This opens up a space for at least two different questions: Which kind of manipulation, intervention, transformation does the material afford? How far could a sound material be manipulated while preserving its original “identity”? It is worth noting that the compositional process includes different moments in which the composer defines the imposed morphology of the sound material she is working on, taking into account which kinds of manipulation, intervention or transformation the intrinsic properties of the material afford or suggest. Within these moments the material is shaped in different gestures, designed through the definition of various parameters: the physical action, namely the movement that has to be done within the physical space of the instrument in order to provide a gestural shape to the sonic idea, the material/tool involved in the actual gesture (the string, the wood, the bow, the piezo, the plectrum, fingers/nails, etc..), as well as the space of the instrument where the action takes place, the quantity of energy – the dynamic – to be put in the action, and lastly, the temporality of the gesture, intended as the internal duration of the sound event or its rhythmic contour. In this way, each gesture becomes more recognizable as a specific sound-event. The temporal dimension that each gesture acquires will be then particularly important to provide information about how sound events will be organized at a structural level, contributing to the creation of a certain sense of motion. As Smalley indicates:
Gestural music, then, is governed by a sense of forward motion, of linearity, of narrativity. The energy–motion trajectory of gesture is therefore not only the history of an individual event, but can also be an approach to the psychology of time (Smalley, 1997, p.113).
Additionally, Smalley observes that if the temporal dimension of a gesture is too loose and stretched in time, the perception of forward motion and linearity gets lost. When the gesture loses its human physicality, the perception of its spectromorphological life will move to the inner details of the sound event; the human scale becomes an environmental one, turning the gestural structure to a textural one. As Smalley again points out, most music shifts between texture and gestures.
Individual gestures can have textured interiors, in which case gestural motion frames the texture – we are conscious of both gesture and texture, although the gestural contour dominates, an example of gesture-framing. On the other hand, texture-carried structures are not always environments with democratic interiors where every (micro-) event is equal and individuals are subsumed in collective activity. Gestures can stand out in foreground relief from the texture. This is an example of texture-setting – texture provides a basic framework within which individual gestures act (Smalley, 1997, p.114).
From this perspective, both gesture and texture are considered as forming principles, but the dominance of one above the other will depend not only on the compositional choices but also on the understanding of the sound material. The heterogeneity of sound material can suggest different degrees of segmentation or malleability. It is a composer's task to understand the possible behaviours of the musical material, considering its properties and its affordances.
The concept of affordances brings us back to an ecological approach to perception, developed by Gibson around the '60s. Gibson's ecological approach has been further elaborated, among others, by William Gaver, with a particular focus on the aural domain. Gaver makes a clear distinction between musical and everyday listening. In musical listening, “the perceptual dimensions and attributes of concern have to do with the sound itself, and are those used in the creation of music” (Gaver, 1993, p.1). Musical listening is usually concerned with the determination of timbre, pitch, loudness, and the ways they change over time. An everyday listening instead, takes into account the experience of hearing what is happening around us: which things are to avoid, and which might offer possibilities for action: “the perceptual dimensions and attributes of concern correspond to those of the sound-producing event and its environment, not those of the sound itself” (Gaver, 1993, p.2). The distinction between these two kinds of listening modes is between the kind of experiences, not sounds. It is, of course, possible to listen to any sound either in terms of its attributes or in terms of the events that caused it: hearing the everyday world as music was one of the revolutionary proposals of John Cage, as Gaver points out. Historically, studies of acoustics and psychoacoustics have been guided largely by the concern of understanding music and sound produced by musical instruments. The latter tend to be more harmonic, compared to the inharmonic or noisy everyday sounds. Moreover, musical sounds tend to have a smoother and relatively simpler temporal evolution, while everyday sounds tend to be more complex. The switch from a musical listening to an everyday one might be relevant in the context of working with a special kind of heterogeneous sound material, such as the instrumental sound matter produced with piezo, since, like everyday sounds, it is more noisy, inharmonic, and more complex. Because of its heterogeneity, the understanding of this specific sound matter could benefit from going beyond the range of physical parameters – such as frequency, amplitude, phase, duration – and considering the perceptual experience from the perspectives of other perceptual dimensions, such as size or force, or energy input into the system.
Gaver's ecological acoustic perspective shares some insights with Smalley's spectromorphological approach, and the concepts of intrinsic and imposed morphology proposed by Wishart. In fact, an ecological perspective takes into account that the pattern of vibrations of solid objects is structured by a large number of physical attributes. The latter can be compared both to the intrinsic morphology of a sounding object and to the gesturally responsive quality of any sounding system. The material is an important intrinsic attribute that has to be taken into account: its internal structure has many complex effects on its vibrations, particularly in the temporal domain. Also the shape and size of a sounding object affect the quality of the sound produced. Size usually determines the lowest frequencies that an object can make, while its shape determines the frequencies and spectral patterns. Different kinds of interaction types – if an object is hit, or scraped, or rolled – impose differences both in the varying of the amplitude over time and the spectrum of vibrations. An impact of hitting, for instance, involves rapid and discrete deformation of an object, while the action of scraping in contrast, involves a continuous input of energy into the system. So, the various kinds of interaction modes might be compared to different gestures, with various levels of energy, that shape the imposed morphology of sound. All sounds are therefore rich in information about their physical attributes, their modes of generation, and the energy involved in their creation. Focusing on what's in the frame means also training ears to different listening modes, combining forms of musical and everyday listening. Assuming a double perspective, sound material can be understood as “sound-itself”, detached from any external context, but also as the embodied and ecological result of different modes of generations, reproduction, or destruction. This twofold approach contributes to a better understanding of crucial information for the comprehension and the definition of the sound material, as well as to the creation of a more precise aural memory of heterogeneous sound material that the composer chooses to work with.
>> go to 3.3. Proximity of sound
Working with piezos challenged my usual compositional approach. A stethoscopic use of this technology on traditional acoustic instruments provokes a new way of listening to the sound matter. As already mentioned the use of piezo facilitates a form of technical listening, which frames the instrumental sounds within a clearer auditory space. The heterogeneous sound matter inside the frame asks for a better understanding in order to be chosen as part of the material the composer can work with. Using piezo I felt the need to better understand the properties of the instrumental sound matter being explored, also in order to understand how these properties could lend themselves to different kinds of manipulation, transformation, and organization. Therefore one of the first questions in my project has been concerned with the heterogeneous nature of the instrumental sound matter, which would become part of my vocabulary. In her book Listening through the noise, Joanna Demers structures a vast discourse about genres in electronic music since 1980, considering how electronic music has changed the way we listen not only to music, but to sound itself, outlining her perspective on "sound" as material.
What I mean by material here amounts to the objectified, audible phenomena in electronic music, from notes and rhythms to sound grains, clicks, timbres, even silence; it is, as Adorno puts it, 'what artists work with' (1997, 147).” (Demers, 2010, p.43).
Joanna Demers refers to the heterogeneous material of the composer's work, pointing out how any kind of “objectified, audible phenomena”, from pre-existing to newly created sounds, could be intended as material. In fact, if the act of composing can be seen as the practice of organizing sound, the sound itself can be intended as the raw material the composer chooses to work with.
Nowadays composers tend to deal with a wide range of sound possibilities, since any sound can gain the status of musical material. As Curtis Roads observes, referring to Varèse, “the philosophy of organized sound extended the boundaries of accepted musical material, and hence the scope of composition, to a wider range of acoustic phenomena.” (Roads, 2004, p.327). Consequently, the composer needs to find strategies to adapt her own work to this wide range of heterogeneous acoustic phenomena, that present different temporalities, different morphologies and different properties. Demers observes that most of the time the discourse about material needs to converge to the activities – construction, reproduction, or deconstruction – that generates it: “As a concept material may encapsulate the dual concerns of sound itself and sound generation, concerns that […] are traits held in common among many electronica genres” (Demers, 2010, p.43). It is interesting to stress this double perspective on sound material. On one hand, Demers takes into consideration the sound material as the “sound itself”, the “objectified, audible phenomenon”, detached from any external semantic content – as in the most significant case of microsound music, addressed in her fourth chapter, in which she observes how the use of minimal particles of material tends to nullify any “external referentiality, converting sound into raw objects” (Demers, 2010 p.70). On the other hand, she considers the sound material from the perspective of its mode of generation, as the product of construction, reproduction, or destruction. She sees it as a malleable material that, in opposition to Schaeffer's formulation of the sound-object, can hardly be separated from its modes of production or from the media on which it is affixed: “material necessarily refers back to its own generation, and so, any discussion of material must include actions and devices involved in its creation” (Demers, 2010, p.43). Any information about the source, actions and devices involved in the mode of production of a specific sound provides knowledge about its potentialities and about the different possibilities to work on it, also in relationship with other sounds.
I have personally experienced that information provided by the mode of production is very important in the process of comprehension and definition of the sound material. Extending Demers' discourse beyond electronic music, I would like to show an example taken from Prossimo (2017), a piece for violin and electronics. At the time of composing the piece, among a vast array of materials I collected a specific sound: a fast repeated sound on the first string (ex. 3.2.1). In order to identify it as part of my material and to define it, I felt the need to indicate the devices and the actions involved in its production. The action consists of a continuous and fast ribattuto, and the same repeated gesture involves at least two devices: the violin as the resonator – whose resonant body is amplified through a piezo attached to it - and the bow as the exciter. The sound embodies different kinds of information about its mode of production: it is played col legno, on a specific string, in correspondence to a certain harmonic node, with a defined energy level, i.e. dynamics. At the same time, as I will explain later, this sound has been stored as a “sound itself”, as a raw object, suitable for further manipulations.
In the Italian translation of Helmut Lachenmann's essays there is an interview by Enzo Restagno, in which the composer tells a brief story. When he was a student in Köln, attending Stockhausen's lessons, Henri Pousseur was there to teach, and he asked Lachenmann to name the first sound that came to his mind. He replied: “the barking of a dog”. Pousseur posed the same question to another student, who replied “the sound of a harp”. Then, he asked the twelve present students to develop a scale, that from the sound of a barking dog proceeds to the sound of a harp (Lachenmann, 2010, pp.26-27). Of course, each student came up with a different way to connect these two sounds. Besides observing the evident heterogeneity of these two sounds and how, nevertheless, each student found out her own way to create with them a musical moment, the interesting aspect of this short story lies in Pousseur's request to develop a scale, as the strategy to connect two distant sound-events. The notion of scale implies the notion of direction and movement. Therefore, in my opinion, Pousseur's request assumes that the creation of a structural relationship between two sounds implies the understanding of their potential possibilities of movement, which in turn is linked to the recognition of the development of the internal trajectory of the sound-event itself. Andrea Valle addresses this issue as a matter of internal and external temporality:
In order to be recognized, audible figures require a nested temporality. On the one hand, the identification of a figure supposes that the figure itself is placed in a context of a temporality that is “external” to the figure. But on the other side, the figure itself is still an object to be appreciated “in real time”, an intrinsically temporal figure which reveals (or at least can reveal) an “internal” temporality (Valle, 2015, pp.76-77).
The composer, in fact, constantly faces the need to negotiate between the internal temporality of the audible figure or sound-object, and the external one, i.e. the structure to which the former refers. The question of temporality is related to the issue of the time scales inhabited by the sound material. In his book Microsounds, Curtis Roads (2004) outlines nine different time scales, specifying for each of them also a chronological range. For example, the “sound object time scale” goes from a fraction of a second to several seconds, the “meso time scale” is usually measured in minutes or seconds, while the “macro time scale” is measured in minutes, or hours, or, in very extreme cases, days. Both the “meso” and the “macro” time scales refer to what has been described above as the external temporality: the “meso time scale” represents the local time in which musical ideas unfold, and processes of development, progression, juxtaposition of different sound objects take place; while the “macro time scale” concerns the notion of form, the architecture of the composition. From the composer's perspective, both these time scales are related to the organization of the sound material. The “sound-object time scale” is instead the time scale of the material itself. In fact, Roads compares the sound object with the note, as the elementary unit of composition in the score, even if he distinguishes the former as heterogeneous and the latter as homogeneous. The heterogeneity of a sound object derives from the fact that two sound objects may not share common properties: they could present different temporalities, different morphologies and different properties. Instead, the homogeneity of a note derives from its static set of properties (pitch, timbre, dynamic, duration) that allows abstraction and efficiency in the musical language. A similar comparison with the note is made also by Denis Smalley, who compares it with the notion of gesture:
The basic gesture of traditional instrumental music produces the note. In tonal music, notes form a consistent low-level unit, and are grouped into higher levelled gestural contours, into phraseological styles, which traditionally have been based on breath groups. Singers and wind-players, after all, have to breathe. In electroacoustic music the scale of gestural impetus is also variable, from the smallest attack to the broad sweep of a much longer gesture, continuous in its motion and flexible in its pacing. The notion of gesture as a forming principle is concerned with propelling time forwards, with moving away from one goal towards the next goal in the structure – the energy of motion expressed through spectral and morphological change (Smalley, 1997, p.113).
With his theory of spectromorphology Smalley introduces the notion of gesture as a forming principle, considering its conditions of motion. Smalley defines spectromorphology as a descriptive tool based on aural perspective, to study sound changes and transformation over time. The term is derived from the Schaefferian term typomorphology (Schaeffer, 1966). Smalley's approach considers sound materials and musical structures from the perspective of the spectra of pitches and their shaping in time. Spectral and morphological changes over time are the consequences of the activity that generates the sound material:
Sound-making gesture is concerned with human, physical activity which has spectromorphological consequences: a chain of activity links a cause to a source. A human agent produces spectromorphologies via the motion of gesture, using the sense of touch or an implement to apply energy to a sound body. A gesture is therefore an energy-motion trajectory which excites the sounding body, creating spectromorphological life (Smalley, 1997, p.113).
Similarly, the notion of gesture linked to the aspect of energy is relevant also to Trevor Wishart who makes a clear distinction between the “intrinsic” and the “imposed” morphology of sound (Wishart 1986). The intrinsic morphology concerns the properties of the sounding system, while the imposed morphology relates to the energy input into the system. In order to make this distinction clearer he proposes three sound examples from the category of continuous sounds: a sustained sound of a violin, of a synthesiser, and the one of a bell. According to their physical properties the first two sounding systems – the violin and the synthesiser – require a constant input of energy in order to produce a long sound, whether the bell needs just a single input of energy to resonate for a long time. So, considering any sounding system as gesturally responsive, the definition of the sound material depends not only on the physical properties of the system, but also on the definition of the gesture that shapes its imposed morphology.
During the compositional process, the composer shapes her own raw matter through a clearer definition of single gestures, choosing for a certain imposed morphology. Going back to the first example of the ribattuto sound of the violin, I can observe how it has been shaped throughout the piece. In the first line, it has simply assumed different rhythmical contours (ex.3.2.2).
Through simple subtraction operations, the sense of continuity that the material presents at its first stage appears somehow broken. The same feature of continuity is instead reinforced when, at the end of the first line, the ribattuto sound is recorded to be electronically processed through a granulator (ex. 3.2.3); while, approaching the end of the first part (bb.13-14), the ribattuto sound is altered in its pitch through a glissando movement – also in the electronics (ex. 3.2.4). Lastly, during the final part of the piece (from b.130), the same sound material appears again, but this time it is played with the piezoelectric microphone and no more with the legno of the bow: one aspect of its mode of production changes since the piezo becomes the exciter. The timbre is therefore affected, even if the material is still very well recognizable (audio ex.3.2.5).
