Living Electronic Music

Drawing on recent ideas that explore new environments and the changing situations of composition and performance, Simon Emmerson provides a significant contribution to the study of contemporary music, bridging history, aesthetics and the ideas behind evolving performance practices. Whether created in a studio or performed on stage, how does electronic music reflect what is live and living? What is it to perform 'live' in the age of the laptop? Many performer-composers draw upon a 'library' of materials, some created beforehand in a studio, some coded 'on the fly', others 'plundered' from the widest possible range of sources. But others refuse to abandon traditionally 'created and structured' electroacoustic work. Lying behind this maelstrom of activity is the perennial relationship to 'theory', that is, ideas, principles and practices that somehow lie behind composers' and performers' actions. Some composers claim they just 'respond' to sound and compose 'with their ears', while others use models and analogies of previously 'non-musical' processes. It is evident that in such new musical practices the human body has a new relationship to the sound. There is a historical dimension to this, for since the earliest electroacoustic experiments in 1948 the body has been celebrated or sublimated in a strange 'dance' of forces in which it has never quite gone away but rarely been overtly present. The relationship of the body performing to the spaces around has also undergone a revolution as the source of sound production has shifted to the loudspeaker. Emmerson considers these issues in the framework of our increasingly 'acousmatic' world in which we cannot see the source of the sounds we hear.

The vast leaps being made in live and interactive technology, and the increasing availability of immensely sophisticated equipment have opened up a tremendously exciting world for today's composers working with live electronic music. This book comprises essays from working composers, who provide their own unique insight into how live electronic music impacts and audience, the performance situation and ultimately, music. Also includes 12 musical examples. Marc Battier has composed several live electronic pieces in the last twenty years. He is associate professor at the University of Sorbonne in Paris.

In this book, scholars and artists explore the relation between electronic music and bodily expression from perspectives including aesthetics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, dance and interactive performance arts, sociology, computer music and sonic arts, and music theory, transgressing disciplinary boundaries and established beliefs. The historic decoupling of action and sound generation might be seen to have distorted or even effaced the expressive body, with the retention of performance qualities via recoupling not equally retaining bodily expressivity. When, where, and what is the body expressed in electronic music then? The authors of this book reveal composers’, performers’, improvisers’ and listeners’ bodies, as well as the works’ and technologies’ figurative bodies as a rich source of expressive articulation. Bringing together humanities’ scholarship and musical arts contingent upon new media, the contributors offer inspiring thought and critical reflection for all those seriously engaged with the aesthetics of electronic music, interactive performance, and the body’s role in aesthetic experience and expression. Performativity is not only seen as being reclaimed in live electronic music, interactive arts, and installations; it is also exposed as embodied in the music and the listeners themselves.

A music-career book like no other, The Music Producer’s Survival Guide offers a wide-ranging, exploratory, yet refreshing down-to-earth take on living the life of the independent electronic music producer. If you are an intellectually curious musician/producer eager to make your mark in today’s technologically advanced music business, you’re in for a treat. This new edition includes industry and technological updates, additional interviews, and tips about personal finances, income, and budgets. In this friendly, philosophical take on the art and science of music production, veteran producer, engineer, and teacher Brian Jackson shares clear, practical advice about shaping your own career in today’s computer-centric "home-studio" music world. You’ll cover music technology, philosophy of music production, career planning, networking, craft and creativity, the DIY ethos, lifestyle considerations, and much more. Brian’s thoughtful approach will teach you to integrate your creative passion, your lifestyle, and your technical know-how. The Music Producer’s Survival Guide is the first music-production book to consider the influence of complexity studies and chaos theory on music-making and career development. It focuses on practicality while traversing a wide spectrum of topics, including essential creative process techniques, the TR-808, the proliferation of presets, the butterfly effect, granular synthesis, harmonic ratios, altered states, fractal patterns, the dynamics of genre evolution, and much more. Carving out your niche in music today is an invigorating challenge that will test all your skills and capacities. Learn to survive—and thrive—as a creative-technical professional in today’s music business, with the help of Brian Jackson and The Music Producer’s Survival Guide!

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.

Performing Electronic Music Live lays out conceptual approaches, tools, and techniques for electronic music performance, from DJing, DAWs, MIDI controllers, traditional instruments, live sound design, hardware setups, custom software and hardware, to live visuals, venue acoustics, and live show promotion. Through case studies and contrasting tutorials by successful artists, Kirsten Hermes explores the many different ways in which you can create memorable experiences on stage. Featuring interviews with highly accomplished musicians and practitioners, readers can also expand on their knowledge with hands-on video tutorials for each chapter via the companion website, performingelectronicmusic.live. Performing Electronic Music Live is an essential, all-encompassing resource for professionals, students of music production courses, and researchers in the field of creative-focused performance technology.

Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect. Cultural liberation and musical innovation. Pyrotechnics, bottle service, bass drops, and molly. Electronic dance music has been a vital force for more than three decades now, and has undergone transformation upon transformation as it has taken over the world. In this searching, lyrical account of dance music culture worldwide, Matthew Collin takes stock of its highest highs and lowest lows across its global trajectory. Through firsthand reportage and interviews with clubbers and DJs, Collin documents the itinerant musical form from its underground beginnings in New York, Chicago, and Detroit in the 1980s, to its explosions in Ibiza and Berlin, to today’s mainstream music scenes in new frontiers like Las Vegas, Shanghai, and Dubai. Collin shows how its dizzying array of genres—from house, techno, and garage to drum and bass, dubstep, and psytrance—have given voice to locally specific struggles. For so many people in so many different places, electronic dance music has been caught up in the search for free cultural space: forming the soundtrack to liberation for South African youth after Apartheid; inspiring a psychedelic party culture in Israel; offering fleeting escape from—and at times into—corporatization in China; and even undergirding a veritable “independent republic” in a politically contested slice of the former Soviet Union. Full of admiration for the possibilities the music has opened up all over the world, Collin also unflinchingly probes where this utopianism has fallen short, whether the culture maintains its liberating possibilities today, and where it might go in the future.