| Instructor: Dr Ho Chee Kong |
Electronic music - How it is different from natural acoustic music and its
impact in music development
Melissa Sim Yunn Tyug. CCLA03 ["Music And Technology"], University
Scholars Programme, National University Of Singapore.
Music is an integral part of everyone with hearing ability and by no means
lie outside of the human experience. We hear music everywhere - they are played
from sources such as tape recorders, LP, CD or MD players, radio stations and
televisions, vary from recordings to live concerts, may be in the comfort of
our own homes or outside in a shopping mall or concert hall and very often,
it is there even when we are not conscious of it. Music has developed and changed
through the ages, taking reference from Western Music, from the middle ages
(450-1450), renaissance (1450-1600), baroque (1600-1750), classical (1750-1820),
romantic (1820-1900) and twentieth century music (1900-1950) to the music of
today . Each period has its own characteristics and style, exploits different
instrumentation and different uses of the same instruments. But all the sounds
that were used were all produced and reproducible naturally until the invention
of the long-player recorder and tape recorder that allowed manipulations of
sounds, which cannot be reproduced in the natural. This leads to the subject
of electronic music in this paper, which seeks to discuss how the introduction
of electronic music has affected the development and treatment of music in composition
by comparing electronic music versus music produced naturally, the appreciation
of the two types of music and our acceptance of it.
First and foremost, I would like to define what I mean by music produced naturally.
This simply means the music or sounds produced by instruments acoustically without
the help of electronics. Music that is amplified through speakers and enhanced
by mixers are included as long as they are produced acoustically and are reproducible
without further technological manipulations. Electronic music here would refer
to music or sounds that are produced electronically or synthesized using electronic
means, such as the techniques of tape manipulation in Musique Concrete which
will be discussed later, that cannot be reproduced in the natural without technological
interventions.
Electronic music originated some time back from the audio analytical work of
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-1894), a German physicist and mathematician
. He built an electronically controlled instrument known as the "Helmholtz
Resonator" to analyse combinations of tones using electromagnetically vibrating
metal tines and glass or metal resonating spheres. The machine could be used
for analysing the constituent tones that are found in complex natural sounds.
However, he was only interested in the scientific analysis of sound and did
not think about using this in music itself. The theoretical musical ideas came
about through Ferruccio Busoni, the Italian composer and pianists who was inspired
by accounts of Thaddeus Cahill's 'Telharmonium', an instrument that was invented
in 1906 that produced music by an alternating current running dynamos. Another
more famous example of an electrophone is the 'Theremin', which made use of
two vacuum tube oscillators to produce beat notes. Musical sounds were created
by 'heterodyning' from oscillators to vary pitch.
Modern electronic music only really started with the invention of the tape
recorder which is a very significant contribution to the music scene. It brought
with it a novel era of music with new treatments and genres that would otherwise
not have existed. Electronic music can be subdivided into three catogaries :
musique concrete, synthesizer music, and computer music.
The earliest of the three to be founded was music concrete, which involves
using sounds found naturally and distorting them in different ways to create
music. It is here that tape recorders play a major part. In the studio, the
sounds are altered by different tape manipulation techniques which are basically
changing tape speeds to vary pitch and timbre, changing the tapes direction
by playing a tape backwards to reverse the envelope of the sound such that it
increases in amplitude where it normally decays, making tape loops by cutting
out a piece of tape and splicing it together so that when it is played, the
sound is repeated over and over again in an ostinato, cutting and splicing different
sections of tape together to connect unrelated sounds or remove unwanted sounds
and tape delay to achieve echo effects. Live musique concrete is different in
that it cannot make use of all the techniques and usually consists of many microphones
placed everywhere around the performing hall and many variable speed phonographs
feeding into a series of mixers and filters which then feed the amplifiers that
drive a great number of speakers scattered through the hall.
Synthesizer and computer music have been coming together with the advent of
MIDI (Music Instrument Digital Interface) and simply refer to sounds produced
by a synthesizer and computer respectively. The tape manipulation techniques
in musique concrete are also applied to these electronically produced sounds.
Computer music depends largely on programs written to generate sounds either
randomly or based on certain criteria that can be calculated (eg. Probability
of an occurrence of a particular note in a certain type of music or through
algorithmic equations.)
Comparing between the kind of sounds one gets from electronic music and from
traditional acoustic music, there is a great difference in the production and
treatment of sounds. In the production of sounds from traditional musical instruments
, one makes use of the vibration of air in a column (aerophones), the excitation
of a stretched vibrating string through examples such as plucking, bowing and
striking (chordophones), the striking or excitation of a stretched membrane
(membranophones) and striking or excitation of a self- resonant, sonorous material
(idiophones). All these make use of acoustics that are available naturally but
perhaps enhanced through the different engineering of the various instruments.
In electrophones, however, electronics play an essential part in the production
of sounds which means that the sounds produced are "unnatural". The
sounds may have originated from an electronic source or may have somehow been
distorted or amplified electronically. These electronically produced sounds
come from oscillators that generate basic wave forms (sine, sawtooth, square
and triangular) or white noise-generators that combine all audible frequencies
in randomly varying amplitudes to give hissing or radio static sounds . The
waves may be used in their pure forms or varied to produce the desired sounds.
The pure sounds obtained from the oscillators are sounds that are very difficult
to produce using natural acoustics in traditional instruments. Conversely, although
synthesizers are capable of "reproducing" sounds from traditional
instruments by taking samples of them, analyzing their waveforms and storing
them digitally so that they can be processed to play at various pitches from
the keyboard, the sounds will not be exactly the same as those produced naturally
even if it is very similar. There are natural harmonics (also known as overtones)
present in natural sounds that are missing in the electronically produced sounds.
Also, when a note is being held, studies have shown that the harmonics of a
musical instrument have different envelopes and may fluctuate randomly in pitch
. Such variations will not be reproducible nor heard from the synthesizers.
Hence, natural and electronic sounds are each unique in their own ways, the
former being more variable and the latter more regular.
Now that we have seen how natural and electronic sounds differ from one another,
we shall explore how the introduction of electronics have affected the development
and treatment of music. As mentioned in the beginning, electronic music is an
entirely new era in the history of music. It changed the way composers created
their music, how the music would be performed and the mindset that live performances
always involved having human figures on stage.
In music concrete, sounds were directly put into tapes in composition whereas
traditionally, the composer writes down on a score what is to be played later
(musique abstraite) . In fact, there is no standard notation for electronic
music, though attempts have been made, as most electronic music do not exist
in notated forms at all . The reason being that many of these electronic music
performances do not involve live performers other than the tape recorders thus
notated scores are redundant as no one needs to see it. Also, the way that some
pieces were put together does not allow for any possible notations. A good example
of this would be Williams Mix mainly by John Cage and Earle Brown with some
involvement from Christian Wolff and Morton Feldman . Cage first created a library
snippets of tape, catalogued as A (city sounds), B (country sounds), C (electronic
sounds), D (manually produced sounds, including normal music), E (wind-produced
sounds, including voice) and F (small sounds requiring amplification to be heard).
He then further classified the sounds into c indicating control and predictability
and v indicating lack of control or unpredictability and used both c and v to
apply to pitch, timbre and loudness in that order. A designation of Bvcv would,
for instance, indicate a country sound of uncontrolled pitch, known timbre and
uncontrolled loudness. In order to produce a graphic plan for the piece (traditional
notations would have been impossible in this situation with naturally recorded
sounds), Cage used a procedure derived from the I Ching, the ancient Chinese
Book of Changes. It involves tossing three coins six times to generate a random
number between 1 and 64 and using this random number to select from matching
listings in several charts to chose the type of sound to be used from the library,
where among the final eight tracks of music it was to be placed, the durations
of sounds and silences, and the shapes of the sounds as they were physically
cut into the tape. All the procedures used in creating this piece of work were
unheard of previously before the advent of electronic music. The way that this
piece of musical work was constructed also brings me to another new style of
composition on electronic music, that of randomness.
This randomness that I am talking about is used in two main ways: one is the
random manner that pieces of spliced tapes were put together to produce a passage
of music and the other is the random way computers were used to generate notes.
It would be interesting to note that even in this new approach to using change
in composing music, there are still some constrains put on the music by the
composer. John Cage was the first to use chance procedures with consistency
, using this as a mode of discovery. The way he differentiated one composition
from another and defined it was in the questions he asked to come up with a
unique array of sounds and procedures. Random numbers were then used to select
from those arrays. An early example of use of this technique is in the piece
Imaginary Landscapes No. 4 (Cage, 1951) . Here, Cage first decided (defined)
the instrumentation of this piece, which consists of 12 radios, and the number
of performers - two for each radio, then used I Ching as described earlier to
help determine the fluctuating dynamics and wavelengths to which each radio
would be set. All these are notated on a twelve-stave score using both traditional
musical notations and numbers. Although there is precise notation of the score,
there is still an element of chance in that the signals picked up by the radio
are unknown beforehand and will not be the same in every performance. Another
instance of this random splicing was seen in rock music where special sound
effects have been produced by cutting up a tape into small pieces and piecing
them together randomly . An example of a composer that exploited the apparent
random generation of notes within a specific range using computers (known as
algorithmic composition) is Herbert Brun and examples of his work include Infraudibles
(1968) and Mutatis Mutandis (1968). Algorithmic composition involves writing
programs that defined the parameters for the computer to work with in order
to churn out music and the end-product of the musical work is still determined
by the composer as to what is aesthetically acceptable and what is utter rubbish.
It should be made clear that not everything produced by the computer is used
though it is left on its own to come out with something new after stating the
boundaries for it.
Other new forms of treatment of electronic music as compared to traditional
acoustic music besides the difference in approach of composition in notation
and the use of randomness or chance would be the tape manipulation techniques
of music concrete mentioned in the earlier paragraphs. These would not be further
elaborated since they were already explained and some techniques shown in the
various examples given though the examples may not explicit for illustrating
this point. However, I would like to add that the technique has expanded from
analogue equipments to use in digital systems which are compatible with digital
computers . The main difference between the two systems is that an analogue
device allows an infinite number of measurements within its range whereas digital
devices measure in limited number of steps. It is advantageous in that the file
size is smaller and it is much easier to patch various components together.
Its compability with digital computers also led to the development of computer-driven
digital synthesizer.
We now move on to look at the differences between the live performances of the
two types of music and how it affects our appreciation of them. Traditional
acoustic music is appreciated differently from electronic music. Different elements
are looked out for when listening or watching a live performance of traditional
acoustic music as compared to electronic music.
In a conventional live musical performance where musicians play their acoustical
instruments on stage, very often, the music is appreciated not only aesthetically
but only in the virtuosity and creativity of the performer is bringing the music
through to the crowd. The skills required in performing a technically demanding
piece is seldom overlooked for example in very fast passages or long passages
that spans across a wide range in a keyboard instrument such as a piano, or
circular breathing used in woodwind instruments to hold a note for a long time,
particularly in the saxophone, that involves the player filling up his cheeks
with air and forcing the air through the mouthpiece as he breathes through his
nose to refill the lungs. The ability of performers in improvisation is also
very important and an essential part of certain genres of music especially in
jazz and also in sections of orchestral pieces called the cadenza , which is
unaccompanied and left to the soloist's own creativity to showcase his talent.
Of course the difference in these last two examples are in that the former requires
the jazz band to really listen out for each other and play off one another while
the latter requires only in individual's part and can be prepared beforehand.
When it comes to electronic music, a live performance is a totally different
matter. For one thing, the performer is either not required at all, or does
not have to be there all the time. To illustrate the second point, we take a
look at the description of a performance of HPSCHD put together by John Cage
and Jerry Hiller . The piece consisted of seven versions of harpsichord solos
produced using computer programs (except the Version 7 which instructed the
performer to "play anything he wants for twenty minutes") and sounds
generated by the computer program HPSCHD recorded into fifty-one audio tapes,
each of twenty minutes duration, that were played back simultaneously, in all
or in part, during a performance. Visually, it also uses projections of over
5000 slides of spaceship and rocket technology and abstract designs and films
of space technology. During the performance, which normally takes about four
hours, the musicians and tape overlap with continual visuals. The performance
decisions were made by the performers themselves with certain guidelines. Every
tape that was started must be allowed to run to its end and other tapes may
be started in the process. Keyboard performers have to select and play through
one of the seven versions to the end, then he is free to leave for a coffee
break and to come back whenever he feels like it, at anytime, to play any of
the seven versions.
In a performance like this, which if course is not representative of all electronic
music performances, the process is totally random with no proper structure and
requires almost no co-ordination among the performers which include tape recorders
as well. Of course, performers still needed to decide which and how many tapes
to play at each time and the keyboardists had to decide when they wanted to
come in. However, once they started their 20 minutes segment, with the exception
of Version 7of the keyboard solo, the music that was being played was not within
their full control but were restricted to the written scores or recorded segments.
There is some improvising involved, but it is different from the kind observed
in "conventional" music like jazz or classical music. The improvisation
here is more in the time of involvement in the music rather than in the music
itself. Also, as mentioned earlier, performers were free to leave in the middle
of the performance when they had finished playing their segment, which is seldom
seen in conventional music performances.
In more common examples of electronically produced music, the "live"
performance often involves only a tape player (or any other types of player
that can reproduce the music from the recording) as the "performer",
unless you consider the person that presses the play button as a performer as
well. This is because many of the electronic sounds used cannot be reproduced
naturally and as they involve processes such as tape splicing or other tape
manipulation techniques from the Musique Concrete such as distortion of sounds
by varying playback speeds or playing the sounds backwards. Pieces have been
put together by combining spliced tape from several performances and thus never
existed "live" . Examples of musical works put together using tape
splicing include Williams Mix (its process of splicing was described earlier)
and Octet by John Cage and Earle Brown . Eight tapes of music were made for
eight speakers in both compositions. A performance of these two pieces of music
was held in March 1953 at the University of Illinois Arts Festival along with
other pieces by other composers. Brown recalled that they had eight mono Magnacorders
on stage and eight loudspeakers placed at equidistant around the auditorium
so the sound came from every part of the hall including the back where some,
who were put off by the Magnacorders on stage and frightened of electronic music
had sat!
Other kinds of music that are synthesized in the studios include rock and different
kinds of dance music like techno, house, trance and rave. Most of these dance
music are written either by one person or likely at most a collaboration of
two (more people can be involved but it is usually not the case) and involve
a lot of trial, error and of course recording, retaining only what the composer
likes and discarding the rest. Many layers of sounds are put together by the
same person through recordings and it is thus impractical and unnecessary to
hold a live performance of the piece (which is available at the touch of a play
button) though theoretically it seems possible if musical notations were available.
Rock recordings has been described as being constructive with electronically
generated or altered signals mixed in at different times and places, removing
the objective reality of an actual performance. So even when such music are
being performed "live", they will often not sound as good as the recording
itself as many such effects are omitted.
In describing so many kinds of live performances of electronic music, my objective
is to say that in electronic music, one appreciates the process of putting the
music together, in trying out new techniques or computer programs that can generate
music, rather than the skills required in performing the pieces because the
work itself is often made up of recordings or is itself a recording. Unfortunately,
since many people are not exposed to the technicalities of composing a piece
of electronic music, they are not able to give the music its due worth of praise
for all the efforts put into producing it, especially when most do not like
the unconventional sounds synthesized and are already put off before they can
find out more. I personally feel that for the general public, so long as the
music is pleasing to their ears, they will accept it and enjoy it but if the
music is unfamiliar or makes them feel uncomfortable because of its novelty,
they are less likely to be receptive to it.
In conclusion, I would like to say that both naturally produced sounds and
electronic sounds have their own characteristics that can be expounded differently.
Treatment and composition of electronic music has employed new ideas and strategies
different from traditional methods, some of which might not have been covered
in this paper. Many live performances of electronic music are distinctive from
each other because of the degree of randomness involved but is exciting as each
performance is a new experience for both the listener and the performers themselves
to discover what can possibly come out of the notated yet still unpredictable
score. Electronic music which are not explicitly catered to the needs of the
general public but written for the composers own pleasure and exploration may
not be popular now but hopefully with further experimentations and greater education
of the public, more will come to appreciate and enjoy the beauty of it.
Bibliography
- Eargle, John M. Music, Sound and Technology. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold,
1990.
- Kamien, Roger. Music: An appreciation. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Book
Company, 1992.
- Kostka, Stefan. Materials and Techniques of Twentith Century Music. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1990.
- Chadabe, Joel. "The great opening up of music to all sounds."
Electric sound : the past and promise of electronic music. Upper Saddle River,
NJ : Prentice Hall, 1997. pp. 21-62
- Chadabe, Joel. "Automata." Electric sound : the past and promise
of electronic music. Upper Saddle River, NJ : Prentice Hall, 1997. pp. 268-285.
Rock and Recording
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