ABSTRACT

Music is a transient art form and as such it resists analysis of its structure, unless it is fixed in a written form. A traditional musical score is often ill-suited for analysis of live-electronic music; it can be substituted by a graphical map of elementary sounds as they occurred in a performance of a musical work. The map presented here focuses on frequencies and their harmonic relations: it is a ‘spectral transcription’. A multilayered transcription of Luigi Nono’s A Pierre. Dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum. À più cori, for contrabass flute in G, contrabass clarinet in B flat and live electronics (1985) was made, using technical means – a computer-assisted processing of specifically made audio recordings – in combination with manual refinement of the computed spectral map. The computer processing is based on time-frequency reassigned Fourier transform ; the manual refinement was done with attention to the psychoacoustics of music perception, characteristics of the musical instruments and performance techniques, and the harmonic nature of musical sound. The final spectral map has a digital form: a custom-made computer application displays the layers that correspond to individual sound sources individually or combined, in detail or as an overall view of the whole musical work; the map can be also complemented by sound resynthesised from the spectral data.