Capturing, Crystallizing and Fragmenting Time - An Introduction to Sonic Arts,

Before the invention of the sound recording and the movie camera, there was no way of capturing the images and echoes of the movement and sounds of life. We do not know how Beethoven (1770 ­ 1828) spoke, or how Mozart (1756 ­ 1791) moved. Written accounts of the day provide some sense of the shadow images of these things, but one man's "gruff" is another woman's "manly".

Today, we capture time, delay it, play with it and transform it: we record, playback, create sonic art objects, and morph the voice of a woman into that of a sustained guitar note (Cher's recent album). As far back as 1624 (27?), Francis Bacon in his, New Atlantis, proposes ...

"We also have sound houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds, and their generation ... We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it: and some that give back the voice louder shriller deeper We also have means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distance."

This paper introduces on overview of the field of sonic arts, focusing on the developments related to sound in a non-verbal (abstract) context, parenthetically as 'music', but centerring on 'music and sound' technologies, and electroacoustics / computer music. In five basic sections:

General Introduction
Let's get Physical (and not so Physical)
You Mean 'What does 'mean', mean?' (Some antics with words)
Biased Histories
Sources / Addenda / Varia

This can be viewed in full by visiting: http://music.concordia.ca/FFAR_250/FFAR_Reading_Ea.html


Kevin Austin, 1999 VI/VII



















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