Materializing Sound: Graphic & Symbolic Notation 1951-2012 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism
Journal of Visual Culture, 2011
Why does sound art remain so profoundly undertheorized, and why has it failed to generate a rich and compelling critical literature? It is because the prevailing theoretical models are inadequate to it. Developed to account for the textual and the visual, they fail to capture the nature of the sonic. In this article, the author proposes an alternative theoretical framework, a materialist account able to grasp the nature of sound and to enable analysis of the sonic arts. He suggests, moreover, that this theoretical account can provide a model for rethinking the arts in general and for avoiding the pitfalls encountered in theories of representation and signification
Sound & Score. Essays on Sound, Score, and Notation
Sound and Score brings together artistic-research expertise from prominent international voices exploring the intimate relations between sound and score, and the artistic possibilities that this relationship yields for performers, composers and listeners. Considering " notation " as the totality of words, signs and symbols encountered on the road to a concrete performance of music, this book aims at embracing different styles and periods in a comprehensive understanding of the complex relations between invisible sound and mute notation, between aural perception and visual representation, between the con-creteness of sound and the iconic essence of notation. Three main perspectives structure this volume: a conceptual approach that offers contributions from different fields of enquiry (history, musicology, semiotics), a practical one that takes the skilled body as its point of departure (written by performers), and finally an experimental perspective that challenges state-of-the-art practices, including transdiscipli-nary approaches in the crossroads to visual arts and dance.
2016
Published with audio examples in Interference: A Journal of Audio Cultures (Vol. 5, 2016): www.interferencejournal.org/the-bright-sound-behind-the-sound/ This paper responds to a recent article by American sound artist Kim Cascone in which he asserts that the presentation of environmental recordings as ‘sonic art’ is often crucially lacking in some form of ‘soul’ or vitality. Cascone suggests that it is the responsibility of an artist working with real-world sounds to enter a more imaginative engagement than precedents within the field (and within the wider field of sonic arts in general) have historically presented. The paper briefly explores historical impulse to deprecate the importance of imagination, along with the imaginative implications of discourse around what Katharine Norman (1996) calls ‘real-world music’. From here, we explore the relationship between imagination and sound in two pieces of sonic art and argue that one response to Cascone’s call for an imaginative turn can be found within the idea of the ‘symbol’ as codified in Romantic poetic discourse (after Kathleen Raine’s reading of Coleridge). The paper explores the way in which a cultivation of an ‘imaginative perception’ can be used to elucidate such symbols in a compositional context and relates the creative and interpretive use of ‘sound-symbols’ to both Voss’ methodology of the imagination (2009) and Thomas’ multidimensional spectrum of imagination (2014).
Representation, Radicalism, and Music “After Sound”
Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy
This commentary presents an experimental-composer’s perspective on contemporary music therapy practice. I begin by offering my impressions of the field, gathered through interviews with practising music therapists, and an examination of the relevant literature. Then, the commentary first draws upon G. Douglas Barrett’s radical post-sonic theorisation of music to question the future of existing music in therapy, before instrumentalising avant-garde aesthetics to imagine what music may become in music therapy. This exploration will pay particular attention to the impacts of the dematerialisation of the art object in contemporary art, and the potential benefits a similar decentering of sound in contemporary music practices may provoke—specifically, the creation of theoretical frameworks that further suppress the authority of canonical forms, and increased contributions from previously-marginalised groups. Next, the commentary presents an analysis of two recent musical compositions that...
Organised Sound, 2017
Sound art as a category has no clear definition, and there are several opinions about what the essential characteristics of sound art are. Is the key feature combinations of sounds that through their referential character provoke new associations and interpretations, or is sound art essentially concerned about space and the deliberate construction of spacesand consequently about the more 'objective' aspects of psychoacoustics and human perceptionor is sound art best characterised as experiments in music as an expanded field, in the tradition of, for example, Cage, Lucier and de Monte Young? These different understandings bring different theories to bear in the exchanges about singular works and which traditions they can best be placed in, and often fall between existing discourses in music and the visual arts. It is this lack of correspondence and coherence in the discourses that initially triggered the editors of this book to gather the colloquium that the book is based on. The book is composed by provocations, responses and discussions from the colloquium with the same title Sound Art-Music, hosted by the editors in 2012 at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts. The agenda of the colloquium was to contribute to the current debate about the relationship between sound art and music, and more specifically to investigate the possibility of arriving at a common framework for discussion and criticism-'on whether and how sound art and music meet in practice, in discourse and in listening' (p. 3). Colloquium participants were
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2021
This book explores the transformation of ideas of the material in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century musical composition. New music of this era is argued to reflect a historical moment when the idea of materiality itself is in flux. Engaging with thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Sara Ahmed, Zygmunt Bauman, Rosi Braidotti, and Timothy Morton, the author considers music's relationship with changing material conditions, from the rise of neo-liberalisms and information technologies to new concepts of the natural world. Drawing on musicology, cultural theory, and philosophy, the author develops a critical understanding of musical bodies, objects, and the environments of their interaction. Music is grasped as something that both registers material changes in society whilst also enabling us to practice materiality differently.