Everyday life sounds: real world in electroacoustic composition

Lelio Camilleri - Conservatory of Music G.B. Martini - Bologna / Tempo Reale - Firenze

Real world sounds have been used since the beginning of the electroacoustic history, the Etude of chemins de fer by Schaeffer is a clear example. Anyway, in the musique concrete language, real world sounds were used non for his transcontextual meaning but just as material. The composition of Heterozygote by Luc Ferrari marks the birth of a new perspective: the use of real world sounds as a material that might evoke its natural context and structure a narrative in the composition.

My lecture is focused on a survey of the different compositional approaches in the use of real world sound in electroacoustic composition in order to bring out the main creative strategies and aspects. The basic idea is to correlate several compositions to the material and discourse axis. By this way, one can enlighten the network of relationships which underline the composer intention to organize and gradate the referential content of the real world sound material.