Compositional Practices and Intuition
When composing I obviously rely heavily on trying to intuitively understand the sonic materials I work with. A current project I am working on emerges from a relatively simple idea, with sonic material derived from basic analog oscillators generating sound waves in a studio setting that mimics an electroacoustic composition studio of the 1960s. The overarching goal of the project is to attempt to introduce change in my working process by replacing the modern music studio production tools with the technologies that were available prior to the introduction of, in particular, the computer. This is also related to the discussion above about the influence of the digital studio on the practice of composing, which in turn is related to the fact that the computer has become a widely-used instrument upon which maintaining originality becomes increasingly difficult. The attempt here is to change the conditions for the composition process in order to focus on the act of listening. Through this process I hope to better understand how various kinds of technologies affect my creative process. This work in progress will only be presented briefly; the main objective here is to point to another possible way of using Bergson's method of intuition and to understand its impact on a compositional practice such as the one presented here.
The general compositional idea takes as its point of departure the beating that occurs between pitches in certain harmonic relations, typically when the pitch difference between two pitches is small. The use of beatings is common in many contexts and is described in detail by Hermann von Helmholtz in his seminal work On the Sensations of Tone ([1874] 1954).[13] Beatings are an example of a transgression of what is considered normal in the listening experience: an effect arises that can become dominant, sometimes masking the original sounds. There is nothing new about using interference in electronic music; it is widely used in synthesis and processing. What makes it interesting in this context is the way it creates a sonic topology that guides the listening. When still discernible, the original sounds together with the added beating make it possible to navigate the sound in multiple dimensions in the act of listening. A sine wave by itself is not a harmonic sound and lacks the attractiveness of complex sounds, but two sine waves sounding together can, in some cases, form a dynamic sound that is complex enough to draw the listener into it. In the example in Figure 4 this process is exemplified with very simple means.
Although the beating patterns between two pitches can be easily calculated,[14] the sounding result of the interference is different than the calculation and, again following Bergson, an analysis from the outside will be a reduction compared to the one performed from the inside. In the example in Figure 3, the sound is represented in a mono recording that can be heard either as just one channel or the same sound in two or more channels, depending on your playback device. Putting two tones that generate a beating in different places in the sound field impacts the sound and the experience of it. In the short example in Sound Example 3, the two sine waves are spaced apart (left and right) in the beginning and gradually panned to the center, revealing the impact that space has on this effect.
For the composition, the pitch relations that I use are derived from a set of improvisations from which I deduct the patterns that I wish to continue working with based on composer James Tenney’s harmonic space proposed in “On ’Crystal Growth’ in Harmonic Space (1993–1998)” (2008). Once I have found the series of sounds and continuous transformations that I wish to work with, I notate the pitches and the transformations I played in order to maintain a certain conceptual stability to the process.[15] The notation in this case is an abstraction of the analysis derived from the intuitive act of listening and tuning. An excerpt of one such notated improvisation may be found in Figure 5, and it should be noted that the main point of this exercise for me is to become acquainted with the material and tune my listening to the various forms of interferences in the intervals in the scale.
The next stage (which I have not started yet) in the process will involve a realization of the notation back into sound, which will be performed in a studio environment designed in collaboration with Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm. This studio is equipped with signal generators, filters, and tape recorders – most from the 1950s and 1960s – that have been acquired from the large collection maintained by the Swedish National Collections of Music, Theatre, and Dance. In comparison to the digital studios of today, much of this equipment is noisy and inexact, and the work processes involve tedious repetition and are error-prone. In the studio, I will interpret the notation with the tools available to me and record it using reel-to-reel tape recorders. Although I have used a computer to generate some of the material as well as the notation, in the act of realization of the notation I will limit myself to the equipment in the studio. Because of slight errors in the oscillator, the inexactness of the tape recorder, and the human factor, the result will be an approximation of the seemingly exact notation. It is only through listening that the acceptable margin of error can be assessed; in other words, the "correctness" may only be evaluated from the inside of the sound, not from the system alone.
It is incontestable that there is an active mode of listening in most compositional practices, and I am not proposing that the listening performed in this project is different in nature. As was the case with the saxophone-musician system described above, however, it is only partly correct to claim that it is from within the sound that the intuitive relation to the material occurs in the different steps of the process. The role of listening here will be even more extensively connected to, and affected by, the larger system, including all aspects of the activity. The system by means of which the pitches were chosen, the notation, and the equipment that will render the sound all affect the listening. This is where Bergson's method of intuition makes sense as a means to understand the artistic process. Intuition allows me to engage with the system of production from within, but it requires that I acknowledge all of its parts: from the moment of the birth of the concept, through the choice of pitches, timbres, and rhythms, to the notation and the reinterpretation of the notation for the analog tone generators and the tape recorder. Hence, this process – which stretches out over time and space – allows for a modality of listening different from what one may implement when listening to the sound alone without knowledge of, or access to, information about the larger system. This is comparable to how listening to the recording of rainfall at night, discussed above, or any sound whose source is recognizable, is an experience that depends on past as well as present experiences, and perhaps even future ones, when the sound is decoded in an act of creative imagination. Under the right circumstances, intuition can operate freely in this system and help me to better understand where in the chain of elements adjustments need to be made. It may also reveal biases and their effects within the various parts of the system.
I can engage analytically within this intuition, which is basically what might be referred to as reflection, and this analysis may also contribute to changes in the process. With analysis from the outside, important information may be gathered, but an integrated understanding of the entire system will be difficult to achieve, as parts of the analysis will then be derived from different stages of the process: the sounding result and the memory of prior processes, such as the notation and conceptual development, will in those cases not be part of the same structure. If I work in the studio, I can use a spectral analysis tool to gather information about the sound, and I can learn a great deal about it this way, but if I wish to have a deeper understanding of the sound, its origin and meaning, I also need to be able to navigate in the larger network of activities that led to the sound; I need to move in a continuum from outside to inside, from analysis to intuition, whereas the spectral analysis only gives me a snapshot at one moment in time.
Figure 4: Using three 7-limit intervals, the fourth and two very close intervals, this example shows how the beating pattern is introduced, with the 75/56 pitch creating 1.557 beats per second. Changing the interval to a smaller difference (75/56 and 98/75, with a beating of 8.534 beats per second) increases the speed of the beating and, with the last interval, the speed of the beating slightly decreases.