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Spectral music (or spectralism) is a musical genre or movement originating in France in the 1970s and characterized by the use of computer analysis of sound wave components as the basis for composition. Waveforms are broken down, especially using FFT analysis, and then recreated into musical forms. Spectral music can be played either (1) electronically (by a computer or playback device delivering sound via speakers) or (2) on traditional, non-electronic instruments, requiring specially trained human performers. Often these two media are used in combination. Music is a form of art and entertainment or other human activity that involves organized and audible sounds and silence. ...
The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, inclusive. ...
Musical composition is: an original piece of music the structure of a musical piece the process of creating a new piece of music // A musical composition A piece of music exists in the form of a written composition in musical notation or as a single acoustic event (a live performance...
Waveform quite literally means the shape and form of a signal, such as a wave moving across the surface of water, or the vibration of a plucked string. ...
FFT may be: Fast Fourier transform Finite Fourier transform, another name for the discrete Fourier transform US Navy hull classification symbol for Reserve Training Frigates Final Fantasy Tactics, a video game. ...
Electronic music is a term for music created using electronic devices. ...
Look up Speaker in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
Composers
Spectral music was initially associated with composers Hugues Dufourt, Horatiu Radulescu, Gérard Grisey, and Tristan Murail. More recently the movement has broadened out into one of the most important contemporary compositional trends (quite recently in the United States; less recently in France and most of Western Europe, where the work of the spectral school was already widely known and appreciated decades ago). Among recent composers building on the spectral idea, the music of Kaija Saariaho, Phillippe Leroux, Phillippe Hurel, Marco Stroppa, and is of particular note. As was the case with impressionism and many other labels for musical style, those composers whose music has been called "spectral" do not generally accept the label. A composer is a person who writes music. ...
Horatiu Radulescu (born Horaţiu Rădulescu in Bucharest, 1942), is a noted composer, having developed his spectral technique of composition in the late 1960s. ...
Gérard Grisey (born 1946; died November 11, 1998) was a French composer of contemporary music. ...
Tristan Murail (b. ...
Kaija Saariaho (born October 14, 1952) is a Finnish composer. ...
The Impressionist movement in music is a movement in music loosely set between the late nineteenth century, up to the middle of the twentieth century. ...
Origins This music began to emerge in the 1970s and is very much a product of France's IRCAM, a pioneering institution supported by the French government and created primarily by the great composer and conductor Pierre Boulez for the purpose of exploring sound scientifically and musically. The idea of spectral music can be seen as an outgrowth of the work of composers such as Maurice Ravel and Olivier Messiaen, both of whom created harmonies and orchestrations based on the harmonic and inharmonic partials contained in complex sounds, such as multiple-stop organ tones, bell sounds, and bird song. Spectral music simply carries this principle much further and with more radical precision, made possible with the aid of computerized FFT analysis. The music of Scelsi, with its concentration on long-held, single tones, continuously mutating in timbre and other parameters, is also another important inspiration for spectral music. Philosophically, the spectralists' attitude of rigorous objectivity in the exploration of sound and the application of their discoveries to composition can be considered a continuation of traditional modernism. Spectral music at the time of its origin was also received as a direct affront to the claim of the serialists and post-serialists to the vanguard of serious musical composition and compositional technique. The IRCAM, Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, was founded in the 1970s by Pierre Boulez. ...
Pierre Boulez Pierre Boulez (IPA: /pjÉ›Ê.buˈlÉ›z/) (born March 26, 1925) is a conductor and composer of classical music. ...
Joseph-Maurice Ravel (March 7, 1875 – December 28, 1937) was a French 20th century composer and pianist, known especially for the subtlety, richness and poignancy of his music. ...
Olivier Messiaen. ...
Look up bell, Bell in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
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Giacinto Scelsi or [a horizontal line beneath a circle] (January 8, 1905 in La Spezia, Italy - August 9, 1988 in Rome, Italy) was a Italian composer whose religious beliefs partially led to his microtonal music. ...
Modernism is a term which covers a variety of political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. ...
Serialism is a technique for composing music that uses sets to describe musical elements, and allows the composer manipulations of those sets to create music. ...
Compositional technique The composition of spectral music is concerned with timbral structures, especially when decisions about timbre are informed by a mathematical analysis known as a Fast Fourier Transform. FFTs can be used to provide graphs that illustrate details about the timbral structure of a sound, which might not be initially apparent to the ear. FFTs can also be used in creating sounds with computers, in order to transform the timbre of a sound in various ways, such as creating hybrid timbres through a collection of processes known as cross-synthesis, or applying a room reverberation to a sound through a process known as convolution. If the music is to be performed by live musicians (as opposed to being played electronically via computer through speakers), then these novel effects must be translated into an extended traditional notation that can be read and executed by a human being with some additional training. The fine gradations of pitch are usually rounded off to the nearest quarter-tone or even eighth-tone - dividing the octave into 24 or 48 discrete pitches, instead of the usual twelve for Western music. Temporal aspects and dynamics are subject to similarly fine controls, creating additional notational hurdles. In music, timbre, also timber (from Fr. ...
A fast Fourier transform (FFT) is an efficient algorithm to compute the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and its inverse. ...
In mathematics and, in particular, functional analysis, convolution is a mathematical operator which takes two functions f and g and produces a third function that in a sense represents the amount of overlap between f and a reversed and translated version of g. ...
A quarter tone is an interval half as wide (aurally, or logarithmically) as a semitone, which is half a whole tone. ...
In music, an octave (sometimes abbreviated 8ve or 8va) is the interval between one musical note and another with half or double the frequency. ...
Performance In performance, spectral music often involves little or no use of electronic or computer-generated sound, yet it produces an effect that sounds "electronic" to modern ears, because the precisely calibrated deviations from the normal tunings of notes produce uncanny effects that are normally associated with electronic phenomena such as feedback, ring modulation, frequency modulation, etc. In the general field of computer music, then, spectral music is usually considered "computer assisted composition", rather than "computer generated music" or "electronic music". To perform such music on traditional instruments such as cellos or clarinets requires an extraordinarily refined training that arose first in France in response to the innovations born at IRCAM. This high degree of scientific acoustical sophistication in the performance of new music has become fairly standard in Western Europe but is much less to be found in the United States, where the general cultural conservatism during the same period (the last decades of the 20th century) produced a more relaxed, post-modern, eclectic new music repertoire, casually incorporating elements of commercial and popular music, imitations of historical styles, quotations, pastiche, neoromanticism, diatonic minimalism, etc. Feedback is (generally) information about actions. ...
Ring modulation is an audio effect performed by multiplying two audio signals, where one is typically a sine-wave or another simple waveform. ...
Frequency modulation (FM) is a form of modulation which represents information as variations in the instantaneous frequency of a carrier wave. ...
Computer music is music generated with, or composed with the aid of, computers. ...
Computer assisted composition (or computer-assisted composition) is the technique or practice of using a computer to aid in the composition of music, though the music itself may be performed either electronically or on traditional, non-electronic instruments without the use of a computer or electronic device of any kind. ...
Computer-generated music is music composed by, or with the extensive aid of, a computer. ...
Electronic music is a term for music created using electronic devices. ...
The violoncello, almost always abbreviated to cello, or cello (the c is pronounced as the ch in cheese), is a stringed instrument and a member of the violin family. ...
Two soprano clarinets: a Bâ™ clarinet (left) and an A clarinet (right, with no mouthpiece). ...
Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated pomo) is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism. ...
Popular music is music belonging to any of a number of musical styles that are accessible to the general public and are disseminated by one or more of the mass media. ...
The neutrality of this article is disputed. ...
(Disambiguation: you may be looking for Neoromanticism (music) or New Romantic (British pop music)) The term neo-romanticism is synonymous with post-Romanticism or late Romanticism. ...
In Music theory, the diatonic major scale (also known as the Guido scale), from the Greek diatonikos or to stretch out, is a fundamental building block of the European-influenced musical tradition. ...
Minimalist music is a genre of experimental music named in the 1960s which displays some or all of the following features: emphasis on consonant harmony, if not functional tonality; reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units such as figures, motifs, and cells, with subtle, gradual, and/or infrequent variation (no...
Spectral music and the United States musical scene: a distant echo Considering the enormous amount and diversity of musical and compositional activity in the United States, with so many well-funded university music schools and departments, myriad computer and electronic music studios, libraries with extensive research capabilities and plenty of scholars and graduate students always hungry for something to write about, there was a remarkable delay between the time of the major musical achievements of the French spectral composers (for example, Grisey's seminal 1975 work, Partiels) and the general awareness of spectral music in U.S. musical academia. It is fair to say that it was virtually ignored for at least a generation.Two examples suffice to make the point. 1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday. ...
In 1997, 22 years after the creation of Partiels, Joel Chadabe's "Electric Sound: the Past and Promise of Electronic Music," a book that was supposed to cover the history of computer music as well as electronic music per se, contained no mention of spectral music or any of the composers associated with it. In the late 1990s, this book was on many reading lists as a standard reference on its purported subject. To know its contents was to be considered thoroughly knowledgable. 1997 (MCMXCVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
The second example is also from 1997. That year's edition of David Cope's Techniques of the Contemporary Composer, though it supposedly covered electronic and computer music, also contained no mention of spectral music or any of the composers associated with it. This book, written by a well-published composer and academic, was similarly ubiquitous in American music school bookstores and on composers' reading lists.
But it was in precisely that year, 1997, that Tristan Murail crossed the Atlantic to take up a teaching position at Columbia University, puncturing the strange American innocence of all music spectral. Tristan Murail (b. ...
Columbia University is a private university whose main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of the Borough of Manhattan in New York City. ...
Nevertheless, even then, a general change in attitude did not happen overnight. The U.S. musical scene is only in the last few years finally beginning to deal with the enormous implications of the spectralists' innovations. Meanwhile, in Europe, even "post-spectralism" is over. What explains this immense time lag is of course beyond the scope of this article; the reader will have to look elsewhere for an answer.
See also Computer music is music generated with, or composed with the aid of, computers. ...
Computer assisted composition (or computer-assisted composition) is the technique or practice of using a computer to aid in the composition of music, though the music itself may be performed either electronically or on traditional, non-electronic instruments without the use of a computer or electronic device of any kind. ...
Electronic music is a term for music created using electronic devices. ...
The IRCAM, Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, was founded in the 1970s by Pierre Boulez. ...
Bibliography
Books - Cohen-Lévinas, Danielle; Création musicale et analyse aujourd'hui (Paris : Eska, 1996) ISBN 2869115105
- Fineberg, Joshua; Spectral music : history and techniques (Overseas Publishers Association, published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, ©2000) OCLC: 48862556
City flag City coat of arms Motto: Fluctuat nec mergitur (Latin: Tossed by the waves, she does not sink) Location Coordinates Time Zone CET (GMT +1) Administration Country France Région Île-de-France Département Paris (75) Subdivisions 20 arrondissements Mayor Bertrand Delanoë (PS) (since 2001) City Statistics Land...
1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ...
This article is about the year 2000. ...
OCLC Online Computer Library Center was founded in 1967 and originally named the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC). ...
Articles - Grisey, Gérard. 1987. "Tempus ex machina: a Composer's Reflections on Musical Time." Contemporary Music Review 2, no. 1:238–75.
- Rose, François. 1996. "Introduction to the Pitch Organization of French Spectral Music." Perspectives of New Music 34, no. 2 (Summer): 6–39.
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