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Procedures for creating music that is art
Peter Lucas Hulen

Supplies – to create art music from scratch one must have:

  • Some aspect of human experience to communicate or bring to consciousness
  • A way to communicate or bring to consciousness some aspect of human experience with sounds organized on a time continuum
  • Sounds to organize on a time continuum
  • Principles by which to organize the sounds
  • The means of production for organizing the sounds
Examples of human experience
  • Social realities
  • Guiding ideas
  • Things held important
  • Interactions and relationships
  • Inward (psychological) experience
  • Natural world
  • Performed art
Sound identification concepts
  • Naming (ring, buzz, vibration, hum, stream, explosion, wave, outburst, gesture, mass, event, click, etc.)
  • Describing by quality/analogy (metallic, round, warm, blocky, buzzy, fluty, scraping, screaming, etc.)
  • Describing  temporally  (continuous, intermittent, random, expected, sudden, etc.)
  • Placing (source, association, context, speech text, etc.)
Sound organization concepts
  • Material
    • Texture (layers, back/middle/foreground, patches/sound types, transformations [pitch, timbre, duration, quality], etc.)
    • Form (event type and order, discontinuation/return, etc.)
  • Rationally informed e.g. Aaba Bcdc Aaba Aaba Cefe Bcdc Aaba
  • Both rationally and intuitively informed e.g.
  • Psychological (surprise, fulfillment, shock, recognition, humor, transcendence, disruption, etc.)

Peter Lucas Hulen is Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of Music at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, USA.

© 2005 Peter Hulen

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