Description:
Much electroacoustic music composition and sound art, and the commentary that surrounds them, is locked into a materialist sound-object mindset in which the hierarchical organisation of sonic events, especially those developed through abstraction, are considered antithetical to sounds ‘being themselves’. This article argues that musical sounds are not just material objects, and that musical notations, on paper or in computer code, are not just symbolic abstractions, but instructions for embodied actions. When notation is employed computationally to control resonance and gestural actuators at multiple acoustic, psychoacoustic and conceptual levels of music form, vibrant sonic morphologies may emerge from the quantum-like boundaries between them. In order to achieve that result, it is necessary to replace our primary focus of compositional attention from the Digital Audio Workstation sound transformation tools currently in vogue, with those that support algorithmic thinking at all levels of compositional design.