Working with Sound - Working with Notes

Visual artists get their material from many places when they are going to make a work. It is the same for modern computer music, and a composition may be based on sounds the composer finds in nature, or on sounds that are made in the computer itself.

After World War Two, some composers began to work directly with sound aided by electronic means. Earlier, composers worked with notes, and most of those writing music today still work this way.

Notes are a fine way to store music, allowing it to be played or sung without the composer needing to be present to explain how the music should be performed.

Even though the notes we use today greatly resemble those used several hundred years ago, there are many note signs that are new in our times. The playing techniques have also developed, and there are many things that musicians do today that weren't so usual, for example, in Beethoven's time.

Notes are symbols that are easy to work with in a computer. The best way to send note information to electronic instruments such as synthesizers and samplers is by MIDI. MIDI is a "music language" consisting only of electronic symbols, and only a few "words." Even though the computer works with electronic symbols, both the notes and the information they convey are the same as before.

A French composer named Pierre Boulez has written that society throughout this century has been too concerned with the past and how the new can be adapted to the old. Boulez believes that we are less creative when we think more about what has happened than what is happening now. This kind of thinking interests art music composers, who often investigate new ways of making music.

A new way of creating music in the 20th century is known as electroacoustic music. The instrument most often used in electroacoustic music since the 1980s is the computer. Here, sound is treated as numbers, as long series' of zeros and ones. The composers still work directly with sound and make music by finding, changing and putting together sounds in new ways. Spoken words might become sounds from birds, for example, or the ticking of a clock might become a door slamming. Several programs that do these kinds of things are found in DSP, under "distort" on the menu.

When making music from sound in this way, the composition often becomes a journey of discovery that entails working with things one does not know so much about beforehand. It is also possible to organize the sounds according to mathematical principles and formulas. Since no difficult instruments are needed to play the music, there is greater compositional freedom in terms of pitch, dynamics and tempo. This differs, of course, from compositions that are played according to notes, by normal instruments whose sounds we know.

Contemporary music is often difficult to listen to because it is organized differently from traditional music. Computer music is particularly difficult for untrained ears because the sounds themselves also seem unfamiliar. But it is also easy to work with this type of music, since it can also contain sounds that everyone recognizes and relates to. We can place these sounds in new contexts and make new associations and experiences for the listener by quite simple means.

In computer music, it is the ear that determines what is music - not how the music upholds a tradition.