Electroacoustic Music

suggestions to me as I hope for this page to be interactive. Links would be the best.

What is Electroacoustic Music ?

Electroacoustic Music is concerned with the exploration of sound.

Being categorized as Music, one naturally draws on views held about the centuries of music preceding this present century. This is unwise.
You must adopt a new method of listening.

Electroacoustic Music is structured by the "concrete" nature of sounds themselves.

For the most part, this music exists entirely on tape and is normally diffused (performed) over a multi-channel loudspeaker system (like BEAST).

Electroacoustic Music is that which uses technology as a tool and gives the composer access to virtually any sound.

There are many "brands" of music now that involve technology. Categorizing Electroacoustic music to any one specific use of technology would be wrong.

Electroacoustic / Computer Music / Acousmatic ?

This final definition compares just three names that composers use to describe their music. Computer Music can normally be attributed to those specialising in synthesis and algorithmic composition. The term Acousmatic was first used by the followers of Pythagoras. When lecturing Pythagoras sat behind a screen so that content was heard but source was not seen. Acousmatic has been taken up by composers most notably from France and Canada who suggest that we detatch cause from sound (car, voice, sea "sounds like a bird" etc). Electroacoustic is an amalgam between Electricity and Acoustic - how sound (pressure variations in the air) gets converted to electricity by microphones, gets recorded and treated, and is finally converted from electricity to pressure vibrations in the air by loudspeakers.
==Dont let names put you off.

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When did it all begin

• From the early experiments by people like Russolo, Martenot, Theremin and Varese
• Pierre Schaeffer, working in Paris around 1950. It was Pierre Schaeffer who created musique concrete, recorded sounds from the environment / the studio used to create music. His first work for this new medium was "Etudes aux chemins de fer". His work was criticised because of its sound association. This focused his research into l'objets sonores and eventually to the idea that there should be a solfege for these sound types which enabled description of sounds in terms of aural phenomena.
• At the same time in the West German Radio electronic music was being composed using only analogue synthesis (sine tone generators with serial control over duration, intensity, frequency, and timbre - the superposition of sine waves to form composities). The early electronic studies of Stockhausen most clearly represent this approach.
• The differences between these two types of music were clear both in style and sound. Through the increases in technology the two schools have merged and yet one still sees a divide between the work (research and composition) of IRCAM and GRM for example.
• The problem of association remains to this day. I believe that incorporating referential sounds (environments, human utterance, text), create extreme problems for the composer as they can often be heard 'extra-musically'. It's a problem to be looked at. (Michel Chion - and the idea of melodrama for example). That's not to say that abstract, 'synthetic' pieces are easier, its just that they dont carry any extra baggage with them. References can be a point of contact or a barrier to comprehension.

• with tape recorders one could play sounds faster, slower, forwards, backwards, loop a small piece of tape so that it repeats itself, mix two or more sounds depending on the number of tape machines, create delays between the heads, simple flanging etc.
• Alongside being able to record sounds (natural sounds) one could create sounds from their very beginnings ie Sine waves. This is where the serial school of composers found the ultimate in disinterested composition. Absolutely everything could be serialised. With oscillators you could control speed, wave shape and then start synthesis by adding waveforms or multiplying them together (modulation).

• With digital techniques one can perform all the above.
  Composers still do pitch changes and reverse sounds just like in the 60's. This could be an answer to why some music today sounds similar to music then. (The deeper reason is that there is a common language - like the tempered scale - between eamusic now and eamusic then.)
  
• Composers can now treat sound with such finess that listening must be directed "spectrally": how a sound lies within the audible frequency spectrum.
• One can now change the pitch of a sound without changing the speed and change the length of a sound without changing the pitch. One can graph spectra (the sonic quality) of one sound onto another. And so on, the list is endless.

I follow with interest the composers entering music into the following competitions

• Borges
• Noroit
• Prix Ars Electronica
• Musica Nova
• Luigi Russolo competition

• GRM - Groupe de recherches musicales, Paris
• IRCAM - also Paris
• SONVS - Lyon
• the CEC - Canadian Electroacoustic Community
• SAN - the Sonic Arts Network of England

Some composers have web sites (see the composers corner). As many British composers are resident lecturers at Universities, their details can be found by going to a university music department's site (see hotlist). However, here is a list of composers that would form part of a history of electroacoustic music to name but a few.

• Pierre Schaeffer
• Edgard Varese
• John Cage
• Karlheinz Stockhausen
• Pierre Boulez
• Philippe Manoury
• Kaija Saariaho
• Francois Bayle
• Bernard Parmegiani
• Francis Dhomont
• Michel Chion
• Chrisitian Calon
• Robert Normandeau
• Ake Parmerud

here are some composers living and working in England

• Denis Smalley
• Jonty Harrison
• Simon Emmerson
• Trevor Wishart
• Alistair MacDonald
• Andrew Lewis
• Javier Alvarez
• Alejandro Vinao
• Mathew Adkins
• Joe Hyde
• Pete Stollerey

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The listening experience

There is a structuralist approach to electroacoustic music which says that there is musical structure at all levels. Being time based we are continually defining something by what it is not as we hear more in a piece. Therefore our short term memory must play a role in securing sounds that are vital and letting less important sounds pass away. The "newness" of composers' soundworlds is more than "sensation". There are deeper levels of meaning to be perceived.

Electroacoustic music does not have to rewrite its own language for each piece and should not be dismissed for baring resemblance to anything. It is the resemblances within itself that are the most important.

What is it in a sound simple or complex, that attracts our ear so that we attend further ? Is it all based on our experience or on other more objective values like volume / spectral content / human utterance ? Is there a universal "liked" sound-world ? The odd thing about electroacoustic music over the past few decades is that the form has not really changed, only the content (the sounds used). If anyone has comparative sonogram analyses of works from the past 30 years that can back up this statement I would be interested. For all the diversity we can achieve it is remarkable to hear the similarity of composers' music.

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Sound Diffusion - The performance practice of electroacoustic music