THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

of Glissandi. Since Stroppa’s first essay, however, advances in technology have made a
number of options for creating visual representations of the music more feasible.
One such option is the use of spectrographs; the use of these computer-generated
images was pioneered by Robert Cogan in his book, New Images of Musical Sound, and
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has since been adopted by many other analysts. These images are quite intuitively
constructed, and figures such as Figure 1.1 bear some resemblance to existing notational
practice. Time proceeds along the horizontal axis, from left to right; pitch is displayed on
the vertical axis, and in the example below and those which follow, is logarithmically
scaled so that octaves appear equally spaced. Intensity corresponds to the darkness of a
given image. Thus in the example above, taken from Glissandi, the initial material is the
softest and is split between the highest and lowest register. The middle material consists
of two thin sine-tone strands, and the material at the end is louder and noisier, filling out
more of the spectrum at once and with the greatest energy not concentrated within one
narrow frequency but spread out across a broad band.
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Martha Brech appraises the advantages and caveats of the use of spectrographs
in electroacoustic analysis–some of which are clear even from this simple example. First
of all, they are quite readable and their depictions are extremely precise. Moreover,
spectrographs have a degree of universality which is uncommon in the field of
electroacoustic music, and unlike many other representations which are generated for a
23Robert
Cogan, New Images of Musical Sound (Boston: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984); other analysts
include Stephen McAdams, Philippe Depalle, and Eric Clarke, “Analyzing Musical Sound” in Empirical
Musicology: Aims Methods, Prospects (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 157-196; Agostino DiScipio
and Martha Brech in articles cited below.
24Martha
Brech, “Sonagraphische Analysen elektroakustischer Musik,” in Electroakustische Musik, ed.
Elena Ungeheuer (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2002), 232-42.
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