Sound and Homeomorphisms Colloque International : De Xenakis à nos jours : Le Continuum et son développement en musique et en architecture 0 1

Résumé 0

There is a superficial, and yet fundamental paradox at the core of Xenakis' work: whilst being the creator of atomised sound (granular synthesis) he was also preoccupied with sound's continuity; or later on his career, while he openly promoted the techniques offered by digital synthesis (i.e. UPIC) he was critical of harmonic analysis and the synthesis derived from Fourier Transforms. At a first glance, these positions may appear incompatible and incommensurable, but considering Xenakis' full awareness of the implicit problems in the aforementioned domains, this presentation would like to argue for possible ways that this fissure is in fact justifiable, by alluding to topological operations that reconcile the analog and the digital. More specifically, the argument will mainly be exemplified in a transdisciplinary way by presenting personal work, in which rendered images taken from a parametrically designed piece of marble (designed by Arch-T) were used to as a compositional tool. The operations to and from the rendered images to the raw sound can be loosely defined mathematically as topological homeomorphisms.