Expanding the Horizon of Electroacoustic Music Analysis eds. by Simon Emmerson and Leigh Landy (review)

Edited volumes on electroacoustic music analysis are not so numerous that we should not welcome a further contribution beyond Thomas Licata's Electroacoustic Music: Analytical Perspectives (Westport, Conn., 2002) and Mary Simoni's Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music (New York, 2006). The present collection covers a wider field of musical examples than these two, though naturally centred on studio-crafted electronic art music, including notable coverage of an audio-only video game, a sound art installation, a turntable team routine, and more than one example of live electronic music. The current volume stems from an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant held by the editors; the holders surely specified an edited book as an output. The invited chapters particularly reflect the home institution's lecturers and doctoral students (De Montford), though with some other UK-based academics, and four international contributors.

The heart of the text is an initiative central to the aforementioned grant, to build an online hub for electroacoustic music analysis, the OREMA project (hosted at www.orema.dmu.ac.uk). The current status of this project already seems to be archival, rather than a continuing active community. The visitor finds two issues of the associated journal eOREMA (though further ones seem unlikely, with no submission information provided), and multiple analyses on the site, including many cases for the same work, in the main not overlapping with the book chapters. My request for a user account was approved quickly, and submitting new materials is feasible, yet existing analyses now seem frozen, with open comments not readily apparent; there do not seem to be recent novel materials. Nonetheless, there are valuable resources here, from contrasting analyses using a variety of techniques to explication of theories of electroacoustic music with analytical application.

The motivation for OREMA is discussed by its original proposer, Michael Gatt, in a core chapter within the text, which promises many benefits of such an analytical initiative to the academic community, but provides no deeper evaluation. There is no listing of the number of active users over time (seemingly tens of users at most, given the website's mention that 'the frequency of contributions decreased slightly, over the summer of 2012' (p. 166), with no data provided for 2013–16, when the book was forming). There is no record of whether any nonexperts got involved (academics and especially postgrads were those initially targeted), and no checks on any effort to 'ensure independence between practitioners in order to prevent homogeneity, which can be commonplace, especially in small groups' (p. 155; there is no convincing reason given by the author, despite a claim from authority, to suppose James Surowiecki's four wisdom-of-crowds criteria as quoted are met). I was left with an unfortunate sense that the project did not succeed in interesting a wider community in the topic. The main reason for reduced activity is identified as available academic time to work on a less established publishing outlet (p.166); the move to the eOREMA journal and the book under discussion here is a fallback from a crowd-sourced ideal, even though we can acknowledge a worthy attempt to diversify outputs.

After an initial three parts concerned more with overviews and theories (including Part I, comprising only an introduction and one chapter by the editors), the real analytical meat of the book is in Part IV, with ten chapters on specific works. While the editors propose some guidelines for their contributors, and a number of theories are presented in the first half of the book, the ten analysis chapters often take their own direction. Many of the chapters here provide insight into corners of electroacoustic music outside of studio art music, including Autechre's Foil (1994), Michel Waisvisz's live performance practice, Douglas Henderson's helically spatialized sonic sculpture Fadensonnon (2009), and the aforementioned coverage of a group turntable routine and an audio-only game.

If interesting...