Instrumental Gesture and Musical Composition

http://computermusic.org/International audienceReal time and gestual monitoring of the production of synthesised sound has been part of the permanent preoccupations of musical informatics since its beginning. The conditions imposed by the standard mode of communication with the computer and by the time taken by calculation at the start of musical informatics placed the musician in a situation far removed from his usual action or description modes, and, in particular, ruled out an instrumental type of relationship. Today, as real time synthesis has been possible for several years, numerous devices are being developed to meet the specific demands of the instrumental Relationship efficiently and in a differentiated way. However, in complete contrast to questions relative to synthesis or compositional models, gestual monitoring has given rise especially to technical developments, with a view to approaching as near as possible given traditional instrumental situations, at the expense of sufficient theoretical reflection focused fundamentally on the role of the instrumental gesture, its status and its application in an informatic tool for musical creation. It is, however, apparent that the instrumental gesture is not mere monitoring. In " natural " sound production by acoustic instruments, this gesture participates intimately with the physical phenomenon and directly determines some of its decisive attributes for perception and musicality. It has simultaneously a concrete function : required for sound production and a symbolic one : the instrument and its accompanying gesture are two causes that combine to produce the sound effect, and, for this reason, the sound effect bears the perceptual indices that are specifically related to the gesture. The indices may remain present and significant in the sound object when this contributes to the composition of a musical structure. In the perspective of creating concepts and pertinent tools for computer assisted musical creation, it seems vital to us to consider the question of the musical gesture more in depth that from purely superficial ergonomic considerations. The object of this paper is to present, whilst attempting to situate it in the general conceptual framework of composition, a particular point of view taking the instrumental gesture, via the computer, as an object that composition may operate on. From this we have deduced the functional specificities that should be included in the conception of a musical creation informatic tool