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Not As Simple As It Sounds an Interview with Joshua Fineberg

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Not As Simple As It Sounds an Interview with Joshua Fineberg SI N-D 2006 pgs 9/27/06 9:40 AM Page 45 Sound: Not as Simple as It Sounds An Interview with Joshua Fineberg A child of psychoacoustics and the computer revolution, the “spectral music” movement is turning Western art music on it ear (by turning it on to its ear). AUSTIN DACEY Joshua Fineberg is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and a composer whose works are widely performed in the United States and Europe. He collaborates with computer scientists and music psychologists to help develop tools for computer-assisted composition, electronic sound manipulation, and in music perception research. In 2004 Fineberg became the U.S. editor of The Contemporary Music Review. In 2006 his book Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture through a Composer’s Ears was published by Routledge. Fineberg is associated with the movement known as “spectral music,” which draws on acoustics and computer technology to explore the fundamental nature of sound (a spectrum is a representation of a sound in terms of the amount of vibration at each of the individual fre- quencies that make it up). In spectral composition, timbre often eclipses melody as the primary musical element. What is spectral music? All such labels are kind of awkward, but the common thread is that rather than taking for granted certain sonic categories as the most musically relevant way to divide up the sound- stream—notes, for example, that are played for particular durations at a particular volume—you start from the assumption that what you have is the soundstream itself. Though sound can be parsed in the traditional way, it can be parsed lots of other ways. By understanding the physical and psychophysical principles of sound, you can gain an under- standing into the possibilities and methods best adapted to modifying sound over time. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER November / December 2006 45 SI N-D 2006 pgs 9/27/06 9:40 AM Page 46 In what ways has spectral composition been influenced Spectral music became one of the first real implementations by science and technology? of computer-assisted composition that went beyond what I would call algorithmically produced music. What spectral This is a kind of music that couldn’t have happened without composers wanted was much more like what happens in com- the progress in acoustics and psychoacoustics in the late 1960s puter-assisted design in architecture. and 1970s when people started having access to the first ana- In music there has been a long tradition of laborious hand- log sonograms and then electronic software sonograms that let calculation, but the reality is that if you spent four weeks cal- you see the interior composition of sound. The personal com- culating something, you’re going to use it whether it turned puter enabled people to analyze sounds more easily with less out to be what you wanted or not! Whereas if you spent demanding equipment. twenty minutes on it with a computer, you might have the courage to go back and try it seven or eight times until you really find the thing you were looking for. Some see spectral music as a reaction to the artificiality of serialism and 12-tone-row music. Is it somehow more natural? In a composition seminar We are creatures that are tremendously sensitive to timbre of mine, I’m just as because the vowels of language depend on timbral perception, likely to pull out as does our auditory scene analysis. The fact that we are rela- tively less good at identifying things like pitches and intervals an article from is part of why for a long time they were interesting. But when Perception & Psychophysics you start thinking you can do anything that is mathematically possible with musical symbols, you get a kind of speculative as a piece by Beethoven. music that at a certain time loses all contact with perceptual reality. Spectral music certainly strove to reground musical dis- course in human perception and cognition. Your book asks, Classical Music, Why Bother? What’s your answer? In order for subsidized art to survive it must be seen as having Spectral music has been called a post-electronic approach to importance and intrinsic value independent of how much music. Sometimes it uses electronic synthesis; often it doesn’t. entertainment value it has. You’re not just going out and buy- But the knowledge acquired in order to make (synthesize) ing it. You’re supporting it because you believe that the world sounds from scratch is essential to writing this kind of music. is a richer place with this art in it. That is a much harder sell To really control sound as we want to, we must understand than it used to be. Now, most people believe that in most enough to be able to make it. domains, there isn’t better or worse. You also see this in the debate over evolution, in the idea that we should teach all the Is the movement French? alternatives. Initially it was centered around an ensemble called I don’t mean that these abstract criteria are based on some- L’ It i n é ra r i e in early 1970s Paris, a very experimentally ori- thing divine. I think they are based on parameters of human ented group that was trying out these ideas. But once you perception and the way the human mind is built, certain had the basic concepts it became very clear that you things may have richer content than others. I tend to think needed computer tools. Because in France music in gen- we’d be better off pretending that it were so, even if it turns out eral is not at the universities, except for musicology or not to be so. The belief that there can be great literature will music history, the place where a lot of this happened was make you wrestle with, say, James Joyce. You can develop a lot IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ of capabilities in that effort that you probably couldn’t in read- Musique). It’s a research institute started in the mid-1970s ing more facile fiction. and built on the idea of providing tools to musicians at the interface between science and art. In the early 1980s, Spectral composers are anti-establishment figures in their own way, aren’t they? the computer-assisted composition techniques that IRCAM was developing prompted them to bring spectral I still don’t understand how I got the job I have! In a compo- composers into the fold. sition seminar of mine, I’m just as likely to pull out an article 46 Volume 30, Issue 6 • www.scienceartfestival.com • SKEPTICAL INQUIRER SI N-D 2006 pgs 9/27/06 9:41 AM Page 47 from Perception & Psychophysics as a piece by Beethoven. Music is so tied to the human perceptual system that until Western classical musicians are quite conservative people. I one has a complete map of that, I don’t know how you would mean, we’re trained in conservatories, for God’s sake! get a computer to write really effective music. It would have to weigh every choice against the perceptual system. This is what You’re challenging their self-conception. composers are doing, even when they don’t think about it: In a lot of the music, we are using the musicians as incredibly playing things or thinking through things in their minds and sophisticated tone generators. What matters much of the time applying them to their own perceptual systems. is the sum of all of the sounds that the musicians are making. Each of their individual parts may not make much sense by What pieces do you recommend as an introduction to itself. And that can be very frustrating for a performer. That is spectral music? very different from a lot of the Western tradition, where each First, Gérard Grisey’s Les Espaces acoustiques (The acoustic line should sing and have its own sense. spaces), which is to my mind the twentieth-century equivalent of the Ring Cycle. Another composer who is essential to the When will we see a Lincoln Center premiere of a compo- beginning of this music is Tristan Murail. Listen to Gondwana, sition written by no one? and what I think is the first piece where electronics and The factual answer is that we have already had more than one. acoustic writing really meet as equals, Désintégrations. More But I think the real question is more like a musical Turing test: recently, there is Grisey’s last work, Quatre chants pour franchir Will we ever hear a piece written by a computer that feels as le seuil (Four songs for crossing the threshold), Murail’s L’ Es p r i t successful and original as one written by a gifted human being? des dunes (Spirit of the dunes), or my Recueil de pierre et de sable And in that context, do not expect one anytime soon. (Collections of rock and sand). ! The Enigma We Answer by Living Alison Hawthorne Deming Einstein didn’t speak as a child And in my dining room the universe waiting till a sentence formed and found its way into this man emerged full-blown from his head. bent on cataloguing each innovation, I do the thing, he later wrote, which though he knows it will all disappear— nature drives me to do. Does a fish the labels, the skippers, the canyon. know the water in which he swims? We agreed then, the old friends and the new, This came up in conversation that it’s wrong to think people are a thing apart with a man I met by chance, from the whole, as if we’d sprung friend of a friend of a friend, from an idea out in space, rather than emerging who passed through town carrying from the sequenced larval mess of creation three specimen boxes of insects that binds us with the others, he’d collected in the Grand Canyon— all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees, that’s made us want to name one for butterflies and skippers, each thing and try to tell each lined up in row, pinned and labeled, its story against the vanishing.
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