Since the 1940s, many terms have been coined to define artistic movements using recording technology to generate new, often dystopic sound environments. The results have often bewildered the ears of ordinary listeners, while exhilarating composers of the stature of Boulez, Messiaen, Sauget, Varese and the visionary Xenakis.
Fifty-two-year-old Dubliner Roger Doyle is an enthusiastic veteran in this area. He has just released a CD of 11 tracks by various artists called By The New Time - a variation of which will be performed at a concert tonight in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, in Dublin.
Doyle prefers the term "electro-acoustic composition": an extremely elastic subject he teaches as part of the Masters in Music & Media Technology course in Trinity College, Dublin, run by composer Donnacha Dennehy, artistic director of the Crash Ensemble. Most of the featured artists have either had pieces aired by Crash (like Judith Ring), or have studied at Trinity with Dennehy, Doyle and others.
"Electro-acoustic music used to mean very academic pieces like, say, Michael Alcorn's work, but it's now loosening up to mean a more generic area of people working with technology in non-pop environments," says Doyle. "There's a very interesting synthesis going on between popular culture, high art and technology."
One of Doyle's two pieces to be performed tonight, the idea and its shadow, was warmly received at a Crash Ensemble gig last December, as well as the Sonorities festival in Belfast. It hinges on a simple, self-conscious, meta-musical conceit. Doyle's fellow composer, Kevin O'Connell, explains in slender Northern tones: "It struck me that every idea you have has its own shadow, that there's another idea that kind of ghosts it, and that very often what you're looking for as a composer is not just the idea, but the ghost of the idea, the shadow it casts as well . . ."
Doyle used a midi-converter to catch and elaborate the nervy melodies of O'Connell's voice with an echo of notes, which gradually destabilises and eclipses O'Connell in the mix as Doyle's whimsical chords wash around again. There are shadows here of the Operating Theatre group, which Doyle, Olwen Fouere and others formed many moons ago.
Dennehy, meanwhile, graces the CD with a similarly meta-musical, 10-minute piece for piano and tape, featuring pianist Joanna MacGregor, alongside a recording of a distinguished-sounding gentleman who intones data - such as "26,400 beats per minute . . . falling or rising slowly" - like a meteorological forecaster.
The idea centres around the pitch-time conundrum in music, in that any beats of a frequency over 18 beats-per-second present a continuous tone to the human ear - analagous to film at 25 frames per second. And as you speed a rhythm up to 26,400 beats per minute, you get the perfect A, to which the strings of an orchestra tune themselves.
Unfortunately, the complexity of the piano score of Dennehy's piece - in the absence of MacGregor - renders it unperformable for tonight. Instead, the baton is handed to the committed flautist Susan Doyle, a regular in the Crash Ensemble, who will accompany Dennehy's Swerve (1998).
Dennehy giggles. "It's a more populist piece, influenced by underground dance music, the celebration of the world of analogue synthesisers mixed with granular digital sound."
THE music tonight will all be accompanied by large-scale projections of digital-video images, some sound-triggered by video-technician Tim Redfern, manipulating loops of footage of his own or material from NASA or other sources.
You will hear the atmospheric, flute/organ samplings of Giles Packham, melting into big pleasurable groove beats, with some demented dial-twiddling; Resonant Air, with its strange whips of violent sound, from Michael Alcorn, director of the Sonic Arts Research Centre, in Queen's University, Belfast; John Basetti's ambient, increasingly growling piece from inside a grandfather clock; and Judith Ring's all-enveloping Accumulation, a big, dark infinitude of spiralling overtones and booming ultrasonic drones.
Other pieces for "live instrument and tape" include Jurgen Simpson's Unlocking: an exploration of the melancholic potential of the accordion, alongside freeform electronics. Then there's the catchiest number: Conor Curran's In Between, performed live with triggered vocal samples, like a sacred music, advancing through progressions - to the scratchy rasp of a buzz-saw.
You might also hear Patrick Daly's punchy piece of circular harmonic phrases, which is strongly Doyle-influenced; Caoimhe Dunn's The Dark Woods, ranging from anxious whispering to grungy guitar; and Roy Carroll's raunchy and scary I'm Born Again, using porn-soundtrack squeals, to a trashily relentless funk baseline.
Although these people appear like academic musicians, they all avert to an "underground" music scene of "acts", like Uziq, Pansonic, Decal, Front End Synthetic - even the Aphex Twin.
I don't know. Maybe if you get wise to this, then the clatter of builders, the hissy shrieks of your PC logging onto a server or the curse of car alarms may never seem like sound pollution again . . . in fact, you might just have an aesthetic experience.
Sample tracks or order CD from By The New Time, at website www.soundout.net/sounds.htm
