Minimal Objects in Microsound
Joanna Demers · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2010
Unlike the genres profiled in chapters 1 and 2, other forms of electronic music treat sound not as a sign but as an object, an entity with no preexisting semantic content. chapter 3 looks at the minimal objects in microsound, a form of electronic music that utilizes brief, usually quiet particles of sound. Microsound artists exhibit surprising consistency in their search for sounds that are supposedly expressionless. The chapter connects this predilection to a similar desire among minimalist visual artists of the 1960s for “objecthood,” Michael Fried’s term characterizing sculpture that appropriates discrete objects for their physical rather than referential attributes.