Leigh Landy: What’s the Matter with Today’s Experimental Music? Organized Sound Too Rarely Heard (1991)

What’s the Matter with Today’s Experimental Music? is based on the premise that contemporary music is suffering from a distinct lack of attention. It inspects and evaluates what is happening to musical experimentation, where things might have gone wrong and what can be done to resolve the problem. Intended as a supplement to surveys of music of the last forty years, it discusses not only the problems of musical content, but also problems of an extra-musical nature. Today’s education and communications media are seen to be the main cause of the anonymity of contemporary music and suggestions are made to improve this situation. Leigh Landy investigates audio-visual applications that have hardly been explored, new timbres and sound sources, the discovery of musical space, new notations, musical politics, and the ‘musical community’ in an attempt to incite more composers, musicians and musicologists to get this music out into the works and to stimulate the creation of new experimental works.

Publisher Routledge, 1991
ISBN 3718651688, 9783718651689
308 pages

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Leigh Landy: Understanding the Art of Sound Organization (2007)

The art of sound organization, also known as electroacoustic music, uses sounds not available to traditional music making, including pre-recorded, synthesized, and processed sounds. The body of work of such sound-based music (which includes electroacoustic art music, turntable composition, computer games, and acoustic and digital sound installations) has developed more rapidly than its musicology. Understanding the Art of Sound Organization proposes the first general foundational framework for the study of the art of sound organization, defining terms, discussing relevant forms of music, categorizing works, and setting sound-based music in interdisciplinary contexts.

Leigh Landy’s goal in this book is not only to create a theoretical framework but also to make sound-based music more accessible—to give a listener what he terms “something to hold on to,” for example, by connecting elements in a work to everyday experience. Landy considers the difficulties of categorizing works and discusses such types of works as sonic art and electroacoustic music, pointing out where they overlap and how they are distinctive. He proposes a “sound-based music paradigm” that transcends such traditional categories as art and pop music. Landy defines patterns that suggest a general framework and places the study of sound-based music in interdisciplinary contexts, from acoustics to semiotics, proposing a holistic research approach that considers the interconnectedness of a given work’s history, theory, technological aspects, and social impact.

The author’s ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS, www.ears.dmu.ac.uk), the architecture of which parallels this book’s structure, offers updated bibliographic resource abstracts and related information.

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
ISBN 0262122928, 9780262122924
303 pages

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David Toop: Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (1995/2001)

Sun Ra, Brian Eno, Lee Perry, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Brian Wilson are interviewed in this extraordinary work of sonic history that travels from the rainforests of amazonas to virtual Las Vegas, from David Lynch’s dream house, high in the Hollywood hills to the megalopolis of Tokyo.

Ocean of Sound begins in 1889 at the Paris Exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed. It goes on to comprehensively map a whole century of ambient music and its legacy.

Publisher Serpent’s Tail, 1995
ISBN 185242382X, 9781852423827
306 pages

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