Sound Anthology: Program Notes

… Time Will Tell … : Folkmar Hein, Curator About the Music

This selection of music compiled for the readers of the current issue of Computer Music Journal is conceived as an imaginary concert. With a duration of just under 80 minutes, the sonic proceedings, including breaks, reach a length typical for a DVD, a CD, or a concert with electroacoustic music—not too short, not too long. The individual works, with lengths falling between 4 and 15 minutes, are also in the range of typical durations for electroacoustic music.

"…Time will tell…"? Is this the "typical" example of music to which we have become accustomed? Does it meet our expectations? Surely not! Neither the familiar nor the expected are what are important, what matters is the new and unknown—that which is not easily explained or demystified. We are looking neither for witty and poetic explanations nor for scholarly elucidation and academic sagacity. We know full well that behind every work a tremendous amount of technical and scientific skill is involved, and that is something worth recognizing. Nevertheless, this Anthology is not based on a technical or scientific theme, but only on an auditory fiction: an acousmatic concert from—reflecting the international orientation of CMJ—an international collection of composers.

The term acousmatic, about which there has been some controversy, was introduced by the Groupe de recherche musicales (GRM), specifically by François Bayle, in 1974. The idea was that concertgoers should focus solely on the acoustic aspects of the performance and not be distracted by optical influences or anything else. This can be a challenge—and a difficult one at that—for 21st-century concertgoers, with the pervasive fixation on touchscreens as an optical distraction. This "concert" has the additional intention of showing that acousmatic works are being created outside of GRM's aesthetic world—in particular, in Swedish, British, and Japanese traditions—which are deliberately brought to the fore in this collection. It seems to me that acousmatic music coming from Sweden has not gained the recognition it deserves. (I am a great admirer of the Elektronmusikstudio [EMS] in Stockholm, which has always been a model in terms of internationality, infrastructure, freedom, hospitality, and equipment, without succumbing to any temptation of technology for the sake of technology.)

There is, incidentally, a common thread through the concert program: Each piece has an individual feeling of tempo, but in a mysterious way a similarly calm pace seems to dominate, interspersed with highly emotional moments of density, dynamics, spatiality, and exciting transformations of both concrete and synthetic sounds.

There is one unusual aspect to this imaginary concert: the concertgoers—all CMJ readers who access the audio data—can shape an individual program order for themselves, and they can freely choose between the stereo and multichannel versions of the works!

Some technical points are worth noting:

1. 1. The eight pieces in the Anthology are in the conventional formats (stereophonic, quadraphonic, octophonic). None uses a surround-sound format, owing to the problematic nature of the center channel.

2. 2. Each multichannel work is also available in a stereo version.

3. 3. Channel assignments are either evident from the file names of the channels, or they are described in the program notes (specifically the works by Horacio Vaggione and Trevor Wishart).

4. 4. All sound files are at a 48-kHz sample rate with 24-bit resolution. The multichannel versions consist of multiple single-track files or, in the case of Vaggione, tracks that are paired as stereo files.

In addition to the information given in the following notes, further documentation is available online at www.emdoku.de/en/search?query=CMJ%20Vol%2042%202018&sources=emdoku

Time Will Tell (2013)—Manuella Blackburn

Tiny, microscale ticks, tocks, clanks, bumps, and rings combine together in new shapes and forms. Miniature sounds from time-keeping devices, old and new, were sourced and isolated for their brevity and "barely there" quality. Reassembling regular clock rhythms from an abundance of single clock ticks and strikes is a fundamental composition methodology in this work, along with the simulation or illusion of internal clock mechanics churning, rotating, and sometimes malfunctioning. The idea of clocks being wound and reset features as a...