Towards an Electronic Music Theory?

The Lounge General Discussion
#1

I’ve been going through Mark Levine’s Jazz Theory Book, and I’d say there’s a lot to be learned from there about harmony, reharmonization, form/tune structure, and improvising tonally.

I know Miller Puckette has tried to write down a theory of electronic music that is mathematical in the sense that (most?) synthesis can be derived from the math of signal processing (convolution can describe filtering, LFO is a multiplicative process, VCOs can be described as trigonometric functions or summations of related functions, etc.), and ‘sampling’ in the electronic sense can be understood and written down from some basic computer science regarding iteration (forwards and backwards for reverse)…

but I don’t mean the nuts and bolts of soundmaking, I mean a set of tools for the formal analysis of electronic works.

it’s clear you have instrumentation, form, melody (or phrases), harmony, but there’s gotta be some terminology because you have so many breaks from traditional form. and in some cases you just have algorithms or modular patches which construct pieces…

in which case you would need a score to really understand. but we dont have a way of scoring electronic music, do we?

has anyone gone down this compositional rabbit hole? i havent read anything by stockhausen or xenakis so maybe i could start there…

5 Likes
#2

i’ll take the argument that it’s a regression to think of scores as useful in the context of electronic music

3 Likes
#3

speaking as someone that has studied music composition at the university level and handwritten more than a few scores for a variety of traditional instruments and ensembles, the ‘sheet music’ largely already exists entirely inside the machines (‘press play’ DAW sets), and anything past that is often largely improvised (i.e. hardware sets, or more involved DAW setups etc.), I see relatively little advantage to notating any gestures that exist outside of the ‘raw material’ - we can easily just listen to recordings of the performance of said pieces or view the DAW project file, etc.

even sheet music for traditional instruments frequently leaves a lot of stuff out or glosses over it and is wildly open to interpretation on many levels. I’ve seen a lot of attempts at notating electronic music, and I mostly shake my head. It’s an interesting exercise but matters only in the most intellectual and academic sense for transcription and learning purposes, but if it blows your skirt up why not? tools for studying and analyzing things don’t need to be practical or even make much sense

5 Likes
#4

tools for studying and analyzing things don’t need to be practical or even make much sense

so i think this is what im getting at, since notation exists as midi and as stems in DAW, id say practically your DAW session (if working in a computer) is really the score for the piece.

but what about other ways of thinking about how electronic music is built?

ive found it helpful to really write down what im hearing as in:

  • instrumentation (roughly speaking)
  • structure
  • how instrumentation changes with structure (sometimes choruses or B parts add or remove instruments)
  • rhythm (this can be notated informally)

here’s my example:

air - cherry blossom girl

tempo:

roughly 88 bpm

instrumentation:

verse:

guitar
drum machine
string machine
pad sound
electric bass
harmonized vocals

chorus adds:

flute
synth chords with decay

verse 2:

evolving pads

bridge adds:

harpischord-like synth

chorus 3:

adds more vocal embellishments panned

structure:

fade in intro: strings and bass

rhythmic:

16th notes on guitar, kind of half-tempo feel

swings a little bit on the piano parts but not too much

harmonic:

predominantly in a minor key, if i had to guess there
is definitely a capo on the guitar just based on the sound

there are a fair number of 7ths in there for the guitar

production:

there is a lot going on here
the focus is really on instrumentation

lyrical:

very simple lyrics
seems like unrequited love
i believe they follow the european mode of making words sound good and evocative
without thinking too much about meaning
and cherry blossom girl is a very evocative lyrical hook

1 Like
#5

you seem to be taking a descriptive approach - it’s excellent to analyze music in all sorts of ways and everyone should do that - one of your questions was about scoring electronic music and my main feeling is that it’s simply not needed or even that useful that vast majority of the time. I really enjoyed this talk by Andrew Scheps (very successful mixing engineer) that I hope relates well here

re: terminology, different musical cultures always develop their own interesting terms for musical elements and ideas. A friend I knew that subbed a bit as a guitarist in a real-deal reggae band said they used phrases like ‘bubbling’ and other things I can’t remember to describe what they wanted and he always just had to kind of smile and nod and listen carefully! Was reading an article the other day about a jazz pianist that said everyone should develop their own musical terminology and have fun with it, as he thinks it’s boring if everyone is using the same terms! Just think about all the terminology we use in electronic music - ‘wobbles’, ‘hypersaws’, ‘breakbeat’ - the list is endless and you aren’t going to learn (or set the trend) on this stuff by reading up on Xenakis generally speaking

3 Likes
#6

i think you make an interesting point about terminology. you could make a glossary and a lot of stuff would be irrelevant tomorrow (thanks internet age)…but i think there are some things that simply make communicating easier

for example, in electronic music “cutoff frequency” or “pad” or “stab” or are as useful terms as “head” and “lay out” are in jazz…you can talk to somebody playing jazz and they’ll probably know what you are talking about. i realize these things evolve organically, but i think there is at least some commonality among musicians talking about pieces composed electronically.

but i find myself frequently joking about “the part with bleep bloops”…

it also i think is usually relevant in (to me, more interesting) pieces of music in terms of A and B (etc.) parts (yes, i know theres ambient drone and ultra minimal stuff out there, but i also dont listen to that kind of music)

#7

I think often about the notion that there is a completely arbitrary relationship between a sign/symbols and the signified (the actual ‘thing’ the symbol stands for) - sometimes terms may have some sort of seeming intuitive logic to them, such as ‘stabs’ or ‘pads’ but it’s really rather arbitrary - what do the letters C, A, and T have do with feline mammals anyway? The signs and symbols we choose to use, even the ones that are self-invented, are generally extensions of our surrounding culture

fundamentally I feel most ‘music theory’ can only be expressed and understood in a cultural context, it has very few inherent and universal qualities. It really doesn’t take long to discuss the harmonic series and how to subdivide units of time, and they aren’t up for debate - after all, these aren’t cultural, they are physical properties. Fundamentally this is where a lot of confusion lies I think - when we confuse cultural inclinations and properties as inherent elements and attempt to discuss and analyze them divorced of their cultural context

1 Like
#8

i mean sure, why does “door” mean what it does? its a pretty dumb sounding word, it should have no correspondences to what it indicates.

your argument basically sounds (to me) like this: forget music theory, its a loaded term, the only worthwhile thing looking at is the culture that produces the music and the soundmaking of that culture , and (to me) that sounds like the stance an ethnomusicologist would take.

#9

maybe not if you’re the composer though, there has to be a way of conveying the composition that can assist a performer - especially if the instrumentation is unusual

3 Likes
#10

yes, what people even mean when they say ‘music theory’ is all over the place. I wouldn’t say ‘forget it’ - it’s often a very useful compositional device (in its many forms, whether we’re talking ‘bubbling’ or ‘plagal cadence’), but it’s descriptive rather than proscriptive and it’s really not a serious business at all

I actually never studied any ethnomusicology, but it’s not surprising that field would have a broader view

#11

some of the scores that come out of the avant garde world are beautiful, but i think its all about what the composer wants to do with the score.

practically speaking, (not in the hardcore academic composing world), i think communicating with a band, it seems that you pretty much you have give people a DAW session since scoring (beyond kind of avant garde stuff) seems to be pretty much impossible for performing effects or a sampler.

1 Like
#12

now that i think about it a little more, maybe one way of sharing a ‘score’ would be to screen capture a session with parts clearly labeled and the transport scrolling. might need multiple takes depending on what you want to display but this might be helpful with transport markers etc.

#13

Some of the things you are talking about remind me of looking at spectrogram images.
It’s easy to see percussion and filter sweeps and such. However I’m not sure I’ve “read” enough of them to discern one timbre from another. Or exactly what note is being played.

#14

unless you study speech formants for a living, you aren’t likely to be able to read the spectrogram of anything.

#15

This 60s classic only just got translated into English last year…

9780520294301
9780520294301.jpg666×1000 139 KB

Schaeffer is often mistaken as being of interest only in regards to Concrete Music - ie. historical tape music but his writings were oriented towards evaluating any music from the perspective of listening for hearable textures, motifs & structure.

James Tenney’s Meta+Hodos is thinking in a similar channel from the other side of the Atlantic but I don’t think it’s generally available (my copy is an offest print spiral bound booklet).

2 Likes
#16

My compositional rabbit hole to date: An electronic composition built on the 4th Messaien mode:

On another forum, some jazz theory geeks were talking about Nelson Veras and his use of Messaien modes for soloing ideas. It was too advanced for me to make use of in soloing, but I thought it’d be fun to write a piece of music using one of them, and chose the 4th mode. I tried searching for any harmony system that others may have created with this mode, but wasn’t able to find anything, so I started creating one. First, I tried stacking thirds, which is how major scale harmony is created from the major scale - the chords I got were too boring and sound-alike. So I tried stacking 4ths instead and got more interesting chords. I think quartal harmony sounds better for this mode because it it has 8 notes, while the major scale, and the three popular minor scales, are all 7-note scales. Sequencers that let you set a scale make these compositional experiments easier - I came up with a riff for my piece by setting Xynthesizr to Messaien Mode 4, then I just messed around with setting steps to notes out of that mode until I found something I liked.

Numerical representations of pitches and pitch intervals work well with electronic music making systems, as we already have the MIDI note number standard - each note number mapping to a pitch in Western equal temperament. Music theory nerds get pretty wild with this stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_theory_(music)

3 Likes
#17

I think the works of Terry Riley and other minimalist / phase music / newyork hypnotic school is important to electronic music as a whole even if you aren’t making minimalist work, techniques and compositions from this movement just go hand in hand with electronic sounds in my mind.

3 Likes
#18

Someone’s been reading Derrida

#19

actually I’ve never read any derrida; my mention of semiotics derives from my background in computer science and programming

#20

or saussure or umberto eco :stuck_out_tongue: