Article,
Using auditory information for events in electroacoustic music
Contemporary Music Review, 10 (2): 85-93 (1994)
DOI: 10.1080/07494469400640321
Abstract
This essay uses research in ecological acoustics to perform a critique of the rejection of worldly meaning and significance inherent in the classical notion of reduced or acousmatic listening, showing how the direct perception of events and their meanings, or affordances, can be exploited by electroacoustic musicians without betraying the spirit of an aural compositional technique. Our dynamic relationship with a meaningful environment and the structured auditory information that it produces is shown to provide the grounds for developing compositional techniques and tools that exploit a closer relationship to sounds through their direct perceptual links to causal actions and events. These links are also shown to provide the basis for a common ground between composer and listener that redefines the acousmatic by reinstating and reassessing the importance of mimesis in electroacoustic music.
