Audible Ecosystems and Emergent Sound Structures in Di Scipio’s Music: Music Philosophy Helps Musical Analysis

Abstract

Background in music philosophy. What emerges from listening? What phenomena does listening create? These two questions extend the field of music research by incorporating phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, 1964) and discussions about the notion of “emergence ” (Varela, 1989, 1996). A simple and short answer to these two relatively similar questions could be: (musical) sound. But if we closely examine the birth of sound, its emergence as a structure, then new questions arise: what are the spatial and temporal limits of this emergence? From what is it made of? How does it appear as a structure? Background in musical analysis. In recent music, many composers have adopted the paradigm of complexity, and are working with chaos theories, with cellular automata, etc. The idea of “emergence ” is sometimes central to this way of thinking about musical composition. This new musical paradigm challenges musical analysis, which is not used to dealing with sound structures that emerge. How is it possible to analyse structures that have no independent existence not only from musical material, but also from the listener and from the space in which they take place? Aims. This paper will focus on Agostino Di Scipio’s compositional research into “audible ecosystems ” and emergent sound structures (Di Scipio, 2003, 2005a, 2005b; Solomos, 2005;

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