Acousmatic Composition

In last weeks lesson we began by setting up the speakers and mixer which was all going well until we came to use the mixer and discovered that no sound was coming through. It turned out that the connections were all plugged into the inserts instead of the inputs but it meant I got to learn that an insert is for sending and receiving information and has two connections on the quarter inch jack instead of one.

Once this had been corrected we sat down and listened to one of the students diffuse Denis Smalley’s ‘Clarinet Threads’. This was a really interesting piece and it allowed us to learn some more diffusion techniques:

• The one fader approach in which we moved the sound around the speakers whilst only having one fader up at a time.
• The two fader approach which is the same idea but simpler to do because one fader will always remain up whilst the others are being swopped.

We learnt that the trick to both these techniques is to wait until there is some kind of moveable sound in the piece and also that silence is a good opportunity to change speakers.

During the class we learnt about spectromorphology. MIDI is event and pitch based whereas spectromorphology is about how the sound behaves in time and how it is then arranged based on that behaviour.

At the end of the class we were split into small groups and each asked to research a composer. Our group decided to look at the music of Trevor Wishart and we settled on the Vox Cycle. Originally we had planned to look at one piece each and discuss it together but after doing this we discovered that only one track was to be shown in class so we settled on Vox 5. We discovered that his main compositional technique was the use of sound transformation and in the case of Vox 5 transforming the sounds of the human voice into natural events.

In the introduction to ‘Audible Desgin’, Wishart notes three assumptions about sounds:

1. Any sound whatsoever may be the starting material for a musical composition

2. The ways in which this sound may be transformed are limited only by the imagination of the composer

3. Musical structure depends on establishing audible relationships amongst sound materials.

These may seem like simple and obvious things but personally it got me thinking of a whole new way of composing. Up until taking this module my thoughts on composition had always focussed on what sounds were harmonically and rhythmically pleasing but reading that made me consider that whatever sound you begin with its how you compliment the sound with others and the whole thought process behind why you chose the sounds. In past weeks when I thought of the relationship between traditional composition and acousmatic composition I always thought of the similarities as being time and rhythm but now i can see that the same processes apply and both have to consider the properties of the sound being produced, whether thats what register of a clarinet sounds best or which part of a recording really works best.

(That probably didn’t make much sense because I didn’t really know how to express it but I wrote it down mainly to make it clear to myself)

We began last weeks lesson by setting up the mixer and speakers and whilst doing this we learnt that everything needs power and also about the safety aspect of setting up. For example, not letting the cables hang loose around the speakers and organising the cables so that they are out of the way of the audience (this prevents the speakers being knocked over or the audience falling). Next we sat down and learnt about the mixer itself and I tried to do a quick sketch of the layout of the faders and inputs (apologies!)

After this we listened to some sounds collected my members of the class and from this I learnt:

• If there is any silence in a sound that you don’t know very well it causes problems when diffusing and one way to deal with this is to drop all the faders and gradually bring them back in. But a knowledge of the sounds your diffusing is essential.
• Watch the speakers so that you don’t have the faders up too loud and damage them.
• Effects such as delay can have a huge impact on the movement of the sound and different techniques can be used on the faders to swing the sound around the speakers and send the sound from front to back.

 After listening to these we summarised what we’d covered in the lesson and discussed how different set-ups of the speakers can have different advantages when it comes to diffusing. We also talked about the whole process of choosing sounds and how this impacts on the composition and the end performance.

After it was mentioned in last weeks class I went away and tried to research ’spectromorphology’ and was utterly confused after the first paragraph but it did inspire me to listen to some tracks from Denis Smalley’s album ‘Impact interieurs’ and this time I tried to imagine how it would/could sound with diffusion. With the idea of diffusion in mind I also had ago at recording some new sounds and altering the ones I’d captured last week.