Experimental Music

This thesis tries to elucidate and exemplify possible intersections between experimental rock of the late 60s and early 70s and the field of electroacoustic music, focusing mostly on production/compositional techniques and aesthetic approaches. A historical overview of the context which experimental rock emerged from is attempted, exploring why and how certain production techniques were used at that period in rock music and investigating into whether the aesthetic outcome of these techniques relates to experiments in the field of electroacoustic music. Musical examples from the field of classical, jazz and rock styles (including artists like Glenn Gould, Lennie Tristano, Miles Davis, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Fred Frith (Henry Cow) and Frank Zappa) are addressed for the sake of exploring different experimental studio practices. Moreover, a part of this research deals with the creative exploration of the production techniques discussed in order to develop my personal compositional work and eventually to create a framework where a discussion about composing electroacoustic music from the perspective of rock production (and vice-versa!) could emerge.

In her close professional relationship to composers, such as Luciano Berio, John Cage, Hans Werner Henze, Igor Stravinsky and Sylvano Bussotti, Cathy Berberian has productively tainted historical preconceptions about the authorial “work” and the role of the singer in the realization of the composer’s creation. Her flamboyant character on the concert stage, where she showcased her more popular work, captured the public’s imagination. The success of this performer–audience rapport was intrinsic to the singer’s performative persona; however Pieter Verstraete argues that through her own composed work ("Stripsody" is the best known), Berberian presented a myriad of personas. She achieved this primarily by deconstructing her own voice as instrument and object, thereby subverting the stability of her relationship to the authorial power of the musical score. Consequently, Berberian’s work invites us to rethink the authorial position of the composer in relation to the singer/performer as well as the enhanced position of the listener whose function it is to imagine such personas in relation to seeing and hearing the performer’s singing body over a number of changing instances.

Discussions of “silent cinema” have generally focused on films made during the silent era (1894–1929). Even after the spread of synchronized sound, however, several experimental filmmakers created films without soundtracks, purely visual experiences that challenged cinema’s status as a multisensory medium. This article gives close attention to Stan Brakhage’s 1959 film "Window Water Baby Moving" as a way of outlining
some of the effects of cinematic silence, such as aesthetic ambiguity and a heightened awareness of cinema’s visual rhythms.

Since the late 1970s, Nigel Ayers (b. 1957, UK) has cut a bracing, subversive path through the contemporary underground, bridging DIY industrial enthusiasms with multimedia experimentation to form a singular body of work. Co-founder of the groups The Pump and Nocturnal Emissions (along with brother Daniel Ayers and then-partner Caroline Kaye), Ayers has been a contributor to and proponent of industrial music’s high-water marks, his Sterile Records imprint disseminating not only NE sides but also defining work from Lustmord, SPK, Maurizio Bianchi, and others between 1979 and 1986. In 1987, Ayers inaugurated the Earthly Delights label with the now-canonical Caroline K recording Now Wait For Last Year, and the imprint has since served as Ayers’s primary outlet for releasing new work, whether as Magnetizdat, Spanner Thru Ma Beatbox, or Nocturnal Emissions, a going concern to this day.

Published, designed, and produced by Ross Waitman and Amaya Productions in collaboration with the artist, ELECTRONIC RESISTANCE compiles mail-art, collages, assemblages, flyers, slides, video stills, ephemera, record and tape covers to present an arresting cross-section of the genre-sundering art Nigel Ayers created between 1980 and 1992. It features an introductory reflection from Ayers, as well as an essay entitled “Bleeding Images: Antipsychiatry, Death, and Mind Control” by art historian and critic Nicolas Ballet (Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), contextualizing Ayers’s work and extensive career.

https://www.amaya-productions.com/

Accidents happen, especially in music performance. This essay proposes that accidents, due to mis-communication, poor planning, or even incompetence, can result in an aesthetic experience. Music to be discussed includes works by Charles Ives, and performances and recordings by the Portsmouth Sinfonia and The Shaggs. This article was written for The Avid Listener, an online journal of essays for music appreciation students and other music lovers. It was edited and scheduled for publication on 3 October 2016, but was pulled by the author for contractual reasons. Thanks to the Avid Listener editors, Andrew Dell’Antonio and Felicia M. Miyakawa, for their editing work and advice.

These projects deal with my intention to offer the musician novel tools for performance and/or improvisation techniques. I think of them in contrast with traditional modular approach. What I have in mind is neither a system with static parameters, e.g. a step sequencer with fixed rhythmic patterns or divisions and fixed interval ratio, nor a pure stochastic-based system. Moreover, these two projects are related to each other so to create a more general environment that may be used both in musical and in an interactive domain.
The entire work starts from my Bachelor’s thesis, ‘Real-Time Intelligent Harmonizer based on AMDF Pitch Detection’.

This co-edited, peer-reviewed volume seeks to blend documented history and academic scholarship surrounding the figure of Cathy Berberian with a double focus. On the one hand, this anthology aims to lay bare the legacy of Berberian as a woman performer-composer who had a remarkable vocal range and critical sense of vocality. On the other hand, it seeks to further a critical (and self-reflexive) thinking about contemporary vocality as developed within post-modern culture by such vocalists-composers as La Berberian who continues to inspire current and future vocal artists until this very day.

Contrary to the hi-tech reputation of pop, the most innovative pop musicians often use traditional, old-fashioned equipment, ignoring the latest technological developments. Musical innovation tends to precede technological innovation rather than the other way round. This article presents a birds eye view of pop experimentalism, grouping a number of influential or otherwise interesting examples into four main categories based on the type of equipment that is subject to experimentation: (i) abusing musical instruments, (ii) abusing amplification, (iii) abusing effects and mixing equipment, and (iv) ‘pop concrète’, or experiments involving tape montage techniques. The examples suggest that technological innovation may be relatively unimportant to the most innovative and musically adventurous pop musicians. Rather, they appear to need to have established some kind of relationship with their equipment before they find radically new ways of using it. Pop experiments involve the critical u...

This research studies the concept of musical experimentalism in the manifestos of musical avant-garde. It theorises the concept of musical experimentalism, clarifies the confusion between the concepts of avant-garde and modernism in music research, and locates the most important manifestos in reference to the idea of musical experimentalism. The main finding of the study is that musical experimentalism is a radical ethos concerning the making of music: aside from working as a musical technique, it can also serve as a way to be in the world and a way to change society. The research examines, among other things, contemporary classical music, electronic music, sound art, noise and free improvisation. The salient material of the study comprises manifestos written by well-known avant-garde and experimental composers such as Edgard Varèse (1883–1965), John Cage (1912–1992) and Pauline Oliveros (1932–). The material also consists of writings by R. Murray Schafer (1933–) and Hildegard Westerkamp (1946–), both representing the field of acoustic ecology. Few previous studies have explored some of the manifestos underlying the idea of musical experimentalism in this study such as the writings of composers Frederik Rzewski (1938–) and Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981). The material also includes manifestos by artists from different domains of art, such as texts by the Italian futurist painter Luigi Russolo (1883–1947), the Russian futurist auteur Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) and the American beat writer William S. Burroughs (1914–1997). This research is based on avant-garde theory (e.g. Bürger 2006 [1974], Ziarek 2001, Calinescu 1987; Huyssen 1986; Poggioli 1968 [1962]) and experimental music studies (e.g. Demers 2010; Saunders 2009; Hegarty 2007; Attali 2006 [1977]; Nyman 1999 [1974]; Mauceri 1997). The research builds the theory of musical experimentalism from the viewpoint of Martin Heidegger’s (e.g. 2010 [1929]; 2007 [1962/1988]; 2000 [1927]; 1998 [1935/1936]) and Herbert Marcuse’s (2011 [1977]; 1969) philosophies using Heidegger’s concepts of ‘being-in-the-world’, ‘uncanny’ and ‘nothingness’, and Marcuse’s concepts of ‘aesthetic ethos’ and ‘counter-societal experience’. The study also considers the idea of experimentalism from the viewpoint of etymology, phenomenological philosophy, transcendentalism and anarchism. The research presents an interpretation of the ethos of musical experimentalism as a mode of musical and cultural subversion. It argues that musical experimentalism does not operate within conventional musical laws, theories, preconditions or definitions, but is based on the idea that music can happen anywhere at anytime. The ethos of musical experimentalism requires openness to the world and acceptance of the indeterminate essence of reality. Musical experimentalism depends on the instability of being and aims to radicalise experience through seeing, hearing and understanding reality in a new way. Musical experimentalism questions the accepted reality and replaces it with a new, artistically formulated reality. In this way, musical experimentalism is also radically political in that it aims not just to subvert musical experience, but also the experience of reality. In other words, musical experimentalism aims to change the world by changing individuals; not only the laws of music, but also cultural values are to be questioned.

Invited paper given for Christian Wolff at Orpheus, Orpheus Research Centre, Ghent, Belgium, 28–29 September 2015.

Conference abstract: In 1972–3, the American composer Barney Childs began work on a book of interviews with modern composers. Unfortunately, Childs could not find a publisher for the book and abandoned the project. The interviews have remained, unpublished and almost unseen, for over forty years. This paper will introduce Childs' interview with Wolff in June 1972. Here Wolff and Childs discuss their concerns, including composition (his recent composition Burdocks), performance, and education. As I have just received this interview, this paper will have no definitive conclusions. It will, rather, examine the interview as time capsule, as a kind of research expedition.

Update, 6 March 2017: The present paper appears as it was given in 2015, as a spoken text. Since this conference paper, I have received all of Childs' interviews, and have now almost finished editing the original interviews before writing contextual essays for the final publication of his book.

Mikrofony zbierają więcej, niż chcielibyśmy przyznać. W nagraniach odbijają się nasze pragnienia i sprzeczności. Refleksja o field recordings – o słuchaniu „na faktach” – nie mogła trafić na dogodniejszy moment. Wygląda na to, że świat właśnie kończy się upłynniać, a może już spod nas wyparowuje. Postprawdę ogłoszono słowem roku. Wierzyć chce się tylko „AszDziennikowi”. Gdy załamaniu ulega wiara w mierzalny, „obiektywny” świat, a opisy rzeczywistości zostają zastąpione relacjami z prób jej wytwarzania, nagrywanie terenowe zyskuje na wadze jako jedna z praktyk, które decydują o kształcie ponowoczesności i zarazem go odzwierciedlają. Książka Filipa Szałaska – zbiór esejów i rozmów o field recordings – ujmuje dźwięk w siatkę interdyscyplinarnych odniesień (od filmów Ghibli i Herzoga przez sny po internetową pornografię), dowodząc, że opisuje on świat równie sugestywnie, co książki, obrazy, awatary. Najważniejsze trendy nowej humanistyki – postkolonializm, animal i thing studies, widmontologie – nie mogą dłużej obywać się bez niego. 

Niniejszy plik zawiera tylko fragment książki.

Este artículo propone una reformulación de las teorías sobre géneros musicales en músicas populares urbanas de acuerdo a la concepción de la genealogía que Michel Foucault establece en base a la obra de Friedrich Nietzsche. Para probar la pertinencia de estos acercamientos se aplicarán al desarrollo del post-rock desde su emergencia en los años 90 hasta la actualidad.

A look at the genre of music that is considered "Japanoise". The paper in question is a person reflection of what is "Japanoise" and how it influenced my work as a composer. The meat of the paper is reflections on Japanoise on a Canadian composer in the 21st century.

Although the cellist Charlotte Moorman was most famed for her topless performances of Nam June Paik’s _Opera Sextronique_ and subsequent arrest for indecent exposure, she spent her entire career grappling with John Cage’s _26’ 1.1499’’ for a String Player_. Yet, as Benjamin Piekut has demonstrated in _Experimentalism Otherwise_, Cage was unhappy with her interpretation of the piece. This particular score allows significant freedom in terms of sound production, though the temporality in which it occurs is strictly defined. Especially in collaboration with Nam June Paik, Moorman increasingly exceeded the confines of the notation and shifted her focus to the section of the score calling for “sounds other than those produced on the strings.” She maintained a serious and earnest dedication to Cage’s original score, though Moorman’s personal markings eventually supplanted the composer’s as her performances with Paik became more extravagant and spectacular.
Building on Piekut’s study, this paper draws from archival material in the Charlotte Moorman Collection and the John Cage Correspondence at Northwestern University to interpret her personal, annotated score for _26’ 1.1499”_. Cage’s unconventional notation requires collaboration from the performer, who must complete his compositional process in order to make the work performable. The piece became a catalyst for Moorman to explore and embrace her agency as an artist. A close reading of Moorman’s annotations illuminates her artistic and interpretive approach and serves as an archive of its performance history. _26’1.1499’’_ became a vehicle for Moorman to find her artistic voice and to embark on a remarkable career in avant-garde performance. She injected a visually and acoustically embodied version of herself into this artifact that Cage produced. A lifelong devotee of Cage’s music and philosophy, Moorman took full advantage of the intrinsic freedom of the score, even when it surpassed the boundaries envisioned by the composer.

Der Aufsatz beleuchtet das Phänomen der Instrumentenzerstörung unter drei Aspekten: Destruktion wird erstens als Wendung gegen die Insignien bürgerlicher Kultur, zweitens als genuin theatraler Akt sowie drittens als Möglichkeit zur Schaffung von Artefakten oder Klangspuren betrachtet.

Just as John Cage used chance techniques to relinquish control in his practice as a composer, he used pedagogical techniques that facilitated shared learning and experimentation. The tenets of Critical Pedagogy, as laid out by Paulo Freire in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, offer insights into the structures and strategies implicit in John Cage’s work as an educator. A survey of accounts by former students of Cage, as well as Cage’s writings on education show that Cage’s approach to both classroom and individualized teaching was characterized by the principles of co-intentional dialogue, praxis, holistic engagement, and an awareness of education as a moral and political act. Critical pedagogy, which clearly articulates and generalizes these principles, therefore offers an analysis that makes it possible to separate John Cage’s innovations in music pedagogy from his personality and aesthetics, rendering them available for further development and application.

Some front matter including table of contents from a rough draft of an anthology with the working title "Outsight Anthology - 25 Years of Music Journalism". This is an anthology of a quarter century of music journalism in print, on the web, and on air. Starting in 1989 with music journalism in Detroit's Jam Rag, then a self-syndicated column of the alternative press, this morphed into Outsight Radio Hours: New & non-mainstream music with artist interviews. A new, 2-hour episode was produced weekly from the late 90s until July, 2014.

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I am closing in on a first draft of my book project and I plan to start sending out feelers today, so I hope to get some good feedback, ideas. I am keeping the full text out of distribution, but I am sharing the TOC and a bit of frontmatter: https://www.academia.edu/45175577/Outsight_Anthology_25_Years_of_Music_Journalism

I began with about 700 items. Now, 100% have been transcribed and all but 41 (about one half of one percent) and proofed, refined, and placed in the lager work. It takes me between an hour or two per interview to do that final step. So, I am about eighty hours of work away from a first draft. This should happen some time by the end of year. (I work mostly on Sundays and occasional evenings.)

The working draft is already closing in on eight thousand(!) pages, so I that to be about the length of the finished work. What do to with it!

I am looking for suggestions. One idea is to find some publisher to put out an extremely abridged version with something like a PDF of the entire work available as a download to purchasers. Another idea is to schedule out blog posts of one item per day over a couple of years.

Any other ideas? Pros and cons?

Thank you

The thesis of this essay can be stated quite directly: Slavoj Žižek, despite having little to say about mashup and remixing in any direct way, engages this new media phenomena in both theory and practice, providing contemporary culture with both a conceptual understanding of the mashup and a carefully executed illustration of its methodology. The examination of this will proceed by way of two movements. The first investigates how Žižek's work, especially his general interest in "short circuiting," provides theoretical insight for understanding the mashup and its cultural significance. The second turns things around, demonstrating how the mashup explains and describes Žižek's own compositional practices. In other words, the first part explains the mashup by way of Žižek, while the second explains Žižek by way of the mashup.

On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of John Zorn's celebrated game piece Cobra, the present article consider the work from a number of perspectives. The first part will describe how the musical game is “played.” Next, I will consider the type of community imagined by Zorn in his game pieces in general and Cobra in particular followed by a consideration of the commercially available recorded versions of Cobra. Finally, I will situate Cobra in relation to works composed by Zorn in the late 1970s through the late 1980s.

During the heat of 1969s fraught political climate, editors of the legendary multi-media magazine “SOURCE: Music of the Avant Garde” invited 20 innovative composers and musicians to respond to a single question: “Have you, or has anyone, ever used your work for political or social ends?” Forty-five years later and in the midst of the latest variety of intense current events, sound/conceptual artist Alyce Santoro posed the same question to 20 unconventional composers working today, two of whom answered the question 45 years ago, and six more of whom had works published in SOURCE on other occasions.

To view both the complete original 1969 SOURCE article along with the 2015 responses for LMJ, please visit http://www.alycesantoro.com/politics_of_sound_art.html.

The contemporary use of the turntable as a sound creation device makes it a quintessential post-modern musical instrument, and the destruction of the technology has allowed artists to explore concepts ranging from it historical socioeconomic value to the exploitation of its current representation as a virtuosic musical instrument in hip-hop and DJ culture.

This Bachelor Thesis in composition explores an alternative compositional process for creating
improvised music through the approach of sound design.

The questions addressed in the thesis are
concerned with how the soundscape can be controlled by the composer while still maintaining the
expressivity of an improvised performance. Thus, the composer’s role as both sound designer,
producer and performer is investigated using live electronics and score design.

The theoretical framework for the thesis is to be found in the intersection between Anglo-American
experimental music, electronic music, sound design and electroacoustic improvisation. Key influences
include indeterminacy as expressed in the music of John Cage, Deep Listening practices pioneered by
Pauline Oliveros as well as the aesthetical paradigms of electronic and electroacoustic music.

The artistic methods revolved around the following steps: studio workshops with musicians (Fredrik
Ekenvi and José Louis Relova Gallego) exploring timbres, playing techniques and music technology in
real-time followed by associative discussions about the soundscapes created; composing audio and
graphical drafts influenced by the workshops; designing diagrams for the electronics and compiling
these to a design document; workshopping and performing the final piece (Towards the Event
Horizon).
Towards the Event Horizon (for bass clarinet, electric guitar and live electronics) is the final result of
the work, comprising a score with accompanying design document as well as a recording of the original
performance at Studio Acusticum in Piteå 20th of March 2021. The artefacts and associated
documentation are presented in their entirety on the dedicated Research Catalogue exposition.

Conclusions include how composition and sound design are tied together and cannot be considered as
isolated processes, especially in the context of live electronics; the interrelationship between the
improviser, the acoustic soundscape and the artistic associations that inform the improvisation; the
importance of form as the defining element of a composition and lastly; how a score for improvised
music can be devised in the shape of a blueprint of form and texture, setting certain technical, sonic
and gestural conditions while leaving the performer to play freely within this frame.

An analysis of the relationship between Pierre Schaeffer and the musical avant-garde of 1953, with particular reference to Pierre Boulez and to Schaeffer's shift from musique concrète to recherche musicale. The main source is Schaeffer's 'Vers une musique expérimentale' (La revue musicale 236); extensive excerpts are translated here into English. The antagonism between the Paris and Cologne studios is discussed in the light of two different approaches to technology and tradition; for the exponents of elektronische Musik new technology was a means to perfect Western music, while for Schaeffer it was simply a means to make new musical discoveries. [RILM]

Introduction to the volume co-edited with Benjamin Halligan and Nicola Spelman on noise and contemporary music, crossing rock, psychedelia, postpunk, industurial, avant-classical and noise music proper, using a variety of conceptual approaches, and featuring  both academic and noise practitioner contributors.

Religion plays an important role in human life. In a recent review, religiosity has been associated with prosocial behavior; although consistent, the association was weak (Saroglou, 2013). To understand religious prosociality, varying theoretical contentions were offered (Preston, Salomon, & Ritter, 2013). The present study tested Supernatural Monitoring Hypothesis and sought to identify the role of the thought of a watching God in a religious individual’s prosocial behavior. With this aim, an experiment was conducted with two groups of participants wherein the experimental group was primed with the thought of a watching God through a song translation. Results of independent samples t-test showed that religious participants who were primed offered more time for a volunteer work compared to those who were not primed. Implications of this study point to the role of the thought of a watching God - interestingly when primed through a song - in prosocial behavior.

This essay seeks to demonstrate a common approach to the interpretation of experimental music scores representing a variety of notational practices. David Tudor’s description of the interpretation of experimental music scores, particularly those which are indeterminate, as being akin to ‘work’ is discussed and applied to ‘classic’ and recent examples of experimental music. Taking as its motto the notion that notation is not a description of sound but is instead a prompt for action, the exact nature of what notation asks of performers will be examined. By drawing from examples of scores that are both indeterminately and complexly notated (and those which are situated between these extremes) the role of the performer in the process of interpretation and realisation is discussed. This leads to discussion of the necessity or otherwise of choosing an approach which is ‘authentic’ or which draws upon established performing traditions when developing interpretation. Thus the idea of a performance practice relating to experimental music – its reality and necessity - is discussed.

Los Cuadernos de Música UNAM son una publicación dirigida a público no especialista, con el fin de pensar la música desde distintos enfoques. En este texto se ofrece una visión panorámica de cierta tendencia ecológica en las exploraciones musicales contemporáneas. Con dicho término, el autor engloba una serie de exploraciones musicales que comparten el anhelo por repensar la relación que lxs seres humanos tenemos con el resto de seres que habitan el planeta, y que se expresan como exploraciones musicales en las que se incorporan sonoridades naturales, en vez de evocarlas o imitarlas por medio de recursos típicos de la tradición musical occidental. Asimismo, se propone un paralelismo entre estas exploraciones sonoras, con cambios al interior de las humanidades, ciencias sociales y las otras artes, situándolas dentro de las propuestas post- y trans-humanistas.

Ola Stockfelt points out in Adequate modes of Listening1 that today, most industrialized Western nations are sharing a more or less homogeneous culture, which is musically dominated by "artistic music" from Europe and North America as well as Anglo-American pop music.

What about non-western nations, then ? Which culture(s) are they influenced by ? Are they still maintained under a post-colonial cultural yoke ? Is experimental music, and by extension noise music, a typically western kind of music ?

In the early twentieth century, Erik Satie argued for the necessity of ‘furniture music’. Such compositions would not monopolize the audience's attention, but would instead serve as the backdrop for other experiences. This essay suggests that Satie's formulation provides a useful framework for understanding the early cinema of Andy Warhol. While films like Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964) are often conceptualized as experiments in boredom, I claim that they are best understood as furniture films, works designed to be consumed partially and distractedly in conjunction with other experiences, such as conversing, eating and drinking. Furthermore, I argue that in Warhol's cinema, the rigid and predetermined temporality of traditional motion pictures gives way to one that is open-ended and amorphous, thus paving the way for new modes of cinematic reception.

* This text is derived from a Visual Intelligence presentation given at Lewis & Clark College in the spring of 2017 *

Through Interdisciplinary-Aesthetics, an argument is made utilizing an Atraudian/Deleuzian conception of the "Body Without Organs"  to emphasize the phenomenological value of live performance.The argument is progressed in theory and practice through use of the argumentative framework as a performance analysis for Experimental Metal band "The Body."

Experimentation with graphic scores has enabled
composers to free themselves from the constraints of
traditional music notation. Avant garde composers in
1950s America and Europe began to develop an
increasing array of new symbols to supplement the music
that appeared on the stave, while those from the more
experimental New York School often did away with
traditional notation entirely, leaving performers to
interpret a vast range of geometric shapes and patterns.
But in spite of these developments, the essentially static
nature of the printed score remained. With the advent of
the micro computing era, however, this limitation could
be trivially overcome, and graphic scores can now be set
in m otion i n w ays t hat a re e ntirely p redetermined o r
generated in real time. Recent developments in tablet
computing have also meant that, for the first time,
hardware capable of rendering such graphics now exists
in a form factor that is portable and fits comfortably on
any music stand.
Decibel New Music Ensemble has been performing from
such animated graphic scores for the past three years, with
many of the works being written by the group's members,
commissioned and extant works being adapted to their
ongoing development of a 'score player' for music
featuring predominantly graphic scores. Initially, laptops
were used for the task, with the scores being set in motion
using networked Max/MSP patches created by ensemble
members Lindsay Vickery and Stuart James. It became
apparent as time went on (and as my laptop went hurtling
to the ground no less than three times) that there were
limitations to this set up, and so the group embarked on a
project to bring these scores to the iPad by developing
their own software in house. The result is a flexible and
modular application that aids not just the performance of
these works, but their rehearsal and distribution as well.
This app is the Decibel ScorePlayer.

While existing analytical frameworks (Chion 1994, Coulter 2009) provide basic classification tools for experimental audiovisual works, they fall short in elaborating the variety of compositional possibilities falling within the notion of “synchresis” (Chion 1994). I propose to delineate the various shades of synchresis through a case study analysis of the somewhat simpler relations between light and sound in media installation works using luminosonic objects: objects which appear to emit both sound and light in an integrated manner.
I will suggest a graphical framework for the analysis and composition of audiovisual relations between sound media and self-illuminating light objects, detailing various forms of integrated audiovisual dynamics. The framework will relate the compositional concepts of vertical harmonicity and horizontal counterpoint (Chion 1994) to the perceptual notion of “cross- modal binding” (Whitelaw 2008), thus linking compositional dynamics to perceptual effects and affects.

This is the starting point of the project Unearthing Imaginary Music, carried out by Asociația Jumătatea Plină, now, in the summer of 2020, a year of great crisis, an unexpected crisis caused by the emergence and spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19), in which our priorities and means of communication have been changing. In which our personal life is changing, perhaps determining, in the future, substantial changes in our collective existence. In this context, the performing arts are gravely affected, as physical distancing forces us either to withdraw and await return to normality, or to find new artforms and new means of transmitting. We recalled in this context the proposal composer Octavian Nemescu made in the '70s of the past century – that of opening towards imaginary music.
It greatly interested me to launch the challenge of conceiving imaginary music scores to other academic ally trained composers (Corneliu Dan Georgescu, Diana Rotaru, Maia Ciobanu, Diana Gheorghiu, Sabina Ulubeanu, Gabriel Mălăncioiu, Darie Nemeș Bota, Mihaela Vosganian, Sorin Lerescu, Constantin Basica) and to myself, in order to see how each "pours" their own substance, ingrained by their aesthetic direction, style and visions, in this new manner of musical communication. The scores have been gathered in this collection dedicated to Octavian Nemescu, bearing the (historical?) marks of the year 2020.