Abstract

Abstract

This paper documents sound recording approaches for immersive multiple loudspeaker acousmatic composition. The notion that spectrum and spatiality are inseparable is supported by perspective-based recording approaches (foreground, middleground and background) that serve to simplify real-world sound environments. A hybrid approach is proposed as findings suggest that it is not possible to limit recording, and in turn re-presentation, to one optimal method.

Abstract

The paper discusses how electroacoustic music has developed, and develops rapidly, with the technologies and societies that nourish it. Core values, aesthetic directions and artistic concerns have changed over time, as has public interest and focus in the various aesthetic iterations of technology-based music.

Abstract

Quelle est aujourd'hui la place de la musique électroacoustique sur la place publique? Quel est le rôle des institutions — studio de production, centre de recherche, institutions d'enseignement — dans le portrait général de la musique électroacoustique? Combien y a-t-il de sociétés de concert électroacoustique professionnelles dans le monde? À qui s'adressent les musiques électroacoustiques d'aujourd'hui? Autrement dit, pour paraphraser un titre utilisé par le GRM dans les années 70, L'électroacoustique du futur a-t-elle un avenir?

Abstract

The word 'Texture' has a common use among spanish and english spoken musicians. However it seems to have a precise musical meaning for not a long time ago. For example: it didn´t appeared as such until 1954 in the Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians edition, and it didn´t has a reference in the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. And there´s a very similar situation in Spanish.

Abstract

La musique   « a priori » á été l’objet du réflexion du « Traité des objets musicaux » de Pierre Schaeffer :

 « A partir de la musique sérielle dont les règles, déjà, se formulaient comme une algèbre, se sont élaborées des « musiques a priori », dont le souci dominant parait être celui de la rigueur intellectuelle, et d’une totale emprise de l’intelligence abstraite….«(1966, p. 20)

Las diferencias que existen entre los materiales sonoros y visuales han sido objeto de complejas polémicas sobre las correspondencias entre sus propiedades. Artistas y teóricos de distintos perfiles (como Wagner, Kandinsky, Eisenstein, Schoenberg, McLaren y Chion, entre otros) se han enfocado en esta situación desde diversos ángulos. Sin embargo, las relaciones que se pueden establecer entre sonido e imagen al interior de procesos creativos parecen obedecer a lógicas complejas que han sido difíciles de formalizar.

El concepto de transducción ha sido evocado en investigaciones previas en referencia a una técnica utilizada para establecer circulaciones de información entre elementos de la imagen y el sonido en la composición asistida por computadora (Sedes et al., 2003). Este artículo aborda el concepto de transducción como una herramienta para describir y analizar los mecanismos que permiten crear transferencias de elementos entre los ámbitos sonoro y visual a diferentes niveles de procesos de composición. El objetivo es establecer un marco conceptual en el que sonidos e imágenes puedan ser puestos en interacción a través de la transducción. Varias disciplinas (tales como la composición musical, las artes visuales, la musicología, las ciencias cognitivas, la arte-terapia, entre otras) podrían beneficiarse de la aplicación de este concepto.

Heritage and Future...an enticing proposition for the forthcoming EMS09 symposium in Buenos Aires. Heritage, our common memory, the many things we have shared during this last half century of electroacoustic music. I will leave the future to the younger and more savvy colleagues, for myself perhaps I should stay closer to the heritage, the memories of the recent past. I must confess that there are things that frighten me. One could be the rapid pace of our changing technology. Is it truly necessary to have to adapt to these constant and accelerating changes? Could we make an effort to 'extend a little' the validity of earlier technological moments?  Scanning some significant steps that have taken place say, since Pierre Schaeffer...You will be surprised... paste discs and turntables – 78 rpms – 33 and why not, 45 rpm; the mono to stereo conversion; the early multitracks with 4 or 8 channels, then 16 or more;  analog tape; DAT recorders; MP3s; sample-to-disk; the world of voltage control and MIDI; diffusion and multichanneling, from Varése, Stockhausen, Normandeau... 5.1, 9.1, and 16.2 sound; Multi-Channel Digital  Projectors; well the list is long.

The question of what listeners do when listening to electroacoustic music is considered and discussed in its relation to everyday listening.  Specific cognitive mechanisms and idioms of electroacoustic music are examined that give rise to artistic meaning, meaning that includes the embodied sense of the flow of felt experience as well as the continuous emotional assessment of context.  The importance of context for meaning is considered as well as the role of cognitive blending, especially the conceptual blending that creates analogy and compression in many electroacoustic works.

The heritage of electroacoustic music has included repertoire and resources which present unique problems in terms of preservation and archiving due to technical and non-technical materials utilized, unique performance and presentation venues needed, and lack of planning and consideration of the  possible significance of the works.  This has lead to a loss of historical content which may be invaluable to future generations of electroacoustic musicians. The author of the paper has encountered the disadvantages of this lack of preservation in her own research of the works of Carla Scaletti, Ruth Anderson, and Annea Lockwood.

This paper aims to offer a general outline of the development of electronic music in Iran and its intertwinement with tradition. After presenting a brief history of electronic music before and after the 1979 Revolution of Iran, I will discuss in more depth the social, political and musical context in which three generations of Iranian composers have developed their musical language. With regard to the phenomenon of multiculturalism evolved in such contexts, the role of universities, the internet, and the use of personal studios will be taken into consideration.

In my paper for EMS08 (Paris), ‘Pulse, metre, rhythm in electroacoustic music’ (Emmerson 2008), I aimed to raise questions as to whether perceptions of rhythmic working somehow distracted attention - took up valuable ‘bandwidth’ - away from a purely spectromorphological, instant by instant, perception of the sound objects in the sonic flow. In this paper I wish to focus on three of the composers I cited, all from Latin America, and all of whom used pulse and rhythm as a primary organising principle. In that paper I grouped them together too easily; here I wish to show both similarities and differences in their approaches to rhythm and to add some detail to their apparent critique of ‘European modernism’, as they saw it. All were PhD students at City University in London in the 1980s where I had the privilege to supervise their work: Alejandro Viñao (Argentina), Javier Alvarez (Mexico), Julio d’Escriván (Venezuela). I argue in fact that their work represented a ‘double critique’: both against ‘post-serial’ approaches (‘parameterisation’ of music, especially electroacoustic), but also developing a ‘strange critical distance’ from the more puritan strains of the acousmatic tradition, then relatively new in the UK.

Artistic creation, scientific research and technological innovation represent three different “areas”  whose boundaries seemed to be well established in the western culture during the past few centuries. Nevertheless, whether because of a real interest, necessity or fashion, these fields have met again and are now associated to continue deepening the cultural changes caused mainly by our use of recently-evolved electronic technologies.

1. Background

At the EMS conference in 2007 in Leicester I described the approach I had taken to making an analysis of Jonathan Harvey’s work Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980).  The analysis had appeared in the book Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music (Clarke 2006).  In particular I explained my concern about relying exclusively on the printed page in analyses of electroacoustic music: be that in the form of text, diagrams or printed sonograms etc.