That said, a lot of more modern aesthetics are also connected to it to this day such as a lot of the Belgian and Quebec traditions. Musique concrète as a concept is quite tightly connected to the RTF studios and the philosophy of Pierre Schaeffer which was really quite different than say the Cologne Studio when that popped up. One of the differences for musique concrète compared to say acousmatic music is also the time period and aesthetics of it all. These units can be gotten used for fairly cheap.Īlso, I think there's something to be said for the "old school" approach to the studio instead of having everything in software, have it in discrete hardware units, like samplers, pulse generators, etc, like Stockhausen did. It's basically a new type of "tape recorder". It's "all one." Good luck with your adventures in sound.Ībout the Ensoniq, I also have a Yamaha A4000 sampler, which would be excellent for creating musique concrete, or pitched sounds. He also showed that pulse-tones (sounding like drum beats), when speeded-up, become pitches. Since sound, even sustained pitches, consists of individual harmonics, which Karlheinz Stockhausen demonstrated in his piece where he placed a microphone on a sustained gong sound at various places, producing the individual harmonics (which sounded like electronic sine tones), then the continuum is revealed. Yes, this makes it more timbrally and texturally experienced. I think that what distinguishes musique concrete from traditional music is that it is not pitched it's more like percussion in this sense, in that it is "noise"-based instead of sustained pitch-based. musique concrète is largely perceived timbrally and texturally rather than melodically. Perhaps a distinction should be made in the character of the music? I.e. But a pitched sound treated as its own motif, or an unpitched sound treated as a pitched instrument, or an unpitched sound treated as its own motif, that is different. If the sound is pitched and treated as a pitched instrument, there is nothing special there. I think the technology used is less important to musique concrète than the original sounds and how they are treated. If it's not barred then why not newer manipulation techniques such as convolution, distortion, and I can't think of a third thing right now but I'm sure there are other techniques we have available now that they didn't then. It creates fantastic soundscapes ranging from hellish to heavenly. But should it be barred by dint of being to modern? I would say the pioneers of MC certainly would've used this technique if they had it available. This forms the background of my piece, wherein I've taken an 8-second sample of existing music and stretched it to over 6 minutes. Regarding speed changes, we have another modern innovation that brings new life into this technique-Paulstretch, an algorithm that similarly granularizes a sound but then smears the grains together to infinitely prolong any sound. I'm able to do it instantaneously with a computer. He had to do it with tape splicing and a tone generator. Inspired by Xenakis, I've also used granular synthesis in my piece, wherein a sample is "granularized" and the playback of the grains can be adjusted to break apart the sound. Maybe not "strict" or "classic" MC, but I do believe it's still in the spirit of MC to experiment with sounds using available technology (this tech was developed in the '70s). In much the same way, I would argue wavetable synthesis can be used for musique concrète as long as 1) the sample used for synthesis is a found sound and 2) the results do not produce a recognizable melody or harmonic progression. In this case the device serves much the same function as the tape player, only allowing you to automate the speeding and slowing of the "tape" by which key you press. I would probably argue that if you can reprogram your Ensoniq synth with arbitrary samples (you probably can't though), then yes you can use it to make MC, especially if it gives you controls to modify the sound such as adjustable filters and envelopes (which were also in the purview of "old school" experimental MC). The Mellotron was also sample-based and actually used tape to store and play those samples, as I recall. Click to expand.Now you're at last on exactly the point I started this thread to discuss! Are there any sort of rules of "purity" in this genre of music? Where is the line drawn between sampling and synthesis?
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