composer | musician | educator

Electroacoustic Music Analysis

Analysis Score

My dissertation research centered on electroacoustic music analysis. See below for more information. In the years since this research has been expanded to include aural analysis of music in general, aural analysis of contemporary music, and the analysis of music without a score... more on that in another post

Problems and Current Methodologies in Electroacoustic Music Analysis, and An Analysis of Lejaren Hiller’s Vocalise from Seven Electronic Studies for Two-Channel Tape Recorder (1963)

Abstract:

This dissertation is an investigation of electro-acoustic music analysis; it highlights the difficulties of analysis, explains some of the prevailing analysis methodologies, and demonstrates the use of a hybrid analysis methodology through an analytical case study. These difficulties and analysis methodologies correlate to electro-acoustic music in general as well as the piece chosen for the analytical case study. The piece selected for the study, Vocalise, is the first movement from a larger work titled Seven Electronic Studies for Two-Channel Tape Recorder (1963) by the composer Lejaren Hiller (1924 - 1994). The study made use of methodologies based on listening (Smalley’s Spectromorphology and Roy’s Functional and Implicative Method) and used computer-assisted analysis (Music Information Retrieval) as a tool for confirming the findings of the listening analysis.