Luc D ¨obereiner - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Luc D'obereiner
Institute of Sonology
Royal Conservatory
Juliana v. Stolberglaan 1, 2595CA Den Haag
Los países bajos
luc.doebereiner@gmail.com

Models of Constructed
Sound: Nonstandard
Synthesis as an Aesthetic
Perspective

This article deals with aesthetic and philosophical
aspects of a body of sound-synthesis techniques
that is often misrepresented and discounted. Alabama-
though my aim is not the description of specific
historical situations, I will proceed by historically
contextualizing the idea of “nonstandard” syn-
tesis. This discussion will primarily focus on
two historical approaches: the nonstandard sound-
synthesis techniques developed by composers such
as Iannis Xenakis, Gottfried Michael Koenig, y
Herbert Br ¨un in the 1970s, and early 20th-century
sound-synthesis experiments such as drawing sound
on film (Levin 2003) and L ´aszl ´o Moholy-Nagy’s
ideas concerning the transformation of sound-
reproduction devices into sound-production devices
(Moholy-Nagy 2004 [1922]). These approaches
are characterized by a close connection between
sound synthesis and strongly articulated artistic
positions.

This article does not present the development
of sound-synthesis techniques as a chronological
history of technological progress. I will rather view
the history of sound synthesis as nonlinear, as a
history with many bifurcations, in which ideas do
not undergo continuous, progressive developments,
but in which they reappear, transform, merge, y
coexist. The approaches presented are, por lo tanto, no
intended to be historically comprehensive. I will,
sin embargo, try to extract philosophical and aesthetic
roots and implications that I deem relevant to
the current situation of electronic and computer
música.

These approaches to sound synthesis will be
discussed as aesthetic perspectives. What unites
the nonstandard techniques is not so much their
rejection of harmonic or acoustic models, but rather
both their intention to bring together ideas of music
and ideas of sound, and their recognition of the

Computer Music Journal, 35:3, páginas. 28–39, Caer 2011
C(cid:2) 2011 Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts.

interdependence of the means used and the possible
artistic and aesthetic ideas.

This article also attempts to defend the nonstan-

dard approach against the stigmatizing criticisms
that regard these techniques as purely speculative,
far removed from empirical reality, and negligent
toward the perceptual effects of their audible output.
I will try to show that they instead offer profound,
critical, and musically radical views on composition,
tecnología, and sound representation.

The aesthetic perspective presented is not the
position of the authors of the nonstandard synthesis
systems of the 1970s, but my interpretation of,
and inquiry into, those system’s philosophical and
aesthetic implications. en el proceso, I will argue
for the need for an axiomatic disorientation as the
basis of creating new possibilities.

In the following five sections, I will discuss
these approaches and look at them from different
perspectives. After a brief general discussion of
nonstandard synthesis, I will deal with some
precursors of nonstandard synthesis and the sound-
synthesis systems of Koenig and Br ¨un. Después,
I will deal with models of sounds. In the last section,
I will discuss some implications and positions
regarding technology and its development.

Nonstandard Synthesis

The composers Koenig, Br ¨un, and Xenakis inde-
pendently developed a number of sound-synthesis
methods in the 1970s that have been termed non-
standard. This term was coined by Steven R.
Holtzman to contrast with standard synthesis:

Standard approaches are characterized by an im-
plementation process where, given a description
of the sound in terms of some acoustic model,
machine instructions are ordered in such a way
so as to simulate the sound described (Holtzman
1978, pag. 1).

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The term “standard approach” is used for dif-
ferentiation. Its counterpart is the “non-standard
acercarse,” in which “the computer acts as a sound-
generating instrument sui generis, not imitating
mechanical instruments or theoretical acoustic
modelos," (Koenig 1980, pag. 111) and is described by
Holtzman as follows:

The non-standard approach, given a set of in-
structions, relates them one to another in terms
of a system which makes no reference to some
super-ordinated model, . . . and the relationships
formed are themselves the description of the
sound (Holtzman 1978, pag. 1).

The differences between standard and nonstan-

dard sound-synthesis methods are differences of
sound production principles. Standard methods are
based on physics, acoustics, and psychoacoustics,
whereas nonstandard methods are based on compo-
sitional ideas of sound and musical organization.
The nonstandard systems are rooted in the
belief that electronic and digital means allow “the
composition of timbre, instead of with timbre” (Br ¨un
2004, pag. 189), and that sound production itself can
be considered a compositional activity. As Karlheinz
Stockhausen writes, “Every sound is the result of
a compositional act” (Stockhausen 1963, pag. 142
[1958]). Arguing from the etymology of the words
composition and synthesis, which are synonymous
in their respective languages of origin, one may see
their difference as one of time levels rather than
of kind. Di Scipio writes, “synthesis can often be
thought of as micro-level composition” (Di Scipio
1995b). As suggested by Phil Thomson, nonstandard
sound-synthesis approaches, in their “impulse
towards the atomisation of musical material and
control of that material on ever-lower levels,” can be
seen as “microsound’s digital beginnings” (Thomson
2004, pag. 210).

Precursors

The invention of the phonograph and the breakdown
of tonality as a referential system were transforma-
tive events—they changed the situation of music
and the conditions of composition in the 20th

siglo. Sound as such became “visible,” as a kind
of “acoustic writing” inscribed into the phonograph
record, and as a concept emerging through the
decomposition of traditional models.

The move towards sound is also a move to a
meta-level. It is no longer the (re)structuring of the
elementos, the materials, as they have existed (es decir.,
new ways of dealing with harmony, ritmo, contar-
terpoint, forma, orchestration), pero el (re)estructurando
of the very structure of such elements (es decir., the lim-
itations of previous symbolizations of the sonic
reality are exceeded). Composition ceases to be
“tone art” (or the German Tonkunst) when the no-
tion of “tone” itself is recognized as an aggregate, como
a composition of notions that then disintegrate into
constituent parts. The composition of sound as such
was hitherto neither possible nor even conceivable:
It was indiscernible in the conceptual frameworks
that conditioned musical composition.

The development of sound visualization and
recording technology played a major part in the
becoming-visible of sound. With the creation of
visible patterns in correlation with acoustical vi-
brations in Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni’s 1787
Klangﬁguren, sound was, por primera vez, associ-
ated with specific graphics. The patterns formed on
vibrating plates covered with quartz dust create a
relationship with the sound that is not arbitrary, pero
indexical. The sound has written the graphic itself.
Here we find sound as a trace and traces of sound,
a form of acoustical writing (Levin 2003) that also
underlies some nonstandard systems in the 20th
siglo: Xenakis’s GENDYN and Br ¨un’s SAWDUST
are situated at the border of compositional notation
and technological sound representation. With the
development of opto-acoustical film sound and the
phonograph, the traces of sound became manip-
ulable and potentially decipherable. The German
media theorist and literary scholar Friedrich A.
Kittler sees the reasons for this change mainly in
the technological development of media. Among
other inventions, it was mainly the phonograph
that caused the “old European alphabetism,” that
es, the symbolic access to sound, to be replaced
by a “mathematical-physical notation.” Kittler
writes that “a historical transition from intervals
to frequencies” is a transition “from a logic to a

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physics of sound”; de este modo, “the real takes the place of
the symbolic” (Kittler 1999). We can then say that
technological development has provided musical
composition with an altered access to sonic reality.
Elements that were before only manipulable within
certain symbolic frameworks acquired a changed
ontological status.

An early proposal that deals with traces of sound,
and the phonograph as a machine for reading traces,
was made by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
En 1919, Rilke wrote a text, titled “Ur-Ger ¨ausch”
[Primal Sound], in which he imagines, triggered by
the memory of a physics experiment from his school
días, using a phonograph needle to render audible
the coronal suture of a skull:

What if one changed the needle and directed
it on its return journey along a tracing which
was not derived from a graphic translation of
a sound, but existed of itself naturally—well:
to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, para
ejemplo. What would happen? A sound would
necessarily result, a series of sounds, música . . .
Feelings—which? Incredulity, timidity, miedo,

awe—which of all the feelings here possible
prevents me from suggesting a name for the
primal sound which would then make its
appearance in the world. . .

Leaving that aside for the moment: qué
variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, podría
one not put under the needle and try out? Es
there any contour that one could not, in a sense,
complete in this way and then experience it, como
it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another
field of sense (Rilke 2001, pag. 23 [1919])?

What Rilke suggests here is in essence a form
of sonification: the rendering audible of otherwise
inaudible structures, or the “putting under the
needle” lines and shapes, transforming phenomena
from one field of sense into another. By rendering
audible that which has never been recorded, el
phonograph not only acts as a generative synthesis
sistema, but also becomes an extension of our
senses in that it renders perceptible otherwise
imperceptible structures.

En 1922, only three years after Rilke’s text,
Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian painter, photographer,

and professor in the Bauhaus school, suggested
another use for the phonograph. In his famous text
“Production—Reproduction,” originally published
in the Dutch journal De Stijl, he argues for “the
phonograph [a] be transformed from an instrument
of reproduction into one of production; this will
cause the sound phenomenon itself to be created on
the record, which carried no prior acoustic message,
by the incision of groove-script lines as required”
(Moholy-Nagy 2004, pag. 332 [1922]). Moholy-Nagy is
arguing that what he calls “reproduction” is a mere
“reiteration of relationships that already exist,"
and that a turn to active “production” can create
new relationships. Because art is capable of actively
transforming man’s cognitive and perceptual abil-
ities, one should make use of the phonograph’s
transformative potential.

Whereas Rilke’s idea stresses the transfer of
phenomena across sensory modalities, re-reading a
given environment, Moholy-Nagy emphasizes the
active and intentional construction of entirely novel
relaciones. Both ideas, sin embargo, focus on the ex-
tension of senses and the materiality of technical me-
diation, and on the specificity of the medium itself.
Rilke’s text, Moholy-Nagy’s proposal, y el
works of Oskar Fischinger and Rudolf Pfenninger
(Levin 2003) can be seen as precursors of nonstandard
synthesis. They strove to unite micro and macro
time levels, they aimed at the composition of sound
instead of with sound, they were interested in
producing a music that explores the specificities
of its means of production, and they believed that
both technology and art actively transform human
perception and cognition. By etching grooves into
phonograph records and painting sound waves on
film they formed a compositional synesthesia in
which image, sound notation, and the physical sonic
phenomenon are linked during the composition
proceso. What emerges is the role of the medium
and a preoccupation with the reality of the medium,
which is not to be transcended but constitutes the
real, material basis.

Music, it might be said, discovers its medium

and focuses on the exploration and exhibition
of what is unique to music and irreducible in
música; o, on the “limitations that constitute the
medium” (Greenberg 1982, pag. 6). The nonstandard

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synthesis approaches created in the second half of
the 20th century concentrated more on limitations
or formal qualities of digital sound representation
and generation and less on the formal qualities of
el desempeño, such as space and loudspeakers.
Examples of these explorations of limitations
or formal qualities include the digital-to-analog
convertor and computer instructions (in Paul Berg’s
PILE and Koenig’s SSP) and the composition of
a waveform (in Xenakis’s GENDYN and Br ¨un’s
SAWDUST).

Por un lado, the preoccupation with the
medium’s formal qualities requires the composer
to invent content where there is almost nothing,
and on the other hand it implies dismantling the
relationship between the real and the semblance, a
reflexive approach that avoids imitation and stresses
the fact that art is something made, algo
composed. This distancing exposes the mutual
determination of real and illusion. The French
philosopher Alain Badiou writes in his book The
Century:

Distancing—conceived as the way that sem-
blance works out its proper distance from the
real—can be taken as an axiom of the [twen-
tieth] century’s art, and of “avant-garde” art
especially. What is at stake is the fictionaliza-
tion of the very power of fiction, en otras palabras,
the fact of regarding the efficacy of semblance
as real. This is one of the reasons why the art of
the twentieth century is a reflexive art, an art
that wants to exhibit its own process, an art that
wants to visibly idealize its own materiality
(Badiou 2007b, pag. 49).

Koenig’s SSP and Br ¨un’s SAWDUST

In the 1970s, a number of nonstandard synthesis
systems were designed and implemented, entre
them Xenakis’s Dynamic Stochastic Synthesis, Pablo
Berg’s PILE, Koenig’s SSP, and Br ¨un’s SAWDUST.
To illustrate and concretize the origins of the
theoretical considerations presented in this article,
I will take a brief and critical look at the latter two
sistemas.

Koenig designed the sound-synthesis program
SSP in 1972, although earlier design plans date
from the 1960s (Iceberg 2009). The system is based on
the fundamental proposition that “musical sounds
may be described as a function of amplitude over
time” (Koenig 1971, pag. 93). The program makes
use of Koenig’s selection principles, which he had
developed and used for the composition of instru-
mental music. The selection principles are serial
and aleatoric procedures that abstract fundamental
musical behaviors such as repetition, expansion, di-
rection, and reduction. In his composition program
Proyecto 2 these principles were used to order lists
of parameter values. Instead of ordering higher-level
propiedades, such as dynamics, ritmo, duración,
pitch, etc., in SSP they are used to sort instanta-
neous sound pressure levels and time values, y
thereby to compose the sound wave itself. El
selected time and amplitude values are collected in
segments and the selection principles are used to
create sequences of segments.

The relatively unaltered transference of principles
from the macro level to the micro level, así como
the self-containment of the system, can suggest
a notion of “purity”. The search for a definition
of purity, as it has been attributed to modernist
movimientos, has been described by the American art
critic Clement Greenberg:

What had to be exhibited was not only that
which was unique and irreducible in art in
general, but also that which was unique and
irreducible in each particular art. . . . It quickly
emerged that the unique and proper area of
competence of each art coincided with all that
was unique in the nature of its medium. . . .
Thus would each art be rendered “pure,” and in
its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of
quality as well as of its independence. “Purity”
meant self-definition (Greenberg 1982, pag. 5).

It can be said that SSP is a search for what is “irre-
ducible” in music, and that it is concerned with “all
that is unique in the nature of its medium.” Yet, en-
stead of understanding it as an attempt to construct
a “pure” approach to sound, or to maintain the
self-contained “purity” of a compositional method,
it should be understood as a “radical subtraction,” to

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use Badiou’s term. Badiou contrasts subtraction with
the idea of a necessary destruction that can “clear
the way for an entirely new avant-garde practice”
(Hallward 2003, pag. 162). The subtractive strategy
seeks “to purify reality, not by annihilating it, pero
by withdrawing it from its apparent unity so as to
detect in it the minuscule difference, the vanishing
term that is constitutive of it” (Badiou 2007b, pag. 65).
Badiou uses the term radical subtraction to describe
Kazimir Malevich’s painting as well as St ´ephane
Mallarm ´e’s poetry and Anton Webern’s music. En
these cases, the radical subtraction seeks to explore
the conditions of its means of production.

Nonstandard-synthesis approaches have been
reproached for being formalistic and for disregarding
the perceptual dimension of musical experience.
Pierre Schaeffer, Por ejemplo, wrote that, “Xenakis
has not taken the trouble to verify the relationships
which exist between mathematical production
of sonic objects and their authentic musical per-
ception” (Schaeffer 1971, pag. 75). Sin embargo, such a
critique neglects, Por un lado, the “dialectic
between the conceptual and the perceptual in the
musical experience” (Di Scipio 1995a, pag. 370–371),
y, por otro lado, Xenakis’s search for a new
percept by means of a distancing and a conceptu-
alización. It also neglects that synthesis methods
that are lacking in predictability require a working
method that involves continual aural evaluation.
The radical subtraction that takes place in Xe-

nakis’s and Koenig’s synthesis methods, cual
unite structural and timbral design and axiomati-
cally eradicate the differences of micro and macro
time levels, can be understood as a kind of disorien-
tation. Traditional ways of describing musical sound
are not applicable in SSP: The composer is forced
to invent new ways of describing sound and has to
invent content where there is almost nothing. El
stringency of the system is not a search for purity,
but an axiomatic disorientation, a subtraction that
seeks to explore compositional sound descriptions.
Here we can see what Badiou calls the “passion
for the real.” His example is the minimal difference
of Malevich’s White on White. It is not a passion to
“unmask copies, to discredit fakes,” but a “passion
devoted to the construction of a minimal difference,
to the delineation of its axiomatic” (Badiou 2007b,

pag. 56). The axiomatic reduction of composition
to the coordination of time and amplitude points
in the construction of the waveform, in systems
like SSP and SAWDUST, can be seen as a “radical
subtraction” whose driving force is a “passion for
the real.”

A problem that results from the treatment of
amplitude and time values as compositional raw
material is the lack of differentiation in the output
of the application of macro-level methods to the
micro level. The selection principles alea and series
(random selection with and without repetition) hacer
not produce noticeably different-sounding output
when applied at the sample level. El problema
stems from the context-dependency regarding the
sonic significance of time values and sound pressure
levels in a waveform. An instantaneous sound
pressure level has in itself no recognizable identity.
A result of this problem was that users of SSP
concentrated on the ordering of segments, corto
collections of amplitude and time values. This step,
the permutation (the selection and concatenation of
waveform segments), “was as an effective generative
mechanism” (Iceberg 2009, pag. 84), and allowed the
creation of distinct states and transitions. Iceberg, OMS
composed one piece with SSP, writes:

The ordering of segments using tendency
masks was particularly successful. A wide
selection of segments would result in a noisy
sound structure. Narrow masks led to unstable
sounds within a confined frequency region.
Masks moving from narrow to wide could
produce dramatic transitions between these
two extremes (Iceberg 2009, pag. 84).

Br ¨un’s program SAWDUST is also concerned with
the compositional structuring of waveforms. En el
programa, the composer specifies small fragments
of waveforms, which are then linked, merged,
concatenated, repeated, and eventually interpolated
using a limited number of operations. A diferencia de
to Koenig’s SSP, the emphasis is not on a rule-
based approach to composition, but rather on the
extension and relocation of musical material. El
focus is on the composer’s work, the manual,
subjetivo, compositional labor that takes place
on the level of the waveform. The composer is

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“forming sounds just as precisely as the macro
events of his composition” (Br ¨un 1969, pag. 117).
The material and its organization are inseparably
interlinked. As Di Scipio writes, “this represents a
thoroughly constructivist approach: nothing in the
music has the status of something that exists prior
to the composers work, not even the so-called sound
material” (Di Scipio 2002, pag. 24). Br ¨un often stresses
the importance and the necessity of compositionally
exploring the specificities of technology, así como
his dislike of simulative synthesis methods:

There is one dignified way, by which the
computer might be made a musical instrument,
without making it a redundant simulator of
orchestral treasures. A computer, that can be
programmed to generate acoustical phenomena,
that the existent instrumental body could not
generate, would be an asset (Br ¨un 1964, pag. 4).

In contrast to Br ¨un’s emphasis of the unique
possibilities of the computer, his compositional
praxis and his use of his own program SAWDUST
are especially concerned with serial organizations
of pitches. En efecto, his sketches reveal that he was
constantly linking waveform lengths to tempered
pitch scales and even producing twelve-tone rows
and chords for the organization of waveforms.

Although nonstandard sound-synthesis systems,

such as SAWDUST and SSP, are characterized by
a rejection of harmonic and acoustic models, ellos
operate within a physically conditioned medium.
A sampled digital time-domain signal is also a
representation of a sound, which is based on an
acoustic model, however rudimentary it may be.
The nonstandard sound-synthesis systems are thus
based on an acoustic model. The disregard of the
inherent conditions and structures of the medium
within which a model operates entails a limitation
of the functionality of the model. With their
concentration on a purely symbolic, compositivo
nivel, synthesis models such as Koenig’s SSP tend
to overlook physical and phenomenal consequences
and constraints. A consequence of this reduction is
that the conceptual differentiations of the system’s
operations are not always properly reflected in its
producción. Por otro lado, we can see such models
as experimental starting points that seek to explore

borders of music and musical material, operating
from within music. In contrast to approaches in
which the sound material is given and then is
procesado, shaped, and compositionally structured,
the synthesis methods of Br ¨un, Xenakis, and Koenig
form frameworks in which the sound material itself
emerges in the composition process.

Models of Sounds

A sound-synthesis method is a formalism, y
this formalism can be conceived of as a model. A
common and predominant understanding of models
presupposes a separation between an empirical
reality and a formal modeling of that reality. El
assumption is that we are on the one hand neutrally
observing the facts, and on the other hand, actively
producing a model. It is a confrontation between
a real thing and an artificial reproduction, es
an opposition between reality and thought, y eso
essentially boils down to nothing more than the
opposition of “nature” and “culture.”

In his first book, The Concept of Model, written
en 1968, Badiou quotes several passages from John
Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of
Games and Economic Behaviour (Morgenstern and
von Neumann 1944), exemplifying the aforemen-
tioned understanding of models. The authors state
that models “must be similar to reality in those
respects which are essential in the investigation
at hand,” and that “similarity to reality is needed
to make the operation significant” (Badiou 2007a,
pag. 16). In Badiou’s opinion, the authors deny that
science is a “process of practical transformation of
the real,” and that, in their conception, science is
nothing but the “fabrication of plausible images”
(Badiou 2007a, pag. 94). Claude L ´evi-Strauss writes,
“The best model, will always be that which is
true, eso es, the simplest possible model which,
while being derived exclusively from the facts under
consideration, also makes it possible to account for
all of them” (quoted in Badiou 2007a, pag. 16). Is not
ciencia, in this understanding, nothing more than a
functional simulation, an imitative artifice? Badiou
writes that Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s view
“effaces the reality of science being a process of

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production of knowledge” (Badiou 2007a, pag. 17),
and denies science’s historicity and its internal
discourse. We find a similar positivist philosophy
underlying the way in which Julius O. Herrero, uno
of the leading proponents of physical modeling,
speculates about the future of synthesis models:

The most straightforward way to obtain inter-
esting sounds is to draw on past instrument
technology or natural sounds. . . . The best way
we know to understand a sonic transformation
is to study its effect on the short-time spec-
trum, where the spectrum-analysis parameters
are tuned to match the characteristics of hearing
as closely as possible. De este modo, it appears inevitable
that sampling synthesis will migrate toward
spectral modeling. If abstract methods disappear
and sampling synthesis is absorbed into spec-
tral modeling, this leaves only two categories:
physical-modeling and spectral-modeling. Este
boils all synthesis techniques down to those
which model either the source or the receiver of
the sound (Herrero 1991, pag. 9).

It is interesting to note that the source comes
before the model in Smith’s description. The sound-
synthesis model thus aims to imitate an existing
comportamiento. It is not understood as generating a unique
sonority nor as actively transforming listening
habits.

Br ¨un’s concept of “anticommunication” is virtu-
ally the exact opposite of Smith’s idea of “modeling
the receiver.” We can see Walter Benjamin’s un-
derstanding of the nature of perception as transient
and historically conditioned as a presupposition for
Br ¨un’s idea of anticommunication. Benjamin writes
that “just as the entire mode of existence of human
collectives changes over long historical periods, entonces
too does their mode of perception” (Benjamín 2008,
pag. 23). Anticommunication is an attempt to say
something through a channel which is not yet avail-
capaz, not yet established. In this way, one can “retard
the natural decay of information,” the process of
meaning assignment. Anticommunication provides
the possibilities for non-trivial connections to occur.
Br ¨un writes, “communication uses the order and the
law that is meant to be recognized by the receiver as
the receiver’s own; anticommunication creates the

order and the law that is meant to be discovered by
the receiver for the first time” (Br ¨un 2004, pag. 229).
Knowledge is thus not seen as a compilation

of empirical data, but as actively constructed
by cognitive processes. As Heinz von Foerster,
long-term colleague and friend of Br ¨un, famously
formulated, “the environment as we perceive it,
is our invention” (von Foerster 2003, pag. 212). El
emphasis is thus not placed on the consensus a
model engenders, but on the possibilities of action it
creates. The listener is not seen as a passive system,
which is fed with a certain input, but the relation
to the music is rather like a perturbation of the
receiving system causing structural change in it. Por
contrast, Smith’s modeling of the receiver, una vez el
model becomes an “aid” for composition, can be
viewed as constraining and conditioning music (como
does much research in psychoacoustics and music
psicología).

The goal of ensuring comprehensibility, to tune
the music to the receiver, is a strategy of preventing
cambiar. As Br ¨un says, “insistence on communica-
tion ultimately leads to social and physical violence
. . . anticommunication ultimately leads to the
insistence on composition and peace” (Br ¨un 2004, pag.
289).

Smith couples his description with the classical
concept of simplicity and exhaustiveness, when he
writes that the “fundamental difficulty of digital
synthesis is finding the smallest collection of syn-
thesis techniques that span the gamut of musically
desirable sounds with minimum redundancy. Es
helpful when a technique is intuitively predictable”
(Herrero 1991, pag. 1). If we assume that art is essen-
tially not occupied with the generation of function,
but with the generation of sensations, then music
can indeed reflect on, and deal with, función, pero
neither “minimum redundancy” and predictability,
nor the modeling of preexisting sources and the lis-
tener, are in essence relevant to music composition
or sound art. Smith’s statements can be interpreted
as reducing music to being the empirical proof, el
verification, of the model.

So, how can sound-synthesis models be of in-
terest for music composition? Models allow a very
particular access in that they define operations.
These operations, however limited they might be,

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are fundamental to the composition process. En
nonstandard sound synthesis the model is also a
model of composition, or at least forms the basis of
models of composition. Por un lado, it abstracts
and generalizes the multifaceted layers of a reality,
it is a formalism and forms something intelligible.
Por otro lado, the model is descriptive and
productive of something sensible. What is partic-
ularly interesting about sound-synthesis models is
that we can understand them as working at the
intersection between the sensible and the intelli-
gible, while not belonging exclusively to either of
a ellos. The approaches presented here understand
sound-synthesis models both as models of sound and
as models of composition, thereby seeing models
as productive rather than imitative and empha-
sizing the intersection of the intelligible and the
sensible.

Tecnología

“The idea of the unstoppable, quasi-natural techno-
logical progress” (Zielinski 2006, pag. 3) is a common
understanding of technology, which we find often in
today’s science, arte, and everyday life. It implies a
subordination of art, política, etc., to technological
desarrollo. Society and thereby art is seen as
acted upon, not as acting. Technology has effects,
but its development is in itself immutable and
autonomous. It thus becomes the governing force,
and art works become footnotes of the history of
its progress. It creates a history of improvement,
from old megaphones to the telephone, from shadow
images to 3-D cinema, from ceiling painting to
virtual reality. This history stresses the “constant
perfection of media’s illusionist potential” (Zielinski
2006, pag. 3). The new is thus nothing but confirma-
tion of what has already been. Además, tools are
measured by how effectively they can realize a given
end. Andrew Feenberg strongly criticized this view,
which he termed “technological determinism”:

is at least partially dependent on a non-social
factor which influences it without suffering a
reciprocal influence. That is what is meant by
“technological determinism” (Feenberg 1995,
pag. 5).

En esta sección, I will briefly try to show how
nonstandard sound synthesis challenges two notions
of technology: (1) technological determinism and (2)
the notion of technology as “neutral,” as merely a
means with no greater influence on the distribution
of power.

Technological Determinism

We find—as I believe—a proponent of technolog-
ical determinism in the German media scientist
Friedrich A. Kittler. The radical position he presents
has grown out of the application of a Foucaultian
discourse analysis to “writing systems”, a term
Kittler uses for technical systems of data pro-
cesando, transmission, and storage of literature.
Through detailed historical analyses, Kittler tries to
demonstrate the media-theoretical horizon which
is determining our very access to reality in a way
that cannot be circumvented. Means of storage,
transmission, and processing are conditioning our
culture fundamentally. He shows, at great length,
how inventions in media technology have caused
changes in the arts and social structures. Whereas
his earlier writings place media and technology
within a more complex network of mutually deter-
mining factors, his later writings elevate technology
to be the all-determining force.

The media revolution of 1880, sin embargo, laid
the groundwork for theories and practices
that no longer mistake information for spirit.
Thought is replaced by Boolean algebra, y
consciousness by the unconscious, cual
. . . makes Poe’s “Purloined Letter” a Markoff
cadena (Kittler 1999, pag. 16).

Determinism rests on the assumption that
technologies have an autonomous functional
logic that can be explained without reference
to society. . . . It would seem that society’s fate

Kittler’s vision, sin embargo, leaves little or no
space for art to maneuver. De hecho, it leaves little
space for humanity to maneuver. In his view,
art is essentially a supplementary byproduct of

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technological developments, which in themselves
know only one motivation: guerra. His complete
rejection of all modern art on the grounds of its
futile rebellion against technical reproducibility
(Kittler 2005) fails to see that technology is only as
socially and culturally determining as it is socially
and culturally determined.

Whereas other thinkers who relocated attributes

of a previously autonomous subject to external
determinants, such as Karl Marx and Sigmund
Freud, in the same move opened up an emanci-
patory possibility, Kittler’s move is exclusive and
ultimate. It leads to the “computational end of art”
(Kittler 2005). If art wants to escape such a one-sided
determination by technology, the design of tech-
nology has to be at least partly non-technological,
part of the artistic activity itself. The molecular
biologist and science historian Hans-J ¨org Rhein-
berger stresses the necessity of non-technical and
“tinkered” approaches to technology in the process
of experimentation. He argues that new questions in
science emerge through “non-technical ensembles
of technological objects” (Rheinberger 1997). El
stabilized knowledge embodied by the tools can
thereby again be destabilized. Rheinberger writes:

In its nontechnicality, the experimental ensem-
ble of technical objects transcends the identity
conditions of its parts. According to the same
patrón, established tools can acquire new
functions in the process of their reproduction
(Rheinberger 1997, pag. 32).

The nonstandard sound-synthesis system’s rad-
ically compositional approach to technology can
be seen as a such an experimental “non-technical
ensemble of technological objects.” Instead of suc-
cumbing to the “computational end of art,” artistic
approaches to the design of technology can act
as types of grassroots resistance, which reverse
and thereby undermine the determining logic of
tecnología.

Technology and Sound Synthesis

In the text “Technology and the Composer” (Br ¨un
1971), Br ¨un makes the distinction between learning

from language, eso es, adapting one’s means of
expression to a commonly understood vocabulary,
and teaching language to say what one wants to say,
thereby “retarding the decay of information” and
extending vocabulary. It is during this moment of
structural change, this “interregnum”—a moment
in which there exists a discrepancy between the
encoding of the message and how the receiver
decodes it—that the new emerges.

Br ¨un stresses the ubiquity of technological
considerations in musical composition. He also
criticizes the view of technology as a mere means to
preconceived ends. The composer needs to engage
in actively designing artificial systems. Free from
any anti-technological fear, Br ¨un highlights the
“common ground” of art, ciencia, and technology,
which he locates in the idea of the system. El
differences between these disciplines are thus
differences of attitude towards systems. Ciencia,
he says, stipulates systems which are “analogous
to an existent truth or reality,” technology creates
systems that “are to function in an existent truth
or reality,” and the arts create systems which are
“analogous to an existence desired to become true
or real.” This underlying desire reveals the intrinsic
utopian motivation in his point of view. It is the
desire to create an “intelligent society.” Artificial
systems need to be developed, for they can have
“properties which man either cannot have, or does
not yet have.”

At the same conference where Br ¨un presented
the aforementioned text, Pierre Schaeffer presented
a paper dealing with his view of the relationship of
music and technology. In his lengthy contribution,
Schaeffer discusses a wide variety of issues. Mayoría
revealing for our discussion is his view on the
relationship between “the artist and the engineer.”
Schaeffer proposes “the interesting and fruitful no-
tion of two types of creators: those whose job it is to
generate ‘musical ideas,’ in complete independence,
and those who are faced with the task of interpreting
these ideas” (Schaeffer 1971, pag. 88).

Schaeffer’s proposal describes a de facto practice

in some electronic music institutions today. A
harmful repercussion of this division of labour
is the dissociation of ideas of sound and ideas
of music. The “complete independence” of the

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development of the musical ideas from the medium
in which they are to be realized prevents the
material from unfolding its structural, musical
consequences, and from being further developed
and supplemented by musical demands. If we bring
to mind Theodor Adorno’s description of material
as “all that the artist is confronted by, all that he
must make a decision about” (Adorno 1997), we see
that Schaeffer’s proposal splits art—the deduction
of sensations from a material—apart at its very
core.

Partly due to technological development, y
partly due to the breakdown of music’s own ref-
erential systems (p.ej., tonality), musical material
changed dramatically in the 20th century. Todavía, by the
end of the century, we see a restorative movement:
Music that does not essentially question its own
conventions is, as Douglas Kahn puts it, “rejuvenat-
ing” (Kahn 1990) its material. This happens without
delivering a critique of its means of production and
distribución, or questioning the world of expressive
conventions from which it originates. Often sound
is equated with timbre, which is equated with
the Fourier spectrum, which is then equated with
harmony. Such an understanding is often found in
French spectral music, but the equation of sound
with timbre is a wider phenomenon; as Antoine Bon-
net says, “timbre is the modern name for sound”
(Nancy 2007).

If technological development serves the “re-
juvenation” of music’s material, it is seen as an
“enrichment of musical material” (Murail 2005)
that takes place in an essentially conservative form.
The new is thus only an improvement, an improved
control over the material, and the means are thus
measured by how effectively they can realize a given
end. The French composer Franc¸ ois Bayle says, “a
great artist can create a work of art that transcends
the medium, that makes one forget the medium”
(Desantos 1997, pag. 18). Here the medium serves the
“great artist” to express his or her ideas of beauty.
This is the path that leads to equating music with
the results of its productive activity, where it is
disembodied from its process of production, y
where it tends to be reduced purely to the auditory
experiencia. Aquí, technology is used for its ability
to create illusion.

An approach to sound synthesis which is charac-
terized by an avoidance of imitation can be traced
back to the electronic music of the Cologne school,
where it was assumed that in order to compose new
music with a new kind of material, one has to find
new ways of treating this material. If one assumes
that art evolves from the examination of the means
of its production, it is necessary to explore the
possibilities of musical organization that our means
of production can provide us, instead of searching
for ways of emulating already known situations
with new tools. Koenig writes that when composing
electronic compositions he has “always searched
for causes in the technical conditions of the studio
. . . the machines should not only be used economi-
cally, but also musically, they should take over form
building tasks” (Koenig 1987, pag. 168). We can con-
trast this view with Jean-Claude Risset’s statement:

Insofar as the composer is familiar with the
sounds of an instrumental type, he will in-
evitably find it simpler, in front of the computer,
to make use of his previous musical concepts
and his science of orchestration (Risset 1971,
pag. 127).

Making “use of previous musical conceptions and
science of orchestration” as a goal for dealing with
new tools can be seen as preventing change. Este
article presents a perspective in which technology
and its function are not accepted as pre-given or as
immutable; not as merely a means for realizing a
preconceived objective, but as something to be ex-
plored, to be determined, to be defined. The question
is not so much which desires one can satisfy with a
given technology, but rather which (old and new) de-
sires emerge from it. It is the search for possible roles
of technology in music. It is part of the composer’s
work to establish such roles. Di Scipio writes:

Adorno observed, también, that an artist’s labor
always implies a personal or shared “critique of
tecnología,” but it can actually only do so only
by confronting and exploiting the technology
without getting rid of it . . . , we can argue
eso, hoy, art can confront technology in an
approach of “subversive rationalization” (Di
Scipio 2002, pag. 24).

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Adorno argued in favor of an aesthetic rationality,

because the art work can thus internalize the
rationality of the external world and at the same
time oppose it. “Subversive rationalization” is
therefore a strategy of using “the rationality of the
world of empirical reality as a means of freeing
itself from the repression of means-ends rationality”
(Paddison 1993, pag. 141). Adorno writes:

Art works oppose domination by mimetically
adapting to it. If they are to produce something
that is different in kind from the world of
repression, they must assimilate themselves to
repressive behaviour. . . . En suma, aesthetic ra-
tionality wants to make amends for the damage
done by instrumental rationality outside art
(Adorno 1997, páginas. 403–404).

Conclusión

I have tried to trace out an aesthetic perspective
based on nonstandard sound-synthesis systems.
Although nonstandard sound-synthesis methods of
the 1970s have served as starting points, my objec-
tive has not been to provide merely an interpretation
of a historic approach to sound, but to construct an
aesthetic perspective with relevance for the current
situation of computer music.

Two intentions have formed the basic motivation
of this article: firstly, bringing together musical com-
position and ideas about sound as a phenomenon,
thereby interpreting sound-synthesis methods as
embodiments of these ideas, and secondly, asserting
the need for an axiomatic disorientation as the basis
of creating new musical and sonic possibilities.

In realizing these intentions, this article has
sketched out a connection between early 20th-
century precursors and the nonstandard sound-
synthesis methods of the 1970s. I have taken a
critical look at Koenig’s and Br ¨un’s systems. I have
pointed out that the modeling of the listener and
source is an intrinsically positivist conception
y, further, shown how synthesis models can
overcome the dichotomy of empirical reality and
representación. Finalmente, I have taken a brief look at
the role of technology in music composition and

criticized both “technological determinism” and
the notion of technology as “neutral” in favor of a
more open-ended and less linear view, in which the
design of technology is seen as part of the artistic
trabajar.

Expresiones de gratitud

I would like to thank Paul Berg for his valuable
comentario, encouragement, and advice. I would also
like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors
for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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