Denis Smalley evolved Schaeffer's ideas into "spectromorphology." Sound is no longer tied to a source. We don't listen to a violin or the wind, but to the texture of the sound itself, its movement and evolution.
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Denis Smalley faced a crisis of the avant-garde: traditional notation was useless for textures that constantly morphed. His answer was 'Spectromorphology'—a revolutionary descriptive language for sound shapes that became the standard for electroacoustic analysis. In his masterpiece Pentes he applies this theory to manipulate the listener's grasp of reality.
He plays with 'Surrogacy': the brain's desperate attempt to identify the physical cause of a sound. Smalley seamlessly welds natural recordings of Northumbrian pipes with synthetic drones so perfectly that the ear cannot detect the seam. The listener is left suspended in a state of disbelief, unable to distinguish between a recorded landscape and a computer-generated hallucination.
node.music - an interactive map of the history of electronic sound
From the Telharmonium, which streamed sound over telephone wires at the end of the 19th century, to music written by AI.
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Black lines are direct links: technology, descent, founding, rivalry.Grey lines are looser: ideas, techniques, collaborations.Hover over a line to see what it connects.
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node.music
Interactive timeline of electronic music history, from the 200-ton Telharmonium (1897) to neural audio.
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