Composing and Notating Complex Sonic Material

A First Attempt of Depicting Sound on Paper or Screen

What you see and hear in the video:
I´ve been thinking of a better, a more adequate and more capable method of notating sound compositions for some days and I´ve come to the following approach.

I devide the basic sound material into 8 groups.

The groups are:

group 1a: sounds extracted from any kind of sound source and not longer than 50 ms.
group 1a: sounds extracted from any kind of sound source with a length of 51 up to 200 ms
group 2: a sequence, a tune, a chord progression, any piece of more or less conventional music.
group 3: technical soundscapes
group 4: soundscapes from nature
group 5: human voice
group 6: synthesized single complex sounds containing changings of loudness and timbre
group 7: synthesized basic wave forms (sine, triangle, square, pulse and saw) without any structured or changing loudness or timbre

Each group is represented in a graph by its own form and/or colour.

Additional parameters like i.e. grain length, density, speed and their changes may be added in writing.

I´m going to draw the material from these 8 groups into a three-dimensional scheme of coordinates with the x-axis representing time, the y-axis representing the perceived basic frequency and the z-axis representing the perceived spectral complexity.

I call the whole graph a “frame” and the arrangement of the graphical elements representing the sounds from the 8 groups a musical phrase. There may be more than than one musical phrase in a frame.

The shown precomposition 2 – I still call it only a precomposition – shall serve as a test and an example for the afore said.

The frame shall serve as a bigger structural unit.

the frame and the phrases may be repeated or transferred to musical variations:
inverted, shifted, made smaller or bigger

along each and every of the three axis (time, frequency or spectral complexity)

or filled with different content from the groups as long as the new content belongs to the same of the 8 groups as the replaced content. Otherwise it would get a different, a new phrase or, a different, a new frame.

I can even let the frame move around in the scheme of coordinates while it is playing its phrases.

… to be continued.

Have a great time and enjoy your day!
Rolf