Methods and Tools for Transcribing Electroacoustic Music Pierre Couprie

Methods and tools for transcribing electroacoustic music Pierre Couprie To cite this version: Pierre Couprie. Methods and tools for transcribing electroacoustic music. Technologies for Music Notation and Representation (TENOR), Université Concordia, May 2018, Montréal, Canada. hal- 01800513 HAL Id: hal-01800513 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01800513 Submitted on 11 Jun 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives| 4.0 International License TENOR'18 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation METHODS AND TOOLS FOR TRANSCRIBING ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC Pierre Couprie IReMus, Sorbonne University [email protected] ABSTRACT the contradiction resides between acousmatic music and an anti-acousmatic analysis method. Listening to the spec- This article presents some tools and methods to carry out trum changes the pure acousmatic character of this mu- transcriptions of electroacoustic music. It introduces the sic” [2]. However, in 1952, Schaeffer imagined the possi- relationship between sound analysis and image or draw- bility of working on the relationship between image and ing at the birth of electroacoustic music and explains the sound through abstract painting: “Some concrete music interest of creating transcriptions. The article contains a works immediately demand the graphic translation and it proposed framework, based on several years of practice, would not be impossible, for example, to compose a con- which links musical analysis to transcription, sound analy- crete music by expressing the equivalence of matter and sis and representation. The different parts of a transcription form of an abstract painting. In any case, this painting are then detailed and methods are proposed to create anno- would be a better score than notes on music staff paper. tations with reference to various examples I have created Thus, there is an indisputable link between these two new since the late 1990s. phenomena, which establish a solid bridge between paint- The last section presents the EAnalysis package, devel- ing and music” [3]. oped with Simon Emmerson and Leigh Landy at Gael¨ Tissot has explained the complex relationship be- Leicester’s De Montfort University, in order to create a tool tween music and visual arts within the GRM [4]. He argues for analyzing, transcribing and representing electroacous- that there has often been a convergence between the mor- tic music. It introduces the interface, the architecture and phological work of the composer and the notion of plas- the transcription features of this piece of software in rela- ticity stemming from the visual field, while going beyond tion to other technologies. the scope of the Groupe Recherche Image (GRI). Jacques Vidal and François Delalande’s animated transcription [5] ´ 1. INTRODUCTION of the fourth movement of Schaeffer’s Etudes aux objets (1959) demonstrates that the idea of using visualization for 1.1 Schaeffer and the transcription of acousmatic an instrumented listening to concrete music dates back to music at least the 1970s. As for the instrumented listening activ- In his Treatise on Musical Objects, Pierre Schaeffer chose ity itself, it probably began with the history of the record- the term “acousmatic” in order to characterize listening ing [6]. The shift between acousmatic listening and in- which does not include the search for production and trans- strumented listening has been accentuated with the advent mission practices. He placed listening at the heart of the of digital technologies and their graphical interfaces, since studied phenomenon. This acoustic listening “symboli- the manipulation of sound can only be controlled through cally forbids any relationship with the visible, touchable, a representation of it. measurable” [1]. On the other hand, the acousmatic lis- Acousmatic music and sound visualization are comple- tener can dissect the sound by isolating it, varying its play- mentary. They are listening practices in which a form of vi- back speed, intensity, or repeating it. This is the first instru- sualization improves the understanding of the phenomenon mented listening in electroacoustic music. Analog play- being listened to. With musical analysis, visualization is back and editing technologies enabled Schaeffer and mem- even an essential prerequisite, as acousmatic listening is bers of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) to an- used several times during the analytical process, benefiting alyze sounds through the concept of sound objects. from all the possibilities of instrumented listening. Studying music created without images through transcription or visualization can seem paradoxical. Indeed, Vincent 1.2 Why would we trancribe? Tiffon has written that: “The sonogram allows the visual We have previously mentioned the lack of visual support transfer of sounds and music that are precisely designed as a hindrance to the development of electroacoustic mu- outside this visual context. At the heart of this paradox, sic analysis. The ethnomusicologist Simha Arom points out that the study of traditional oral music requires one Copyright: c 2018 Pierre Couprie. This is an open-access article distributed “to have a global picture of the sound document in front under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, which of us at all times” [7]. The proximity between the analyt- permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided ical approach used in ethnomusicology and the one used the original author and source are credited. in the electroacoustic works has allowed for the develop- 7 TENOR'18 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation Figure 1. Representation and transcription framework. ment of transcription in the same way as that used in struc- 2. THE ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK tural linguistics. This filiation can be found in the work of Transcription is usually a complex exercise (Figure 1). The several researchers such as François Delalande, who has method proposed in this article is divided into two steps. used transcription as a pre-analytical step [8], or in that of François-Bernard Mache,ˆ who has linked the units to 2.1 Representations their context in a phonological process [9]. Transcribing an electroacoustic work partially follows the steps developed This section concerns the realization of one or more rep- for the structural study of languages. Partially, because resentations which serve as visual support to musical anal- some steps such as switching, or the concept of equiva- ysis. The waveform and spectrum (linear, logarithmic or lence class are only rarely applicable in a systematic way. wavelets) facilitate the segmentation of the musical flow The segmentation of the musical flow remains one of the into sound materials. If the analytical objective is to study most problematic steps in the analysis of electroacoustic slow evolution or to opt for an analysis method without works. Thus presented, transcription remains a primarily segmentation, then it is interesting to extract audio descrip- descriptive tool. tors. One or more representations are realized during this step. In addition to transcription as a pre-analytical step, its use in a pedagogical or presentation context remains the 2.2 Transcriptions most widely used. I have developed a graphical code that During transcription creation, the type of segmentation is is attractive and easily understandable by a novice audi- selected from musical analysis: ence, for instance the transcriptions which I carried out for the CD-ROM La musique electroacoustique´ [10]. Colors, 1. By identifying the origin of sounds (causal analysis). shapes and their arrangement on the graphical space have 2. By segmenting the musical flow into morphologies been chosen to enhance the understanding and memoriza- based on an analysis of the acoustic parameters of tion of works. This coding generally corresponds to the sounds (morphological analysis). origin or context in which the sounds are used. The origin of the sounds is often imaginary – in this way, the ap- 3. By identifying the musical functions of musical dis- proach is close to the concept of sound-image proposed by course (functional analysis). François Bayle [11]. On the contrary, transcription, which 4. By identifying elements of structures ranging from is often absent from theoretical writings on electroacoustic large temporal divisions – musical form – to the most music, offers a wealth of possibilities. Finally, transcrip- finely divided – microstructures (formal analysis). tion is very commonly used to exemplify analytical dis- course. The analyst can choose between these types of segmentation or mix them. The next step is to convert these an- Whether it is as a pre-analytical step, an educational tool alytical elements to annotations that will be assembled to or as an example accompanying

Load more