Two Approaches to Electroacoustic Composition
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If you’ve been able to view any performances or recitals over the past few years, you may have noticed a growing trend in electroacoustic music. Electroacoustic music refers to music with a combination of live-played instruments and audio processed by a computer. This computer audio may consist of synthesizers, recorded audio samples, or live audio processing where the computer is manipulating a sound signal and outputting it through a set of speakers in real-time. There are several Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) available for download that you can use to build these pieces, but I will not touch on that here. In this text, I will offer two approaches that I have personally used in composing electroacoustic music. But first…
Why has this type of composition become so popular? Here are a few reasons I understand:
COVID-19
As many musicians will recognize, the pandemic that we’ve lived through has had a profound effect on live performances. Our ability to create music with others has been restricted greatly. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love performing solos and listening to solo works as much as the next musician, but there is something about the intention of blending your sound with other sounds that many performers and myself are intrigued with. Electroacoustic music has allowed this sort of auditory conversation to continue, even without other musicians on stage.
Orchestration
We as musicians now have access to an infinite number of timbre-combination. I was recently able to attend a composition seminar over Zoom that featured well-known composer Michael Torke. In this meeting, he defined orchestration in a way that pivoted my perspective on sound design in a profoundly simple way:
Orchestration is the art of doublings.
Nothing more nothing less. Composers start with melodic and rhythmic motives; the next step is determining which instruments play which motives and when. Does the cello play this line? What if the clarinet doubles this? Just like that, you’ve created a new timbre. Electroacoustic music takes this concept and multiplies it by an infinite number of synthesizable sounds.
Composers Get More Control
Occasionally, composers have a bit of a control issue. It’s obvious that an artist would want their art to be represented in the purest form accessible to them, but there are unfortunately times when this does not happen due to a performance error. When writing a piece containing an electronic tape, the composer is at the very least guaranteeing some amount of consistency from performance to performance. The tape should sound the same each time. The performer, however, brings the piece to life through their touch.
Now, here are two approaches I’ve used to construct a piece of this nature.
Approach One: Acoustic Performer as a Soloist on Top of Electronic Accompaniment.
In this method, the electronic track will play a relatively large role in the piece. It might best be described as a backing track; offering chords, beats, and structure. The soloist then may auditorily float on top as the “feature” of the music. When writing with this method, you may want to consider creating a click track for the performer to use. This will allow them to stay synchronized with the tape. If your tape is dense enough and offers plentiful cutes, a metronome is less important. Nhiyr, a composition of mine from 2019, was largely written with this technique in mind. Here is a quick excerpt of the digital tape solo near the end of the piece:
Notice everything the tape offers: Chord progressions, drums, and phrase structures.
This audio is something you might be able to listen to without the acoustic performer and not feel like there is something missing. The performer may then sit on top of this music and add a new layer of life and complexity to it. Here is that same excerpt, this time with the performers.
Approach Two: Electronic track as an extended embellishment/articulation to the acoustically performed music.
The electronic tape plays a very different role in this method. Not offering macro structure, the electronic track will act as an extension to an acoustic instrument on a micro-level. It can be used as sparsely as only appearing for one individual note… Why do this? As Michael Torke said earlier, this is the art of orchestration. We are transforming the sound color of as little as one singular note.
Maybe you’re writing a solo flute piece, and you want them to play a note with a more percussive sound, something that is generally difficult for said instrument. You can achieve this easily using the track! Simply double the flute line using a more percussive sound (that is, a sound with a higher decay) on your computer.
The opposite of this example would be to take an acoustic percussive sound with a high decay and short release, and use the electronic tape to extend this sound far longer through time than what is possible of the instrument. Do you want the low C on your marimba to resonate for 5 minutes? Double the note with a sustained synth to create this effect.
A note: for this type of composition, it is crucial that you provide the performer with a click track to keep them aligned with the digital audio.
Here is an example of the tape audio from my piece for Saxophone and Steel Pan, Ego Death.
Notice how empty this sounds. You would likely lose interest in the piece if this was all there was. The tape here is not meant to be interesting by itself, it is meant to act as an extension to the instruments. Here is that same excerpt with the acoustic instruments (MIDI) included.
Now you’re able to really hear the material; the tape simply emphasizes the live-performed music.
Before I conclude, I must mention one more version of electroacoustic composition. This is not a method I’ve used thus far but is a popular one that essentially allows the performers to have full control of their performance sound. This is through a type of real-time audio processing using software such as Max/MSP. You can program your computer to actually interact with the acoustic music being performed with the use of microphones or a direct-in box. These sound modifications and interactions can be as simple as adding a tape delay or reverb, but there are some more dense examples out there.
These are the methods of electroacoustic music that I have become most experienced with. Based on the music that you want to write, you can use method one to create denser and more involved electronic music for your performer to play along with. Method two allows for your composition to be more centered on the material acoustically performed, with the tape only acting as an extension of the instrument. These two methods need not be mutually exclusive, they can be easily mixed and you can create a piece that utilizes both! Try exploring these techniques, and you’ll most likely discover that there is an infinite number of new sound combinations available to you.
