MusicAcoustica ‘06: some Chinese papers

by lawrence

Ken Fields requested a brief translation of the titles and abstracts of the Chinese papers, so that foreign participants who had missed it due to the clashing of schedule (which means 99% of them, because the EMS paper session was going on at the same time) would not be totally in the dark. Instead of doing that, I’ll try to recap what I’ve seen and heard (and occasionally said) during the Chinese paper session this afternoon.

I didn’t sit through all of them as I’ve been shuttling between the Chinese session and the EMS session. And while I do have soft copies of all the Chinese papers, I’m going to run them through a filter in my head. For example, papers about how to construct the discipline of electronic music studies and more education-oriented papers won’t be covered here. Sorry to those who are interested in these, but there ain’t no objective journalism. ^_^

  • An analysis of the sound-morphing techniques used in GRM Tools and the two general tendencies of modulation in electronic music, by LI Pengyun 李鹏云

  • Dialogues between different spaces - a suite, by ZHANG Ruibo 张睿博

    • This is Zhang Ruibo’s introductory analysis of an award-winning piece realized in Paris in 1992 (first part) and 1993 (second part). The strange thing was that Zhang Ruibo didn’t mention the name of the composer during the whole presentation, so that we naturally thought it’s his own work, until he started to complement the work towards the end! Shocked by this unusual gesture, I can’t help approaching him for the authorship of the piece after his presentation, and found out it was Zhang Xiaofu - Ruibo’s professor.

  • An analysis of Kontakte and the electronic music theory of Stockhausen, by HUANG Zhenyu 黄枕宇

    • I didn’t catch all of it, but apart from analysing Kontakte, the speaker also spent some paragraphs on the famous “four criteria of electronic music” of Stockhausen.

  • Explanation of the Chinese and English version of some key terms in electronic music, by Huang Zhenyu

    • This topic is of utmost importance so we (Dajuin Yao and I) were glad that we had catched it after a quick visit to Perry Cheng’s MIDI masterclass in another building.

    It’s also the most revealing Chinese paper of that afternoon.

    Mr Huang is known as the Chinese translator of The New Music: The Avant-garde since 1945, by Reginald Smith Brindle. During the Chinese paper session he discussed terms like “electronic music”, “electro-acoustic music”, “computer music” and “experimental music”. His references include the Grove music dictionary, books by Charles Dodge, Barry Schrader, Peter Manning, John Schaefer et al. The paper consists of basically translations and paraphrases of the texts on the topic by the above authors, with no mentioning of the Chinese literature at all. I suppose some studies has been done in the Chinese academic world (although I’m not aware of any), but there’s one essential article which was written and distributed seven years ago outside of the Conservatory system, and since it has clarified the issue with deep insight and clear logic, it has become the de facto standard Chinese translation and definition of those terms in the non-academic electronic music community.

    The article is called Guide to Electroacoustic Music 電子原音音樂入門法, written in Chinese by Dajuin Yao and published on New Music Web in 1999. You can read it here.

    I believe Yao is the first to come up with a Chinese translation of “electroacoustic music” (电子原音音乐, Dianzi Yuanyin Yinyue). In the article, he defined the music as one that involves the the modulation of usually “acoustic” (as in “acoustic guitar”) sounds with “electronic means”. And “Dianzi Yuanyin Yinyue” is simply a direct, straight translation of the English version. This translation is widely accepted and fluently used - in both oral and written language - by sound artists, experimental musicians, underground musicians, phonographers/field-recordists, in a word: all the non-academic new music practitioners in China. Although most of them know some English, but those who are better at reading than speaking usually refer to the concept as Dianzi Yuanyin Yinyue in conversations.

    Huang’s paper informed me that two Chinese translation of electroacoustic music exist in the academic studies: one is 电子声学音乐 (Dianzi Shengxue Yinyue), the other is 电子音响音乐 (Dianzi Yinxiang Yinyue). I presume that Huang is not aware of Yao’s translation.

    The first one is a mis-translation. The translator misunderstood the “acoustic” in “electroacoustic” as “of or relating to sound”, while the real meaning here is, as we all know, the same as in “acoustic guitar”: Of or being an instrument that does not produce or enhance sound electronically. So it’s kind of like the flipside of “electronic”.

    The second one, Dianzi Yinxiang Yinyue, is of very low comprehensibility and a lot of ambiguity. In Chinese-language, the word Yinxiang usually refers to audio playback equipments, and in less cases, to “abstract sounds”. When being used together with Dianzi (electronic), it usually refers to sounds which has a lot of “electronica flavour” - certainly not what the original English term means.

    I’m sure you’ve seen the problem here even without further analysis.

    For those who’re interested, I’ve uploaded Huang’s paper to our server, you can download and read it here (Word format). It’s written in Chinese.




1 Comment »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

  1. An analysis of the sound-morphing techniques used in GRM Tools and the two general tendencies of modulation in electronic music

    Man, what’s this? Plug-in user review could be a paper?

    Comment by Rio — October 26, 2006 #

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

times.
Entries and comments feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS.