ABSTRACT
The musics examined by disciplines variously known as ‘ethnomusicology’, ‘world music’ and the like bring us many approaches to how we examine the music of oral traditions, sometimes more specifically focusing on embodied performance. The western score-based tradition became challenged, too, from within ‘art music’ practice – at least its so-called avant-garde. The anthropologist Tim Ingold has published a critique of soundscape which seeks to re-establish a more holistic model of human perception in the world. In the world of electroacoustic music, visual representations of sound have steadily invaded the sound studio. The detail of the discussion surrounding the development of Nattiez’s ideas is outside our remit here except to observe some unease with the idea of ‘neutral level’ especially as represented by a score. Machine sound analysis and transcription were quickly harnessed to measure pitch and time elements from recordings.
