Music 680: Special Topics in Music Theory - Electronics in Performance (Fall 2006)
Class 6: October 16, 2006

Stockhausen / Kontakte (1958-60) for piano, percussion, and four-channel tape
	extraordinary notation for this work! (two pages included in "Concept of Unity" article)
	various types of instrumental / electronics relationships
	        in Kontakte: instruments and electronics imitate and extend one another: otherness
	                timbral, pitch, rhythmic connections
	                textural, gestural, and spatial relationships (unusual placement of the instrumentalists)
	        in Mikrophonie: integration: processing versus sonic / pitch relationships: togetherness
		Mantra as a certain kind of fusion of these approaches
			primarily a "processing" integration
			but also mirror-structures in the pitch (piano) and frequency (ring modulator) relationships
	"real world "spatialization technique: 
		rotating directional loudspeaker positioned in the center of a square array of microphones
		doppler effect and room acoustic all accounted for....
	moment-form continued
		Harvey: "the almost mystical obsession with 'feeling' or the 'now'
			moment-form as a break with teleology; collage instead of linearity
		Kontakte's 16 moments are themselves subdivided into sections
			six as the "magic number" for Kontakte
				subsectioning, proposed structure of 18 moments, many local details
				Harvey: "six degrees of variation between 'just noticeable' and 'violent' in each of the
					six dimensions (spatial location, volume, texture, register, speed, instrument 
					family), ordered into six subdivisions within each 'moment'. The six types of
					moment are related by the same range of six degrees of variation...."
			six instrumental timbre-types: 
				metal (pitch/noise), skin (pitch/noise), wood (pitch/noise)
			six spatial movement types: 
				rotation, looping, alternation, independent point-source, unison, isolated points
		facilitates a much wider array of developmental / variation / narrative possibilities in the form
		reduces the potential for overlap and layering; more linear progression through the form
			moment IV, moment X, ...
		note that the open-moment form works (Momente, Mikrophonie I) follow Kontakte...

Stockhausen "The Concept of Unity in Electronic Music"
	the drive towards complete numerical integration: 
		serial technique in the piano and percussion parts (cf. Harvey p. 89)
		but also beyond serialism in the attempted integration of timbre, frequency, and rhythm
		expressing musical parameters as a continuum of temporal phenomenon
			from fastest to slowest: timbre, frequency, rhythm, form	
				Struktur X (track 45) as the canonical example
					in part because the "Concept of Unity" article documents this particular example
					and in part because of the clear perceptibility of this instance
						relatively linear process connecting the timbre/frequency/rhythm continua
		"any drastic separation between acoustics and music is no longer meaningful...."
		"one general set of laws to govern every sphere of musical time itself...."


Pd techniques
	Greg's assignment 3: massive duplication of resources as a strength of the machine....
		and throw~ and catch~ as a modification for sanity
	pulse-train synthesis and Pd implementation (or "arrays, continued")
		for tabosc4~ arrays need to be specific lengths: (power of 2) + 3
			for instance, 131, 259, 515, 1027
		mixing tabwrite (as control, to set and remove pulses) and tabosc4~ (as signal, for output)
		bp~ and vcf~ for bandpass filtering with resonance
			particularly relevant since pulse-trains tend to produce rich spectra
		also needs reverberation (rev3~), and spatialization for a complete reconstruction
		the Struktur X example:
			approx 3 seconds of slowing pulses from 166 cps to 40 cps
				while filter sweeps from 300 Hz to 40 Hz and back
	review of soundfiler, tabplay~, tabread4~ for sample playback

preview of next week: Cage, Oliveros, Tudor - indeterminacy (against improvisation)