Besides this talk and the diffused concert at the Central Conservatory, Lyon also played a fantastic set at the vital local new music venue D-22. Photos of that gig will be uploaded soon.

He’s also the co-author of the Max/MSP objects FFTease.

Do We Still Need Computer Music?, by Eric Lyon.

Miha Ciglar live at Waterland Kwanyin series, 2 Kolagas, Beijing. This is one of the two off-MusicAcoustica events this year.

Audience.

So I’ve decided to share the song with you.

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome the professor of Shanghai Conservatory, Mr Sean “Iron Tinnitus” Li. (applause)

Right: Sean Li (LI Sixin 李斯心)

Instead of printed brochures, the audience had to read bilingual artist biographies and program notes on a huge projection screen on stage. This clever and thoughtful idea turned sour as the audience realized that the projector was left turned on for the entire duration of the concert. Neither my composer friend Lydia Ayers (former professor at Hong Kong University of Technology) nor myself had ever seen any electroacoustic/acousmatic concert presented in this way, as most of the audience ended up staring at the projected text or trying to comprehend the English during the whole show.

What can be more ironic? The very core of the concept of the acousmatique, which the GRM literally re-invented and have heralded for about half a century, is to disconnect the sight of the sound source from the aural perception, so as to focus our attention on the sound objects themselves. Although strictly speaking, the program notes are not the source of the sounds; nevertheless, it is visual distraction that has been avoided like a plague in concerts of this nature. On a deeper level, are not the forced visibility of biography of the artist and the genesis and description of the piece, and even the listing of the sound sources themselves equally “anti-acousmatic”?

That evening’s GRM concert felt more like watching a silent film made from English and Chinese text stills with soundtrack, or, a lecture on the current state of GRM with sound examples. Even if the audience wanted to close their eyes and enjoy a true acousmatic concert, the after-vision of bright yellow text on black background were still visible after the eyelids were closed.

Not only that, there were some unfriendly applause from the audience at several points when agitating music was quieting down in the pieces.

These phenomena point to a deeper issue of horror vacui, an art historical term referring to the fear of empty spaces in visual designs. The horror vacui that ran deep under the surface of the concert that night was not only visual, as indicated by the former phenomenon, but also aural, as indicated by the latter.

For the former, I have come up with a wonderful excuse for the concert organizer – that this year’s theme of MusicAcoustica is indeed “language,” therefore listening to GRM works while checking out the English-Chinese translation of program notes was only fitting, not to mention its educational value for Chinese students of music, who really need to sharpen their foreign language skills.

As for the latter, I am as clueless as the unfriendly applauding audience.

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.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/93095554@N00/sets/72157594342449038/