Curtis Roads: Microsound (2001)

“Below the level of the musical note lies the realm of microsound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of music—notes and their intervals—into a more fluid and supple medium. The sensations of point, pulse (series of points), line (tone), and surface (texture) emerge as particle density increases. Sounds coalesce, evaporate, and mutate into other sounds.

Composers have used theories of microsound in computer music since the 1950s. Distinguished practitioners include Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. Today, with the increased interest in computer and electronic music, many young composers and software synthesis developers are exploring its advantages. Covering all aspects of composition with sound particles, Microsound offers composition theory, historical accounts, technical overviews, acoustical experiments, descriptions of musical works, and aesthetic reflections.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2001
ISBN 0262182157, 9780262182157
xii+409 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)
Accompanying CD (68 FLAC files, ZIP, added on 2013-9-11)

Simon Emmerson (ed.): Music, Electronic Media, and Culture (2000)

Technology revolutionised the ways that music was produced in the twentieth century. As that century drew to a close and a new century begins a new revolution in roles is underway. The separate categories of composer, performer, distributor and listener are being challenged, while the sounds of the world itself become available for musical use. All kinds of sounds are now brought into the remit of composition, enabling the music of others to be sampled (or plundered), including that of unwitting musicians from non-western cultures. This sound world may appear contradictory – stimulating and invigorating as well as exploitative and destructive. This book addresses some of the issues now posed by the brave new world of music produced with technology.

Contents: Introduction, Simon Emmerson; Part One: Listening and interpreting: Through and around the acousmatic: the interpretation of electroacoustic sounds, Luke Windsor; Simulation and reality: the new sonic objects, Ambrose Field; Beyond the acousmatic: hybrid tendencies in electroacoustic music, Simon Waters; Part Two: Cultural noise: Plunderphonics, Chris Cutler; Crossing cultural boundaries through technology?, Simon Emmerson; Cacophony, Robert Worby; Part Three: New places, spaces and narratives: Art on air: a proile of new radio art, Kersten Glandien; ‘Losing touch’? the human performer and electronics, Simon Emmerson; Stepping outside for a moment: narrative space in two works for sound alone, Katharine Norman; Index.

Publisher Ashgate, 2000
ISBN 0754601099, 9780754601098
252 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)

Michael Nyman: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd ed. (1974/1999)

“Michael Nyman’s book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing which developed alongside, and partly in opposition to, the post-war modernist tradition of composers such as Boulez, Berio, or Stockhausen. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4’ 33’’ consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence to be performed on any instrument. Such pieces have a conceptual rather than purely musical starting point and radically challenge conventional notions of the musical work. Nyman’s book traces the revolutionary attitudes that were developed towards concepts of time, space, sound, and composer/performer responsibility. It was within the experimental tradition that the seeds of musical minimalism were sown and the book contains reference to the early works of Reich, Riley, Young, and Glass.”

Second edition
Foreword by Brian Eno
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1999
ISBN 0521653835, 9780521653831
196 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-11-4)