ABSTRACT
John Paynter and Peter Aston’s Sound and Silence aimed to inspire creativity by proposing extra-musical narratives, geographies or sounds themselves as a stimulus. Group composition should not be a replication, writ large, of an individual composition experience – to do that would miss out on the considerable advantages of working together. A cooperative, concurrent design approach avoids requiring any group member to generate individual sections of the composition themselves. Concurrent design is an industrial practice for finding group solutions to complex problems. Concurrent design processes are used to generate solutions to complex problems, such as managing an international space mission, harnessing the experience of multiple participants. The harmony team could be responsible for creating unstructured dissonance, spectral approaches, noise, or use Balinese tuning scales, in addition to considering sounds that fall under a traditional description of Western harmony. The contributions from individual group members are unlikely to conform to a particular harmonic design in advance.
