Musique électroacoustique latino-américaine

Juan Pampin, Metal Hurlant, 1996
(Argentine)



Durée de l'enregistrement : 14 min 52 s.
Instruments : Pour percussion métallique (solo) et sons générés par ordinateur
Remarques : Ken Piascik, percussion.

Autres ressources disponibles :
- À propos de Juan Pampin
- Compositions par Juan Pampin

À propos de cette composition :

[Traduction française non disponible]
We live in a society of immaterial materials. More and more, we manipulate things we are unable to touch. Sounds and images traveling through networks at increasing speed reach us everyday, but their apparently physical presence is no more than the semblance of digital information. The intangibility of sound compounded with the homogeneity of the digital medium contributes to digression from the qualitative aspects of acoustic material. In the process of abstracting sounds into notes or events, notes into numbers, and numbers finally into bytes, the digital medium runs the risk of losing qualitative differences intrinsic to sound. The seeming immateriality of music may result in the tendency to entrust the process of compositional work to the logic of algorithmic procedures. Exclusively guided by a processual logic, music produced in this fashion depends on a set of basic logical expressions and their associated rules of transformation. A composition mainly governed by formal operations ends up in most cases neglecting the acoustic quality of musical material. One of the intents of my project is to reverse the tendency toward homogenization and hierarchization the digital medium induces in the composer.

Metal Hurlant has been composed for a percussion player (playing metallic instruments) and computer generated sounds. The hybridity of the piece serves a qualitative logic. Atonal music during the '20s and serialism later stressed what Adorno referred to as the inner logic of procedures. In contrast, this work follows the logic of the sound materials, not the logic of the procedures, to shape acoustic matter.

The acoustic material comes from a studio recording of metallic percussion instruments. Spectral analysis of these sounds provides the raw matter for the composition. This data is a digital representation of the qualitative traits of metallic percussion. It defines the range of acoustic properties available for manipulation and determines the further behavior of qualitative traits in the overall composition. In this way, qualitative parameters supply compositional parameters.

Access to the interiority of the sound material is mediatedby the digital medium. In this work, the digital medium does not flatten the qualitative structure of matter. On the contrary, spectral analysis is used here to explore what can be called the sound "metalness" of the selected instruments. Since the range of compositional operations is provided by the isolated sound metalness, to certain extent the qualitative structure of the material takes command over the compositional process. Moreover, the metalness ruling the computer generated sounds furnishes the morphological boundaries of the instrumental part. Metal Hurlant is an expression of metalness sculpted on percussion and electronic sounds.

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