Sound Synthesis Procedures as Texts: An Ontological Politics in Electroacoustic and Computer Music

Abstract

This article describes a set of "textual" technological practices that have been emerging over the past decade in the work of underground electroacoustic and computer music composers, focusing particularly on Florian Hecker and Russell Haswell. Guided by methodological insights from the field of software studies, the article zooms in on two computer programs, PulsarGenerator and GENDYN, presenting a genealogical analysis of them as cultural objects and outlining how these lines of descent are aestheticized in their works. In the hands of these artists, sound synthesis procedures carry an author function, and this transgresses both their legal status as technological "inventions" rather than texts, as well as their ontological status in the electroacoustic music genre. Combined with a compositional focus on "sounding" the materiality of these technologies-the particular affordances, limitations, and quirks of their operative functioning-this textual practice contributes to a new aesthetic, one that challenges the prevailing logic of secrecy, alchemy, and semblance in this music. Using the notion of "ontological politics" inherited from science and technology studies, I show how these practices highlight zones of contestation over electroacoustic music's ontology.In 2008, a piece of code was shared on the online forum for users of the graphical programming environment Max that was purported to be the work of the British electronica duo Autechre. Autechre are a notoriously clandestine outfit, especially regarding their working methods, so this rare insight into their téchne naturally garnered some interest. The code itself is visually very messy and the only instruction on the screen is to "load a short .aif and then press spacebar." This action launches a sequencer that triggers polymetric patterns comprising short synthesizer sounds; they approximate kicks and snare drums, as well as "laser" sounds, so-called "gabber steps," and other sound effects. It sounds a bit like Autechre, at least close enough for the code to be debated in nearly 150 subsequent posts. The discussions it elicited ranged from the question of whether or not information "wants" to be free; to what constitutes an instrument and what a "trick" or "effect" in electronic music practice; to the role software environments play in creativity and whether they should be credited in CD publications; to questions of open and closed source software and the types of behaviors, secretive or pedagogical,

Of Sound and Flavour – Revisiting the Notion of Material for the Cultural Sociological Analysis of Art Domains

“…Equalisation can come very close to extreme calculative rationalisation, when 'acoustic events' are divided into temporal micro-slices (or 'grains') which will then be recombined in changed ways through 'granular synthesis' (Roads, 2004: 86). It can also be achieved through stochastic processes, whereby sequences of music, or even a whole musical piece, are produced through an algorithm which synthesises sounds undergoing aleatory variations (as in Xenakis' GENDYN programme, a reference for contemporary computer music, including glitch, noise and 'extreme' computer music -see Haworth, 2015). Echoing Nicolas' argument of an increased dependency of contemporary music on mathematics, Paul Théberge has suggested that music has been transformed 'from an art of instrumental sound, performance and compositional technique to one of mathematics, digital technologies and algorithmic operations' (Théberge, 2015: 330).…”

Meeting the Garden Halfway: Ethnographic Encounters with a Sound Installation Microculture

“…6. Far from a straightforward valorization of "practice" (for critiques or extensions of the "practice turn" in music studies, see Born 2010; Steingo 2018), my approach continues the ongoing engagement with actor-network theory, ontology, and new materialism in ethnomusicology (Bates 2012;Risk 2013;Roda 2014Roda , 2015Steingo 2018), and music studies at large (Born 2005(Born , 2015Haworth 2015;Piekut 2013Piekut , 2014. Although I draw primarily on Barad (2007), related ideas about "mattering" animate Latour's (2004) and Stengers's (2010Stengers's ( , 2011 work on "cosmopolitics" and Mol's (1999) discussion of "ontological politics.…”

Automatic Synthesis Technology of Music Teaching Melodies Based on Recurrent Neural Network

“…Speech processing has been widely applied in composition and songwriting, record production, and entertainment. Unlike simple speech synthesis, music melody synthesis has two additional processing steps: tone detection and transformation [5,6]. Wenner et al [7] preprocessed the musical melody synthesis corpus through automatic note segmentation and voiced/unvoiced sound recognition, constructed a high-quality music melody synthesis system, and proposed a music melody adjustment algorithm, which functions as an adaptive filter capable of detecting musical note cycles.…”