More and more electroacoustic music is being created for live performance. Unlike most Western music, these works use sound effects and a wide variety of tones. They can sound like running water, the roar of an animal or something unidentifiable.
Here’s the problem: how can these sounds be represented in sheet music, so they can be performed? What musical notation system would work?
In the West, music has traditionally been represented by 12 notes written on staffs. Could this conventional system be used for electronic music or must a new one be invented? And how could any system of notation for electronic music be made readily understandable?
This summer, Nicolas Bernier , a professor of digital music in the Faculty of Music at Université de Montréal, is considering these questions and working on a new notation system with the help of Ph.D. students David Caulet and Pierre-Luc Lecours.
Looking for a common standard
As a creator of electroacoustic works, Bernier would like to have a standard system for writing down his compositions in order to perform them on stage."My synthesizer has arrays of buttons and cables," he said. "When I’m on stage, how do I remember what to do, which button to press, what kind of sound to produce? What is it supposed to sound like to the audience? If I turn the knob 75 degrees or 25 degrees, the sound will be very different. How do you write this down so that you can play the piece again later?"
What should be noted? Should every manipulation and every sound produced be written down? In a classical score, every note can be written on the page and then played, but a synthesizer can generate a hundred notes in a fraction of a second. Writing down each note would be impractical and impossibly complex for the performer to read.
"It isn’t worth writing down every note," said Bernier. "The idea is to describe the energy of the sound and its movement. Is a sequence of sounds rising or falling? Does it have distortions?"
Multi-tones are a challenge
Writing sheet music for a multi-tonal instrument is another major challenge. The piano and violin have relatively stable timbres. A piano will generally sound like a piano and a violin like a violin. But electroacoustic instruments produce a multitude of timbres. They can sound like a piano or a violin or something else entirely.So how best to describe these multi-timbral sounds, and how can the notation be made easily readable and quickly usable by as many people as possible? Ideally, musicians should be able to understand intuitively what the sheet music is saying. Bernier plans to explore different approaches to rendering the notation graphically.
Just as a play will have stage directions at the beginning of a scene, an electroacoustic score could indicate instrument settings at the beginning of the piece and whenever there’s a change. For example, turning the violin bow backward will produce a harsher, less melodic sound. "In the score," said Bernier, "you might write something like ’play with the bow backward for a shrill or scratchy timbre’."
As a first step, scoring a synthesizer piece he’s working on, Bernier is using conventional Western notation supplemented by instructions for timbre and manipulations. He also plans to work on a text-based notation system.
Synthesizers and guitar pedals targeted
To help him in his research on electroacoustic sheet music, Caulet will work on notation for unconventional uses of guitar effects pedals. He is preparing a performance and his research focuses on new ways of playing and notating this style of music, for which there is currently no standard method."Although guitar pedals are commonly used, there are few precise codes for indicating the manipulations in real time," said Bernier. "Usually, people just say whether distortion is on or off. However, guitar pedals can be used to modify sound parameters in a variety of ways live, and there is no notation system for describing this precisely."
For his part, Lecours will look at performances and compositions for modular synthesizers. Few musicians perform works for modular synthesizers written by others due to their complexity and the difficulty of communicating them. Performances are often based on technical outlines and a good dose of improvisation rather than formal scores. Lecours’ research will also explore approaches to notation.
