In this comprehensive book, the author draws together various theoretical threads that have emerged from his years of experience working in music, music-theatre and electroacoustic music. The author addresses communicative issues in the composition of sonic art from a perceptual perspective, searching for criteria for composing music with non-lattice materials which 'work' in some experientially verifiable sense.
Table of contents:
- 1. What is Sonic Art?
- 2. Beyond the Pitch/Duration Paradigm
- 3. Pythagoras, Fourier, Helmholtz: Towards a Phenomenology of Sound
- 4. The Nature of Sonic Space
- 5. Sound Structures in the Continuum
- 6. Gesture and Counterpoint
- 7. Sound Landscape
- 8. Sound-image as Metaphor: Music And Myth
- 9. Is There a Natural Morphology of Sounds?
- 10. Spatial Motion
- 11. Utterance
- 12. The Human Repertoire
- 13. Phonemic Objects
- 14. Language Stream and Paralanguage
- 15. The Group
- 16. Beyond the Instrument: Sound Models