Organized Sound Spaces with Machine Learning: 1.2.1 Music as Organized Sound

1. Materiality of Music

1.2.1 Music as Organized Sound

Music as Organized Sound – Varèse

Later, towards the mid 20th century, some composers started to think about what is then to make music if we can use any sound as musical material? One of those composers was Edgard Varèse, and again, I would like to read a paragraph from an article titled Liberation of Sound by Edgard Varèse (1966).

First of all, I should like you to consider what I believe is the best definition of music, because it is all inclusive: 'the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound' as proposed by Hoene Wronsky. If you think about it you will realize that, unlike most dictionary definitions, which make use of such subjective terms as beauty, feelings, etc., it covers all music, Eastern or Western, past or present, including the music of our new electronic medium. Although this new music is being gradually accepted, there are still people who, while admitting that it is 'interesting,' say: 'but is it music?' It is a question I am only too familiar with. Until quite recently I used to hear it so often in regard to my own works that, as far back as the tweties, I decided to call my music 'organized sound' and myself, not a musician, but 'a worker and rhythms, frequencies and intensities.' Indeed, to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been cold noise. But after all, what is music but organized noises and a composer, like all artists, is an organizer of disparate elements?

Varèse opens up the idea of music. Starting from the expansion of musical material, and thinking about, how can we call something music if any sound can be musical? And in his view, it is the organization that matters. And following Varèse's suggestion, we also have other composers coming in and giving us a more comprehensive understanding of the materiality of music:

any sound can be used to produce music (Russolo 1913);
music is organized sound (Varese 1966);
relationships exist between pitch, noise, timbre, and rhythm involving multiple layers (Stockhausen 1972);
sounds exist in a physical 3-D space (ibid.);
the timescales of music is in multiple levels infinitesimal, subsample, sample, sound object, meso, macro, supra, and infinite (Roads 2004).

We started from Luigi Russolo's expansion of musical material. And then, we came to Varèse's understanding of music, a generalized definition of music. And then after that, Karlheinz Stockhausen proposes four criteria of electronic music, which he later expands those criterias in the late 20th century. Without getting into the details of those criterias, Stockhausen emphasizes the relationships between pitch, noise, timbre, rhythm, and how music consist of multiple musical layers. Additionally, Stockhausen emphasizes the physical 3-D space that we can use for musical composition. In the beginning of 21st century, Curtis Roads (2004) proposes the time scales of music in multiple levels.