Electronic Dance Music in Narrative Film

As a growing number of filmmakers are moving away from the traditional model of orchestral underscoring in favor of a more contemporary approach to film sound, electronic dance music (EDM) is playing an increasingly important role in current soundtrack practice. With a focus on two specific examples, Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998) and Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998), this essay discusses the possibilities that such a distinctive aesthetics brings to filmmaking, especially with regard to audiovisual rhythm and sonic integration

Exploring Hybridity: An investigation into the integration of instrumental and acousmatic structural strategies

The aim of this commentary, which accompanies a folio of electroacoustic/acousmatic, instrumental and mixed compositions, is to investigate the relationship of instrumental and acousmatic compositional practices and to find common integrating structural strategies. These practices are also related to the handling and organization of disparate and large amounts of sound information in both media. Multi-dimensional aural spaces are very common in both instrumental and acousmatic media when timbre becomes a dynamic and form shaping parameter. The listener may perceive the musical discourse in multi-dimensional musical spaces through multiple perceptional modes. A musical syntax of those - usually indeterminate and ambiguous - aural spaces may be achieved through a hybridization of interconnected temporal concepts, connected to motion, gesture and shape, and spatial concepts, connected to sound source and timbre. The narrative structure of the musical discourse is linked to conceptualizations of physical and conceptual musical spaces through cognitive schemas and patterns and can be approached through visual and spatial metaphors that resemble film and TV montage structures. A sound montage theory provides a basic framework for the organization of narrative structure in sound composition

Electric Shadows (Dianying) *

Catalogue Essay on Isaac Julien's installation "Ten Thousand Waves". Probably also included in catalogue for Isaac Julien exhibition Sao Paulo Autumn 201

On the Integrity of the World of Sounds: Montage and Organic Unity

The purpose of this paper is to track the history of interaction of two fundamental principles of creating sounding musical texts: the organic unity, on the one hand, and the editing, on the other hand, in both composers’ and performers’ artwork. It is likely that the idea of organic unity reached the highest point of its development in Mozart’s oeuvre; later, Beethoven and composers of the following generations started comprehending the idea of a process (or, in philosophical terms, “the becoming”) as something organically integral. According to an opinion of musicians with a romantic way of thinking, sound engineers’ work in general, in particular editing, tends to break an ideal view of integrity as the instantaneous and inimitable life of an artwork. At the same time, as will be presented, the principle of editing an artwork, from the motifs to the entire structure, also reached its highest, though often implicit, expression in the music of Romanticism (Schumann, Chopin). On the contrary, musicians of the post-Romantic era, such as Strawinsky or Gould, preferred the method of montage which can easily explain their general preference for the audio recording, with its almost unavoidable, merely “cinematographic,” editing for the live sound. Having disavowed an idea of the process as a kind of organic development, both composers of the avant-garde and the following trends in new music have engaged a virtuosic playing with the very principle of editing, including the editing of every separate sound, as their most important creative method. Therefore, there are various ways of comprehending an idea of integrity at different time periods of art history as well as fundamentally different methods of implementing this idea in accordance with certain artistic purposes

From Fractured to Fractal: The Improbable Continuum in Twentieth-Century Music

This article is discussing the way twentieth-century musical creation managed to deal with the erosion of the homogenous temporality connected to tonal music, and doing so, how it suggested at different levels, new ways to consider music writing.  Using a pluridisciplinary approach necessary to explain how the concept of montage introduced in plastic arts has been able to take root into the musical field at the turn of the century, we will look at various examples focusing on continuity versus discontinuity as a key element of this shift, after reviewing the ins and outs of what could be seen as a “temporality crisis” in music. We will highlight what we can view as a reversal of the classical paradigms in the musical field with regard to time and space.  Then, we will show how these aesthetic approaches are in fact reconnecting with some new modes of continuity, improbable ones at times, as they appear to contradict the very nature of continuum.This article is discussing the way twentieth-century musical creation managed to deal with the erosion of the homogenous temporality connected to tonal music, and doing so, how it suggested at different levels, new ways to consider music writing.  Using a pluridisciplinary approach necessary to explain how the concept of montage introduced in plastic arts has been able to take root into the musical field at the turn of the century, we will look at various examples focusing on continuity versus discontinuity as a key element of this shift, after reviewing the ins and outs of what could be seen as a “temporality crisis” in music. We will highlight what we can view as a reversal of the classical paradigms in the musical field with regard to time and space.  Then, we will show how these aesthetic approaches are in fact reconnecting with some new modes of continuity, improbable ones at times, as they appear to contradict the very nature of continuum

Painting with sound: the kaleidoscopic world of Lance Sieveking, a British Radio Modernist

In the late 1920s, British Radio became briefly and creatively entwined with a broader modernist culture. Largely through a series of spectacular programmes such as The Kaleidoscope (1928), made by the producer Lance Sieveking, the BBC started to develop an ‘art’ of sound. This episode has generally been passed over in histories of modernism and broadcasting: at best, it has been seen as a brief and whimsical piece of formal experimentation. But through examining Sieveking’s private papers, this article shows that this new art of sound was rich in meanings and symbolism, and had a wider influence than has hitherto been assumed. Sieveking drew heavily on his own life, which encompassed imprisonment and flying during the First World War, and a glittering array of social acquaintances, which connected him with the most advanced artistic thinking. This led him to find ways of representing in sound the subjective mental experiences and jumble of memories that so fascinated modernist artists in an age influenced by popular Freudianism. Sieveking’s life and writing also shows how he drew boldly from the visual language of experimental silent cinema at a critical moment in its own development. In creating a complex montage style for radio, Sieveking also anticipated some of the aesthetic devices that would be deployed in the coming era of sound on film. Sieveking and his programmes therefore illustrate a particular moment of British cultural history when the creative boundaries between different media were especially porous, with highly creative results

The play's the thing

For very understandable reasons phenomenological approaches predominate in the field of sensory urbanism. This paper does not seek to add to that particular discourse. Rather it takes Rorty’s postmodernized Pragmatism as its starting point and develops a position on the role of multi-modal design representation in the design process as a means of admitting many voices and managing multidisciplinary collaboration. This paper will interrogate some of the concepts underpinning the Sensory Urbanism project to help define the scope of interest in multi-modal representations. It will then explore a range of techniques and approaches developed by artists and designers during the past fifty years or so and comment on how they might inform the question of multi-modal representation. In conclusion I will argue that we should develop a heterogeneous tool kit that adopts, adapts and re-invents existing methods because this will better serve our purposes during the exploratory phase(s) of any design project that deals with complexity

The play's the thing

For very understandable reasons phenomenological approaches predominate in the field of sensory urbanism. This paper does not seek to add to that particular discourse. Rather it takes Rorty’s postmodernized Pragmatism as its starting point and develops a position on the role of multi-modal design representation in the design process as a means of admitting many voices and managing multidisciplinary collaboration. This paper will interrogate some of the concepts underpinning the Sensory Urbanism project to help define the scope of interest in multi-modal representations. It will then explore a range of techniques and approaches developed by artists and designers during the past fifty years or so and comment on how they might inform the question of multi-modal representation. In conclusion I will argue that we should develop a heterogeneous tool kit that adopts, adapts and re-invents existing methods because this will better serve our purposes during the exploratory phase(s) of any design project that deals with complexity