Digital Tools in the Teaching of electro-acoustic Music and its Influence on the Compositional Practice

The lack of authorial notations and published scores in the field of electroacoustic music poses a challenge not only to experienced musicologists. It also raises the question of how to prepare new listeners for the task of understanding and analysing pieces of music that rarely rely on written documentation and hardly offer any visual clues during performance. Since over the last two decades, electroacoustic composition has shifted by and large from the analogue to the digital domain, it would stand to reason that a mimetic approach, that is to say the simulation of compositional choices with the help of relevant audio software, might help young musicologists get a better sense of what it means to derive musical structures from seemingly non-musical sonic material. Reflecting upon my personal teaching experience, I shall firstly outline the limits to a purely aural mode of analysis in the classroom. Secondly, I will expound the problems that can arise from the attempt at replenishing aural analyses with compositional exercises in a digital working environment. Although amateur acts of creativity may be suited to minimise affective and/or associative descriptions of electroacoustic music, they run the risk of introducing further misconceptions, especially about the actual complexity of the production process. Thus, the last part of my paper is based on a survey among professional composers who made the transition from the analogue to the digital age. Their individual statements indicate that an advanced analytical perspective would require a more consistent exchange of ideas between compositional practice and musicological research, including didactic design