This collection initiates a resolutely interdisciplinary research dynamic specifically concerning musical creativity. Creativity is one of the most challenging issues currently facing scientific psychology and its study has been relatively ... the work of eminent composer, Jonathan Harvey. This unique volume...

Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) was one of Britain's leading composers: his music is frequently performed throughout Europe, the United States (where he lived and worked) and Japan. He is particularly reno

This collection of essays and interviews addresses important theoretical, philosophical and creative issues in Western art music at the end of the twentieth- and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Edited by Max Paddison and Irène ... prominent musicologists, philosophers and composers, including Célestin Deliège,...

Sound and Music Computing, 2009, Porto, Portugal. Arshia Cont, Grégoire Carpentier, Jonathan Harvey, Gilbert Nouno

This paper reports various aspects of the computer music realization of "Speakings" for live electronic and large orchestra by composer Jonathan Harvey, with the artistic aim of making an orchestra speak through computer music processes. The underlying project asks for various computer music techniques: whether through computer aided compositions as an aid for composer's writing of instrumental scores, or real-time computer music techniques for electronic music realization and performance issues on the stage with the presence of an orchestra. Besides the realization techniques, the problem itself brings in challenges for existing computer music techniques that required the authors to pursue further research and studies in various fields. The current paper thus documents this collaborative process and introduce technical aspects of the proposed methods in each area with an emphasis on the artistic aim of the project.

Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction, Nicolas Donin

Recent research on remediation has focused on the aesthetic and epistemic transformations that affect a work of art when transferred from a medium (or support) to another. But remediation can also be observed at micro levels: in the workshop of most contemporary composers, various musical elements are commonly funneled through the worlds of analogic reproducibility, digital reproducibility, and notational reproducibility. A famous example since the rise of spectralism is the idea of zooming in into a (recorded) sound through its (instrumental) transcription. "Instrumental synthesis", as Grisey coined it, has become widely familiar to musicians and audiences even before computer-assisted composition devices made it possible to automate most of the tasks involved. Although spectralist composers were probably the first to turn acoustic analysis into a compositional toolbox, ‘resynthesis’ emerged as a standard procedure in composition only in the 1990s –a time marked by younger composers’ increasing ability to process sound in various ways thank to dedicated softwares. As a compositional concept, then, ‘resynthesis’ is not so new; what is really new is that such a complex, technical procedure has became part of today’s ‘common practice’, as it were. In this chapter I try to delineate the underlying aesthetics of resynthesis by focusing on a selection of significant works from the turn of 21th century: Joshua Fineberg’s work for ensemble "Paradigms" (1994); visual artist Pierre Huygue's "Silent Score" (1997); Aaron Einbond’s "What the blind see" (2010); as well as pieces by Peter Ablinger, François-Bernard Mâche and Jonathan Harvey. Resynthesis can be aimed either at identity (i.e. the reliable simulation of an original, targeted sound), or at "difference within family resemblance". In some cases we could guess what the original sound is —we hear a ghostly sound, or a ghost within sound— whereas in other cases we don’t know that there is an prealable sound ‘under the surface’ –a sound from which the composer took a structural or textural imprint. Resynthesis, then, could well be a musical counterpart of moulage –a disruptive technique in art history inasmuch as it substitutes ‘imitation’ with ‘imprint’, as Georges Didi-Huberman demonstrated in his "La ressemblance par contact" (2008). Contrary to its lasting presence in the arts from prehistory to Duchamp, such technique is a recent byproduct of 20th-century’s technologies of musical reproducibility.