Hugues Dufourt, La musique spectrale. Une révolution épistémologique.

International audienceSpectral music is now more than forty years old. In his preface, French composer and philosopher Hugues Dufourt defines it thus: Spectral music basically represents a change in our ways of thinking music. It is no longer a music based on traditional and well separated categories, such as melody, counterpoint, harmony or timbre. Spectral music, on the contrary, is the music of middle categories and hybrid objects. Its objects stand at the frontier of two or more dimensions, timbre and harmony, harmonicity and inharmonicity, pitch and noise, rhythm and grain. Spectral music is the exploration of continuous transitions between traditionally heterogeneous domains; it creates mixtures and works to breach the thresholds of perception. The music of the end of the last century has irresistibly uncovered colour, as both a predominant and autonomous dimension of its language. We can define it as the art of colour modulation. (15-16) After reading this introductory passage, coming as it does from the person who coined the term " Musique spectrale " (in 1979, Dufourt wrote the famous manifesto " Musique spectrale "), 1 the reader might expect a book that takes stock of the state of this compositional technique / movement, and explores its historical development and main protagonists – a sort of ultimate book on spectral music. In fact, this volume (published in 2014 and running to 485 pages) reunites a series of essays composed by Dufourt over the course of twenty years and should be read in the light of this consideration. As a collection of old and recent articles dealing with spectral questions, it has another goal: neither musicological, nor merely historical, analytical, phenomenological or autobiographical. Placing himself in the dual role of editor and contributor, Dufourt introduces in the preface the underlying themes and motivations: This book […] deals with the structural mutations of 'serious' music from the 1970s. It also traces the portraits of illustrious predecessors who initiated music to the irreversible path of modernity and enabled a moulding of the new matrix of the world. The purpose of this book is to outline the history of categories of musical thought in 1 Written for the Société Nationale de Radiodiffusion, Radio France/Société internationale de musique contemporaine, SIMC, 1979, 30-32

Computer Music Analysis via a Multidisciplinary Approach

(Abstract to follow

The Identity of the Work: agents and processes of electroacoustic music

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Searching for lost data: outlines of aesthesic–poietic analysis

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"Points of Time, Points in Time, Points in Space. Agostino Di Scipio's Early Works (1987–2000)", in Makis Solomos (ed.), Contemporary Music Review, Volume 33, Issue 1, 2014, Special Issue: Agostino Di Scipio: Audible Ecosystems, pp. 72-85, DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2014.906699

International audienceThis paper bears on Agostino Di Scipio’s work from the years 1987–2000. Early computergeneratedpieceslikePuntiditempo(1987)andEstensioni(1988)seemtoreflectakindof double artistic individuality. In the first piece, the musical structure is fragmented and the sound micro-structure is split in random particles. In the second (the only piece Di Scipio madewithdigitaladditive synthesismethods)bothsound and the overallmusical structure are worked out in a deeply deterministic way. This dualism returns frequently in Di Scipio’s early career: the qualitative exploration of infinitesimal sonic units with related concepts of ‘granular’ sound, and a formalized approach to the musical macrostructure (algorithmic composition) seem to complement each other. In the winter of 1994–1995, Di Scipio started working with real-time signal processing and live electronics. He started investigating space-related phenomena, and to address himself to composing the instruments (i.e. designing the overall performance infrastructure) as a task different from composing for existing instruments, whether these are usual musical instruments or computational tools. In the new orientation, a more comprehensive view of the ‘performance ecosystem’ turned out to be crucial, and it led to important later developments (the Audible Ecosystemics series of live-electronics works). The present paper investigates these early stages in Di Scipio’s career. It builds on a variety of sources and archival documents, and emphasizes that the composer’s early efforts did not follow a linear path but rather raised issues and implications spreading out fanwise from one specific conceptual knot: the one concerning ‘emergence’ (‘sonological’ and ‘formal’ emergence)

Les origines du nom de RIM (Réalisateur en informatique musicale)

cote interne IRCAM: Zattra13aNone / NoneInternational audienceLes origines du nom de RIM (Réalisateur en informatique musicale

The Assembling of Stria by John Chowning: A Philological Investigation

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Collaboration and Musical Assistants at IRCAM, CCRMA, and CSC

The revolution of sound recording, synthesis and transformation (commenced in 1948 with concrete music and in 1950 with electronic music), followed by the birth of computer music (since 1957), caused the natural emergence of a new professional profile – someone who can work in the phase of researching, writing, creating new instruments, recording and/or performing live during concerts. From the early days, laboratories and electronic music studios have involved the presence of different individuals with diverse but intertwined competencies. This is true for the Milan, Cologne, Paris and San Francisco centres during the first analogue generation; this has continued with the digital revolution (at CCRMA in Stanford and other centres in the United States, in France, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, East Asia, to name a few). Although books and essays dedicated to the history of Computer Music do agree, in principle, on the interdisciplinary nature of this music and the importance of collaboration,3 and the field of music collaboration starts at last being investigated,4 the existence of the musical assitant has been often unreasonably neglected. In both the musical score and the program notes, or in written sources (a least in the published ones), his/her presence remains hidden most of the time, and literature on the collaboration composer/musical assistant is scattered. I’ve been studying collaboration in computer music for a few years.5 Previous results have allowed me to trace the history of the name of this profession as it developed at IRCAM (Musical Assistant and RIM, Réalisateur en Informatique Musicale) [Zattra 2013a], to outline the analysis of an anonymous survey submitted to different musical assistants all over the world [Zattra 2013b] and to report findings from semi-structured interviews (Musical Assistants’ self-knowledge, role and visibility: Zattra 2015). In this communication I will report findings from a study based on primary and secondary sources and administrative documents, conserved at three computer music centres: the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris, the CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics) at Stanford University and the CSC (Centro di Sonologia Computazionale) in Padova. The analysis will examine two points: 1) institutionalisation and recognition: I would investigate the presence (or absence or understatement, as the case may be) of an express concern for the theme of collaboration and the role of the musical assistant; 2) the presence of passages inside the sources, describing the ways in which this collaboration was undertaken between musical assistants and composers. My study covers the technological historical period which runs from the early computer programs until the first real time experiments. It is intended to enlighen the hidden art-science collaboration, the emergence of a profession, the traces remaining from the habitually wordless communication between a composer and an assistant, in the early era of computer music. It introduces questions about cooperation and the way it could induce dilemmas when considering authorship. The choice of these three centres is motivated by the close historical, musical, organisational, scientific and technological connections, and by the numerous technical, cultural and scientific exchanges between the three