Some thoughts on the recent question of 'acousmatic music'

[Kevin Austin]

I consider this to be a question of semantics, ie, what does the term mean? As such, this is an intellectual pursuit, and in the contemporary western world, that places the discussions inside institutions of learning. It is de facto an academic question. As a point of comparison I will use the term “chamber music” as a parallel. The reason is explained below.

[Please feel free to leave this post anywhere that you feel it is off your tracks.]

Chamber music has a general central definition of ‘one player per part’. This is in contrast to a piece performed with more than one player per part. This definition moves chamber music from the ‘act of composition’, to the ‘act of performance’. The Beethoven Grosse Fuge played by an orchestra is an orchestral performance, and therefore, not a chamber [music] performance.

I propose that a central definition of acousmatic is fixed media. If the work is not ‘fixed’, it is something other than acousmatic. If fixed media includes a live component, this is ‘mixed music’. In live electronic performance, it is live electronics. This is because of the central definition I propose.

I propose that a central definition of electroacoustics is sound from a loudspeaker.


What was the period of time of Romantic period? About 1800 - 1900. There are examples of pre-romantic pieces, early, middle and late, post-romantic and neo-romantic.

What was the period of time of chamber music? Chamber music, as defined above, is not an historical period, it is a manner of performance – one player per part. Therefore, there is no pre-chamber music, no early, middle or late, and no post, or neo.


What is the period of time of acousmatic music? As defined above, acousmatic is not a historic period, it a manner of ‘notating’ [storing] the composition. The medium is ‘fixed’, and the piece remains invariant.

To help clarify, I will remove the word ‘music’. Acousmatic becomes a sub-category of electroacoustics. Acousmatics is sound from a loudspeaker the source of which is fixed media. This allows for the clustering of acousmatic practices from ‘documentary’ [a live recording], to ‘invented’ [ie a composition made exclusively from electrical signals]. This may be a wider definition than is useful without modifiers, however, it is the one I am proposing.

With this definition, there was a period of pre-acousmatic, and post-acousmatic will happen when all of the fixed media have collapsed.

With these definitions, old-fashioned pop music, the band standing around a mic in a studio, was chamber music, and ‘documentary’ acousmatic. One of the best examples of this is the early work of Phil Spector, for, as the story goes, his songs were produced without overdubbing, but they were not chamber music.


All recorded sound involves processing in the model of: SOURCE > PROCESSOR > FIXED MEDIA OUTPUT. Processor in this case can be as basic as a volume control and a razor blade, or as complex as . . . An historical dividing line is related to being able to cut up and assemble the signal on the fixed media. This was first done on optical tracks of films. The temporal resolution was about 1/24 second – one frame. BBC and other broadcasters had wire recorders, but editors needed a welders license.

Acetate-, plastic- or paper-based magnetic tape allowed precise editing. This is a beginning of the development of acousmatic “music”, when composers / sound engineers recognized the possibilities of fixed media recording beyond that of simply being documentary sound.

My view is that this is the period we live in.

This is a [purely] metric proposition, not based on perception or language constraints, but on the means of storage of a signal on fixed media.

My proposition is that this is an academic / intellectual discussion, and the most likely place for this will remain in the academy. The place where the discussions will be recorded will be at conferences and in journals. There is overlap into the popular press, but IME, most popular press articles are introductory in style and nature. Those interested in having a wider and deeper sense of the discipline of acousmatic music[s] will need to go to reliable academic sources like Wikipedia and YouTube.

Or smart, intelligent, brilliantly thought-provoking email lists, inhabited by the best and the brightest minds.


Hmmmmm . . .



Kevin



Executive summary: Acousmatic music is not an historical period, and therefore ‘post’, while interesting, is a divide-by-zero adjective.

From the distant land where after 44 years, Blue Alberta became Orange Alberta.

[David Hirst]

OK Kevin, I’ll bight, just reel me in ;-) …

I agree that the definition of a term like acousmatic is largely an academic question, although all academic questions may have social implications.

While it is relatively easy to create a term like acousmatic music, put a box around it, and give it some attributes. It is much harder to put a box around the term ‘post-acousmatic’ and give it some attributes since the word ‘post’ can include such a broad spectrum of possible interpretations, it is almost rendered meaningless, other than the trivial ‘after’. This is the difficulty that has provoked such a lengthy debate, IMHV.

There are many views of what acoustic music might be (or was), but this is expanded exponentially if the discussion drifts to post-acousmatic music.

For views on acousmatic music, can I suggest my own favourite to add to your Youtube and Wikipedia sources:

The collection published way back in 1991, called:

Vous avez dit Acousmatique? Available here:

http://www.electrocd.com/en/cat/lien_1991-11/

Finally…

While this is an engaging discussion for some, in the year 2015, and considering the recent destruction of the entire country of Nepal, a more difficult question for me personally might be:

In the light of climate change and other recent catastrophic world events, what is the role of the artist within such a world, and how does that role influence, or relate to the artist’s work (or not)?

Best Regards,

David

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[Rick]

It sounds like what happened to the term 'acousmatic music' is similar to what happened to the term 'classical music'

[Pierre Alexandre Tremblay]

> I agree that the definition of a term like acousmatic is largely an academic question, although all academic questions may have social implications.

Argggghhhhhhh! I think this is the wrong way round. Social questions have academic implications ;-)

If acousmatic is 'academic', academia includes radios, arts councils, labels, studios, conservatoires, universities, some magazines and journals, some scenes too...

It's all about power, and self-defining scenes/canons. There is no such thing as academic music - you will find a very wide breadth of musics in academia, to very wide range of quality and success... and the same breadth outside, with the same variable quality... and there is a very large overlap between the two.

The label of 'academic music' is often some kind of cheap anti-intellectualism based on years of snobbery on both sides. Can we move on please? Back to the Arcana book series. Written with a slightly dated anti-academic view, but mostly from amazing practitioners of the 'NYC Downtown scene' trying to define itself against eurocentric canons, half of the paper are very intellectual and academic indeed, and would be now rejected by anti-academics. The snake has eaten its own tail, ideas get articulated in words and music, with different level of success in either and both. Good for us all to resist the dumbing down of everything around us.

Write if you want, read if you want, talk if you want, play if you want, compose if you want, perform if you want.

Please feel free to change the word "want" for "need" if it fits better your soul ;-)

Please let's just stop doing (change the verb accordingly with the list above) the same things/sounds/thoughts than the previous generation: go for the essence of today - imitation smells funny, as it can only be a rotting ghost of the past. To quote Kandinsky: be a child of your time. Which includes sampling. Again, the snake is eating itself.

To be more blunt about definitions:
Post-acousmatic - acousmatic practice in the 21st century that does not sound like the masterpieces of the style from the 70s-80s-90s. In other word, if the reference in the piece is stronger than the piece itself, just trash it.

pa

ps Google 'Richie Hawtin Huddersfield' - now is minimal techno academic?

[Richard Dobson]

And more Aaarrrgh - please, please, everyone, read up on the writings
of Roy Harris on the language myth - not least "The Semantics of
Science" and "The Necessity of Artspeak". Only through fully
addressing the principles of integrational linguistics [in a nutshell:
- words - parole - langue - are used by humans to integrate their
activities, they do not, cannot stand for things out there
(reocentric) or in the mind (psychocentric), and telementation is
impossible] and embracing the concept of the language myth can this
vast Gordian knot of words, taxonomies, ontologies and the whole
infrastructure of, um, academic debate be unravelled. Case in point,
not everyone hears or reads the word "academic" and understands the
same thing by it. Ditto, for that matter, "post-acousmatic".


How about this - there has been a movement in music (at least) called
"fusion" - e.g. classical/jazz, east/west, etc. What would
"post-fusion" be"? The words exist, they must "mean" something!

Oh, and no rules, please, about what people should or shoudl not be doing now...

Blessed be,

Richard Dobson

[Pierre Alexandre Tremblay]

> And more Aaarrrgh

I love this pirate-speak ;-)

> not everyone hears or reads the word "academic" and understands the
> same thing by it. Ditto, for that matter, "post-acousmatic".

yet they are both used very much out there, usually to define as a reaction (academy) or as a branch out (post-acou) of something that a community seems to agree on as a definition of both terms.

or maybe they disagree despite tentatives of normalisation ('vous avez dit acousmatique', 1991)

> Oh, and no rules, please, about what people should or shoudl not be doing now...

People can do what they want indeed. the last bit for post-acousmatic was more a manifesto - trying again to use words to define what I observe is happening in the wonderful world of acousmatic: a neo- and a post-

p

[Rick]

Just as an aside,  definitely a anecdotal,  but ran across this one in a shop in Totnes this morning.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=itz9_BmIdWQ

[Kevin Austin]

Thanks.

The YoutUbe of: Bright Copper Noon - Willis Earl Beal - Acousmatic Sorcery - 2012, I would consider acousmatic in the meaning of fixed media. The work does not come from the music concrète tradition as far as I can tell. It is more of a [documentary] recording of a song. The song is based on traditional western metric and pitch-based [pentatonic] grids / structures, and the texture remains one of voice accompanied by a toy piano.

Another characteristic is the minimum size of the chunk, which appears to be at the level of the beat unit and phrase, largely cycles of groupings of four for the phrase and four phrases for the verse / chorus.

The text I find to be anecdotal, constrained by being in english.

Kevin

[Kevin Austin]

I guess I come from a different linguistic / semantic background. My first approach is somewhat more analytical in collecting objects / ideas etc and looking for similarities and differences. At this point I accept that this is not a metric but a psychometric. The result[s] will be statistical in nature, ie, 73% or respondents consider this to be post-acousmatic as defined at the start of the survey.

In a previous email I laid out a simplified version of my primary attributes. This doesn’t put a box around anything, the proposition is for a filter to move the piece under consideration into a category. The definition is not language- or culture- specific.

For example, for a long time the word film meant something about image captured on a medium, and through the interaction of light with chemicals – a light-sensitive emulsion, an image was captured on a medium. This is somewhat analogous to ‘tape’. Then there was video [television], where the emulsion was replaced with a light sensitive screen that was scanned to an analog electrical signal, and subsequently, by digital means etc etc. The parallels to the capture and storage of sound are well-known.

Each change of the technology opened up possibilities for capture and manipulation. In my experience, the [traditional] film culture was not quickly accepting of the development of video. Many film schools had put a box around around ‘film’ and had to be brought quietly and gently into the world of the digital [r]evolution.

It might be relatively easy to create a term like “live film”, but my ol’ grey cells can’t figure out what this might mean. Ditto “live acousmatic”.

My reading of the history of sound projection relates to the slow development of multi-channel audio. While Stockhausen threw sounds around the Philips Pavilion in 1958, there was no other practical way to do this. By the late 1960s the first multi-channel playback systems could be found. Eight-channel playback in the 1970s was still a one-off event. How many people had access to eight-channel playback in the studio, and discrete eight-channel playback in the concert hall?

Was it essential for acousmatic music to be played back over multi-speaker diffusion systems?

Did this diffusion have to be live, or could this be pre-recorded?

How many students of electroacoustics do their first assignment in five-channels?


Kevin

[Petri Kuljuntausta]

hi Kevin,

this goes to sidetrack but you mentioned that you can’t figure out what 'Live Film' might mean. Here comes a short practical example about how we create live film.

With artist Sami van Ingen I have played live film concerts where we start the performance from zero. No shooted film frames, no fixed/composed sound. Sami uses few meters long 35mm empty film loops. When he turn the projectors on he starts to paint the films in front of the audience. With different kind of emulsions he manipulates the structure of the colors (see the attachment). Different emulsions affects different way. And then he paint more, combine colors, create layers, or scratch the film/painting (with fingers or other tools) and so on. I use granular/generative software for the soundtrack. 'Primaries' is the title of the work, typically our performance lasts 45-60 minutes.

best,

petri

[Kevin Austin]

Thank you.

From the definition I provided, about light interacting with an emulsion, painting on clear plastic would not be ‘film’, as film was fixed media. I’m sorry if my excessive abbreviation left out some important steps, such as the intermediate processes of developing and editing. You describe the process as painting emulsion. The photographic film with light-sensitive emulsion I have worked with was opaque until it was developed.

My sense is that the visuals are from the school of ‘action painting’, and projection. In a much cruder form it used to be done with overhead projectors and bowls of water and/or oil, and food coloring. Another version of this was to have a roll of clear acetate film, about 10 meters long, and 28 cm wide that was slowly scrolled across the projection surface. Water colors were dreadful, acrylics were mostly opaque and very messy, so permanent felt markers became the tool of choice. Mostly mundane.

Is there a link to one of your performances. I would like to see / hear more.

Kevin

[Petri Kuljuntausta]

Hi Kevin,

this unedited live documantation of Primaries was recorded in January at FilmWinter festival, Stuttgart Germany.
https://vimeo.com/119592662

Sami van Ingen: 35mm film projectors

Petri Kuljuntausta: laptop

Henri Lindström: synths

best,

petri

[James Phelps]

Thank you for presenting this.  The definitions and "rubriqueification": tedious and tangential at best.  The work: beautiful.

-Jim

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From: Petri Kuljuntausta <petr...@gmail.com>
To: CEC conference <cec-con...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, May 8, 2015 4:10 AM
Subject: Re: [cec-c] Some thoughts on the recent question of 'acousmatic music'

[Kevin Austin]

Thank you.

The video of the performance is now its own ‘object’. The performance is in an area that in the academic environment I live in would not be in the School of Cinema, or so much in Electroacoustic Studies [right now], but more in interdisciplinary or intermedia studies, although this could change.

In a smaller school, these divisions might be less apparent. Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts is large enough to have some 17 disciplinary areas, among them Design and Computational Arts http://www.concordia.ca/academics/undergraduate/calendar/current/sec81/81-90.html with ten fulltime faculty, which translates into around 250-300 students, Transdisciplinary Arts — ARTX and ARTT, Intermedia, a School of Cinema, probably close to a thousand students involved in temporal arts, fixed media, performance art, environmental, staged etc etc. http://www.concordia.ca/finearts/academics/departments.html

Sometimes developing collaborative structures is a bit like herding cats.

Kevin