Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening by Kramer Jonathan D. Carl Robert

Author:Kramer, Jonathan D.,Carl, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2016-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

8.7. Real Time in Electroacoustic Music

So, once again, what is “real” musical time? Does it correspond to gestural time or to piece time? Is it necessarily and hierarchically superior to “unreal” musical time, whatever that might be?

The term “real time” is actually most readily associated not with gestural vs. piece time in traditional music but with computer music. For the computer musician, the ideal of “real time” is the apparently immediate response of an interactive system to some stimulus.24 The notion of real time as so understood did not originate with music technology, however. In group improvisation, in whatever style, the real-time (i.e. almost instantaneous) response of one performer to another has always been an ideal.

It should be no surprise that computer musicians are concerned with the reality of musical time, when we recall how unreal, in a certain sense, musical time was in the infancy of computer music. In the 1960s, composers would spend days constructing what they hoped was a few seconds of coherent electronic sound. But they could not hear the results of their labors until they sent off their digital tape to a distant laboratory, which converted it to sound. When the sound tape arrived in the mail a week later, the composer finally got to hear what his/her snippet actually sounded like—with sometimes surprising results.

Days of constructing the sound, more days of waiting, and then finally a few seconds of recorded music to listen to! The gap between conception and audition was massively greater than the duration of the musical excerpt. It is no wonder that composers yearned for a somehow more “real” musical time, with little or no disconnect between the construction of the sound and the hearing of it. What seemed unreal was the long wait. It was as if a pianist played a series of figures at the keyboard but did not actually hear the result of his/her finger movements until a week or two later!

Such gaps are not the sole province of computer music, even though it is within the context of musical technology that the term “real time” has gained its greatest currency. Composers of music for human performance, particularly if the music is complex or requires a large performing force, have had to wait years between conception and audition. But there is a crucial difference: an orchestral composer (take Mahler as an example) may not have heard his symphonies immediately, but he did hear them in his head, in his imagination, possibly aided by imperfect but still “real-time” renditions at the piano. But a computer-music composer, for whom composing is not only putting together known sounds but also constructing hitherto unknown sonorities, may not have a mental sonic image. Hence, computer music came of age with the advent of real-time technologies, which allow for the immediate production of sound.

The distinction between real and delayed time pertains to instrumental as well as electroacoustic and interactive music. A real-time performance of that Mahler symphony, by a flesh-and-blood orchestra, is one thing; a recorded performance is another.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.