On Sonic Art

English language

Published 1996 by Taylor & Francis Group.

ISBN:
978-1-315-07789-5
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3 stars (1 review)

In this newly revised book On Sonic Art, Trevor Wishart takes a wide-ranging look at the new developments in music-making and musical aesthetics made possible by the advent of the computer and digital information processing. His emphasis is on musical rather than technical matters. Beginning with a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying the Western musical tradition and the traditional acoustic theories of Pythagoras and Helmholtz, he goes on to look in detail at such topics as the musical organization of complex sound-objects, using and manipulating representational sounds and the various dimensions of human and non-human utterance. In so doing, he seeks to learn lessons from areas (poetry and sound-poetry, film, sound effects and animal communication) not traditionally associated with the field of music.

4 editions

An irrelevant speculation

3 stars

The point I disagree the most with Wishart is that I don't consider sound per se as interesting, and I don't quite understand why Wishart values perceptual reality this much. There's a burning desire in me to "hear", say, Pontragin duality - and that has nothing to do with any perceptual reality. Let's think about the history of mathematics. Before around the time of Riemann, mathematics was really just about properties of numbers, about finding roots of certain equations, etc. This for me is profoundly boring so that I wasn't interested in mathematics at all when I hadn't learn abstract algebra and didn't know what topology is. Now we more or less know that mathematics is a general science of structure and mechanism, the most general science of abstract synthesis. It now seemingly has nothing to do with number at all - though factually in the deeper levels they're still …

Subjects

  • Computer composition
  • Computer music
  • Music, philosophy and aesthetics