notation_miyama

The universal notation for electronic sound in “mixed music”
34878089
Chikashi Miyama
The idea of fusing acoustic instrumental sound and electronic sound have been an inspiration to
many composers. In fact, many late-20th century composers, such as Berio, Boulez, Harvey, Kagel,
Murail, Nono, Stockhausen, and Xenakis attempt to integrate these two sound worlds. Stockhausen
describes the attraction of the fusion between instrumental sound and electronic sound as follows:
The familiar (instrumental) sounds give the orientation, the perspectives of the listening; they
function as traffic signs in the unlimited space of the newly discovered electronic sound world.
Also the electronic sounds sometimes come very close to the familiar sounds - to the point of
confusion ... The encounter with the familiar and nameable, in regions of the unknown and
nameless, make the unknown even more mysterious, fascinating; and conversely, the known,
also the banal and old - that for which we hardly still had an ear - becomes completely fresh
and alive in the new surrounding of the unknown. [Stockhausen. 1968]
There are three approaches to combine acoustic and electronic sound. The first approche is to include
an electronic instrument such as, a theremin, an ondes martenot, a synthesizer in the instrumentation.
The most well-known early examples in this category may be Ecuatorial (1932-34) by Edgard Verése
and Turangalîla-Symphonie (1946-48) by Oliver Messiaen. The second approch is “mixed music.” It
involves live instrumental or vocal performer(s) and pre-recorded tape. The word “mixed” refers to the
mixture of instrumental and acousmatic music. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1959-60) is one of
the prominent works in this category. The third approch is “live electronic music.” In this style of
music, sound produced by a performer is modified electronically at the time of production in a manner
usually controlled by the another performer or an audio engineer. For example, Stockhausen employs a
ring-modulator in order to process the sound from two pianos in realtime in his piece Mantra (1970).
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Among these three approches, the second approch, “mixed music”, is presumably the most
problematic for performers in comparison with the other two approches because they have to play with
the sound from tape; they usually need to listen to the tape over and over again in order to realize
perfect synchronization.
Mixed music also poses an issue to composers; the notation of electronic sound. For acousmatic
music composition, it is usually not necessary for them to notate their music in scores because
composers are able to produce sound and record it on a tape without any assistance from performers.
However, for “mixed music”, they are required to notate the tape part in order to supply cues for the
performers and describe the interaction between acoustic instruments and electronic sound from the
tape. Nevertheless, some composers avoid writing detailed descriptions of the tape in the score of their
mixed music pieces: they indicate when an engineer should start or stop the tape and describe the
content of the tape with some text as seen in the score of Kagel’s Phantasie (1967).
Figure 1 Phantasie by Maurizzio Kagel
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Possibly, they intend not to provide performers any detailed information about the tape from the
scores. It may be an effective strategy in case a composer needs to employ the electronic sound solely
as background texture or an ornamental. But, if a composer wants to utilize electronic sound as if it
were an individual instrument and attempt to create more complicated, for example, a counter-point-
like relationship between acoustic sound and acousmatic sound, it is necessary for them to somehow
notate the content of the tape in the score in order to provide the performers accurate cues.
However, it is not easy to notate tape part in common music notation (CMN) 1 because the nature of
electronic sound as opposed to instrumental sound is significantly different. A researcher, Curtis Roads
clarifies three reasons that common music notation has been bypassed by many electronic music
composers.
CMN is biased toward pitch and duration of notes, to the detriment of other facets of music.
Its pitch and time representations are limited to equal tempered pitches (or offsets therefrom),
fractional durations of a single geometric series (1/4, 1/8, 1/16 etc.), and pulsed rhythms.
CMN has few provisions for the representation of timbre and does not represent spatial
trajectories. The note concept is a single-event abstraction and does not account for the
mutating multievent sound complexes possible with computer music. Synthesis parameters,
for example, are difficult to represent in CMN, such as multiple envelopes on sound
parameters.
CMN addresses only one level of music form; it was not designed to represent and overview
of high-level musical structure; neither is it possible to look below the level of a note to
examine the details of the evolving sound structure.[Roads 1996]
After pointing out these issues, he concludes that CMN evolved to match conventional European
concert performance practices. He asserts that the expanded palette of sound and the changing
performance possibilities of music prompt a need for new notational schemes: graphical notation
(figure 2).
1 Common music notation describes almost all conventional Western music written between 1600 and 1900.
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Figure 2 Iconmic timbre representation of nscor by Curtis Roads
Although, as Roads asserts, it is difficult for composers to notate electronic sound in CMN and
graphical notation might be a better way to notate electronic sound, CMN is a primary language for
them to comunicate with musicians, who studied Western music performance: they are usually not well
experienced with notational systems other than CMN. Therefore, composers must seek a point of
compromise between these two notational demands in case they should ever have an ambition to
compose a “mixed music” piece. Could there be any ideal way to reconcile or fuse these two different
notational styles? Could there be any universal notational style for acoustic instruments accompanied
by tape-recorded electronic sound? What is the best representation of electronic sound for performers?
In this paper, we will focus on the notation of mixed music and explore the answers for these
questions by comparing three completely different approaches of three composers: Karlheinz
Stockhausen, Jonty Harrison, and Kaija Saariaho.
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Karlheinz Stockhausen composed his first mixed music, Kontakte for piano, percussion, and 4-
channel tape in 1959-60. He explains the function of electronic sound and the relationship between
electronic and acoustic sound as follows.
Six categories of instrumental sounds are employed: metal sound - metal noise, skin sound -
skin noise, wood sound -wood noise; the piano either connects or splits up these categories, or
it gives signals in the ensemble playing. The electronic sound categories create relationships
and transitions between the instrumental categories, provide possible sound transformations
from every category (metallic, skin-like, wood-like, etc.) to every other one, and soundmutations
to completely new sound events; they fuse with them and alienate themselves into
previously unknown sound spaces. [Stockhausen, 1960]
In the score of Kontakte, he combines graphical notation and common music notation (figure 3).
Figure 3 Kontakte, Karlheinz Stockhausen
He separates a system into two parts with a thick horizontal line, employs graphical notation in the
space above the line, and utilizes fragmentary common music notation in the space bellow the line. On
the top of the each page, he places the boxed sections and subsection marks containing roman numerals
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and letters (e.g. IA, XIII A) and indicates timecodes with big numbers below them. The solid vertical
lines extended from subsection marks and supplemental dotted lines indicates the synchronization of
the tape sound and the instrumental sound. There is no description of tempi or time signatures;
performers always have to listen to the tape part very carefully in order to properly respond to the
“cues” from the tape and play the phrases scattered on the score in the designated length of time.
In the graphical notation, Stockhausen employs roman numerals to indicate speaker groups. The tape
is composed for 4 channels and 8 speakers; one speaker group consists of a pair of speakers (figure 4).
Figure 4 Kontakte, Sound projection diagram
He uses one group of speakers to play electronic sound in some sections. For example, in section IV
E, the audience hears the electronic sound from speaker group I (left-rear). But in some other sections,
he employs multiple speaker groups to generate different sounds. For example, in section IV F, he
vertically separates the graphical notation area into two parts, employing thin horizontal lines. The
upper area of this section shows the sound from speaker group I (left-rear) and the lower area displays
the sound from speaker group III (right-front). Later in the same section, he writes III → I, indicating
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the movement of sound from speaker group III to I (right- front to left- rear). By this notational system,
he attempts to solve the problem of CMN that Roads specifies; he notates the relationship between
space and sound with the roman numerals and the division of the graphic notation area. The extreme
case of this spatial notation is seen in section IXA (figure 5). He separates the tape part into four with
the horizontal borders and draws tube-like lines across them in order to depict the multiple movements
of sound from one speaker group to another speaker group.
Figure 5 Kontakte, notation of spatial trajectories
As seen in this notation, his approach is highly detailed: he attempts to convey all sonic events from
the score. Why was he required to write such an extremely detailed score? In fact, even for his former
work, Gesang der Jünglinge (1955-56), He writes a detailed diagram even though the piece is solely
for tape. Brian Fennelly claims that during this period of time, some electronic pieces were notated in
order to protect the composer by copyright. Besides, the quality of analog magnetic tape may
physically deteriorate over time and it is technically imposible to make a copy of analog media without
lowering the sound quality. Stockhausen was presumably aware of the possible recreation of the tape
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from scratch. In fact, in some sections, he writes the length of tape above the graphical notation (figure
3 and 5). In other words, the detailed score of electronic part is a sort of a “backup” of the electronic
sound.
He also writes some dynamic control instructions for an audio engineer. In the graphical notation area,
for instance, in figure 5, between 57’4” and 59’2”, he writes a boxed “+” mark below the graphical
notation area. With this symbol, Stockhausen requests the audio engineer at a mixing console to turn up
the volume of the electronic sound.
The graphical notation area is written for four people: pianist, percussionist, engineer, and himself.
Stockhausen draws numerous dotted vertical lines to provide performers cues, employs boxed “+” and
“-” marks to give instructions for an sound engineer, and note the length of tape for himself.
Consequently, the score appearance becomes highly complicated. He writes seven different kinds of
numbers in the score, such as length of tape, time code, duration, section number, speaker group
number, number of timbre, and decibel. In terms of the performance practice, what the performers
essentially require from the score is cues for the synchronization; they need to know when they should
start to play their phrases. But the superflous information of the score may prevent them from reading
the cues efficiently.
The graphical notation of Kontakte has one more significant issue: the inconsistent Y-axis. In his
notation, the X-axis constantly represents the progress of time but Stockhausen varies the meaning of
Y-axis section by section. In section IF, he uses a thin horizontal line to indicate a pitch transition of a
long sustained sound; the bends in the middle of the lines indicate ascending or descending gestures of
sound (figure 6). But in some other sections, for example, the beginning of section III, he draws several
big decrescendo-shaped objects. If the Y-axis represents the pitch of the sound, this object is supposed
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to express the gradual reduction of spectral content, but in fact, these triangles mean simply
decrescendo: the reduction of the amplitude (figure 7).
Figure 6 Kontakte, pitch transition
Figure 7 Kontakte, Decrescendo-like notation of electronic sound
He uses the Y-axis to indicate three different parameters: amplitude, pitch, and the movement of
sound. This paradoxical use of the Y-axis clearly demonstrates the fact that the two-dimensional, XY-
based notation is insufficient to describe all perspectives of electronic sound.
The last issue is the pictorial representation of sound. For example, in section IB, he employs three
squares filled with randomly drawn lines (figure 8). In this section, a schematic notation is his personal
graphical interpretation of the sound gestures or characters. These three boxes may express the chaotic
atmosphere of the electronic sound but they do not depict any scientific or objective sound properties
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such as pitch, loudness, or timbre. They are icons. What an interpreter can objectively perceive from
this notation is the existence of sound, the length of sound, and the equality of sonority among these
three boxes. CMN has been employed for about three hundred years by many composers and it is still
the “universal” notational system because it is a highly objective and scientific system. For example, an
A4 quarter note in tempo = 60 means the production of 440 Hz. sound for 1 second. It is based on
scientific or mathematical facts. The score of Kontakte appears to be scientific to some extent because
it contains various kinds of numbers and graph-like objects but, in comparison to CMN, Stockhausen’s
notation depends too much on his subjectivity; how he feels and how he interprets the sound.
Figure 8 Kontakte, pictorial representation of electronic sound
As discussed above, his graphical notation has three major issues, such as a superflous amount of
information, the inconsistent meaning of the Y-axis, and the pictorial representation of sound. The score
may require a tremendous effort on the part of the performers to interpret this extremely complicated
notational method. Moreover, some notational symbols, especially pictorial symbols are only valid in
this piece; instrumentalists have to study many rules just for this piece. Could there be any other more
universal, simple, consistent, and objective approaches to notate electronic sound?
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A British composer, Jonty Harrison (1952-), offers a completely different notational approach. As
opposed to Stockhausen’s notation, his notation is simple, coherent, and scientific. In his work,
Abstracts for large orchestra and 8-channel tape (1998), he simply inserts the waveform of the tape to
the full score (figure 9). This representation of sound is commonly used in the electronic music studio
or recording studio today because almost all DAW software employs this representation to provide
users information about recorded or processed sound. It simply shows the progress of time on the X-
axis and the amplitude (i.e. the strength of the air pressure) on the Y-axis. Since sound is physically
vibration transmitted through the air, this representation enables us to describe any kind of sonic events.
Thus, this sound-representation system is in one sense more universal and "common" than CMN.
However, for performers, the waveform does not provide much information. It only conveys one aspect
of sonic events: the transitions of loudness and the sonic gestures. It does not represent any pitch or
timbre information. For example, a dynamically static long sustained texture may be seen as just a long
thick line in the waveform representation, even if it contains numerous pitch or timbre transitions. In
case of Harrison’s works, the waveform may work properly in order to provide cues to performers or a
conductor because his pieces are often dynamic and gestural but this notational system is not a
universal for all composers.
The waveform is not only scientific representation of sound. For example, sonogram is an another
option (figure 10). The sonogram can represent not only amplitude but also the pitch and harmonic
content of the sound (i.e. timbre). However, it is questionable whether this sort of high-level scientific
representation is convenient for humans. The sonogram represent a musical tone which contains several
overtones in the form of multiple horizontal lines but we perceive it as a single sound. Moreover, the
sonogram describes timbre as a ratio of harmonic content but we usually recognize a timbre by
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associating it with musical instruments, objects, or onomatopoeia (e.g. guitar-like sound, metallic
sound, wah-wah, etc.).
Figure 9, Abstracts by Jonty Harrison
Figure 10 Waveform (upper) and Sonogram (lower)
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Both Stockhausen and Harrison employ a sort of graphical notation in order to display electronic
sound. In terms of its consistency, objectivity, and simplicity, Harrison’s notational approach may be
superior to Stockhausen’s approach. However, Harrison’s notation has a significant issue; a deficiency
of information. Besides, his notation invokes a question about whether or not scientific representation
is really ideal for notation.
A Finnish composer, Kaija Saariaho’s approach is quite different from both Stockhausen and Harrison.
In fact, she makes an objection to Curtis Roads’s assertion; she sometimes attempts to avoid graphical
notation and translate electronic sound to CMN. In the score of Jardin Secret II for harpsichord and
tape (1989), she writes more traditional music symbols, such as dotted quarter notes, glissandi, quarter
rest, tie, tenuto in the tape part (figure 11). She manages to write scores in the style which most
performers are accustomed to. It, thus, facilitates the reading of the score but the sound of the tape part
is far from what we normally expect when we see these traditional notational symbols. Because in
CMN, usually one staff is associated with one instrument (i.e. one timbre) but the tape part contains the
timbres of various kinds such as recorded or processed harpsichord sound, human voice, etc. Thus, she
writes supplemental texts in parenthesises, for example, “voice”, “on hpscd. strings”, or “hpscd.
sounds”, in order to associate each note with a specific timbre.
In some sections, she also employs Stockhausen’s approach: pictorial or schematic representation.
For example, in the third system in figure 11, she simply draws decrescendo-like triangle object in the
last two measures. In these two measures, the tape plays electronically processed textural harpsichord
sound.
She uses these CMN-interpreted representations and the schematic representation alternately. The
advantage of this notation is that she can suggest performers how much attention they should pay to the
tape in order to synchronize by switching these two notational system.
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Figure 11. Jardin Secret II by Kaija Saariaho
Her notational system demonstrates that CMN can be used to describe the electronic part to a certain
extent. However, this method is obviously not universal. Her piece contains rhythm-based material, she
combines only a few timbres in one part, and the sound that she employs can be easily associate with
musical sound (e.g. voice, harpsichord string, etc.). Hence, she can notate the electronic part in CMN.
As seen above, Stockhausen, Harrison, and Saariaho attempt to notate electronic sound via different
approaches. Each approach has advantages but all of them still have some issues but at least they
clarify the essential problems of “mixed music” notation.
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First, we only have two dimensions, the X and the Y axes on paper, but they are insufficient to
convey all the information which electronic sound contains. As opposed to music written in CMN, we
have to focus on not only pitch and rhythm but also other properties such as timbre and spatial
trajectories in electronic music; they can be cues to performers and they are often more important than
pitch and rhythm in terms of musical expression. Second, in order to solve the problem above, we have
two options. One is to switch the meaning of the Y-axis section by section as Stockhausen notates. The
other is to keep presenting one property as Harrison notates. The former approach may confuse
performers but it can suggest to the performers which property of electronic sound they should focus
on. The latter approach is much simpler, consistent, and easy to understand, but the information that the
waveform provides is insufficient in some cases. Third, graphical notation can be very subjective as
seen in Stockhausen’s pictorial representation but also can be very objective as seen in Harrison’s
waveform representation. On one hand, subjective pictorial representation has no absolute universality
because it is not based on scientific background but on the other hand, it is useful to communicate with
performers because we share the impression of sound to some extent. In contrast, Harrison’s waveform
representation is highly objective and scientific. But scientific representation is sometimes illusory and
it is not always “real” to humans. Fourth, graphic notation is not the only approach for depicting
electronic sound. We can notate it with CMN to some extent as does Saariaho. Although, her
“interpreted” notation is not universal and unnatural as CMN, it may be the most practical and
convenient for performers to perceive cues from electronic sound in some cases.
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References
Fennelly, Brain. 1968. A descriptive notation for electronic music. phD diss., Yale University.
Grove Music Online. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/subscriber/article/
grove/music/20114pg9#S20114.3.6[accessed November 7, 2008].
Roads, Curtis. 1996. the computer music tutorial. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Saariaho, Kaija. 1989. Jardin Secret II. Helsinki: Edition Wilhelm Hansen
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1995. Kontakte. Kürten: Stockhausen-Verlag
Harrison, Jonty. 1998. Abstracts. Bahmingham: University of York Press
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