Spectral Music

L’obiettivo del seguente elaborato è quello di presentare a fondo l’indagine centralizzante nella ricerca compositiva del periodo post-avanguardie, più precisamente nelle due esperienze europee del Sonorismo (Polonia, fine anni ’50 - anni ’60) e dello Spettralismo (principalmente Francia, fine anni ’60 - anni ’70), nelle due figure di Kazimierz Serocki (1922-1981) e Gérard Grisey (1946-1998), compositori rappresentativi, in maniera pressoché fondante, delle due correnti citate. Attraverso lo studio delle loro opere, più precisamente Freski symfoniczne (Symphonic frescoes per orchestra, 1964) e Partiels (per 18 strumentisti, 1975) se ne metteranno in stretta connessione gli intenti musicali e deontologici, solo apparentemente distanti o incoerenti l’uno all’altro, ma facenti parte in realtà di due domini distinti della medesima ricerca nell’esplorazione della natura puramente timbrica del suono, ricerca caratterizzante e preponderante in ogni generazione di compositori dal Secondo Novecento fino a (forse più che mai) quelle di oggi.
Questa stretta necessità di un’esplorazione totale della sfera timbrica nella musica d’oggi verrà palesata nell’opera di Kaija Saariaho (Finlandia, 1952-2023) - verso cui non nascondo risieda un personale e sentito omaggio commemorativo in seguito alla sua recente prematura scomparsa - e principalmente tramite la sua ultima composizione, HUSH (per tromba e orchestra, 2023), proprio per dimostrare in termini il più possibile odierni il prezioso e più che mai attuale stimolo proposto dagli autori sopracitati, evidenziandone al tempo stesso attitudini ed eredità compositive.

This paper presents a hybridization method using Morph, a sound timbre hybridization and modeling software running on the Windows 95 platform. Elaboration occurs in Fourier space and is based on analysis/re-synthesis operations through FFT and FFT-1. The hybridization method works through the segmentation of two starting spectra in zones centered on the energy peaks. Each identified spectral zone, is numbered in increasing order so that a matching can be established between pairs of zones with the same value during re-synthesis. A full description of the Morph elaboration performance includes cross-synthesis, timbre hybridization, harmonic/inharmonic component separation and filtering. An initial catalogue of hybrid sounds has been compiled using this system, in order to tackle hybridization problems in an organic and systematic manner. The criteria used for the drafting and organization of the catalogue are discussed in the latter part of this paper.

Modulation, a term often used to describe a temporary or permanent change of key in traditional common practice music, has been somewhat relegated and precluded from being used to describe other elements of music and sound. There is a useful exception, that of "metric" modulation. I would argue that this is because the metric modulation example has become an understood and formally chronicled methodology that justifies its existence and usage. In the process of modulating from one key to another, the traditional use of a "pivot" chord provides a mechanism for shifting from one key to another via a chord common to both keys. Metric modulation shares the "pivot" in that a common

When Olivier Messiaen completed the vast opera Saint Francois d'Assise in 1983, he was mentally and physically exhausted, believing that this monumental work would be his final compositional statement. Coaxed at first by his wife, Yvonne Loriod, he began to write a series of miniatures -a rarity in his output. Then, in the last years of his life, Messiaen composed a final large orchestral cycle, Eclairs sur 1 'Au-Dela... . This thesis examines the seven works which Messiaen completed after Saint Francois and argues that, following the crisis provoked by the opera, his music underwent a discernible change in style. In addition, the thesis uses the works in question to examine the characteristics of Messiaen's music, with a particular emphasis on an often overlooked aspect of his technique: harmony. In the process, many other questions are addressed, such as the ways in which Messiaen utilizes birdsong within a larger structure. The thesis is in three parts. Part I begins ...

Reverberasi (multiple echo) adalah sinyal noise akustik yang muncul dalam suatu ruang tertutup akibat adanya superposisi dari suatu pantulan multiple dan difraksi dari dinding dan objek-objek yang ada di dalam ruangan tersebut. Sinyal yang tereverberasi merupakan masalah kompleks yang sulit dicari solusinya, karena sinyal suara asli berkorelasi dengan efek reverberasi.

HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Ce que dit l'éditeur.

Le triptyque Professor Bad Trip est l'une des plus singulières œuvres du tournant du XXe siècle. Fausto Romitelli (1963-2004) y puise son inspiration dans le graphisme psychédélique de Gianluca Lerici (alias Professor Bad Trip), les expériences d'Henri Michaux sur la mescaline ou les transgressions des toiles de Francis Bacon. À travers trois Lessons, il s'approprie les sons électriques, les artifices de l'amplification et les textures métalliques et saturées du rock, ainsi que sa violence, ses forces souterraines et ses effets hypnotiques et hallucinatoires. Mais jamais il ne renonce à l'écriture et à la création d'un langage propre. Fausto Romitelli cherchait un autre monde musical, tout à la fois charnel et vécu, qui intégrerait des éléments hétérogènes et allierait une combinatoire lointainement dérivée des sériels tardifs et le grain du son, sa matière, à laquelle le mouvement spectral avait donné voix. Dans cet ouvrage, Luigi Manfrin nous introduit à l'œuvre musicale et théorique de Romitelli, avant d'analyser, de manière sensible, rigoureuse et documentée, les trois panneaux de Professor Bad Trip à l'aune de l'harmonie et du timbre, des objets sonores ou de la relation entre répétition, distorsion et anamorphose.

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Luigi Nono's ...sofferte onde serene... (1976-77) initiates a profound transformation in his compositional strategies, shifting from overt political messages to more nuanced explorations of sound. Focusing solely on one instrument, and recalibrating his compositional techniques, Nono took this piece as an opportunity to reconsider his musical thought and to deeply rethink the act of listening. Scrutinising this transformation from a musical perspective, this essay highlights Nono's renewed engagement with canonical and variation techniques taught by his early mentors Scherchen and Maderna, while also discussing the seamless integration of live and electronic sounds. Taking Nono's redefined musical language as an appeal to rethink listening as a critical process, this paper asserts the political potency of Nono's late style, suggesting that attentive listening is a political act, urging a reconsideration of musical engagement and the ethos of listening in a turbulent world.

The pedal harp is a relatively young instrument. From the beginning of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century, its technical and musical development coincided not only temporally but often also spatially with the history of the harpsichord and the piano. The new instrument was originally most successful in Paris and then in London. This article is intended to stimulate a discussion on the less-studied repertory for harp, piano and violin from the 1780s until the time of Berlioz, as well as to offer a new perspective on better-known stylistic elements.

Two experiments were carried out to determine the dependence of perceived roughness on the frequency ratio of two simultaneous harmonic complex tones. In the first experiment, the frequency ratios of the tone pairs corresponded to 35 within-octave intervals of various musical tuning systems. In the second experiment 12 intervals were used; six of them ranged from 10 cents below to 10 cents above an equally-tempered fourth and the other six encompassed a similar range centred around the equally-tempered fifth. In both experiments the amount of roughness was assessed by absolute magnitude estimation. Results show that roughness considerably varies with the frequency ratio of a pair of harmonic complex tones, which is a well-known phenomenon. A new finding, that is in contrast to published theories of roughness, is that equally-tempered intervals produce less roughness than their counterparts based on integer frequency ratios. This effect is attributed to slow beats that arise between the harmonics of two complex tones when the frequency ratio of an equally-tempered interval slightly departs from integer ratio. Such beats, heard as fluctuations, impart a smooth character to the sound.

To his contemporaries, Josquin’s chansons seem to have been as representative of his output as the sacred genres. During his lifetime, the musician experienced a fundamental change in chanson composition. He still knew the melismatic style of the Dufay generation, but worked mainly on the type based on “popular” tunes. Their short melodic phrases were particularly convenient to his interest in rational and economic procedures (among other things, in canons), but they were at odds with the tradition of the arched melodic line. The main focus of the article is on Josquin’s engagement with the chanson “cantilena” in his earlier periods and the presumed synthesis of melodic and rational demands in his late compositions.

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The development of computer-assisted composition (CAC) systems is a research activity that dates back to at least the works by IRCAM on OpenMusic [1]. CAC is a field that is concerned with developing systems that are capable of automating partially or completely the process of music composition. There exists several compositional tasks a system can address (e.g. rhythm generation, harmonization, melody generation, etc). These tasks can be realized with machine learning (ML) algorithms given a conditioning or not on prior musical sequences. Many ML-based CAC systems have emerged from both academia and industry over the years [2] [3]. For the majority of them, the user continuously generate music by tweaking a set of parameters that influences the model's generation. Building on top of Apollo, an interactive web environment that makes corpus-based music algorithms available for training and generation via a convenient graphical interface [4], Calliope is specialized for advanced MIDI manipulation in the browser and generative controllability of the Multi-Track Music Machine (MMM) model [5] for batch generation of partial or complete multi-track compositions. The aim is to enable the ability for composers to effectively co-create with a generative system. Calliope is built in Node.js, the Web stack (HTML, CSS, Javascript) and MongoDB. It is made interoperable with the MMM pretrained model via the Python runtime. MMM offers both global-level deep learning parameters (e.g. temperature) and track-level music-based constraint parameters: note density, polyphony range and note duration range. Bar selection can be used to refine the request for generation. It is also possible to delete or add MIDI tracks to an existing MIDI file in order to generate on a subset of the tracks or to generate a new track for a given composition. The composer makes use of all these varied controls to steer the generative behavior of the model and guide the composition process. Batch generation of musical outputs is implemented via the MMM's Python interface which offers batch support natively. This ability means that the composer can rapidly explore alternatives, including generating from a previously generated output, for a given set of control parameters. We have tested batch requests of 5, up to 1000 generated music excerpts at a Copyright: © 2022 Renaud Bougueng et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

This paper describes the development of a hierarchical multiscale procedure within the finite volume OpenFOAM framework for modelling the mechanical response of non-linear heterogeneous solid materials. This is a first development of hierarchical multiscale model for solid mechanics using the finite volume discretisation method. In this computational procedure the information is passed between the macro and micro scales using representative volume elements (RVE), allowing for general, non-periodic microstructures to be considered. An RVE with the prescribed microstructural features is assigned to each computational point. The overall macro response accounts for the microstructural effects through the coupling of macro and micro scales, i.e., the macro deformation gradient is passed to the RVE and in turn, the homogenised micro stress-strain response is passed back to the macro scale. The incremental total Lagrangian formulation is used to represent the equilibrium state of the solid domain at both scales and its integral equilibrium equation is discretised using the cell-centred (colocated) finite volume (FV) method in OpenFOAM. The verification of the model is demonstrated using both 2D and 3D simulations of perforated elastic-plastic plates subjected to tensile loading.

The articles and videos in this issue of Musimédiane are the result of a team effort by Labex GREAM* members Pierre Michel, Nathalie Hérold, Camille Lienhard and Ingrid Pustijanac (University of Pavia-Cremona, Italy) to prepare Les Espaces acoustiques for a concert given by the student orchestra of the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK) at the Tonhalle in Zurich on 22 April 2016, conducted by Pierre-André Valade.  In addition to the three articles featured, this issue presents a unique collection of documents:
 Videos of the rehearsals on 20 and 21 April 2016 in Zurich
 Video interviews with the conductor and some of the musicians
 Photos of personal scores annotated by the conductor
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Ce numéro de Musimédiane a pour objectif de mieux faire saisir les questions interprétatives liées à un tel cycle instrumental et orchestral en abordant d’une part les champs de recherche liés à l’instrumentiste, à la lecture et la notation, aux techniques instrumentales étendues, d’autre part les champs de recherche liés au chef d’orchestre : techniques de répétition, lecture propre de l’œuvre et annotations des partitions, cheminement parcouru avec l’œuvre. Ce numéro se situe donc entre la musicologie de l’interprétation, les Performance studies et la  créativité distribuée. Plusieurs grands axes sont particulièrement explorés à travers les articles et les vidéos : la question de la temporalité, le travail du son et l’exécution des hauteurs.

* Examines different kinds of integrations and collaborations of audio and visual in multiple art forms
* Offers an interdisciplinary list of contributors
* Emphasizes experimental tendencies while analyzing and contextualizing them in critical frameworks

Propomos neste artigo uma leitura da primeira peça da suíte Les Espaces Acoustiques, Prologue, escrita em 1976 por Gérard Grisey para viola solo. Considerando que o conjunto de peças constitui-se em uma sistematização musical das técnicas composicionais que viriam a ser aplicadas e desenvolvidas por Grisey no restante da sua obras, esta análise referencia-se por escritos acadêmicos acerca de sua composição e, sobretudo, por escritos do próprio compositor em seus esforços por apresentar conceitualmente a construção epistemológica que subsidia tais procedimentos. Dessa forma, o biomorfismo que lhe serve como constante campo analógico, como em sua noção tripartite de tempo musical (esqueleto, carne e pele do tempo) e em sua proposta de processo formal (inspiração e expiração), é por nós compreendido como campo de operações composicionais e, consequentemente, como critérios analíticos, permitindo-nos propor abordagens interpretativas e aplicações para novos procedimentos composicionais a partir da noção de fluxo de energia.

Through The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky ushered in the end of musical time, as we know it. The work's expansion and contraction of rhythmic cells, irregular accents, rhythmic ostinatos, layering of rhythmic patterns, and asymmetrical groupings contributed to rhythm being an equal partner with harmony in the structuring of music. Struck by the originality of its rhythmic practices, Messiaen analyzed The Rite in 1930. This interest in The Rite was to have a profound impact on the history of music. Through his work as both a composer and teacher, Messiaen became an important disseminator of Stravinsky's rhythmic ideas in the twentieth century. Messiaen's analysis of The Rite of Spring was his most brilliant work as a teacher, as attested to by numerous former students. Volume II of the Treatise on Rhythm, Color, and Ornithology (1949-92) contains an outline of this detailed oral analysis. Although he often analyzed The Rite measure-by-measure in class, in the Treatise on Rhythm Messiaen provided only the highlights of one interpretation. In this essay, I will examine Messiaen's analysis of The Rite of Spring as laid out in the Treatise on Rhythm, outlining its contents before delving into the "Introduction" to Part I, the "Augurs of Spring," and the "Sacrificial Dance." To conclude my paper, I will consider the analysis's influence on Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, two of Messiaen's most illustrious pupils.

The piano is an instrument extensively used in classical, jazz, and pop music, since its broad pitch range and ample dynamic levels allow the instrument to become self-contained and versatile for various kinds of music. Previous work has found the piano to be emotionally neutral among eight tested non-sustaining instruments. This paper further explores the emotional characteristics of piano sounds with a listening test comparing isolated one-second sounds of different pitches and dynamics on the piano over ten emotional categories: Happy, Sad, Heroic, Scary, Comic, Shy, Romantic, Mysterious, Angry, and Calm. In the experiment, the loud bass was ranked the most Angry and Heroic, and the effect dropped with increasing pitch. The soft treble was ranked the most Calm and Shy, and the effect dropped with decreasing pitch. The trend was clear across the octaves. Both loud and soft sounds have distinguishing emotional characteristics. In contrast, the emotional categories Mysterious and Happy were not much affected by dynamics.

In writing a piece for gamelan and string quartet-traditional Indonesian instruments and an ensemble which is perhaps the epitome of traditional Western music-I wanted to thematize the very idea of combining the two. Cultures, peoples, languages and so on, are not strictly defined or self contained wholes, but have always existed in constant flux, infiltrating and fertilizing one another, while expanding and creating new (or renewed) forms and ideas. Seen from this perspective, the world is not an aggregate of unbridgeable gaps and differences, but a web of connections, variations, and echoes. My piece serves as a counterpoint for several quotes by Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American literary scholar. Said untangled some of the connections between orientalism and colonialism; between the West's view of the "Other" and hundreds of years of imperialistic endeavors which still continue today. Framing Said's quotes on how to move beyond this history and present, my piece is set as an imagined encounter which results in an increased range of possibilities for everyone involved: the gamelan instruments are being bowed, while the string instruments become gongs. This idea of mixing and cross-fertilization was at the heart of Said's ethical project, and of his optimism: "this seems to me to be the most interesting human task; it's the task of interpretation; it's the task of giving history some shape and sense; for a particular reason-to understand my history in terms of other people's history. In other words, to try and understand, to move beyond, to generalize, one's own individual experience to the experience of others. And I think the great goal is in fact to become someone else. To transform itself from a unitary identity to and identity that includes the other without suppressing the difference".

I. Introduction [1.1] This essay considers some expressive aspects of musical timbre. (1) Objectively quantifiable in terms of spectral energy distribution, onset, envelope, and spectral flux, timbre nevertheless remains the most ineffable quality of musical sound, and descriptions of it necessarily resort to terms from other sensory domains: "color," "grain," Klangfarbe, and the like. Its multidimensionality is part of its elusive nature, and while the individual components of a timbre-its attack transients, the synchronicity of its partials, and so on-can be precisely measured, these physical attributes do not always correspond one-to-one with perceptual experience. As contemporary musicians have increasingly focused on timbre as a crucial semantic feature of their work, the need to develop a solid discursive framework for timbre and its effects has become more pressing. My approach in this essay draws on the work of ethnomusicologist Cornelia Fales, whose essay "The Paradox of Timbre" I will quote at some length (Fales 2002). I believe Fales's insights get at the heart of timbre's expressive power, especially her concept of "perceptualization," the notion of timbre as a thing largely forged in the listener's head. While Fales's research interests lie primarily in non-Western musics, I find her work suggestive of an interpretive approach to Western contemporary classical music, an approach that takes seriously associations of transparency and turbidity with pure harmonics and noisy timbres, respectively. The first part of this essay will explore acoustical and psycho-acoustical

Heave, Sway, Surge (2014-19) is a musical composition for nine instruments that attempts to evoke the subjectivity of a body in motion by deploying sound-mass textures that rely on transitional acoustic states. It uses motion and force as its musical material and a system of notation in which acoustic parameters are represented vertically against horizontal time, with line segments plotting their continuous values; and shows discrete positions and configurations as tablature. The production of the score relied on a suite

The main objective of this short paper is to present results and a computational modeling process as a tool to aid musical composition. These results are related to the composition of the piece "Intermezzi and Capriccio" from a Fantasia, an ensemble of piano solo pieces worked from a cross analysis of the first Intermezzo of Johannes Brahms' Four Pieces for Piano Op. 119. In this way, the musical analysis I propose aims to compositional results, which in turn guides, the analysis itself. In this sense, the objective is not that of an analysis and modeling in order to reconstruct an original, but of analysis and modeling that allows it to unfold into new objects.

Timbre, in contrast to pitch and loudness, remains a poorly understood auditory attribute. Persons attempting to understand it may be confused as much by its nature as its definition. Indeed, timbre is a “strange and multiple” attribute of sound (Cadoz, 1991, p. 17), defined by what it is not: it is neither pitch, nor loudness, nor duration. Consider the definition proposed by the American National Standards Institute (1973, p. 56): “Timbre is that attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which a subject can judge that two sounds similarly presented and having the same loudness and pitch are dissimilar.” Therefore, timbre is that perceptual attribute by which we can distinguish the instruments of the orchestra even if they play the same note with the same dynamics. The absence of a satisfactory definition of timbre is primarily due to two major problems. The first one concerns the multidimensional nature of timbre. Indeed, it is timbre’s “strangeness” and, even more, its “multipl...

Music for nothing – Rebecca Saundersʼ traditions, routines, demands and contradictions
The music by Rebecca Saunders, which is internationally admired for its richness and sophistication in case of sound and timbre, is in the tradition of autonomous tone color composing. Closely musicological discussions with it have so far hardly taken place or have remained mostly descriptive. This is also due to the contradictory strategy of the composer to make her music appear contextless when speaking about colors, but at the same time to charge it expressively, semantically and spiritually from the outside through titles, texts, comments and associations. While on the one hand their works seem unhistorical and unrelated, so to speak “natural”, on the other hand they are based on well-known effect models, tonal elements and a repertoire of typical playing techniques, sounds, gestures and tension curves of new music that Saunders himself has long tried out. In addition, her sound surfaces are based on central tones and her physical-haptic understanding of sound shows strong close relationships with composers such as Giacinto Scelsi, Gérard Grisey, Wolfgang Rihm, Helmut Lachenmann and Edgard Varèse. Since a critical compositional examination of these characteristics and routines is largely absent, there is a risk of stylistic hardening.

Man in Music: Nicolaus A. Huberʼs Compositonal Opening of the World

Only few composers are asking in such a fundamental way, what music consists of and how their materials and structural conditions are relate to physical, psychological and social mechanisms und dispositions of humanity. Since the mid-1960s in many of his 100 works Nicolaus A. Huber brought music into contact with diverse elements and principles of nature, art, philosophy, religion, politics, media, sports, body, dream and the musical tradition, including classic, folk, pop and political songs. Influenced by Luigi Nono and the historical materialism of Karl Marx he defined tonality as a functional disposition of soul like an archetype, described by the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung. For Huber this was not an abstract theory but a compositional practice, demonstrated at concrete musical phenomenon like crescendo or unchanging tones hold for a long time. Hubers “critical composition” made clear, that his work has to deal with problems related to Man, but reflected in music.

Seit je diente Musik als Anstoß zur Entstehung von Musik. Die Komposition neuer Stücke auf der Basis von Giacinto Scelsis alten Ondiola-Improvisationen lässt sich daher leicht bagatellisieren. Ebenso gut lässt sich das Unternehmen „Scelsi Revisited“ aber auch skandalisieren. Denn warum sollten die von Scelsi offenbar nicht zur Transkription für irgendeine Instrumental- oder Vokalbesetzung ausgewählten Tonbänder ausgerechnet von anderen Komponisten für neue Stücke verwendet werden? Warum muss zu einem auskomponierten Werk werden, was Scelsis außergewöhnlicher Kompositionspraxis nur als ein Arbeitsschritt unter mehreren anderen diente und genau darin seinen beschränkten Zweck erfüllte? Auf je eigene Weise geben die im Zuge von „Scelsi Revisited“ entstandenen Kompositionen eine Antwort auf diese Fragen, so auch Tristan Murails Un Sogno. Die Analyse dieses Stücks erfolgt vor dem Hintergrund der paradoxen medialen Wechsel von Scelsis Ondiola-Spiel zu Tonbandaufnahmen, transkribierten Partituren und schließlich live aufgeführter Musik. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf Murails Auseinandersetzung mit Scelsis Tonbändern sowie den formalen und harmonikalen Parallelen seines Stücks zu Scelsis Anahit. Schließlich dient die Analyse der kritischen Erörterung des für Scelsi wie Murail gleichermaßen zentralen „(Wunsch)Traums“ von Musik als einem mit zwingender Evidenz im Hier und Jetzt sich ereignenden Klangfluss.

The piece Partiels (Grisey 1976), from Gérard Grisey's cycle Les Espaces Acoustiques, is emblematic of the aesthetics of French spectral music. Considered and analyzed by several authors from a compositional perspective (Krier 2000, Féron 2010), it has given rise to very few studies centered on performance, and more specifically on the performance elaboration process-rather than the performance considered as a finished product (in relation to this issue, see for example Cook 2001).

Many frequency-based compositional ideas and related techniques inform Tristan Murail’s compositional methods. Here I will examine the following works: Gondwana (1980), Désintégrations (1982), Serendib (1992), La Barque mystique (1993), L’Esprit des dunes (1994), Le Partage des eaux (1995) and Winter Fragments (2000). The present article also aims to give an overview of his musical ideas and reveal some of their development during the past two decades: A thorough study of Murail’s musical output has not been available in English to date. Murail’s more recent composition Le Lac (2001) is discussed in depth in a separate article earlier in this book; both this article and the discussion of Le Lac show how materials can be obtained and translated into the score or into electronic sounds accompanying the performance. The two articles can be read as an introduction to his work, though they may, I hope, inspire other composers to explore frequency-based composition and further their own working methods and ideas. In this essay, I especially wish to shed light on frequency-based compositional techniques and related working methods that could employ the software OpenMusic.

In this essay, I wish to shed light on some frequency-based contemporary compositional techniques and in particular the use of OpenMusic software to aid the creative process. The practices in question are often grouped under the name spectral techniques, a term generally referring to the use of frequency spectra as the basis of composition. Since these techniques are often of a much broader scope and encompass all kinds of frequencyrelated calculations, I will prefer here the adjectival form 'frequency-based'. Some of the frequency-based techniques are explained by taking the composition Le Lac (2001) by Tristan Murail as an example. I analyze both the score and several of the OpenMusic patches the composer prepared during the compositional process. The reader of this essay will thus be able to trace the creative process and gain insights into the workings of the composition. In the first section of this essay, Murail's composition is discussed from a musicological and music-theoretical standpoint. In the second part, construction is discussed, revealing the generation and transformation of the "musical object", "sequential object" and "object sequence". The processing and transformation of musical objects are examined, elucidating two related but separate phenomena: how the composition takes form as shaped by the composer and how it evolves over time for the listener.

In this essay, I wish to shed light on some frequency-based contemporary compositional techniques and in particular the use of OpenMusic software to aid the creative process. The practices in question are often grouped under the name spectral techniques, a term generally referring to the use of frequency spectra as the basis to composition. Since these techniques are often of a much broader scope and encompass all kinds of frequency-related calculations, I will prefer here the adjectival form ‘frequency-based’. Some of the frequency-based techniques are explained by taking the composition Le lac (2001) by Tristan Murail as an example. I analyze both the score and several of the OpenMusic patches the composer prepared during the compositional process. The reader of this essay will thus be able to trace the creative process and gain insights into the workings of the composition.
In the first section of this essay, Murail’s composition is discussed from a musicological and music-theoretical standpoint. In the second part, construction is discussed, revealing the generation and transformation of the “musical object”, “sequential object” and “object sequence”. The processing and transformation of musical objects are examined, elucidating two related but separate phenomena: how the composition takes form as shaped by the composer and how it evolves over time for the listener.