Lecture 02: – Timescales
In which we briefly contextualise the course to come by considering sound, structure and time and draw some distinctions between the analytical and experiential. We then get started with a practical demonstration of software in-action.
Time-scales at work in this course
In the work that you’ll be doing over the next weeks, we can think of the various activities in terms of some broad scales:
- synthesising
- shaping
- phrasing
- composing….
Curtis Roads offers the following depiction of the various (sonic) time scales we can consider, and different ways of thinking about them:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(time)
Useful explanation of the Haas/Precedence Effect:
To start to get us accustomed to our software, I’ll give us some simple examples whilst we go through this diagram.
Structure and Perception
As a thought to keep in mind over the coming weeks, as you synthesise, shape, phrase and compose is the importance of distinguishing between some of Roads’ categories as perceptual artefacts versus concrete objects.
For example, the way Roads describes a ‘sound object‘ is quite distinct from the way the same term is used in the tradition that has emerged from Musique Concrète. For Roads it is “a basic unit of musical structure, generalising the traditional concept of a note to include complex and mutating sound events” (Roads, 2015, Composing Electronic Music, OUP, p 50) . A valuable concept, worth having a name for.
However, for Pierre Schaeffer, there’s a subtle but nonetheless important distinction in that the sound object is an “object for human perception and not a mathematical or electroacoustical object for synthesis.” Meaning that the deciding factor is in what we hear: even if there are ‘objectively’ a number of events happening together, if we hear them as a unity then that would constitute a single sound object (for Schaeffer).
I’m raising this point because it is in this gulf between what (and how) we perceive versus what is given (e.g. by our tools) that the enterprise of structuring sound lives.
Delving into Software…
Time for a more in-depth example of some patching. We’ll move slow, but don’t worry: it should be videoed so that you can refer back to it.
Some examples then
Stucke for orchestra, op.10/ Sehr ruhig und zart by Webern. A complete piece in 42 seconds.
Performed by LSO cond. Pierre Boulez.