A short introduction

Even pre-pandemic, and certainly now, much of the music we experience today is – in one way or another – electronic: this is obvious in the case of recordings, broadcasts, highly produced music, etc. It’s slightly less obvious when listening to classical recordings, but even most of those - from all eras, at this point - have been minutely edited and processed using DAWS (Pro Tools, Cubase, Logic Pro, Audacity, etc.). Even live acoustic concerts are often performed in a hall that has had its acoustics ‘enhanced’ in one way or another.

Still, music as an electronic medium is a relatively new concept, and the early pioneers of electronic music oscillated between various aesthetic philosophies and technological dos and don’ts. In his 1913 manifesto, The Art of Noise [not required reading for the class but historically important and not so long], Luigi Russolo advocates a music made from ‘the infinite variety of the timbres of noises,’ in order to liberate musicians from the ‘facile and traditional.’ This idea inspired Edgard Varèse, a French-born American composer who mainly wrote for conventional instruments, but who referred to himself not as a composer but as an ‘organizer of sound.’ His 1936 Liberation of Sound [again, not required reading but there it is] envisioned the possibility of realizing Russolo’s dream with electronic means; this became a reality on a variety of different fronts within a decade.

By the 1950s, electronic music still mainly existed in avant garde and academic settings (with occasional forays into sci-fi film soundtracks like Forbidden Planet). Composers had divided into two camps, one advocating synthetic sound production (i.e., what eventually came to be known as 'synthesizers'); the other, spearheaded by a French radio engineer, Pierre Schaeffer, advocating constructing music from real-world sources, recorded in the field or found on records. He dubbed this musique concrète, and an example of it is his 1948 Cinq Etudes de Bruits: Etude aux Chemins de Fer (“5 Noise Studies: Study for Iron Paths [Railroads]”).

Since then, the dividing line between these two approaches has dissolved, and the line between ‘music’ and ‘noise’ has become slippery and porous. In pop music, sampling and synthesis – neatly packaged into software – are all-pervasive. There are websites devoted to tracing pop music samples to their sources, and vice versa (I currently use whosampled.com).

The ‘organization’ of these particular sounds can be conceptualized in a number of ways. As with your first set of Found Sounds, the sources can be myriad, as are their qualities as sonic objects. It is perhaps useful to focus on just two factors: the amount of ingredients and the method of preparation. 1) amount of sources: some composers use one sound, others use many; 2) raw or cooked, served whole or sliced and diced: sometimes the source is recognizable, sometimes it’s not; sometimes the source is presented intact, other times it’s altered almost beyond recognition.

For Thursday 3/9, please do the following (aka Assignment 12)

1) WATCH these two videos:

Anything Can Be Music: A Short Film About Matthew HerbertLinks to an external site.

The Most Sampled Loop in Music HistoryLinks to an external site.

2) READ this short article

Roland Barthes, 'The Grain of the Voice'Links to an external site.

3) LISTEN/VIEW 6 examples of first generation musique concrète on this playlistLinks to an external site..

4) FILL OUT the THIS SURVEY, where you'll be asked to describe each piece with 3 adjectives (this is inspired by Barthes' article), and to reveal your favorite and least favorite.