Inseparable models of materials and of musical design in electroacoustic and computer music*

Audible Ecosystemicsas Artefactual Assemblages: Thoughts on Making and Knowing Prompted by Practical Investigation of Di Scipio's Work

“…Di Scipio manages to elicit a deep and rich sense of interaction between machine, people and environment without recourse to complex models of audition or explicit metrics, but rather through the empirically guided deployment of a relatively few simple signal processing resources such as delays and linear filters. At work here is a markedly different notion of what it means to model in a music-technical context that, again, resonates with Ingold's distinction between hylomorphism and textility but that is also anticipated in Di Scipio's (1995Scipio's ( , 1998 own thinking, and relevance to contemporary concerns over the role of formalism in making musical systems (Linson, 2011;Poepel, 2008). Such work should be seen (and heard) as exemplary in helping to develop our disciplinary voices.…”

Atoms and errors: towards a history and aesthetics of microsound

“…Agostino Di Scipio has followed Xenakis' lead in synthesising sound directly from complex mathematical formulae, but has taken his inspiration not from stochastic and probabilistic mathematics, but from the current interest in iterated nonlinear functions, of which fractals are an example, and which derive from the study of nonlinear dynamical systems ('chaos theory') (see, for example, Gleick 1987 for a popular and canonical survey reference). Like Xenakis, he attempted to employ the same methods in sound design as in formal construction, in an effort to elide the distinction between form and material which computer music has perhaps inherited from instrumental music (Di Scipio 1995). Later, Di Scipio worked with converting iterated functions directly into sound via a DAC (Di Scipio 1996Scipio , 2000.…”

“…For Di Scipio, the direct synthesis of sound from iterative nonlinear functions can be used to allude to, if not to model, environmental sounds (Di Scipio 2002a, b). To borrow Roads' terminology, not only does Truax integrate the microsonic level with the level of the sound object, meso-and macro-level in a way which Di Scipio (1995) claims can elide the distinction between synthesis and composition, but his music also aspires to integrate itself with the supra time level of history, society and politics and nature. Further, the role of digital technology in our complexly mediated world can itself provide a basis for that technology's role in the construction of what Truax calls a 'contemporary myth'.…”

Audification and Non-Standard Synthesis inConstruction in Self

“…Most discussions concerning the use of data at audio rate have focused either on its design in the context of auditory display (see for example Dombois and Eckel 2011;Grond and Hermann 2012: 218-19) or on its potential as compositional material in the context of non-standard synthesis (see for example Di Scipio 1995;Hoffmann 2009). Thus audio-rate data use offers alternative possibilities.…”

“…Thus audio-rate data use offers alternative possibilities. Most discussions concerning the use of data at audio rate have focused either on its design in the context of auditory display (see for example Dombois and Eckel 2011; Grond and Hermann 2012: 218–19) or on its potential as compositional material in the context of non-standard synthesis (see for example Di Scipio 1995; Hoffmann 2009). Research on non-standard synthesis from the viewpoint of auditory display and audification as material in the context of music has been limited.…”