ABSTRACT
The term ‘live electronic music’ faded slowly but steadily from the vocabulary between about 1975 and 1985, giving way to the (albeit correct) term ‘real-time’. But language cannot so simply obscure a fundamental misunderstanding that has come with this change. The human performer has somehow been subsumed into the computer itself, as into the terminology that goes with it.
Since the earliest experiments many have seen the unavoidable problem of ‘mixed’ acoustic and electroacoustic resources. The inherent separation of cause and effect (real or apparent), the confusion caused by the recording and reproduction of (for example) improvisation, with many further instances of dislocations and surrogates, has resulted in a host of misunderstood terms, unexamined assumptions and - in the author’s view exacerbated not explicated with the advent of computer technology - blind alleys of endeavour in compositional research.
This paper hopes to start to unravel some of this confusion, concentrating in the first instance on timbral cues and their relation to the two terms of the title. (The term ‘timbre’ will be taken in its broader English sense, including typological, morphological and contextual components).
