Mirrors, echoes & doubles: a history of musical duplication
This study focuses on the significance of duplication in the history of music and other related artistic disciplines. In this text I look at the acoustic, structural, perceptual and aesthetic implications derived from the duplication of sonic materials, instruments, objects, setups, gestures and performers. From a general perspective, the use of duplication raises a number of issues of perceptual and acoustic nature: the effect and auditory conditions generated by the performance of identical sounds by two or more sonic sources, the importance of synchronicity or asynchronicity in the suggestion of aural and visual analogies, the role of distance in the establishment of auditory correspondences, the degree of similarity required by specific materials to be identified as doubles, the role of the performer in creating a sense of gestural and performative duplication, the relationship between acoustic and acousmatic sources in the delineation of sonic parallels, etc. In this study, the subject of duplication is chiefly regarded from spatial, performative and sonic perspectives. The sections focusing on spatial issues examine the function of duplicated setups of objects and instruments in the space of performance. The analysis of performative elements addresses the role of gestural duplication and doppelgangers as musical and scenic resources. Finally, the sections on sound investigate the perceptual and aesthetic effects of duplicated sonic sources, echoic interactions and sonic displacements