The "Paradoxical Complexity" of Sound Masses
Beginning with simple elements of sound, composers can use their expertise to craft compositional systems that may be enormously complex and far beyond the comprehension of most listeners. But by the end, I think it is a magical thing if it comes around to become perceptually simple again: a musical organism with processes, gestures, and gestalts that are readily appreciated and comprehended.
Brightness / Darkness
“Brightness” is one of the most common terms used to describe sounds, drawing on strong cross-modal associations. Most people can call to mind examples of “bright” sounds: what do these sounds have in common?
Most sounds are made up of multiple different sound components, including partials and noise components. The relations between sound components have a big impact on how the overall sound is perceived:
Seven Beginnings
Seven Beginnings (2019), for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, two violins, viola, and cello, was composed as a deliverable of my ACTOR postdoc. The piece builds upon the trend of speech transcription in recent music, with a focus on spectral transcription and cross-modal composition. But far from being a technical étude, it is a very personal piece with a very specific motivation behind its materials and methods.
The Unanswered Question – Charles Ives
In 1908, American composer Charles Ives composed The Unanswered Questionfor string orchestra, solo trumpet (or English Horn) and four flutes (or three oboes and one clarinet). This piece inspired Leonard Bernstein’s famous Norton Lectures of the same title at Harvard in 1973 and continues to capture the imaginations of musicians and audiences today….
Red Bird —Trevor Wishart
Trevor Wishart is a contemporary British composer closely associated with extended uses of the human voice. Whether in acousmatic pieces such as Encounters in the Republic of Heaven (2011) or in pieces for live performance such as Vox 4(1987), his compositions masterfully exploit the subtlety and range of human vocal production…
Shepard Tone
In this post Auditory Scene Analysis, we introduced some of the ways that sound components are grouped together by the auditory system. This has many musical applications, and also lays the foundation for some interesting auditory illusions. One of the most famous is the Shepard Tone, named for cognitive scientist Roger Shepard, which creates an illusion of perpetual ascent or descent. A quick search on YouTube will turn up many examples; here is a handful:
Deus Cantando — Peter Ablinger
This week’s amazing moment in timbre is a bit of a mind-bender: a piano that recreates the timbre of the human voice. It’s Peter Ablinger’s Deus Cantando (2009). for a piano being played by a computer-controlled mechanical device. Watch and be wowed:
Auditory Scene Analysis
This is a spectrograph, a way of visualizing sound in which the y axis represents frequency, the x axis represents time, and darkness or colour represents concentration of energy. Looking from bottom to top shows how the sound energy is distributed on the continuum from low to high, and looking from left to right shows how that distribution changes over time...
Dripsody — Hugh Le Caine
Our second Amazing Moment in Timbre is another classic, but somewhat lesser-known. It’s Canadian composer and inventor Hugh Le Caine’s Dripsody(1955).
Atmosphères — György Ligeti
We’re beginning our “amazing moments in timbre” series with a true classic, György Ligeti’s paralyzingly beautiful orchestral masterpiece Atmosphères(1961)…
Partial
Although we may perceive sounds such as musical notes as singular, self-contained units, the physical reality often suggests something very different. Most sounds we hear are actually complex mixtures of many different sound components, some of which are noisy and transient, others of which may have stable frequencies…