. She strives to make electroacoustic music with Chinese characteristics and study computer music, she participated in the interactive installation program Sound*Beijing in the same year. She received her Bachelor degree at National Academy of Chinese Theater Art in 2012, majored in Sound Design Department to study sound recording arts and designing.

Her electroacoustic music works have won many awards on noted competitions, such as Spectral Color won an Honorary Mention (2011), Echoes of woodblock from Peking Opera won the First Prize (2012), Dances with Crystals won the First Prize (2014) at MUSICACOUSTICA COMPOSITION COMPETITION, and The Road to Krakow won the third prize of The Competition of Oskar Kolberg (2014).

She has been commissioned by festivals and ensembles, such as Autumn- for violin and electroacoustic music (2013), Linchong Fled at Night for Peking opera singer and electronic music (2016) at MUSICACOUSTICA-BEIJING. She is also the residency composer of Love for Music Ensemble in Beijing.

Her works been performed widely at the festivals around the world, such as Audio Art Festival in Bunkier Sztuki (Poland, 2012), Hungary, Slovakia, WOCMAT (Taiwan, 2013), CIME (North Texas, USA, 2014), ICMC (Netherlands, 2016), International Electronic Music Festival (New York, 2017).

She is also enthusiastic for music translation job and has served as translator for lectures of MUSICACOUSTICA Festivals and served as assistant for Professor Marc Battier’s and Professor Jeffrey Stoles’s workshops.

 

maggieqmj@yeah.net

 

 

 

-  Ken Fields

 

Ken Fields engaged in interdisciplinary studies across multiple departments (art, music and cognitive science), receiving a Doctorate in Media Arts from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2000. Ken then moved to China to participate in the development of nascent digital arts/music programs at China's Central Conservatory of Music (China Electronic Music Center, 2003- Current) and Peking University (School of Software, Department of Digital Art & Design, 2004-2007). A major accomplishment of this period was to lead a team project to translate the Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads into Chinese (Published in 2011). Ken held the position of Canada Research Chair in Telemedia Arts from 2008-2013 and is now back full-time in Beijing at China's Central Conservatory of Music developing Artsmesh, a professional MacOS application used widely in the field of network music.

 

ken@ccom.edu.cn

 

 

RICHARDS, John / LANDY, Leigh

 

On the Music of Sounds and the Music of Things

 

 

After a century of great upheaval in music, the twenty-first century is demonstrating that it will provide electroacoustic (or sound-based) music with continued radical developments although they may very well be of a different sort. Technological developments certainly dictated most of the twentieth century changes in music and this influence is in no way decreasing. The key change is less in terms of radical change regarding content; instead, our thesis is that production and distribution will be highly influenced by the formation of new musical communities, often focused on increasing participation through a workshop approach. Although tendencies that have existed for centuries will continue alongside those that arose in the previous century, traditional concepts will be renewed given the ubiquity of technology.

 

Stated in another manner, the development of artists producing Western art music or forming part of the commercial music sector may not alter significantly although interest may wane in the former and new means of packaging music may need to be developed within the ‘music industry’. This, however, is not our key concern. Our focus stems from the radical broadening that took place in the previous century, namely starting with the musical note as the unit measure of almost all music produced to the availability of any sound as musical material. We are talking about particular forms of sound-based music and how their future evolution will involve an increasing number of enthusiasts, how their position within music as a whole will redefine musical boundaries, and how their production and dissemination may form an addition to what might traditionally have been called folk music. This latter point is of great significance, as music in recent centuries has evolved from primarily an art form made by and for everyone and anyone to a more artisanal, professional trade. Our position is that an evolving eras of sampling and do-it-yourself cultures, the latter also known as hacking, will dissolve the ‘amateur’/professional distinction to an extent. This development, alongside much of sonic art’s music existing outside of clear pop/art music boundaries, will offer this young century a new form of music of the folk, whether musicians are performing together in one physical location or are performing by way of a (virtual) network.

 

Even the notion of instrument is broadening, one exciting product of the do-it-yourself (DIY) culture. An increasing number of musicians build their own instruments and, in so doing, are designing the need for their instrument and creating music based on that need leading towards new and often surprising forms of virtuosity and even anti-virtuosity and ‘naïve’ approaches: making new sound-based instruments as a method for creating a tabula rasa.

 

It is arguable that, following the music and associated philosophy of John Cage, musical content is not changing as rapidly and radically as it did throughout the previous century. Our century is, as far as this is concerned, one of synthesis – that is, further developing the radical musical approaches of the twentieth century. Instead, the radical nature of our time is to do with the holism related to creation and dissemination that many working within the music of sounds are in the process of developing. It is this form of radical development that will be our focus in this text.

 

This talk sets-out to summarise the core themes of Richards’ and Landy’s research in this area. Central to their argument is the development of a ‘music of sounds’ and a ‘music and things’. Landy builds on his sound-based music paradigm - a condensed version of the key ideas presented in Landy’s two 2007 books [23] - setting the scene for the re-examination of music’s key categories and the place of the music of sounds within that.

 

Landy investigates the evolution of sampling culture and, in particular, sound-based approaches within it. Issues of interest involved with production include: legality and related rights issues, sequential composition, the author and ownership, the apparent lack of a ‘celebrity culture’ amongst others. Distribution channels are mainly through nonstandard means of audio production. It is, as is the world of hacking, a space in which accessibility is broad and the professional/everyone else distinction is not of particular importance. Here there are two-way influences between traditional high art and popular cultures leading towards a variety of forms of music that possesses its own space, its own communities of interest offering a variety of forms of participation. Sampling here represents a broad range of approaches from soundscape to grains of samples, from music-based sampling using sound-based techniques to sampling anything. Where hacking is highly focused on the experience of making, sampling is highly focused on the recomposition or recontextualisation of experience.

 

Richards examines a music of things and the holistic approach of how the borderlines between instrument maker, performer and composer are becoming increasingly fuzzy or, better said, a new form of artist is emerging whose music is a manifestation of his or her (or their) instrument(s) and their self-sufficiency. He looks beyond Cage and Duchamp and the ideas of found sound and objet trouvé to discuss a new type of materialism and objecthood found in electronic music that draws on the broader philosophy of object-orientated ontology as expressed by, for example, Bruno Latour. Instrument is no longer seen as a tool for musical expression, but a self-sufficient system in which the music is ‘found’. In such cases, this demarcated system points to a technological object that has clearly defined boundaries and often limited parameters for control. The object may have the capacity to generate its own sound (self-generating). But at what point does objecthood breakdown and the sound-making system resemble a collection of things?  Through making and engaging with electronic sound on a fundamental level – wire, solder, electronic components – the musician/artist is placing an onus on the constituent parts of these sound-making systems and how such elements are connected. There is a shift from the prescribed and concrete, to a relational aesthetic: how things fit together or not. A consequence of this approach, where the idea of musical instrument would seem to be subjugated, is to question instrumental virtuosity. Richards proposes a new type of virtuosity that resides in ‘listening’. Moreover, he considers the politics of, what can be broadly described of as, hacking in relation to music.  He observes a new form of electronic music that has emerged that critiques contemporary culture through anti-technology manifestations and how a DIY electronic music is often used as a way of seeking self-determination. Finally, he reflects on how such practices can lead to new forms of electronic music performance and how the act of making is taken on to the ‘stage’.

 

The talk, based on a book that the presenters are currently completing, will commence with a contextual introduction and the presentation of the talk’s key ideas. After this Richards and Landy draw parallels between the two areas of the music of sounds and the music of things. Key concepts such as recycling and appropriation, sample as object, plundering and hacking, and technological processes are discussed. Cut and paste culture is considered, not only in relation to sound, but in relation to objects and materials, schematics and code. The hardware re-mix is also presented. The emergence of new communities forms the focal point for reflection. Workshopping and participation, which echo a broader cultural milieu of ‘an age of participation’, are seen as central to DIY and sampling cultures within sound-based music.  To substantiate the findings, the authors will also draw on a range of case studies and statements from artists working across the disciplines presented.

 

 

 

 

-  John Richards

 

John Richards explores the idea of Dirty Electronics that focuses on shared experiences, ritual, gesture, touch and social interaction. He is primarily concerned with the performance of large-group electronic music and DIY electronics, and the idea of creating music inside electronics. His work also pushes the boundaries between performance art, electronics, and graphic design and is transdisciplinary as well as having a socio-political dimension. Dirty Electronics has been commissioned to create sound devices for various arts organisations and festivals and has released a series of hand-held synths on Mute Records. In 1999, Richards joined Andrew Hugill and Leigh Landy as part of the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, at De Montfort University where he helped initiate the Music, Technology and Innovation, and Music, Technology and Performance degrees. Richards has also written numerous texts on DIY practices in electronic music and new modes of performance.

 

jrich@dmu.ac.uk

 

 

-  Leigh Landy     --- see p.49

 

RITTER, Martin

 

Considering Space: Issues Surrounding Communicating Spatial Information in Electroacoustic Music Works

 

 

Electroacoustic music has made an important imprint on how we conceptualize, compose, perform, and listen to sounds in communal settings. With the advent of the speaker, sound(ing) objects have been freed from their attachment to a direct physical action and may now display a high degree of centrifugal aesthetic (Ciciliani 2014). I will use three composers for shaping the discussion on space, the use of space, and how we might approach it analytically once we have the means to archive it: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hans Tutschku, and Barry Truax.

 

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a pioneer in both electroacoustic music and the use of space in music. He was a prolific writer and we have a large body of literature as well as sketch materials showing how he thought about space and the future of the use of spatial elements in music (Stockhausen 1959). Seminal pieces like “Gesang der Jüngline” and “Kontakte” will bring historical perspective and help situate the current discussion.

 

Hans Tutschku studied sound diffusion with Stockhausen during the late 1980ies and early 1990ies. His piece “Zellen-Linien” will be used as a means to advance the discussion into the present. Sketches, the score, as well as personal communications with the composer will be used to gain insights into the use of space in Tutschku’s music.

 

Finally, portions of Barry Truax’s piece “Basilica” will be used as a case study to demonstrate a new system of visualizing spatial content by using ambisonic recording technology and computer vision algorithms.

 

The traditional documentation/archival of (western) music, i.e. the score, has a long history formally starting in the early medieval period with Guido D’Arezzo. Guido’s systems had to make a choice as to what was deemed the most important musical parameter for maximizing future reproduction/performances, namely pitch. This choice, made hundreds of years ago, still limits us today in how we learn, think, compose, and write about music. Had Guido decided, for example, that timbre or indeed space was more, or as important as pitch, our musical thinking and how we approach sound would be markedly different. One notable effect of space on a sound is that any sound carries an acoustic imprint of the characteristics of the (physical) space it is heard in (Blesser and Salter 2009). This means that a performance of a musical piece can never be recreated the same way twice. Once the sound leaves a speaker/sound source, the space, and the objects within the space alter the sound.

 

The pitch centric system of the western score took hundreds of years of constant improvements to get to our contemporary system (Read 1987), which allows for a remarkable number of parameters to be archived. However, spatial elements are still rare, and difficult to retain since 3-D space, especially fine-grained, complex temporal movement in 3-D space is exceedingly difficult to represent on 2-D paper/screens. Recent research has attempted to add spatial aspects to notation with the help of digital tools such as The Spatialization Symbolic Music Notation Project (Ellberger et al. 2014, 2016). This is an important step as this can encode the composer’s intentions clearly into a score, which, much like pitches on the staff can help the analyst understand the piece. However, since space imprints on the sound, the study of a score alone even with embedded spatial trajectories still cannot achieve a satisfactory analytical outcome. With “Zellen-Linien” we can study the Max/MSP patches gain another layer of information. There are a total of 32 electronic cues (for a less than 20 minute long piece), which are triggered via MIDI foot pedal. They are self-contained and do not need any further input from the performer. Tutschku describes spatialization not in terms of movement, stasis, or other more common terms, but rather assigns “attributes” to his cues such as “jittery”, “dull”, “energetic”, etc. He has confirmed that these attributes operate on a continuum, meaning they happen within a reasonably defined space but the computer determines the exact details at runtime. This means that each performance of “Zellen-Linien” has a slightly different, yet predictable outcome, which in turn makes it difficult to generalize the piece in any conventional theoretical sense.

 

In order to analyze and better understand spatial music, such as “Zellen-Linien” or “Basilica”, we need to investigate a different approach. Traditionally, the emphasis of musical analysis was to summarize, explain, and contextualize, a piece of music on a global scale. This means that we have a good understanding of how, for example, the sections of a Mozart piano concerto are constructed and relate to each other theoretically. We can even investigate and understand historical trends that led to the composition and how maybe over time the interpretation of the same score changed by various performers. But all these tools do not easily distill into a workable solution for electroacoustic music. As a consequence, the performance itself must become the main focus of an analyst’s investigation. However, since a performance is ephemeral we need to preserve/archive it with the highest possible fidelity, not only in pitch (traditional recording technologies) but also space. For this, ambisonic recording technologies may be utilized. An ambisonic recording captures the sound at the location of the ambisonic microphone from all directions, which means we can imagine the microphone array as a directional sensor that allows us to visualize the sonic energy on a sphere (O’Donovan et al. 2007; O’Donovan, Duraiswami, and Zotkin 2008). Therefore, a higher order ambisonic recording would allow a musicologist to preserve these spatial attributes of a performance, mirroring the experience of a single audience member. With the proper hardware and software, the performance situation can then be recreated to a higher degree than possible with stereo or surround sound recordings. Of particular interest here is also the option of beamforming. Beamforming allows a listener to concentrate on a specific direction of the spatial recording. This means, for example that one could listen for all the sounds coming from the back left of the room, or try and follow a sound as it moves through the space, recreating its trajectory for analysis. This opens up a completely new way of interacting and thinking about spatial contexts. Research my colleagues and I are currently undergoing focuses on the extraction of trajectories form ambisonic recordings using an em32 Eigenmike. We postulate that with the help of computer vision algorithms we will be able to parse recordings into viable trajectories for further musicological and theoretical analysis, which I will demonstrate through examinations of Barry Truax’s “Basilica”.

 

 

 

-  Martin Ritter

 

Martin Ritter is interested in the intersection of music, technology, and performance. This includes musicological research in electronic music and how it can be analyzed and understood with the aid of digital tools. He is also a composer of electronic and acoustic works, which have been performed across North America and Europe. He has been published in the proceedings of NIME, ICMC, EMS, and eContact!. He also actively participates in new music festivals such as the Darmstadt, Impuls, and ComposIt where he has had the opportunity to study Roger Reynolds, Mark Andre, Klaus Lang, Gerd Kuhr, Joshua Fineberg, Philippe Leroux, Emmanuel Jordan, Marta Gentilucci, Davide Ianni, and others.

He holds a DMA in composition from the University of British Columbia where his primary teachers were Drs. Keith Hamel and Robert Pritchard, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Computational Media Design at the University of Calgary with Drs. Friedemann Sallis and Jeffrey Boyd.

 

martin@martin-ritter.com

 

 

ROMERO-PORRAS, Judith

 

 “Murmullos del Páramo”: rethinking Julio Estrada's opera

through Zeami's theater Nô aesthetics

 

 

The purpose of this research is to rethink the characteristic elements in the opera “Murmullos del Páramo” of the Mexican composer Julio Estrada through Zeami’s aesthetics. One of the opera’s versions was performance in Tokio in 2010. This opera was inspired from the study of sound in Juan Rulfo’s[24] works that Estrada made in the 90’s.

 

The aesthetics in Zeami’s theater is an art of austerity elements to impact the public with a fine drama. In “Murmullos” (whisperings) Estrada searches for the core of music: the result is an austerity of sound. I want to show how these approaches join the same aesthetics.

 

This project will be developed into two parts:

The first part, I present Estrada’s musical idea and his opera. He develops the concept of sound in his book “El Sonido en Rulfo, el ruido ese”[25]. He presents four ways of sound’s perception: speaking sound, environment sound, musical sound and time sound. He explores these dimensions to create and structure his opera.

 

The second part, I present the Zeami’s aesthetics through Aya Sekoguchi’s recent work “L’empreinte de Zeami dans l’art japonais: la fleur et le néant”[26]. Sekoguchi explores the Zeami’s periods to analyze the evolution and the formation of the theater nô and his influence in Japanese art. I analyze Estrada’s approach through the concepts like “ma” (starkness).

 

The goal of this research is to describe and analyze Estrada’s opera performance of 2010 and consider this work in order to define his style or even to propose a theory for its stylistic work.

 

 

 

-  Judith Romero-Porras

 

Judith Romero Porras was born in the city of Puebla on April 16th, 1975. She obtained a bachelor's degree in classical music at the Conservatory of Music of the State of Puebla. During her years in the Conservatory she participates as a pianist accompanying the Children's Orchestra and the Symphonic Orchestra of this institution. She participates in two competitions: "Young Pianists of Puebla" in 1992 and the "First National Piano Competition Isaías Noriega" in 1994. In 1995, she became assistant professor at this Conservatory.

In France, she makes an equivalence of studies allowing her to enter the last year of the “licence” degree in music. In 2003, she obtained her degree in music and musicology. On her return to Mexico, she retook her work at the Conservatory of Music of the State of Puebla. Then, she obtained a master's degree in education at the Center for Prospective and High Studies A.C. of the city of Puebla. From 2007 to 2010, she works as a French teacher in the Department of Language and Culture Studies at the Autonomous Popular University of Puebla.

In 2010, she received a scholarship from the Ministery of Education of the State of Puebla for master's studies in musicology at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. This research will be extended with a scholarship from Columbia University in New York during the fall of 2012. Her research subjets concern the history and construction of a musical identity in Mexico in the twentieth century. The evolution of Mexican music leads her to become interested in the introduction of new techniques of composition of the 1960s. This subject is currently her research line for the doctorate in music that she has been doing since November 2015 under the advice of Ph.D. Marc Battier.

 

lased11@hotmail.com

 

SARGENTI, Simonetta

 

Analysis of electroacoustic and interactive music works:

Solo by Karlheinz Stockhausen, an example of performance analysis

 

 

Electroacoustic music is no longer just an art, but has become a means to comunicate. The musical works composed using electroacoustic media, interactive works as multimedia installation, are a great part of music creations today. In order to understand the characters and structure, as well as the processes that leas to its realisation, the traditional analysis does not always work. That is particularly evident in music works realised recently, but also some works created in the past have a non conventional representation. These are more performance events than events to be fixed permanently in a score. For the analysis of these works we need a new approach.

 

In this study, I further investigate different recent interpretations of the work Solo by Karlheinz Stockhausen, composed in 1966, using analogic techniques for the realisation of the live electronics. Starting from 1990 and just now, the piece has been performed with digital techniques and recently with interactive technologies. Also that piece can be analysed as a performance event communicating emotions.

 

The aim of this study is to analyse examples from different performances of that piece and investigate differences in interpretations of Solo by relating score segmentation with the analysis of performers’s gestural interaction. I also explore the effect of musical structure on communication of emotion.

 

The analysis is conducted in two steps:

1-  different interpretations by different performers using a own version of the score (also different score versions)

2- different interactions  between the player and the live electronics in the same score version  (same score version, with different live electronics)

 

The analysis involves qualitative and quantitative methods : an analysis of the different score versions, I , a constant-Q time-frequency representation for analysis of audio files, and an analysis of interactive processes in real time during a live performance of the piece as a soundscape improvisation.

 

I have considered the following versions:

1- flute version, by D. Wiesner

2- double bass version, by E. Francioni

3- violin version, by Simonetta Sargenti

4- soundscape improvisation, by A. Petrolati, L. Muncaciu, E. Francioni and others

 

 

References

 

K. Stockhausen (1966). Solo n.19 (score). Vienna: Universal Edition.

S. Sargenti, (1996). Software per la definizione di strumenti nella musica elettronica: Analisi e realizzazione di Mikrophonie I e Solo di Karlheinz Stockhausen. In Atti del XI Convegno di Informatica Musicale, Bologna 1996.

S. Sargenti, An example of evolution in electroacoustic music performance: Stockhausen’s Solo and the creation of a soundscape , ‘Proceedings of the EMS Conference’, University of Sheffield, 2015

E. Francioni (2014).  Solo, n. 19. Tutorial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu_j9zDWUb0

L. Muncaciu (2014). A vocal version of Solo. www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLdylmU-fJ

L. Gabrielli  e al. (in fase di pubblicazione),  WeMUST: Wireless technologies and open software for networked music performance: An example of the performance ‘Waterfront’:  www.youtube.com/watch?

C. Cannam, C. Landone, e M. Sandler (2006). The Sonic Visualiser: A visualisation platform for semantic descriptors from musical signals. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR-06).

O. Lartillot e P. Toiviainen (2007). A Matlab toolbox for musical feature extraction from audio. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx-07), Bordeaux, France (pp. 237-244). ISBN: 978-88-901479-1-3.

 

 

 

-  Simonetta Sargenti

 

Simonetta Sargenti was born in Milan. She completed a M.A. Degree in Violin, in Composition and in Electroacoustic Music at the Conservatory “G. Verdi” in Milan, and holds a M.A.Degree in Philosophy and Musicology at the Università Statale di Milano e Università di Bologna. As a professional performer, her interests mainly lie in the application of technology to the musical domain, with a special focus on the 20^th-century repertoire. Her compositions involve several instrumentations, including live electronics and magnetic tape, and have been performed in several European countries. She recently contributed to audio-visual installations at the Villa Simonetta in Milan. She is active as a musicologist and researcher in electroacoustic music and music theory and analysis. She teaches History of Music at the Conservatory of Novara and History and Analysis of Electroacoustic Music at the Conservatory of Pesaro.

 

simonasargenti@gmail.com