electroacoustic and computer music

[Sarah Gen]

Dear people of the CEC,

I’m trying to find a succinct, layman-understandable statement from electroacoustic communities/conferences (or more than one) that in common parlance, computer music and electroacoustic music are related disciplines such that, say, you might find a computer music piece on a festival of electroacoustic music or an EA conference.

The reason is that i’m working through a tenure process. My previous director understood “electroacoustic” as a catch-all term to include things like DSP alongside algorithmic composition or computer-assisted composition, whereas my new director is tending to take it as only music that is created with loudspeakers. While I do both, it would be better if my computer-assisted pieces also “counted” towards my tenure (gotta make all that time spent with OpenMusic and Mathematica count :-/ ).

Thanks millions for any thoughts! :-)

Godspeed,

Sarah Gen

Dr. Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice
she/her
Composer & Musician
Director of Gender and Voice Inquiry Lab at Penn State
Coordinator  of ROARS (Research of the Arts, Recording, and Sound)
Assistant Professor of Composition & Music Technology
Penn State School of Music
http://riceklang.com

[Kevin Austin]

Hi Sarah

I hope this finds you well.

My reply will try to break your question into a couple of parts so that my reply may be understood. [sic]

The first paragraph for me is confusing, and I will explain why. There are two terms introduced, neither of which is defined. To me there appears to be an implied contextualization that ‘words’ have meaning, independent context, and definition.

In the first year ea I courses I taught for a number of decades, the classes were required to write reports on the topics of the lecture portion of the course. The Reports were to be written in a formalized structure that began with a list of terms, usually 5 or more, and their definitions. This provided the reader with two important pieces of information, [1] that the meaning the writer was attributing to the word, would be the one adopted by the reader, and [2] the writer had to have done the research to determine what key terms meant.

In discussions with people who ‘assume’ that important words in their vocabularies have 'fixed’ / ‘agreed upon meanings’, I call these terms psycholinguistic bombs. This is a discussion about ’the’ meaning, aka, semantics.

There is a third word in the paragraph that I almost never attach to the word ‘electroacoustic’. The word is . . music. Music is also a word that I rarely discuss anymore . . in the past 50 years or so, partly because of its inherited characteristic of being a psycholinguistic bomb.

I have taken this amount of space to provide you with a relatively clear [?] explanation of my ‘context’, for what follows.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++=

Definitions

Many people I have met do not like having this conversation. However, you have asked. I will not “shoot from the lip”. I have spent a couple of decades sorting out my thoughts on ‘electroacoustic’, and a couple of decades ago I modified a description I had heard from Michael Century. I simplified it by removing it from a discussion / description of a language-specific descriptor.

My definition is something like, “sound from a loudspeaker”. I delimit my definition to describing the mode / modality of transforming energy from electrical to acoustic. For some people this is enough. For some it is too much.

I continue the definition to define two other immediate aspects, signal, and sound. [Sound I avoid defining unless pushed to do so — this introduces the two aspects of metric and psychometric.] There is no ’sound’ is the mixer; there is no sound in the signal path; there is only signal.

[Parenthetically, I have been chewing on a “Unified Field Theory for [Sound] Synthesis”, so my thinking is not undeveloped. I digress.]

In parametric modular [analog] synthesis, there are three functions: signal, control and logic. There are two types of module, SOURCE and PROCESSOR — and compound modules. [Er, excuse me, that’s three . . ‘Please go and check on the state of the cat!].

My definition of ea assumes contexts and precedents. One of these is the organology of equipment. Whether the signal originates as analog or digital, it is a signal. Almost all signals are processed. The simplest form of processing is amplification. [I digress.] Whether the amplification is a TCA [trans-conductance amplifier], or a multiplication sign, the function is the same. I turn the knob on the amplifier, you write x = y times -1.5. Computer / analog, in the model, it’s all the same.

I have avoided a subtly here: is the amplification like turning up the volume on a guitar amp, or is the value associated with the amplification part of the process of the “composition” [undefined] of the ‘piece’.

In both cases, metric and creative, the signal is going to a loudspeaker, ipso facto, electroacoustic.

You will have noticed that I avoided making a distinction between “computer”, and analog circuitry. From my first use of a MOOG system, December 1969, and even before, I had considered a modular synthesizer to be an analog computer.

[There is a side discussion here about Information Theory and quantum systems . . but I digress. I just checked on the cat. The answer, again, was, Alive, Dead, Not Alive, Not Dead . . four-condition logic . . but we won’t want to go there at this time in the morning . . it’s elephants and turtles all the way down]

Consider, a difference between a computer writing ‘acoustic’ sound art, and one writing “electroacoustic” sound art, comes down to whether the output goes to a printer or a loudspeaker. My first exercise in my ‘Computers and Music’ course, was a piece for two flutes, realized using the MOOG, recorded to tape. A number of years after, I sketched out a version of the PL/II algorithm that could be realized on an analog system that had lots of gates.

Your choice . . 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

And anecdotally . . oh no, not another reference to Schrö . . no. I have had a number of opportunities to explain the above in ‘[gender-neutral] layperson-understandable’ english, by recontextualizing the situation into a generalized context of creativity and the role[s] / impact of AI.

Until about 18 months ago, on any occasion I started to explain, 90% of those around me had fled for the hills. This percentage of flight has now dropped below 33%.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

If I thought about it, I could likely add more, but I think the cat would have screamed its away out of the box by then.

Be well

Kevin

Think global

Act local

Music invents meaning

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[Pierre Alexandre Tremblay]

On a worldwide available resource, Landy, Emmerson and Couprie (et al) work is fantastically inclusive:

- http://ears.huma-num.fr/

and

- https://ears2.eu/

and in general, EMS as our main musicology conference also has a broad definition. The taxonomy is ears (the first) is quite impressive…

I hope this helps

p