Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-vt8vv Total loading time: 0.001 Render date: 2024-08-16T03:14:37.287Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Tactility, Traces and Codes: Reassessing timbre in electronic media

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2013

Gabriel Paiuk
Gabriel Paiuk*
Affiliation:
Institute of Sonology, Juliana van Stolberglaan 1, 2595CA, The Hague, Netherlands E-mail: gabriel@gabrielpaiuk.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article starts by arguing that in diverse approaches to electronically produced sound in music of recent times a shift in focus has occurred, from the creation of novel sounds to the manipulation of sound materials inherent in a culture of electric and electronic devices of sound production.

Within these practices, the use of lo-fi devices, circuit-bending, cracked electronics and a resurfacing of older technologies is coupled with digital technology in a process which emphasises the devices characteristic modes of sound production and artefacts. Electronic sound becomes regarded as embedded on a reservoir of qualities, memories and registers of technologies that inhabit our sound environment.

From this starting point our apprehension of technologically produced sound is reassessed, constituted as the crossing of particular conditions of production and reception, cultural traces and codes inherent in the practices and characteristics of media.

This perspective lays the ground for a compositional approach that exposes and problematises the interaction of these multiple conditions.

Type
Articles
Information
Organised Sound , Volume 18 , Special Issue 3: Re-wiring Electronic Music , December 2013 , pp. 306 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barker, J. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bayer, F. 1981. De Schönberg à Cage: Essai sur la notion d'espace sonore dans la musique contemporaine. Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar
Boulez, P. 1966. Notes of an Apprenticeship. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Brenez, N. 2004. The Forms of the Question. In J.S. Williams, M. Temple and M. Witt (eds.) For Ever Godard. London: Black Dog.Google Scholar
Chion, N. 1983. Guide to Sound Objects: Pierre Schaeffer and Musical Research. Paris: Editions Buchet/Chastel.Google Scholar
Chua, D.K. 1999. Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Drumm, K, Tétreault, M. 2000. Particles And Smears. New York: Erstwhile Records, erstwhile 006-CD.Google Scholar
Eno, B. 1979. The Studio as Compositional Tool. In C. Cox and D. Warner (eds.) Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum/Bloomsbury Academic, 2004.Google Scholar
Gibson, J. 1966. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Gottstein, B. 2011. Björn Gottstein in Discussion: An Aesthetics of Refusal. In B. Beins, C. Kesten, G. Nauck and A. Neumann (eds.) Echtzeitmusik Berlin/Self-Defining a Scene. Hofheim: Wolke.Google Scholar
Kim-Cohen, S. 2009. In The Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. New York: Continuum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kittler, F.A. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Lacasse, S. 2008. La musique pop incestueuse: Une introduction à la transphonographie. Circuit: Musiques Contemporaines 28(2): 11–26.Google Scholar
Lachenmann, H. 1980. Quatre aspects du matériau musical et de l’écoute. Revue musicale suisse 6: 261–270.Google Scholar
Link, S. 2001. The Work of Reproduction in the Mechanical Aging of Art: Listening to Noise. Computer Music Journal 25(1): 34–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marks, L. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Massumi, B. 1998. Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible. Architectural Design: Hypersurface Architecture 68(5–6): 16–24.Google Scholar
McKinnon, D. 2010. Awkward Ecologies: Sound-Based Music. eContact! 13(3). http://cec.sonus.ca/econtact/13_3/mckinnon_ecologies.html Google Scholar
Portishead. 1994. Dummy. New York: Go! Beat Records, 828 522-2 CD.Google Scholar
Radiohead. 2007. In Rainbows. London: XL Recordings, XLCD-324.Google Scholar
Sabbe, H. 1987. The Feldman Paradoxes: A Deconstructionist View of Musical Aesthetics. In T. DeLio (ed.)The Music of Morton Feldman. London: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Siepman, D. 2010. Agency and Improvisation in the Ambient Sound World. Perspectives of New Music 48(1): 173–199.Google Scholar
Suvin, D. 1987. Approach to Topoanalysis and to the Paradigmatics of Dramaturgic Space. Poetics Today 8(2): 311–334.Google Scholar
Sylvian, D. 2004. The Good Son vs. The Only Daughter. SamadhiSound, ss005-CD.Google Scholar
Young, J. 1996. Imagining the Source: The Interplay of Realism and Abstraction in Electroacoustic Music. Contemporary Music Review 15(1): 73–93.Google Scholar