Topographie Sinusoïdale

by Marcus Maeder

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Topographie Sinusoïdale 47:44

about

Topography usually means the description of objects on the face of the earth, landscapes with mountains, valleys, plains, rivers, lakes. The spatial properties of these objects can be shown with contour lines representing elevations and depths. The graphical representation of these properties on paper involves a metaphorical process, although the form being depicted is directly recognizable in its representation. We draw on similar devices when we think or speak about music. For example, we describe how we perceive sounds or how a piece of music affects us referring to different modes of perception; tactile (a sharp or soft dissonance), taste (a sweet melody), visual (bright D major), emotional (a sad song) etc. There is in fact no talking about music without use of metaphors. Among these, spatial comparisons are particularly important; in fact, they are such deeply rooted concepts that we mostly do not perceive them as metaphorical at all. While it seems natural to us to speak of high or low notes, this seemingly most basic of descriptions actually contains a double metaphor: the spatial description high-low stands for the position of a note in musical notation, this diastematic notation is itself a metaphor for a physical phenomenon: fast and slow oscillation.

If spatial metaphors are so important for our thinking and speaking about music, it would seem obvious that such figures of thought can, conversely, serve as important devices in composition and likely produce strong associations with listeners. How will we as listeners, trained to detect spatial information in acoustic phenomena, react to music that speaks to our associative reception capabilities at a very deep level?

The sounds, which Maeder first took from his ever-growing collection of sound material, heterogenous at first, are processed in different ways (extreme deceleration, spectral smoothing and tracing etc.). They appear as if arranged in space, defining upper and lower boundaries of spatial objects, cliffs, edges, slow passages from one scene to another, at times focusing on details of a larger group of objects. The organization of sound events on the time axis, the overall formal structure, is determined mainly by changes in density of events, by different pitch and by harmonic configurations. Although the association of a journey through different landscapes is a rather obvious one given the title, each listener will imagine his or her own world or have completely different associations altogether. In this sense, the listener is as involved creatively as the composer, performing his or her own creative act while listening. (Lucas Bennett)

credits

released January 1, 2013

Artwork – Medusa Cramer

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about

Marcus Maeder Switzerland

Marcus Maeder is a sound artist, researcher and composer.

discography

Crepuscule

Oct 2020
Non-Human

Jan 2017
Progeny

Jan 2015
Topographie Sinusoïdale

Jan 2013
annex

Jan 2010
Subsegmental

Jan 2009

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