Free music and the discipline of sound

Abstract

The history of music in the twentieth century is viewed as a process of expanding the sonic material of music to include all sound. Technological barriers to the full exploitation of the domain of sound are suggested as causing the process to take more time than it would otherwise due to cultural or aesthetic factors alone. Important historical developments in music over the last century are reconsidered to be, at least in part, strategies for circumventing technological limitations to manipulating and accessing all sound. Support for this perspective is found in the words of artists and composers of the time and in comparisons between the technologies available for creation in the visual and the sonic arts. Sound modelling is examined as a post all-sound paradigm holding promise for normalising the relationship between sound and music.

Sounds of the system: the emancipation of noise in the music of Carsten Nicolai

“…I never wanted to go down one path, but have always faced up to contradictions … Creating polarities is a principle behind my work' (Nicolai 2002). By analysing the structures of Carsten Nicolai's music on both the microscopic and the macroscopic, we shall see that Nicolai has benefited from twentieth-century composers' 'introduction of ''all sound'' as the material for making music' (Wyse 2003), while simultaneously adopting the procedures of mainstream popular music. This paper argues, however, that sounds typically considered extraneous are now musicalised in the work of Carsten Nicolai and that the true potential of what may be considered 'noise' is recognised in the CD autorec and the track Impulse which appears on the rasternoton CD, oacis.…”

“…Technology has been central to all three developments in the emancipation of noise. The inspiration behind Russolo's Art of Noises manifesto 'came largely from the sounds of the post industrial revolution city' (Wyse 2003). The advent of electrical amplification through the valve and transistor led to the use of distortion so that by the 1960s, 'Noise was gradually being accepted by rock musicians as a musical element that can be controlled' (Vorvelt 2006).…”