Inseparable models of materials and of musical design in electroacoustic and computer music*
Agostino Di Scipio · Journal of New Music Research · 1995
The focus of this article is on the models that may characterize the notion of material in the task‐environment of electroacoustic and computer music. By investigating the cognitive relation between material and form, it is shown that technologically‐based sonic art can leave the pseudo‐ontological dualism of instrumental and vocal music (sound vs. structure, sonic vs. syntactical properties), and establish new paradigms of music composition. The article elaborates on the fresh, yet largely unexplored, theoretical and aesthetic potential proper to sonic design (viewed, here, as an activity of knowledge‐modelling) and then concludes exploring the relativistic epistemological assumptions which are peculiar to the experience of a thoroughly‐going music of timbre and sound morphology.