Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes

  • Authors:
  • Denis Smalley

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Music, City University, Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB, UK

  • Venue:
  • Organised Sound
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

The art of music is no longer limited to the sounding models of instruments and voices. Electoacoustic music opens access to all sounds, a bewildering sonic array ranging from the real to the surreal and beyond. For listeners the traditional links with physical sound-making are frequently ruptured: electroacoustic sound-shapes and qualities frequently do not indicate known sources and causes. Gone are the familiar articulations of instruments and vocal utterance: gone is the stability of note and interval: gone too is the reference of beat and metre. Composers also have problems: how to cut an aesthetic path and discover a stability in a wide-open sound world, how to develop appropriate sound-making methods, how to select technologies and software.