Juxtaposition and Non-Motion: Varese Bridges Modernism and Electroacoustic Music

Edgard Vare` se’s Poe` me e´ lectronique can be viewed as a bridge between early twentieth-century modernism and electroacoustic music. This connection to early modernism is most clearly seen in its use of musical juxtaposition, a favoured technique of early modernist composers, especially those active in Paris. Juxtaposition and non-motion are considered here, particularly in relationship to Smalley’s exposition of spectromorphology (Smalley 1986), which in its preoccupation with motion omits any significant consideration of non-motion. Juxtaposition and non-motion have an important history within twentieth-century music, and as an early classic of electroacoustic music, Poe` me e´ lectronique is a particularly striking example of a composition that is rich in juxtapositions similar to those found in passages of early modernist music. Examining Poe` me e´ lectronique through the lens of juxtaposition and non-motion reveals how the organisation of its juxtaposed sounds encourages the experience of sound structure suspended time.

Music, Magic, and the Mythic: The Dynamics of Visual and Aural Discourse in Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen

The 1980s saw a wave of African films that aimed to represent, on both local and international screens, a sophisticated pre-colonial Africa, thus debunking notions of the continent as primitive. Toward this aim the films inscribed the conventions of oral performance within their visual styles, denying spectator identification with the protagonists and emphasising the presence of the narrator. However, some critics argued that these films exoticised Africa, while their use of oral performance’s distancing effect echoed the ‘scientific’ distance structured by the ethnographic film, in which African societies were represented as ‘the other’. Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen exemplifies this tension, transposing into cinematic form oral storytelling techniques in the depiction of a power struggle within the covert cult of the komo, a Bambara initiation society unfamiliar to most non-Bambara viewers. This paper demonstrates how the film negotiates this tension via music, which interpellates the international spectator by eliciting a greater identification with the protagonists than that determined at a visual level, while encoding a verisimilitude to rituals that may otherwise be read as the superstitious practices of ‘the other’. In this way, music and image in Yeelen operate as parallel, though often overlapping, discourses, bridging the gap between the film’s culturally specific narrative and formal components, and its international spectators.

Compost city: underground music, collapsoscapes and urban regeneration

This paper looks at the recent history of Hulme, Manchester, which during the 1980s was home to many of the most successful bands of the post-punk era. This flourishing of underground music was not planned, however. It emerged, through a complex network of urban forces, some physical, some social. The paper develops the concept of the ‘compost city’ a laissez-faire approach to the management of urban culture, which is oppositional to the current vogue for more hands-on cultural industries management.

HIGH-FIDELITY MUSIC CODING AT 4 BITS.

A very high-quality sub-band ADPCM music coding scheme which compresses high-fidelity music signals, bandlimited to 15kHz, to an equivalent PCM representation of only 4 bits per sample, is described. By processing music sampled at 32 kHz, this coder exhibits a total bit rate of only 128kbit/s and is consequently applicable to the ISDN. Subjective tests conducted with this coder have shown that music recovered from the compression scheme is essentially indistinguishable from the original material. The results obtained are of major importance, not only for ISDN and broadcasting, but also for other digital audio technology such as compact disc (CD) and digital audio tape.

INDEPENDENT EVALUATION OF THE PERFORMANCE OF THE CCITT G. 722 WIDEBAND CODING RECOMMENDATION USING MUSIC SIGNALS.

The subjective performance of the G. 722 7-kHz wideband speech-coding recommendation using music signals is described. A number of audible distortions specific to music signals were found to be present in real-time evaluations of the coder. As a result, three modifications are proposed which are found to improve the performance for music signals. These modifications are compatible with the G. 722 system configuration. The results obtained clearly demonstrate the very high coding efficiency of subband ADPCM (adaptive differential pulse-code modulation) with comparison to digitally companding and ADM schemes when applied to music signals.

The role of formal structure in liking for popular music

The effect of restructuring the form of three unfamiliar pop/rock songs was investigated in two experiments. In the first experiment, listeners' judgements of the likely location of sections of novel popular songs were explored by requiring participants to place the eight sections (Intro - Verse 1 - Chorus 1 - Verse 2 - Chorus 2 - Bridge (solo) - Chorus 3 - Extro) of the songs into the locations they thought them most likely to occur within the song. Results revealed that participants were able to place the sections in approximately the right location with some accuracy, though they were unable to differentiate between choruses. In Experiment 2, three versions of each of the songs were presented in three different structures: intact (original form), medium restructured (the sections in a moderately changed order), and highly restructured (more severe restructuring). The results show that listeners' judgments of predictability and liking were largely uninfluenced by the restructuring of the songs, in line with findings for classical music. Moment-by-moment liking judgements of the songs demonstrated a change in liking judgements with repeated exposure, though the trend was downwards with repeated exposure rather than upwards. Detailed analysis of moment-by-moment judgements at the ends and beginnings of sections showed that listeners were able to respond quickly to intact songs, but not to restructured songs. The results suggest that concatenism prevails in listening to popular song at the expense of paying attention to larger structural features. © 2012 by the regents of the university of california all rights reserved.