The Latin American electroacoustic music collection

The Latin American electroacoustic music collection is a convenient resource compiled by Ricardo Dal Farra. It lists 1723 works by 390 composers from 1956-2007, with an historical introduction, composer biographies and interviews.

A nice bonus is that a selection of 231 compositions is available for listening online, some with scores or sonograms.

I wish we could do something similar with the EMS music archive.

Two online journals

Dancecult : journal of electronic dance music culture. "Dancecult is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (EDMC)."

Jems : journal of experimental music studies. "Jems is an online peer-reviewed journal devoted to experimental, systems, minimal, post-minimal, ‘new’ tonal and postmodern music." The same web site also hosts The experimental music catalogue and its article archive.

I've updated the meta-bibliography. All links to Music & Dance Reference should now work.

EAM and 20th century modernism

Reading Paul Griffiths' Modern music and after (3. ed.), I was struck by the author's cursory treatment of EAM, especially since he himself writes that

"[...] electronic music was soon set on a path apart from other music, to become a sphere (too often regarded as a secondary sphere) with its own institutions and proponents." (p. 18, emphasis mine)

Griffiths doesn't reveal the identity of those who regard EAM as a "secondary sphere" (nor what he means by "secondary"), but he certainly seems to belong to them, since he mentions almost no composers that have devoted themselves to EAM.

From the book's index I've estimated that, of the 10-11 most mentioned composers, Stockhausen receives by far the most attention, followed by Boulez, Cage and Nono, and then Berio, Messiaen, Ligeti, Stravinsky, Babbitt, Kagel and Lachenmann. Surprisingly, Xenakis is not among these 11, and ranks below e.g. Elliott Carter, Maxwell Davies, Ferneyhough, Henze, Kurtág, Reich, and Scelsi.

The composers Griffiths discusses in connexion with EAM are almost the same as the ones listed above. Of those that's mentioned more than twice, Stockhausen again receives the most attention, followed by Nono, Berio, Cage, Babbitt, Boulez, Chowning and Schaeffer. These composers were obviously important for the development of EAM, but many of them wrote mainly instrumental and vocal music.

Many of the other EAM composers discussed in the book are associated with either IRCAM or computer music, such as Jonathan Harvey, Jean-Claude Risset and Charles Dodge. Xenakis' EAM isn't mentioned, and also left out are the entire French/Canadian acousmatic and soundscape traditions, e.g. Bayle, Dhomont, Ferrari, Parmegiani, Radigue, Schafer, Smalley, Truax, and Westerkamp.

Of course, Modern music and after is an introductory text, and numerous composers have to be excluded (for another perspective on this, see James Primosch's blog post Whose “Modern Music” and whose “After”?). I still think that Griffiths' text is a good introduction to the main trends in 20th century modernism, and a glance through Music in the late twentieth century, the fifth volume of Richard Taruskin's Oxford history of Western music, suggests that it too suffers from the same distorted view of EAM.

But privileging EAM that emanates from serial and computer music is an unfortunate bias that carries with it notions of purity, control and academicism. It's no coincidence that David Metzer chooses Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge and Harvey's Mortuos plango, vivos voco as his prime examples of purity in Musical modernism at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Not all computer music sucks, and there is certainly boring and academic-sounding acousmatic EAM, but that's no reason for musicologists to neglect the latter.

EAM and music perception

There is an interesting discussion in the online journal Empirical musicology review (EMR) concerning the use of electroacoustic music (EAM) for the study of music perception. In "Time series analysis as a method to examine acoustical influences on real-time perception of music" (EMR, vol. 5, no. 4 (October, 2010)), Roger T. Dean and Freya Bailes use an extract from Trevor Wishart's Red bird to analyse correlations between the acoustic properties intensity and spectral flatness, and listener arousal (perceptions of change) and valence (expressed affect). They argue that

"[p]revious studies of listeners’ real-time perceptions of affect in music have attempted to map response through time to acoustic properties of the piece [...]. Missing are substantial attempts to assess which acoustic properties also drive listeners’ perceptions of the structure of the same music. Structure in this instance need not be a music-theoretic analysis of large-scale form [...], but refers to the low-level assessment by a listener of change and continuity in the music. [... M]usical forms that do not rely on hierarchical structures such as tonality or meter might exhibit quite a close relationship between acoustic properties of the work, listener perceptions of structure (change in sound), and listener perceptions of affect. EAM is one such form, and the subject of the current paper."

Dean and Bailes find that

"intensity influences perceptions of change and expressed arousal substantially. Spectral flatness influences valence, while animate sounds influence the valence response and its variance."

Marcus T. Pearce, in "Time-series analysis of Music: Perceptual and Information Dynamics" (EMR, vol. 6, no. 2 (April, 2011)), comments that Dean and Bailes

"[...] give two reasons for using EAM in their study: first, to demonstrate that their methods generalise beyond Western tonal music which is more often used in empirical work on music perception; and second, Red Bird provides an opportunity to test their methods on idiosyncratic temporally-localised timbral features in addition to the continuous features which generalise to other musical genres (see, e.g., Dean, Bailes & Schubert, 2011). Interestingly, their timbre feature of choice is spectral flatness, which they view as a more global indicator of timbre than spectral centroid, which is more commonly used in research on music perception (though this is not true of research on audio signal processing and music information retrieval where spectral flatness is one of the standard descriptors used in the MPEG 7 standard)."

Spectral flatness is the geometric mean of the power spectrum divided by the arithmetic mean. Noisy spectra have high flatness, peaky spectra low flatness. Spectral flatness is also related to the information content of the sound. The spectral centroid, i.e. the mean, barycenter or "mass center" of a spectrum, is correlated with brightness. Both flatness and centroid are included in the MPEG 7 standard. For descriptions of these and other timbre measures, see Geoffroy Peeters, A large set of audio features for sound description, 2004.

In addition, Pearce remarks that

"Dean and Bailes also argue that EAM can be algorithmically generated in such a way that the acoustic and algorithmic parameters of interest are systematically varied in creating stimuli for research on music perception. In other work, for example, Dean et al. (2011) extend their approach to the effects of intensity on arousal in two pieces written by Roger Dean, one of which is composed in the minimalist style. We might legitimately ask what advantage such algorithmically generated music has over the stimuli often constructed artificially to create experimental conditions in empirical research on music perception. The most obvious advantage is that the results gain in ecological validity from using stimuli created by composers, using stylistically legitimate methods, with an artistic purpose. These results should generalise to the experience of similar music outside the laboratory, while results obtained with artificially created or altered musical stimuli are not guaranteed to do so. The advantage of computer-generated music over other musical styles is that it can be produced so as to conserve experimental control."

Dean and Bailes respond to Pearce in another paper, "Modelling perception of structure and affect in music: spectral centroid and Wishart’s Red Bird" (EMR, vol. 6, no. 2 (April, 2011)) where they analyse the Red Bird extract using spectral centroid and find that

"[...] it is fairly clear that spectral centroid and spectral flatness bear a quite distant relationship to atomic perceptual processes, and it is still unclear how they may influence cognition. But acoustic intensity, on the other hand, is an immediate determinant of an important perceptual response, loudness, and this relationship is much better understood. Again, most studies use short tones, often synthetic, but it is clear that even with longer musical extracts, intensity is a close determinant of continuously perceived loudness."

Sound art and electronic music courses at Hola folkhögskola 2012

A distance learning course in sound art will be held during the first semester 2012 at Hola folkhögskola, close to Kramfors in Northern Sweden. Since the course info is in Swedish, I guess the course will be taught in Swedish, too. A rudimentary English translation of the course description:

The course is for artists and other interested who want to refine their ways of expressing themselves in sound. It is a course for those who want to broaden their styles with creative work with sound in sound art projects. The course includes seminars, projects under supervision, listening skills and analysis of sound in film, music, radio and web. Literature studies.

The application deadline is January 15, 2012.

Hola folkhögskola also has a distance learning course in electronic music with Pd for beginners, application deadline February 15, 2012, and a one-year course in Music production and audio engineering starting the second semester 2012. One can choose electronic music and sound design as a specialisation. Application deadline April 15, 2012.

Some sound art papers

The papers from the Sound Art Theories Symposium 2011 papers are now available. For those interested in digital archiving, David Grubbs' paper "'Remove the Records from Texas': Parsing Online Archives" discusses two "very different kinds of online archives", UbuWeb and DRAM (the acronym stands for Database of Recorded American Music, but the archive holds works from other countries as well).

Calls for 2012

Please note that all calls etc. for 2012 will be published here, and not in separate posts.

New books and CDs in EMS' library

New books

• Aare, Anders: Ljuddesign för scenen
• Acoustic environments in change, Five village soundscapes
• Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 1959
• Diederichsen, Diedrich & Ruhm, Constanze (ed.): Immediacy and non-simultaneity : utopia of sound
• Hellström, Björn: Noise design : architectural modeling and the aesthetics of urban acoustic space
• Helmholtz, Hermann von: On the sensations of tone as a physiological basis for the theory of music
• Kirn, Peter (ed.): The evolution of electronic dance music
• Manzo, V. J.: Max/MSP/Jitter for music : a practical guide to developing interactive music systems for education and more
• Mossberg, Frans (ed.): Buller i blåsväder
• Mossberg, Frans (ed.): Ljudmiljö, hälsa och stadsbyggnad
• Numminen, M. A.: Till Helsingfors
• O'Konor, Louise: Viking Eggeling 1880-1925 : modernist och filmpionjär : hans liv och verk
• Re-tooling residences : a closer look at the mobility of art professionals
• Salter, Chris: Entangled : technology and the transformation of performance
• Shryane, Jennifer: Blixa Bargeld and Einstürzende Neubauten : German experimenal music : evading do-re-mi 
• Tonsättare i Sverige 1981
• Young, Gayle: The sackbut blues : Hugh Le Caine : pioneer in electronic music
• Zetterblom, Margareta: Textile sound design
• Åman, Jan & Birnbaum, Daniel (ed.): De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde

New CDs  

• 5 composers
  
• 5 composers : second coming
• 5 composers : 3rd hearing
  
• Academic noise
• Archipel électronique. Vol. 1
• Ars Ludi: Percussione e oltre
• Bilbao Kolektibo Elektronikoa: BIKE 3.0
• Bits and pieces
• Broberg, Jonas & Karlsson, Erik Mikael: Two composers
• Cache 2004
• Cache 2007
• Cache 2008
• Cache 2009
• Electronic music from Catalonia 2010
• Electronic music. Vol. IV, Música viva competition : prize winners 2007 - 2008 - 2009
• Elektrofoni : new electroacoustic music from Sweden
• Gros: Homes
• Johansson, Pär: The empty palace
• Kubisch, Christina: Licht Himmel : Gasometer Oberhausen
• Leak: Redemption
• Leak: The old teahouse
• Liljekvist, Jan: The strange and incredible world of Dr Jayne Insane and the Gutbucket Philharmonicks
• Lindström, Mats & Runolf, Sören: A wonder of beauty and efficiency
• Lundsten, Ralph: Nordic nature symphony no. 3 : ”A midwinter saga”
• México electroacústico 1960-2007
• Pauk: Insekt
• Phonorama
• Riis, Jakob: No Denmark
• Rylander, Henrik: Formation
• Sigal, Rodrigo: Space within
• Six winners : the Stockholm Electronic Arts Award
• Winner takes all

(The full catalogue can be found here: http://www.elektronmusikstudion.se/library-and-archives/.)

EMS12 call for papers

Next year's Electronic Music Studies Conference, EMS12, will take place in Stockholm on June 11-15 2012. It is co-organised by EMS (Elektronmusikstudion) and KMH (The Royal College of Music). Keynote speaker is Lars-Gunnar Bodin and the theme of the conference is Meaning and meaningfulness in electroacoustic music.

Deadline for submission of papers: Tuesday 17 January 2012, 09.00 CET (GMT+1)
Extended to Monday 30 January 2012, 12.00 CET (GMT+1)

New CDs in EMS library

Some of these CDs are a gift from Tamas Ungvary. These CDs are listed separately below. Thanks, Tamas!

New CDs

• BBC radiophonic music
• BBC radiophonic workshop : a retrospective
• Cage, John: Bird Cage
• Estonian music now 2011 : exploratory music from Estonia
• Futurism & dada reviewed
• Musica futurista : the art of noises : music & words from the italian futurist movement 1909-1935
• Splitting bits, closing loops : sound on sound
• The Wire Tapper 25
• The Wire Tapper 26
• The Wire Tapper 27

CDs from Tamas Ungvary

• Ars Ludi: Percussione e oltre
• Bianchini, Laura: Immobile e doppio
• Computer music @ CCRMA. Volume one
• ICMC 1992
• ICMC 1994
• Interpreting the soundscape
• IRCAM : les années 90
• Lupone, Michelangelo: In un grattacielo
• Sala, Oskar: My fascinating instrument : Mixturtrautonium
• Viñao, Alejandro: Son entero, Triple concerto
• Voigtländer, Lothar: Elektro-akustische kompositionen