Anno 2020/2

This paper takes a transdisciplinary theoretical approach on the thoroughly technologized performance practices of live electronic music (or live electro nics) and related sound art approaches and considers them a most relevant artistic domain for investigating liveness (the “living” character of performance). We start with a few remarks concerning the terminology of liveness and their musico-historical backgrounds, stressing relevant theoretical points and proble- matic commonplaces in established views on the subject. 

The production of Prometeo. Tragedia dell’Ascolto (1984–1985) brought together musicians, soloists, a choir, a lyricist, an architect, an artist, and sound engineers working on computer generated sounds and live electronics, under the guidance and compositional writing of Luigi Nono. This article focuses on Nono’s collaboration with musical assistants Alvise Vidolin, Sylviane Sapir and Mauro Graziani from CSC (Centro di Sonologia Computazionale, University of Padova), who designed the real-time digital sound processor, called 4i system, used in Prometeo.

This paper presents an overview of the epistemological grounding of the computational approach to musical syntax as a tool to advance our understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of the musical experience. From the proposed perspective, formulations of music-theoretical and analytical thinking in formal terms can be read as hypotheses on the output of computational models at different levels of description. Computational models, in turn, make it possible to derive testable predictions on observable behaviours that are available for empirical investigation. The deep connection linking music-theoretical and computational thinking is illustrated with examples drawn from analytic accounts of tonal harmonic syntax.

The goal of this paper is to examine part of a spectral composition in order to present methodologies that enable the examination of music, which would otherwise escape analytical scrutiny. To do this we combine the traditional scholarly methods of musicology and the scientific examination of acoustic data requiring the skills and techniques of computer science and mathematics. By combining the skills and the knowledge of the musicologist and the computer scientist, we hope to propose solutions to some of the issues that arise in the study of this type of music and to contribute to the burgeoning field of computational musicology.