Nature in electroacoustic music (original) (raw)
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NATURE SOUNDS IN SOUND ART AND ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC, THE BODILY RESOUNDING TECHNOSPHERE
RESOUNDING SPACES, APPROACHING MUSICAL ATMOSPHERES, 2020
In recent years, there has been an exponential rise in the use of nature field recordings in electroacoustic music and sound art. Some composers and artists use non-human animal sound samples (called biophony, e.g. insects and birds) and non-animal sounds (called geophony, e.g. water and thunder) from the perspective of soundscape ecology, ecoacoustics, or bioacoustics to directly address global ecological challenges and issues-the effects of noise pollution or global warming on non-human animals for example. Oftentimes the translation of these environmental concerns into a sound art piece or composition alienates the potential of bodily engagement, as the outcome is either technological, conceptual, intellectual or a visualization with the use of a different medium. The use of nature field recordings in artistic compositions with the intention of communicating these ecological issues to the listeners' bodies, rather than discussing concepts o representing soundscapes, can be a strategy of engagement and dissipation of otherness. Reframing these sound samples and compositions, with an aim to construct an emotionally resonating atmosphere-just as the score of a movie evokes a certain mood in a scene-could bodily communicate environmental issues. This bodily engagement can perhaps propitiate a deeper intellectual reflection on these subjects.
Musical Aesthetics of the Natural World: Two Modern Compositional Approaches
Jefferson Journal of Science and Culture, 2019
Throughout recorded human history, experiences and observations of the natural world have inspired the arts. Within the sonic arts, evocations of nature permeate a wide variety of acoustic and electronic composition strategies. These strategies artistically investigate diverse attributes of nature: tranquility, turbulence, abundance, scarcity, complexity, and purity, to name but a few. Within the 20th century, new technologies to understand these attributes, including media recording and scientific analysis, were developed. These technologies allow music composition strategies to go beyond mere evocation and to allow for the construction of musical works that engage explicit models of nature (what has been called ‘biologically inspired music’). This paper explores two such deployments of these ‘natural sound models’ within music and music generation systems created by the authors: an electroacoustic composition using data derived from multi-channel recordings of forest insects (Luna-Mega) and an electronic music generation system that extracts musical events from the different layers of natural soundscapes, in particular oyster reef soundscapes (Stine). Together these works engage a diverse array of extra-musical disciplines: environmental science, acoustic ecology, entomology, and computer science. The works are contextualized with a brief history of natural sound models from pre- antiquity to the present in addition to reflections on the uses of technology within these projects and the potential experiences of audiences listening to these works.
The sounds of the natural world have served as a key source of musical inspiration for composers throughout history; and for the last century, recording technology has enabled the utilisation of the sounds themselves as compositional material. The use of recorded environmental sound in musical works has become common practice for composers working in a plethora of different styles and genres, employing a wide variety of techniques; however, a comprehensive analysis and comparison of these different approaches has yet to been undertaken. Aside from technical and stylistic considerations, the other vitally important question for such an analysis regards what this use of natural environmental sound as compositional material means, both to composers and listeners. In today’s society it is the increasingly significant socio-political issue of global climate change which dominantes contemporary thought regarding humankind’s relationship to the environment; and it is therefore inevitable that the resonances of this will be felt in any work which takes the sounds of the natural environment as its subject. The task of achieving a properly contemporary musicological analysis of such works therefore demands that they be considered from an ecomusicological perspective, which focuses on their socio-cultural significance in the light of contemporary environmental concerns. In undertaking this ecomusicological analysis, stylistic traits become less important than the specific ways in which the environmental sound is used, the role that it plays within the composition, and the meanings that it generates. This paper will therefore propose a new critical framework for works which use natural environmental sound as compositional material, addressing a significant gap in ecomusicological scholarship and facilitating a new understanding of a common compositional practice which takes into account its new meaning to the ecologically-focussed society of the 21st century.
Enhanced: The Music of Nature and the Nature of Music
Our world is filled with innumerable natural sounds, and from the earliest times humans have been intrigued and inspired by this “soundscape.” People who live close to nature perceive a wider range of sounds than those of us living in industrialized societies, who rely heavily on advances in sound technology. The sounds of whales in the ocean, for example, were first recorded in the 1940s, yet the Tlingit, Inuit, and other seafaring tribes have been hearing them through the hulls of their boats for millennia. Similarly, the ultralow frequency communications of elephants [HN1] have only just been recorded even though the Hutu and Tutsi tribes of central East Africa have incorporated these sounds into their songs and stories for centuries. It is said that every known human culture has music. Music has been defined as patterns of sound varying in pitch and time produced for emotional, social, cultural, and cognitive purposes (1). Is music-making in humans defined by our genes? [HN2] Do other species show musical language and expression? If they do, what kinds of behavior invoke music making in these animals? Is there evidence in the animal kingdom for the ability to create and recreate a musical language with established musical sounds? How are musical sounds used to communicate within and between species? Do musical sounds in nature reveal a profound bond between all living things?
“Ideas for a Musicology of Electroacoustic Musics: Notes to a Reading of Landy”
Electronic Musicological Review, 2001
The musicology of electroacoustic music has been reviewed by Landy (1999) in accordance with the traditional division of the discipline: historical musicology, systematic musicology and ethnomusicology, plus critical musicology. Because electroacoustic music cannot accept some tenets of Western art music, its musicology is necessarily critical. A study of musique concrète illustrates this. Electroacoustic music and its musicology are isomorphs.
About the aesthetics of electroacoustic music. A proposal
It is hardly disputable that, nowadays, almost any (music) production or listening experience is mediated by an electric, electronic or digital component that makes electroacoustic music a constant, extensive, and familiar presence, more than we can imagine, but still something hardly comprehensible, difficult to define, understand and interpret: “e-music’s ground is […] selectively sticky, given how it seems, on the one hand, to say that it defies definition and, on the other, to embrace so many” (Saiber 2007: 1616).