On Sonic Art

by Emmerson,Simon

• ISBN13: 9783718658473
• ISBN10: 371865847X
• Edition: CD
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1996-07-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In his ground-breaking book On Sonic Art Trevor Wishart takes a wide-ranging look at the new developments in music-making and musical aesthetics made possible by the advent of the computer and digital information processing. His emphasis is on musical rather than technical matters. Beginning with a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying the Western musical tradition and the traditional acoustic theories of Pythagoras and Helmholtz, he goes on to look in detail at such topics as the musical organization of complex sound-objects, using and manipulating representational sounds in the new music, organizing the spatial motion of sounds and the various dimensions of human and non-human utterance. In so doing, he seeks to learn lessons from areas (poetry and sound-poetry, film sound effects and animal communication) not traditionally associated with the field of music.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Series
Editor's Introduction
Preface
Acknowledgements
What is Sonic Art?	p. 3
Beyond the pitch/duration paradigm	p. 11
Pythagoras, Fourier, Helmholtz: towards a phenomenology of sound	p. 45
The nature of sonic space	p. 71
Sound structures in the continuum	p. 93
Gesture and counterpoint	p. 109
Sound landscape	p. 129
Sound-image as metaphor: music and myth	p. 163
Is there a natural morphology of sounds?	p. 177
Spatial motion	p. 191
Utterance	p. 239
The human repertoire	p. 263
Phonemic objects	p. 287
Language stream and paralanguage	p. 299
The group	p. 315
Beyond the instrument: sound models	p. 325
Bibliography	p. 333
Music Examples	p. 339
Music References	p. 353
Index	p. 355
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