Santa Clara University Scholar Commons Music College of Arts & Sciences 6-3-2004 The pS ell of Speech Bruno Ruviaro Santa Clara University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.scu.edu/music Part of the Composition Commons Recommended Citation Ruviaro, Bruno, "The peS ll of Speech" (2004). Music. Paper 20. http://scholarcommons.scu.edu/music/20 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts & Sciences at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Music by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE SPELL OF SPEECH A Thesis submitted to the Faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Electro-Acoustic Music by Bruno Tucunduva Ruviaro DARTMOUTH COLLEGE Hanover, New Hampshire June 3rd 2004 Examining Committee: Jon Appleton (chair) Eric Lyon Ioana Chitoran Carol Folt (Dean of Graduate Studies) http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~bruno [email protected] Abstract This text is a complement to the musical composition The Spell of Speech, a piece for actress, electro-acoustic sounds and live-electronics composed in 2004 as part of the requirements to conclude the Master’s degree in Electro-Acoustic Music at Dartmouth College. The core of this research is the relationship between speech and music composition. The first chapter presents a theoretical framework comprising evolutionary musicology and music cognition. The second chapter contains a historical survey of electro-acoustic music in which human voice plays a fundamental role. Finally, the third chapter analyzes the composition The Spell of Speech, presenting the main techniques used and the musical ideas involved. ii Preface This text is about music and language. More specifically, it is about the relationship between spoken language and music from the standpoint of a composer. Even though my interest in this subject dates back at least five years, it was during these last two years (2002-2004)—while enrolled at the Master’s program in Electro- Acoustic Music at Dartmouth College—that I could systematize and further develop the ideas presented here. This text was written during the compositional process of the piece The Spell of Speech, which is the center of my current research. This piece is scored for one actress, electro-acoustic sounds and live-electronics, including a variety of compositional approaches based on speech. This written thesis should be seen as an accompaniment to The Spell of Speech. In the following pages, I discuss in detail some fundamental theoretical ideas that are involved in the interdisciplinary research on the music-language relationship, as well as presenting an historical survey of contemporary music in which the interplay between speech and music structure is a dominant element. Specific speech-related composition techniques are also described and discussed. The first chapter presents an outline of current research in music cognition and evolutionary musicology concerning similarities and divergences between music and language. Special focus is given to the discussion of possible common origins for music and language, a hypothesis that is based on the analysis of their basic shared features. The problem of the identification of fundamental units in music is analyzed in the light of the analogue question in the language domain. General concepts and their definitions are borrowed from linguistics when needed, not only to clarify certain theoretical issues but iii also to demonstrate how compositional thinking can benefit from a better understanding of the structures behind human speech. After introducing some major questions that naturally arise in compositional projects involving human voice in general (and speech in particular), the second chapter presents a historical overview of some fifty years of electro-acoustic composition focusing on pieces that brought to light such questions. Pieces, composers and compositional trends are presented in chronological order. The chosen compositions are not thoroughly analyzed, for this would fall out of the scope of the present work. Instead, I tried to point out what is special in each piece in the relationship between composition and speech. The end of the chapter provides a table summarizing composers, pieces and significant dates. Finally, the third chapter goes into details of my own compositional process. A number of techniques utilized in the creation of The Spell of Speech are described. Influences from historical pieces and ideas are pointed out, as well as the correlation between speech composition techniques and phonologic and prosodic issues. Audio and video recordings of the first performance are enclosed for reference. The Spell of Speech was premiered on May 16th 2004 at Rollins Chapel (Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA). It was performed by actress Hannah Chodos. Live- electronics and electro-acoustic sounds were controlled and diffused by myself. Bruno Ruviaro iv Acknowledgements I am very much indebted to all those people who helped me in some way to have this work done. Jon Appleton, my advisor, for his invaluable help and support in all aspects, academic and non-academic, throughout these two years I have lived at Dartmouth. Eric Lyon, Larry Polansky, Ioana Chitoran, Charles Dodge, Daniel Levitin and Jean-Claude Risset for their teaching and insightful conversations. Theresa Ciambra, for all the priceless help in every fundamental detail and organizational planning. Stefan Tomic, for having written the Perl script I am using in the voice analysis/resynthesis process. Hannah Chodos, for her dedication and artistic commitment. Percussionist Fabio Oliveira, for his wonderful participation in my final concert. Yuri Spitsyn, for helping me in the DVD creation. My friends Masaki Kubo, Steve Pierce, Yuri Spitsyn, Bill Haslett, Irina Escalante and Owen Osborn, for their extraordinary help in putting together the final concert. My parents and Tânia Lanfer Marquez, for more than obvious reasons. Bruno Ruviaro Hanover, May 26th 2004 v Table of Contents Abstract ______________________________________________________________ ii Preface _______________________________________________________________iii Acknowledgements ______________________________________________________v Chapter 1 _____________________________________________________________ 1 1.1 Introduction ____________________________________________________________ 2 1.2 The Musilanguage model__________________________________________________ 3 1.3 Evolutionary musicology __________________________________________________ 6 1.4 Music cognition experiments _______________________________________________ 8 1.5 The problem of structural unit definition____________________________________ 13 1.6 An overview of speech prosody ____________________________________________ 24 Chapter 2 ____________________________________________________________ 30 2.1 General considerations about the use of voice in electro-acoustic music ___________ 31 2.2 Historical Overview _____________________________________________________ 39 Chapter 3 ____________________________________________________________ 56 3.1 The Spell of Speech _____________________________________________________ 57 3.2 Techniques I: Analysis and resynthesis _____________________________________ 58 3.3 Techniques II: composition on speech pitches ________________________________ 69 3.4 Techniques III: the live-electronics _________________________________________ 70 3.5 The Spell of Speech: formal organization ____________________________________ 80 3.6 The concert ____________________________________________________________ 83 3.7 Future work ___________________________________________________________ 85 APPENDIX A (score) __________________________________________________ 87 APPENDIX B (Perl scripts) _____________________________________________ 94 APPENDIX C (Csound files) ___________________________________________ 103 APPENDIX D (l’Attente, by Roland Barthes) _____________________________ 107 APPENDIX E (posters and program notes)_______________________________ 112 APPENDIX F (pictures)_______________________________________________ 116 APPENDIX G (CD and DVD) __________________________________________ 123 REFERENCES ______________________________________________________ 124 vi List of Tables and Figures Table 1: Historical compositions....................................................................................52 Figure 1: Sonogram in Audiosculpt; non-averaged partial tracking ................................59 Figure 2: Sonogram in Audiosculpt; averaged partial tracking. ......................................60 Figure 3: Screenshot of Open Music.. ............................................................................65 Figure 4: Raw conversion of MIDI data into a score and an elaboration on it.................68 Figure 5: First of two Max/MSP patches used in The Spell of Speech.............................72 Figure 6: Second of two Max/MSP patches used in The Spell of Speech. .......................73 Figure 7: Patcher dopplerdelay ......................................................................................74 Table 2: Schematized formal structure of The Spell of Speech........................................81 vii Chapter 1 1 1.1 Introduction There is a significant amount