Worrall, David. “Editorial: Computation in the Sonic Arts.” Organised Sound, vol. 25, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–3..
Worrall, David, editor. “Computation in the Sonic Arts.” Organised Sound, vol. 25, no. 1, 2020.
STATEMENT:
Organised Sound is an international peer-reviewed
journal which focuses on the rapidly developing methods and issues arising from
the use of technology in music today. It concentrates upon the impact which the
application of technology is having upon music in a variety of genres,
including multimedia, performance art, sound sculpture and music ranging from
popular idioms to experimental electroacoustic composition.
I have been a contributor and
editor for Organised Sound for 25
years. This issue, Computation in the Sonic Arts seeks to go beyond descriptions
of how specific compositional procedures are used in individual compositions in
order to address the social and musicological dimensions of computation. In
doing so, it aims to stimulate conversation and interdisciplinary communication
about the activity of computational design as it applies to the sonic arts and
the temporal arts more generally.
My own article, Computational
Designing of Sonic Morphologies, examines the origin and consequences
of a materialist sound-object mindset in which the hierarchical organization of
sonic events, especially those developed through notational abstraction, are often
considered, erroneously, I argue, antithetical to sounds ‘being themselves’. Instead, that musical sounds are
not just material objects, and that musical notations, on paper or in computer
code, are not just symbolic abstractions, but instructions for embodied actions
between resonators and (often human) actuators. When notation is employed
computationally to control resonance and gestural actuators at multiple
acoustic, psychoacoustic and conceptual levels of music form, it is possible
for vibrant sonic morphologies to emerge and be sustained from the quantum-like
boundaries between them. I argue that, in order to achieve that result, it is
necessary to replace our primary focus of compositional attention from the
Digital Audio Workstation sound transformation tools currently in vogue, with those
that support algorithmic thinking at all levels of compositional design. This
will afford the reinstatement of the use of symbolic logics in electroacoustic
composition at multiple structural levels from microsound resonance generation
and activation to corporally-informed gesture models. Further, it offers the
potential to stimulate and enable the creation of new alliances between the
capacity of our auditory processing to produce only weak cognitive bindings to
unknown sound sources and symbolic structures, and in doing so, enable
metaphorical cognitive sub-conscious forms to emerge.