Models of Constructed Sound: Nonstandard Synthesis as an Aesthetic Perspective

Abstract

This article deals with aesthetic and philosophical aspects of a body of sound-synthesis techniques that is often misrepresented and discounted. Although my aim is not the description of specific historical situations, I will proceed by historically contextualizing the idea of “nonstandard” synthesis. This discussion will primarily focus on two historical approaches: the nonstandard soundsynthesis techniques developed by composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Gottfried Michael Koenig, and Herbert Brun in the 1970s, and early 20th-century sound-synthesis experiments such as drawing sound on film (Levin 2003) and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s ideas concerning the transformation of soundreproduction devices into sound-production devices (Moholy-Nagy 2004 [1922]). These approaches are characterized by a close connection between sound synthesis and strongly articulated artistic positions. This article does not present the development of sound-synthesis techniques as a chronological history of technological progress. I will rather view the history of sound synthesis as nonlinear, as a history with many bifurcations, in which ideas do not undergo continuous, progressive developments, but in which they reappear, transform, merge, and coexist. The approaches presented are, therefore, not intended to be historically comprehensive. I will, however, try to extract philosophical and aesthetic roots and implications that I deem relevant to the current situation of electronic and computer music. These approaches to sound synthesis will be discussed as aesthetic perspectives. What unites the nonstandard techniques is not so much their rejection of harmonic or acoustic models, but rather both their intention to bring together ideas of music and ideas of sound, and their recognition of the