Electronic Musician

Electronic music evokes new sensations, feelings, and thoughts in both composers and listeners. Opening the door to an unlimited universe of sound, it engages spatialization as an integral aspect of composition and focuses on sound transformation as a core structural strategy. In this new domain, pitch occurs as a flowing and ephemeral substance that can be bent, modulated, or dissolved into noise. Similarly, time occurs not merely as a fixed duration subdivided by ratios, but as a plastic medium that can be generated, modulated, reversed, warped, scrambled, and granulated. Envelope and waveform undulations on all time scales interweave to generate form. The power of algorithmic methods amplify the capabilities of music technology. Taken together, these constitute game-changing possibilities. This convergence of technical and aesthetic trends prompts the need for a new text focused on the opportunities of a sound oriented, multiscale approach to composition of electronic music. Sound oriented means a practice that takes place in the presence of sound. Multiscale means an approach that takes into account the perceptual and physical reality of multiple, interacting time scales-each of which can be composed. After more than a century of research and development, now is an appropriate moment to step back and reevaluate all that has changed under the ground of artistic practice. Composing Electronic Music outlines a new theory of composition based on the toolkit of electronic music techniques. The theory consists of a framework of concepts and a vocabulary of terms describing musical materials, their transformation, and their organization. Central to this discourse is the notion of narrative structure in composition-how sounds are born, interact, transform, and die. It presents a guidebook: a tour of facts, history, commentary, opinions, and pointers to interesting ideas and new possibilities to consider and explore.

Overview: Although the most vital and innovative trend in contemporary music, techno is notoriously difficult to define. What, exactly, is techno? Author Dan Sicko offers an entertaining, informed, and in-depth answer to this question in Techno Rebels, the music's authoritative American chronicle and a must-read for all fans of techno popular music, and contemporary culture.

Pink Noises brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures, including club and radio DJs, remixers, composers, improvisers, instrument builders, and installation and performance artists. The collection is an extension of Pinknoises.com, the critically-acclaimed website founded by musician and scholar Tara Rodgers in 2000 to promote women in electronic music and make information about music production more accessible to women and girls. That site featured interviews that Rodgers conducted with women artists, exploring their personal histories, their creative methods, and the roles of gender in their work. This book offers new and lengthier interviews, a critical introduction, and resources for further research and technological engagement. Contemporary electronic music practices are illuminated through the stories of women artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds. They include the creators of ambient soundscapes, “performance novels,” sound sculptures, and custom software, as well as the developer of the Deep Listening philosophy and the founders of the Liquid Sound Lounge radio show and the monthly Basement Bhangra parties in New York. These and many other artists open up about topics such as their conflicted relationships to formal music training and mainstream media representations of women in electronic music. They discuss using sound to work creatively with structures of time and space, and voice and language; challenge distinctions of nature and culture; question norms of technological practice; and balance their needs for productive solitude with collaboration and community. Whether designing and building modular synthesizers with analog circuits or performing with a wearable apparatus that translates muscle movements into electronic sound, these artists expand notions of who and what counts in matters of invention, production, and noisemaking. Pink Noises is a powerful testimony to the presence and vitality of women in electronic music cultures, and to the relevance of sound to feminist concerns. Interviewees: Maria Chavez, Beth Coleman (M. Singe), Antye Greie (AGF), Jeannie Hopper, Bevin Kelley (Blevin Blectum), Christina Kubisch, Le Tigre, Annea Lockwood, Giulia Loli (DJ Mutamassik), Rekha Malhotra (DJ Rekha), Riz Maslen (Neotropic), Kaffe Matthews, Susan Morabito, Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Pamela Z, Chantal Passamonte (Mira Calix), Maggi Payne, Eliane Radigue, Jessica Rylan, Carla Scaletti, Laetitia Sonami, Bev Stanton (Arthur Loves Plastic), Keiko Uenishi (o.blaat)

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During the twentieth century, electronic technology enabled the explosive development of new tools for the production, performance, dissemination and conservation of music. The era of the mechanical reproduction of music has, rather ironically, opened up new perspectives, which have contributed to the revitalisation of the performer’s role and the concept of music as performance. This book examines questions related to music that cannot be set in conventional notation, reporting and reflecting on current research and creative practice primarily in live electronic music. It studies compositions for which the musical text is problematic, that is, non-existent, incomplete, insufficiently precise or transmitted in a nontraditional format. Thus, at the core of this project is an absence. The objects of study lack a reliably precise graphical representation of the work as the composer or the composer/performer conceived or imagined it. How do we compose, perform and study music that cannot be set in conventional notation? The authors of this book examine this problem from the complementary perspectives of the composer, the performer, the musical assistant, the audio engineer, the computer scientist and the musicologist.

The Creative Electronic Music Producer examines the creative processes of electronic music production, from idea discovery and perception to the power of improvising, editing, effects processing, and sound design. Featuring case studies from across the globe on musical systems and workflows used in the production process, this book highlights how to pursue creative breakthroughs through exploration, trial and error tinkering, recombination, and transformation. The Creative Electronic Music Producer maps production's enchanting pathways in a way that will fascinate and inspire students of electronic music production, professionals already working in the industry, and hobbyists.