ABSTRACT
A great deal of today’s electroacoustic music has been found to be highly complex and difficult to penetrate for the listener, yet no one likes to get lost during a work. In my experience offering the first time listener a helping hand is one of the great ways of making contemporary works more accessible.
In this article I attempt to describe a tool, illustrate it and to an extent categorise applications relevant to timbral electroacoustic composition, music in which there is often no melody (or Hauptstimme), no metre, no tonic, perhaps no audible structure. If none of these traditional devices is a composer’s aural focus, what is, and can this device be perceived by the listener? The goal here is not to stimulate simplicity in timbral music, but instead to strive for greater music appreciation and consequently music evaluation in which composers, musicologists and all others involved in electroacoustic music can profit. An extensive CDiscography has been included.
