Chapter Eight

The In(visible) Sound

Miguelángel Clerc
Leiden University

A visual encounter with a score always proposes the possibility of imagining the
result of the performed audible experience. The imagined version of the music
that results depends on the nature of the symbols and signs that appear. We are
trained to understand these, and the music they represent, in very specific ways.
In some musical pieces extra levels of interpretation and new instructions blur
the representation. In some scores it becomes very difficult to imagine a rep-
resentation. In the latter case, the score functions as instructions for the per-
formers and conductors, and the sound image proposed by the composer only
appears in the actual live performance. These scores lose the possibility of an
immediate visual-audible apprehension. The music represented remains hidden.
The distance between sound and its representation in a score can be affected
by differences in the point of departure in the compositional process. After
analysing works of others and my own compositions I concluded that there
were three types of starting points for a musical creation and its score. The first
takes the compositional process from score towards sounds. This doesn’t exclude
the possibility that the composer has an initial sound idea of the composition,
but it implies that he will let the autopoietic characteristics of the processes
and relations in the score take over. Graphic scores that intend to be an alter-
native to traditional notation or scores that intentionally propose interpreta-
tional problems are also scores which start from a visual image and in which
sound is an event that will develop later on through diverse and personal inter-
pretations. In the second type, the compositional process starts from sound
towards score. This is the opposite of the first category, where the score is higher
in the hierarchy. Starting from sound produces many changes in notational
requirements. Scores in this category originate in a process of transcription
of a sound proposal that obliges the elements of the score to be necessarily
diverse and dependent on all aspects of music (time, pitch, timbre, physical
movements, etc.). In applying this approach the composer might also use pro-
cesses that are more related to the score than to sound itself, but the point
of departure and the conditioning element is sound. The third and last type
is a three-step process starting from extra-musical elements to music score towards
sound. In this, the origin of the compositional and notational processes can be
almost anything (literature, graphics, maps, drawings, smells, etc.). In this pro-
cess the musical score tries to represent something non-musical and in the end
will also produce a sound. This is close to the concept of “data sonorisation,”
which implies a transformation of data, which are neither musical nor sound

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