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| Format: | Recurso digital |
| Language: | En |
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Zenodo
2026
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| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19150734 |
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| _version_ | 1866901705818374144 |
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| author | Di Scipio, Agostino Scorranese, Daniel |
| author_facet | Di Scipio, Agostino Scorranese, Daniel |
| contents | <p>The first tape music composed by Iannis Xenakis, Diamorphoses (GRM Paris, 1957) features extremely peculiar sonorities that challenge and even resist clear qualitative descriptions, making it difficult or impossible to ground music analysis on shared notions of the ‘sound object’, as worked out by scholars in the shade of Pierre Schaeffer’s early contributions.</p> <p>Few sources are available about its actual production in the studio. They often mention the use of magnetophonic prototypes developed at GRM, the phonogène and the morphophone. There is little doubt the former was really used. In contrast, mention of the morphophone has always remained highly problematic. No specimens of that device have survived their times and the few indicators about its use in actual compositional work are largely conjectural. </p> <p>For these reasons, Diamorphoses is a kind of ‘cold case’ in the history of early electroacoustic music: some of its most remarkable sonorities are poorly understood partly because the studio production strategies devised to create them are poorly documented. We make the hypothesis that the morphophone was indeed utilized by Xenakis to create the unique textural sonorities heard in later passages of Diamorphoses, described as “layered swarms of glissando” in [Frisius 2009, 147-148]. For our discussion to lay on empirical grounds, we try to model or reconstruct the operations the composer might have gone through to create such sonorities. We can make such an attempt thanks to the DIGITAL MORPHOPHONE ENVIRONMENT, a recent MaxMSP application meant to replicate (and eventually extend) the morphophone functionalities in the digital domain. </p> <p>Our tests ultimately provide indirect but reliable empirical evidence that those layered streams of glissandoing sounds were indeed the outcome of analog signal processing operations that could only be pursued with the morphophone, in the GRM studio as of 1957. Accordingly, the conjecture that Xenakis had used the morphophone in the realization of Diamorphoses can be considered correct. We also suggest that, by employing that device in special manners, he might have tried to somehow measure or at least grade the sonic density of his thick sonic textures.</p> |
| format | Recurso digital |
| id | zenodo_https___doi_org_10_5281_zenodo_19150734 |
| institution | Zenodo |
| language | enc |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| publisher | Zenodo |
| record_format | zenodo |
| spellingShingle | A Cold Case In The Early Electroacoustic Music Repertoire: The 'Glissando Swarms' Of Diamorphoses Di Scipio, Agostino Scorranese, Daniel <p>The first tape music composed by Iannis Xenakis, Diamorphoses (GRM Paris, 1957) features extremely peculiar sonorities that challenge and even resist clear qualitative descriptions, making it difficult or impossible to ground music analysis on shared notions of the ‘sound object’, as worked out by scholars in the shade of Pierre Schaeffer’s early contributions.</p> <p>Few sources are available about its actual production in the studio. They often mention the use of magnetophonic prototypes developed at GRM, the phonogène and the morphophone. There is little doubt the former was really used. In contrast, mention of the morphophone has always remained highly problematic. No specimens of that device have survived their times and the few indicators about its use in actual compositional work are largely conjectural. </p> <p>For these reasons, Diamorphoses is a kind of ‘cold case’ in the history of early electroacoustic music: some of its most remarkable sonorities are poorly understood partly because the studio production strategies devised to create them are poorly documented. We make the hypothesis that the morphophone was indeed utilized by Xenakis to create the unique textural sonorities heard in later passages of Diamorphoses, described as “layered swarms of glissando” in [Frisius 2009, 147-148]. For our discussion to lay on empirical grounds, we try to model or reconstruct the operations the composer might have gone through to create such sonorities. We can make such an attempt thanks to the DIGITAL MORPHOPHONE ENVIRONMENT, a recent MaxMSP application meant to replicate (and eventually extend) the morphophone functionalities in the digital domain. </p> <p>Our tests ultimately provide indirect but reliable empirical evidence that those layered streams of glissandoing sounds were indeed the outcome of analog signal processing operations that could only be pursued with the morphophone, in the GRM studio as of 1957. Accordingly, the conjecture that Xenakis had used the morphophone in the realization of Diamorphoses can be considered correct. We also suggest that, by employing that device in special manners, he might have tried to somehow measure or at least grade the sonic density of his thick sonic textures.</p> |
| title | A Cold Case In The Early Electroacoustic Music Repertoire: The 'Glissando Swarms' Of Diamorphoses |
| url | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19150734 |