Electronic Music Composition Research Articles

Toward authentic electronic music in the curriculum: Connecting teaching to current compositional practices

Despite emerging efforts to teach from within authentic music making contexts, electronic music in schools generally remains detached from the practices of actual composers. Often electronic technology is regarded merely as a set of tools for learning and, as a result, many view active engagement in technology-based music making as a supplementary, rather than essential, component of the music curriculum. This article introduces some of the practices of electronic music composition in which many composers currently engage, including perspectives, concepts, techniques and resources. The purpose is to provide a basis for the development of teaching approaches that are informed by authentic practices, and that have the potential to engage learners in music making beyond the classroom.

Armin: Automatic Trance Music Composition using Answer Set Programming

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken a leading role in many activities which used to be made “by hand”; one of them is the musical composition. Such task now has another alternative implementation, through the support of software that can compose different musical genres to the point where a computer can compose pieces with some autonomy. This paper proposes Armin, a system dedicated to the electronic trance music composition. Armins aim is to provide a trance music composition to serve as a template or a base audio file, ready to add more instruments in a mastering (remastering) production Additionally, it seeks to enable greater collaboration between a machine and a human, both seen as musical composers.

Emerging Materiality: Reflections on Creative Use of Software in Electronic Music Composition

The authors examine how materiality emerges from complex chains of mediation in creative software use. The primarily theoretical argument is inspired and illustrated by interviews with two composers of electronic music. The authors argue that computer mediated activity should not primarily be understood in terms of simple mediation, but rather as chains of complex mediation in which the dominant form of representation is metonymy rather than metaphor.

Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States: Crossing the Line (review)

Women Composers and Music Technology the United States: Crossing the Line. By Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006. 301 pp., including discography, bibliography, list of Web sites with access to recorded music, and index of proper names. On my computer desktop is a photo of the faculty and staff of the famous Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, circa 1970. The six individuals posing for the camera are arrayed a kind of hierarchy: Milton Babbitt and Otto Luening occupy the foreground, with Vladimir Ussachevsky just behind them, and Mario Davidovsky occupies the middle ground. In the background, right of center, two young women stand close together, looking formal and modest despite the long hair and short skirts typical of the era. The women are Alice Shields and Pril Smiley, who worked the center as teachers, technicians, experimenters, and collaborators; during the center's most productive period they were two of the four primary instructors electronic music. Both are prolific, accomplished, award-winning composers of electronic music, yet they never received the status and pay their work at the center warranted, and they are seldom mentioned the standard narratives of the history of electronic music the United States, as Joel Chadabe's Electric Sound bears witness. (1) This neglect is hardly surprising: women have worked in the for a common goal so very many roles and fields, yet for historical and cultural reasons men have commanded the and are thus the subjects of history. Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner's greatest achievement Women Composers and Music Technology the United States: Crossing the Line is to shift background and foreground so that women like Smiley and Shields become the historical subjects and their male colleagues play supporting roles. This perspective shift makes Hinkle-Turner's book more than a compensatory history, adding women to a male narrative; rather, it is a women's narrative, attending to the ways that the particularities of these composers' lives as gendered beings intertwine with their careers, creativity, and community. The volume is the first of a series on women and electroacoustic music Hinkle-Turner plans to write for Ashgate; future volumes will address women Europe, Australasia, and Latin America. No one is better qualified to write such a book: a composer herself, Hinkle-Turner is also a university computing professional and longtime advocate of women music. These conditions give Hinkle-Turner not only the technical savvy and broad knowledge of the field required for this type of study but also awareness of and access to the composers who are the subjects of her research. She draws primarily on her own interviews with living composers and her analyses of electronic music for much of the material of the book. But she also brings to the table her feminist sensibilities and knowledge of feminist musicology, which is particularly evident the book's introduction. Of the six chapters that follow the introduction, three are devoted to women composers academic settings (chapters 2-4), while two are more topical, concerning women and technology popular music (chapter 5) and women multimedia (chapter 6); the final chapter provides a trenchant assessment of the current status of women electroacoustic music. This concluding chapter is the most theoretical of the book, for here Hinkle-Turner grapples with the reality that, after seventy or so years of breaking down barriers, forming alliances, networking, mentoring, and achieving success, women composers of electronic music find that younger generations of women are not following their footsteps. Rather, the numbers of female students university electronic music composition programs have actually decreased recent years (247), and their female predecessors doubt their own influence as role models (253). Hinkle-Turner airs several theories to explain this phenomenon, including cultural constructions of femininity, the aggressive jargon of the computer world, and U. …

The tip of the iceberg: laptop music and the information-technological transformation of music

AbstractUnderstanding laptop music requires more than a new perspective on the configuration of a ‘weareable computer and an audio interface’ as a musical instrument for performance. It combines the strategies and traditions of electronic media-related music composition of the twentieth century, like reproductive music, electronic music, computer music and Net music in a single, digital, multi-purpose device originally designed for business and multimedia applications. Consequently, what we hear is mostly not a genuine laptop music, but one facet of the information-technological transformation of music that has been the result of the digital integration of these established traditions. This article gives an overview of the aesthetic implications of these traditions and with respect to laptop performance and musical style.

Development of electronic music in Ukraine: emergence of a research methodology

AbstractIn this article the authors present an overview of the current situation in Ukraine, with regards to the question of analytical terminology applied to new methods of creation in electronic music composition. The article establishes the differences and the similarities between the analyses of instrumental and electronic music structures, while considering the role of technology in the creation of new electronic music works. This paper also establishes a link between the origin of current analytical processes and electronic music practice in Ukraine, taking into account the function of a given terminology and its characteristic elements relating to a local geographical and cultural context. The authors underline the importance of integrating new music forms in academic circles and discuss external influences in the development of new musical systems. This is demonstrated by exposing selected musical materials, which can be considered representative of the creative and theoretical processes found in the field of electronic music in Ukraine.

Jam2jam

Jam2jam

Fifty years of electronic music in israel

the history of electronic music composition, technologies and institutions is traced from the founding of the state of israel in 1948. core developments are followed beginning with the founding generation including joseph tal, tzvi avni and yizhak sadai, continuing with the second and third generations of musicians and researchers, living in israel and the united states. the institutional and political dynamics of the field in this country are explored, with a focus on the challenges of building an audience and institutional support, as well as prospects for the future.

Loudspeaker array as a musical composition genre

A fixed array of loudspeakers can be used as a proprietary format for electronic music composition, leading to a fixed genre of work. The author will describe his experiences using a 6-channel array of full-range loudspeakers, describing the compositional principles he has employed, including issues of source localization, ambient and reverberant fields, available bandwidth, and sound-pressure levels. Spatial relationships, musical issues and problems, and related concerns will all be discussed.

Cassiel: symbolic pulse sequencing

This text presents the motivation and design principles behind the pulse sequencer, a software component used for electronic music composition and performances by Cassiel. The pulse sequencer is a generic, language-based sequence processing engine which can be regarded as an arpeggiator, a sequencer, or anything in between. In fact, arpeggiation and sequencing are special cases of a more general control system. We conclude with some comments about the strengths and weaknesses of the system drawn from several years’ experience in performance projects.

The Lost Student found

Electronic music holds appeal for at-risk students at the high school level. Anne D. Modugno uses electronic music composition as a key to success for at-risk students.

György Ligeti'sGlissandi: An analysis∗

Abstract During the last forty years composers working with electronic and computer technologies have produced works whose analysis cannot be often driven with the traditional canons the musicology offers. After a brief presentation of a possible method of analysis, this paper takes into examination the first electronic music composition of Ligeti, a work which, besides its indubitable musical value, is a true original work within the post‐webernian structuralism period.

Some practical aesthetic problems of electronic music composition

Abstract The paper discusses limitations imposed upon the studio composer by time schedule, type of equipment and the actual sound synthesizing situation, and formulates questions on (the lack of) constraints the electronic music composer derives from psychoacoustic and structural/functional conditions for perception.

Some aspects of the teaching of electronic music composition∗

Abstract Until composers approach the medium with clear perspectives, electronic music is going to remain dominated by novelty, theatricality and voodoo. If teachers of electronic music composition are to provide clear perspectives to the next generations of composers, they must recognize and eliminate at least three major obstacles: 1. the science‐fiction aura; 2. the pedantic pseudo‐scientific aura; and 3. the teachers’ own tendency to explain the hardware but to let the “software” look after itself. Despite the obvious difficulties of talking about patently nonverbal aesthetic considerations, the student must begin to grapple with those issues from the very outset if he is to maintain the essential balance of technique and aesthetic decision making.

Are Junior High Students Ready for Electronic Music? Are Their Teachers?

Many educators feel that electronic music composition could be more adequately treated on the college level. The electronic music lab at the Julia R. Masterman, fe: School in Philadelphia is an excellent example of the possibilities on the secondary school in Philadelphia is an excellent example fo the possibilities on the seondary school level.

Psychological Pitch Scale: Use in Musical Composition

A subjective pitch scale, such as S. S. Stevens' mel scale, presents interesting possibilities for musical composition. In order to make the scale useful for composition, a computer analysis of the curve was made, which yielded a table of mels vs. frequency at 1-mel intervals. This scale, in which intervals of equal mel size are equal in subjective size throughout the audible frequency range, opens the way to some new concepts of melody and counterpoint. Possibilities for the use of the scale exist in composition for conventional instruments as well as in electronic music composition. A preliminary experiment was conducted comparing judgment of pitch intervals in the low- and high-frequency ranges of the scale with a standard interval in the 1000-cps range. Further experimentation is needed in several areas: (1) it seems probable that the extreme high-frequency range of the scale is not quite accurate; (2) the scale should be determined using complex tones; (3) the question of whether or not equal mel steps are equally discriminable needs clarification. Tape-recorded examples of the mel scale and its use in musical composition are presented.