FPA 147  00-1            Lecture 1
Electroacoustic Music Electro - from electrum/Latin or eletron/Greek (amber) When amber is rubbed it produces sparks Acoustic - of or pertaining to sound, the sense of hearing or the science of sound - from akoustikos/Greek (hearing)

Therefore the science of interaction or inter conversion of electronic and acoustic phenomena.

Music - the art of organizing tones to produce a coherent sequence of sounds intended to elicit an aesthetic response in a listener. Vocal or instrumental sounds having some degree of rhythm, melody and harmony. From mousa/Greek - the art of the muses.

Muses were any of 9 daughters of Mnemosyne & Zeus, each of which presided over a different art or science. None of the muses specifically presided over music because it embraced so many of the forms. Music is the most abstract of the arts. It is not an object. Up until very recently it could not be stored. It is merely "wrinkles in the air". (Ursala K. LeGuin) Our hearing is not physically directed or selective as sight is - we have no ear lids. Therefore it may operate upon our deepest emotions in subliminal ways. It is one of the first experiences of the fetus and constitutes a major component of that environment. Before we have language we have music. Music gives the majority of us pleasure.

Music is a way of thinking about the world, a tool for understanding. "A dialectical confrontation with the course of time" Michel Serres, 1975

In this culture "seeing is believing". When we understand something we say, "I see". The explicit empirical nature of sight is balanced by the intuitive and emotional nature of sound and music. Sight is the surface, sound is what lies below.

Music is prescient (Jacques Atali, from his book "Noise") its forms represent society as well as predict what is to come.

Music is often thought of as one of two subcategories of a larger phenomena called sound. Noise is the other subcategory and can be defined as disorganized sound or sound organized in a very complex manner. In any case these distinctions are culturally based and learned. Music has many elements of noise in it (percussion instruments, the initial attack of many instruments, etc.) The early twentieth century composer Edgar Varese called music "organized noise".

 Sounds may be produced either by physical actions or electronic means In acoustic based sounds energy is required to generate sound and to overcome the inertia of the object which will vibrate. This initial energy might come from the breath, by striking or plucking (etc) or through some mechanically assisted system such as the piano, pipe organ or celeste. We therefore use the term acoustic for an instrument or sound which occurs without electronic amplification or other electronic means.

Electronic sounds may be synthesized directly or derived from an amplified or electronically altered acoustic source or otherwise defined as sounds recorded and played back electronically.
 

The distinction between electronic and acoustic sources is often quite blurred: is an acoustic guitar heard through a PA system "electronic"? Is a sampler playing back a digital recording of a 'cello electronic? etc. Hence the handy term electroacoustic which refers not only to the materials of the art but also the method. More than anything else, electroacoustic music is a way of thinking  about, creating, producing and presenting music. Thus it becomes less of a distinctive means of expression while becoming all the more important as a way of thinking about music.

The single most important accomplishment that you will gain from the successful completion of this course is a change or shift in how you perceive and think about sound (or music and noise). The goal is to enlarge your notions of what constitutes successful and effective musical expression and sound communication.

 The Tradition Most of the music we will study in this class emerges from the European Art Music tradition. We will trace its roots back through this century to the one before; suggesting that the seeds of electroacoustic music can be found in the work of Wagner and Mahler & other innovative 19th century composers. Here we also trace (from the romantic period) notions about the composition as "work of art" and the role of the composer in specifying every nuance. With the advent of electroacoustic instruments with their many modalities for expression, contemporary electroacoustic music is also an extension of the even older tradition of "composer-performer" of Chopin, Beethoven, Bach, etc. Other Influences In addition to the influences of the dominant European culture, electroaocustic music has had many others. Being born out of the discovery of electricity, it has been influenced by most of the major technological advances of the 20th century. Disc recording, synchronous film systems, telephones, radio, tape recording, computers, etc., were all used very early in their respective development for electroacoustic pieces and experiments. Finally it shares with acoustic music a curiosity and fascination with music from other cultures, a tendency to "borrow" from popular music forms such as jazz or folk music and world music and like so-called "Classical" music, electroacoustic music eventually ends up in a television ad or a pop song. Venues Electoacoustic music can be heard most Sunday nights at10:00pm on CBC’s Two New Hours (105.7 FM).  Several COOP radio programs feature it, including Musica Nova. Local composers put on concerts (occasionally) and both SFU, UBC  & the VNMS mount yearly events.  The SCA has its annual concert, featuring a multi speaker "diffusion" system, in the SFU Theatre in early March.  Independent composers often produce their own concerts as will local galleries and artist run centres such as the Western Front, the Grunt Gallery, etc.  Canadian composers have an organization called the CEC which has a newsletter, a newsgroup (cecdiscuss) and mounts festivals, conferences and national broadcasts. Most European countries have similar set-ups.  There are several record labels in Canada which feature this music: Empreints Digitales, McGill Records, Uof M, CentreDisc and many in the US and Europe.  Most contests have special categories for electroacoustic music and there are several yearly festivals devoted to it: Bourges (France), etc., ICMC (moving) What are the Benefits •Ear-training: timbre and pitch perception,

•understanding the raw materials of music and sound,

•methods for editing and processing sound,

•increased sensitivity to non-pitched elements of music and to timbre, dynamics, density, macro gesture, etc.

•Introduction to how things are done.

•An art form that doesn’t require years of training in particular physical skills.

•Essential to work with contemporary systems which come out of these techniques and equipment...

• Good training for working with any kind of electronic technology.

 Sound When an object, or part of one vibrates, it causes the material around it to vibrate. Through touch or through our ears we perceive the vibration as sound.
  SOUND HAS PHYSICAL PROPERTIES (IMPERICALLY MEASURED)

SOUND HAS PSYCHOACOUSTIC PROPERTIES (WHAT WE PERCEIVE)
 

 The vibration must occur quickly enough for us to perceive the change as sound (it would otherwise be a pressure change) and at least occur 20 times a second for it to be perceived as a continuous sound or tone.

We model these vibrations as travelling in a wave in a medium. It travels at different speeds in different mediums:
 

Air  (normal - 20°)    344m/s  1,130ft/s

Air (hotter -  35°)    402     1,320

more humidity = faster

Helium 927 3,040

Water 1,437 4,714

Steel 5,000 16,400
 

 In the air sound acts as repeating waves or ripples in a pool. The waves are formed of compressed and rarefied regions of air. If it is a continuous tone, then the more waves in a given unit of time then the pitch is perceived as being higher. The greater the change in pressure, the louder the sound will appear.

Sound has several parameters:

Frequency (Hertz)

Pitch ("notes") low to high (subsonic to infra or ultrasonic) Amplitude (Decibel) Loudness (ppp-fff) soft to loud (imperceptible to the pain threshold) Envelope (Milliseconds, Attack, Decay) Time, duration (stacatto, legato, etc.) dynamic behaviour over time, Click to Drone Spectrum Timbre, Tone colour pure sine to complex waveform, harmonic, inharmonic, coherent, noisy Frequency: Approximately 20 - 20,000 cycles per second
  41.2 low E on a bass guitar

60 Alternating (AC) Current - Hum

261.63 Middle"C" on the piano

440 A above middle"C" - a tuning standard

1000 Test tone, ears very sensitive to this frequency

4186 highest note on the piano

14,700 Television flyback transformer

 Hertz = cycles per second. Kilo = 1000, Mega = 1,000,000, milli = 1/1000

Pitch is perceived as a LOGARITHMIC function. Every time the frequency is doubled or halved we call this an "OCTAVE" and we perceive this tone as being of the same "PITCH CLASS" and almost equivalent. This is a cultural bias.

Since frequency is important to us as pitch (which is not continuously variable) then we privilege certain frequency intervals in this culture:

Octave 2/1 or 1/2 ratio

Fifth 3/2 ratio

Fourth 4/3 ratio, etc.

Pitch is a logarithmic function: We organize frequencies in octave groups.

 Amplitude: measured in decibels (dB)

range of human hearing is 0 - 120 dB

hearing is a logarithmic function - dB is a log scale. This represents a range of 1 watt/m2 - 10 -12 watt/m2

Increase sound by a factor of 10 and it increases by 10dB

Doubling is approx 3 dB

A factor of 100 = 20 dB, 1000 = 30dB

Two sound sources of equal intensity = 3dB increase - if amplitude doubled = 6 dB
 

 Db  describes:
0   threshold of hearing

20  rustling of leaves

30  quiet whisper at 3 feet

40  quiet home

50  quiet street

60  normal conversation

70  inside a moving car

75  loud singing

80  car at 25 feet

88  motorcycle @ 30 feet

90  blender @ 3 feet

100 loud diesel @ 100 feet

107 power mower at 3 feet

115 jackhammer @ 3 feet

117 chainsaw

120 6 feet from a club speaker

130 jet @ 100 feet
 

 Amplitude is directly related to pitch perception
  below 1Khz amp inc = pitch drop

above amp dec rise
 

 Envelope/Duration:
  When the duration of an object is less than the time threshold required for pitch recognition it is heard as a "click"

Perception of frequency = inverse of total duration in milliseconds

10 milliseconds = ±100hz

40 ± 25hz

Greatest energy almost always at the attack.Need to overcome the inertia of the object which is to vibrate - also the most complex timbre at this time.
 
 

 Future Topics: SPECTRUM

SINE WAVE

AMPLITUDE/LOUDNESS

FREQUENCY/PITCH

TIMBRE

TRANSDUCTION

ENVELOPE (ATTACK, DECAY)

NOISE

DECIBEL

DIGITAL & ANALOGUE REPRESENTATION OF SOUND

STORAGE

TRANSMISSION

MODIFICATION