scholarly journals A Personal and Fragile Affair: The Sonic Environment and Its Place In My Compositions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Thomas Voyce
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Field Recording ◽  
Acousmatic Music ◽  
Sonic Environment ◽  
Musique Concrete

<p>To begin with, I will briefly outline my compositional process. This will help to provide an understanding of my motivations. I will then pose some questions relating to the practice of field recording and the use of these materials in electroacoustic composition. Through a discussion of early electronic music, musique concrete, soundscape composition and the ideologies of composers associated with these movements, I will reveal the tensions surrounding the use of referential material in acousmatic music. Finally, I will show how I have attempted to address these tensions in my own work.</p>

scholarly journals A Personal and Fragile Affair: The Sonic Environment and Its Place In My Compositions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Thomas Voyce
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Field Recording ◽  
Acousmatic Music ◽  
Sonic Environment ◽  
Musique Concrete

<p>To begin with, I will briefly outline my compositional process. This will help to provide an understanding of my motivations. I will then pose some questions relating to the practice of field recording and the use of these materials in electroacoustic composition. Through a discussion of early electronic music, musique concrete, soundscape composition and the ideologies of composers associated with these movements, I will reveal the tensions surrounding the use of referential material in acousmatic music. Finally, I will show how I have attempted to address these tensions in my own work.</p>

scholarly journals ‘There Must Be a Poetry of Sound That None of Us Knows…’: Early British documentary film and the prefiguring of musique concrète

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-186
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Cox
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Coal Face ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Musique Concrete

Standard histories of electronic music tend to trace the lineage of musique concrète as lying mainly in the Futurists’ declarations of the 1910s, through Cage’s ‘emancipation’ of noise in the 1930s, to Schaeffer’s work and codifications of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This article challenges this narrative by drawing attention to the work of filmmakers in the 1930s that foreshadowed the sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and thus offers an alternative history of their background. The main focus of the article is on the innovations within documentary film and specifically the sonic explorations in early British documentary that prefigured musique concrète, an area ignored by electronic music studies. The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the documentary movement’s members, particularly their leader John Grierson, will be compared with those of Pierre Schaeffer, and the important influence of Russian avant-garde filmmaking on the British (and musique concrète) will be addressed. Case studies will focus on the groundbreaking soundtracks of two films made by the General Post Office Film Unit that feature both practical and theoretical correspondences to Schaeffer: 6.30 Collection (1934) and Coal Face (1935). Parallels between the nature and use of technologies and how this affected creative outputs will also be discussed, as will the relationship of the British documentary movement’s practice and ideas to post-Schaefferian ‘anecdotal music’ and the work of Luc Ferrari.

Electronic Music

Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 107-117
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
World War ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Edgard Varese ◽  
American Composer ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Musique Concrete

With the end of World War II came the rebirth of European radio. Government stations in both France and Germany established experimental studios for research, from which arose a new kind of music, “electronic music.” The station in France, Office de Radiodiffusion Télevision Française (ORTF), was directed by the engineer/composer Pierre Schaeffer and his partner, Pierre Henry, who called their musical creations musique concrète. In Germany the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) studio produced music through the process of “synthesis.” This chapter will explain the difference between the two approaches used to create electronic music with examples from the percussion solo and ensemble repertoire. Early experiments using wire recorders, test records, and tape recorders by composers Halim El-Dabh, John Cage, and Edgard Varèse precede the major electronic works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mario Davidovsky, and the American composer Stephen Everett, whose use of computers in “real time” brings the reader into the next century.

Embodiment in Composition: 4E Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Evidence from a Case Study

2020 ◽  
pp. 102986492096144
Author(s):  
Ulla Pohjannoro
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Extended Cognition ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Musical Notation ◽  
Musical Structures ◽  
Sonic Environment ◽  
Theoretical Considerations

The purpose of this study was to theorise on a composer’s corporeality from the point of view of the embodied, enacted, embedded, and extended cognition paradigm, in the light of empirical data that cover the compositional process of creating one particular piece of music. The data include related manuscripts and the composer’s verbal account of those manuscripts. Composition is seen as an interactive coping behaviour and an adaptive process of knowledge acquisition and production in a sonic environment. In this epistemic process, the composer begins working with various kinds of ideas: sounds, timbres, musical structures, experiences, philosophical thoughts. They explicate these intuitive or reflective embodied representations through different kinds of externalisations, such as musical gestures, narratives, visualisation, and finally, musical notation. This study substantiates the way in which embodied, extrabodily, embedded, and enactive processes constitute the cognitive acts of a composer, usually considered as almost purely mental. It shows how musical composition may not only be grounded but also depend on embodied knowledge that the score only partly conveys. In addition to helping composers and performers communicate in real life, the findings may be useful for identifying the different cognitive premises and circumstances that can result in discrepancies between the ways in which they interpret musical notation.

What the GRM brought to music: from musique concrète to acousmatic music

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 189-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Battier
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Constant Attention ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Acousmatic Music ◽  
Musical Sounds ◽  
Musique Concrete ◽  
And Diffusion ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractSixty years ago, musique concrète was born of the single-handed efforts of one man, Pierre Schaeffer. How did the first experiments become a School and produce so many rich works? As this issue of Organised Sound addresses various aspects of the GRM activities throughout sixty years of musical adventure, this article discusses the musical thoughts behind the advent and the development of the music created and theoretised at the Paris School formed by the Schaefferian endeavours. Particular attention is given to the early twentieth-century conceptions of musical sounds and how poets, artists and musicians were expressing their quest for, as Apollinaire put it, ‘new sounds new sounds new sounds’. The questions of naming, gesture, sound capture, processing and diffusion are part of the concepts thoroughly revisited by the GRMC, then the GRM in 1958, up to what is known as acousmatic music. Other contributions, such as Teruggi's, give readers insight into the technical environments and innovations that took place at the GRM. This present article focuses on the remarkable unity of the GRM. This unity has existed alongside sixty years of activity and dialogue with researchers of other fields and constant attention to the latter-day scientific, technological and philosophical ideas which have had a strong influence in shaping the development of GRM over the course of its history.

‘There is Music in It, But It is Not Music’: A Reception History ofMusique Concrètein Britain

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-230
Author(s):  
LOUIS NIEBUR
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Reception History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Cultures ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The One ◽  
Musique Concrete ◽  
Hostile Attitude

AbstractThe traditional narrative of the development ofmusique concrèteandelektronische Musiktells a story of esoteric, academic branches of musical modernism emerging out of Paris and Cologne in the 1950s. But this narrative clouds our understanding of the unique ways this music developed in Britain, largely filtered through the BBC, as a relatively populist, accessible iteration of Continental techniques. This article explores how British reactions to contemporary music and, in particular,musique concrèteandelektronische Musik, reflected on the one hand continued suspicion towards Continental music and on the other a deep insecurity about Britain's musical position in the world. The predominantly hostile attitude towards electronic music from within establishment musical cultures betray profound concerns about trends that were seen to exert a harmful influence on British musical society.

scholarly journals Music – Bodies – Machines

2020 ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Martine Louise Rossiter
Keyword(s):  
Human Anatomy ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Visual Metaphors ◽  
Internal Structures ◽  
Acousmatic Music ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Formal Design

This article provides an overview of the Music – Bodies – Machines: Fritz Kahn and Acousmatic Music project and accompanying suite of music – Der Industriepalast.  The project is inspired by the work of infographics pioneer Fritz Kahn (1888-1968) who developed works such as Der Mensch als Industriepalast. There is a body of work examining Kahn’s work (Sappol, 2017; Von Debschitz, 2017; Doudova, Jacobs, et al.) that has revealed Kahn’s intent of making the human anatomy accessible to the non-specialised reader through visual metaphors; unlike the descriptive anatomical illustrations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which show how the human body looks, Kahn’s works visually explain how internal structures work using concepts, metaphors, and allusions. This article explores some of the ways in which Kahn’s striking visual images have inspired the composition of five novel acousmatic works of music.  The article starts with a survey of existing works making use of similar, extra-musical influences to examine how extra-musical influences such as infographics and painting may influence the formal design of acousmatic music.  It goes on to consider how, exactly, the infographics of Fritz Kahn have been used within the project.  In some cases, this guides the choice of particular materials (such as the sound of a beating heart to represent an image of a heart monitor), but in other cases, there is influence on phrasing, placement, and even the formal design of entire pieces. Taken as a whole, the article seeks to explore the following questions; 1) What impact does the context of a particular image have on a composers’ response? 2) How do composers respond to visual stimuli in acousmatic music?  What is their compositional process? 3) How do such parallels between the specific sonic and visual examples offer new interdisciplinary insight to artistic practices and research? 4) How do sound recording techniques inform acousmatic music and generate new creative processes that operate within the sphere of human-machine relations?

Soundscapes of Resistance: Amplifying social justice activism and aural counterpublics through field recording-based sound practices

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-210
Author(s):  
Nimalan Yoganathan
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
News Media ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Field Recordings ◽  
Field Recording ◽  
Police Encounters ◽  
Soundscape Studies

This article examines creative sound practitioners who audibly convey social justice commentary through their use of environmental soundscapes as source material. I discuss how micro-watt radio pioneer Mbanna Kantako, electronic music artist Muqata’a and audio activist Christopher DeLaurenti work with field recordings to produce subversive counter-narratives against news media and state discourses. I outline three specific sound projects as case studies: Kantako’s aural counter-surveillance of police encounters within the predominantly poor and Black neighbourhood of Springfield, Illinois; Muqata’a’s album Inkanakuntu (2018) composed using field recordings of Ramallah, West Bank; and DeLaurenti’s radio piece Fit the Description (2015) that incorporates field recordings of the protests following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. I argue that composing with soundscapes of contested urban spaces can function as sonic activism that confronts the oppressive soundscapes of systemic racism. The case studies are examined through the following common themes: 1) the use of what I term aural counterpublics to amplify marginalised voices and soundscapes of resistance, and 2) the radical re-appropriation of microphones and oppressive police and military audio technologies as a means of ‘speaking back’ to systems of power. Finally, I suggest how these case studies convey the need for intersectional and decolonised approaches to soundscape studies.

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