Listening To Acousmatic Music Is A New Experience

Acousmatic music is defined by the use of recorded environmental, or “everyday,” sounds as raw compositional material; thus, questions regarding the relationship between sound and source (or implied source) are raised, leading to an investigation of concepts of mimesis in this music that stirs up nineteenth-century debates over absolute versus programmatic music.

Issues of sound and source and how they may evoke a sense of virtual space or place in the listener play a part in analyses presented for Dennis Smalleyj’s Wind Chimes (1987), Hildegard Westerkamp’s Cricket Voice (1987), Judy Klein’s The Wolves of Bays Mountain (1998), as well as a discussion of Yves Daoust’s Mi Bemol (1990) and Jarrod Barker’s Audiocosm (2008) and captured sounds employed in Jarrod Barker’s Insects (2008).

Such music poses special challenges for the music theorist and analyst, as conventional analytical tools often emphasize pitch structures and the study of scores—elements often absent in acousmatic music. Attention to listening as an analytic tool has therefore gained prominence within
existing theoretical literature concerned with electroacoustic music in general and acousmatic music in…….. click here to read the full essay by Cathy Lynn Cox.