Research Prospectus

 

        I can say that my musical research finds its origin and its end, its goal, in my creative music composition work. During my fifteen years as an active musician, I have always been utterly concerned about understanding the internals of my Art. All my research has had the purpose of allowing one to become proficient at thinking, understanding, manipulating and exploring the universe of sounds with the intention of creating Music.

        My current research can be summarized in three main topics: studies in Microtonality and Complex Rhythmical procedures, studies in Musical Form and Structure (which hopefully will yield a Treatise on Musical Structure and Form for an Experimental Electroacoustic Music), and the development of the tools that allow all of the previous tasks to be successfully performed. What follows is a summary of these three research topics.
 

1) For the past four years I have been engaged on a project of developing a database and library of sounds to be used primarily for the creation of Electroacoustic Music. It is an effort similar in nature (but unfortunately yet quite far in scope) to the famous personal sound library owned by the French composer Pierre Henry. This project of mine is a mixture of a database, a gigantic computerized sampler and a suite of computer applications and computer programming libraries. It allows one to have algorithmical access to the sounds in the database and to transform these sounds in an infinite number of ways. For every sound collection in the database there is a C++ computer program object that manages sound requests from other C++ applications. This "sound-sample manager", so to speak, can deliver requests of sounds with characteristics that are different from the actual sounds inside the database. That "manager" is programmed to find the closest match in the collection and it then transforms this sound so that it conforms to the requested specifications. For an electroacoustic composer, it is like being an alchemist inside a room with millions of bottles of substances of different colors and properties, all within the grasp of his fingers. My C++ sound database allows this composer to try out an infinite number of different mixtures and amalgams of those substances with surgical precision. This database is programmed so that it can be indefinitely expanded. Pierre Henry's reel tape collection has fifty years of age, fifty years of sound collection. My digital one has only started, but its value for an electroacoustic composer can already be felt and heard in my acousmatic radiophonic opera KA, my DMA thesis at Columbia University. You can listen to mp3s of my entire radio-opera KA at : http://www.music.columbia.edu/~alessi/mp3_samples.html
Also visit my computer utilities page.

 
2) Connected to the previous item is my research in Microtonality and Complex Rhythms. The fact that I am a proficient computer programmer allows me to easily connect my sound database collection to experiments involving the creation and exploration of different tuning systems and rhythmical methodologies, always with surgical precision quality. For example, I developed an application that can assign any arbitrary collection of microtonal pitches (they are defined according to their fundamental frequencies inside a simple text file) to the keys of a MIDI keyboard, so that one can play, hear, and explore that pitch collection. Such a tool is invaluable not only to composers, but also to anyone interested in the research of psycoacoustics and music theories that involve the perception of microtonal pitch spaces, of complex and irrational rhythms, not to mention the potential for the development of applications for the teaching of microtonal (or even standard) aural skills.

3) Following the work done in my DMA dissertation, I am planning a Treatise on Musical Structure and Form for an Experimental Electroacoustic Music.

        In the first part of such work, I would try to define and map the idea of what is Musical Form and Structure from a point of view that is disconnected from a particular musical tradition or culture. At the core of such work would be a thorough study of Pierre Schaeffer’s Traité des Objets Musicaux (Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1966), a very important and seminal work which is, unfortunately, still unavailable in English and therefore quite unknown in the USA. As a matter of fact, I have been studying for several years Schaeffer’s Traité because of its strong syntony with my own ideas. Schaeffer’s work is an attempt to define what is Music and what belongs to the Musical realm in a basic primitive, archetypical level disconnected from Culture. His most important accomplishments are his phenomenological study of musical listening and perception, and his idea of a solfege of sound objects, which is based on an attempt of formalizing a Morphology and a Typology of sound objects.

        Some of my ideas for this Treatise have already been sketched in my doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. In that essay, I analyzed how musical structures could be developed in several levels. Basically, my ideas were focused in two fronts, first, a microscopic one, which I called a Musical System, defined as being a systematic series of filtrations of the continuums of information contained inside sound itself. The second front is a macroscopic one, Musical Form, which I claimed to be the result of a judicious application of Montage technique. Here, I often used concepts borrowed from Semiotics and Film Theory. For example, I used Serguei Eisenstein's Montage theory and Andrei Tarkovsky's concept of Time Pressure to explain my special notions of Musical Time and Musical Space. I believe most of my definitions and conclusions are correct but still at a very raw state. They are in need of clarification, further exploration and amplification.

        In the second part of the Treatise, I would deal with issues pertaining more directly to the field of Electroacoustic Music, which I view as the most important and promising medium for an Experimental Music, as defined in my dissertation essay. Armed with my seven intensive years of experience working with Computer Music, I would return once more to Schaeffer’s Traité, this time to his breakdown of the "Electroacoustic Chain", and carefully explore and map all the main issues concerning the composition of Electroacoustic Music. First, I will work with the idea of a virtual electroacoustic lutherie, which will generalize concepts for sound pick-up, sound cataloguing, signal processing, and algorithmic composition. Second, I will propose general guidelines for an orchestration of sound objects, including a vertical orchestration (the study of simultaneities), as well as horizontal and spatial orchestrations. Finally, I will discuss sound diffusion/projection, spatialization, and Acousmatic listening.

        The main goal of the Treatise is to precise, at the most basic level, what are the Materials and Tools at the disposal of an Electroacoustic Music composer of the 21st century, and the nature, qualities, and possibilities of those elements, in other words, their "alchemical" properties. Regardless of aesthetic/cultural preferences, such studies would be important to anyone who wants to try to understand the nature of the organization of sounds as a form of artistic expression, and who wants to become proficient at thinking, understanding, manipulating and exploring the universe of sounds with the intention of creating Music.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Chion, Michel. Pierre Henry. Fayard/Sacem, Paris, 1980.

• Costère, Edmond. Lois et Styles des Harmonies Musicales. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1954.

• Dovzhenko, Alexander. The Poet as Filmmaker. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1973.

• Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods.  Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994.

• Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1976.

• Eisenstein, Sergei. The Film Form. Meridian Books, New York, 1957.

• Eisenstein, Sergei. The Film Sense. Meridian Books, New York, 1957.

• Khlebnikov, Vielimir. Collected works of Velimir Khlebnikov. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1987.

• Maiakovski, Vladimir. How Verses are to be Made; in Selected Works in three volumes. Raduga, Moscow, c1985-1987. Volume 3, pages 179 to 211.

• Nattiez, Jean Jacques. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., c1990.

• Schaeffer, Pierre. Traité des Objets Musicaux. Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1966.

• Schaeffer, Pierre. Vers une Musique Expérimentale. La Revue Musical, Paris, 1957.

• Tarasti, Eero (editor). Musical Semiotics in Growth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press ; Imatra: International Semiotics Institute, 1996.

• Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting Time. Bodley Head, London, 1986.

• Xenakis, Iannis. Formalized Music. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1971