The title of this piece refers to the guitar as an object of obsession. It explores the digitalization of guitar tropes such as percussive tapping and strumming as self-accompaniment, the interleaving of melody with electronic feedback, and rapid shredding gestures. The cultural identity of the guitar in the 20th century has been shaped by artworks and performances that recombine such techniques to demonstrate virtuosity or express aggression in heavy music genres. In this piece, software is used to recreate, exaggerate, and extend sounds that can be considered guitaristic by using sound effects processing and sound synthesis techniques that model the instrument with different levels of accuracy. It also uses recordings of actual guitars that are manipulated to suggest an alternative identity for the instrument, highlighting the way in which it has become a common tool for discovering found sounds in experimental music. By simultaneously plundering the extremes of idiomatic and unidiomatic guitar playing, this piece reflects on how the guitar has gained a unique status as an electroacoustic musical instrument. While instruments such as theremins allow for performance with purely electronic sounds, and drum machines can arrange patterns of sound recordings from acoustic sources, the guitar robustly merges these two poles of instrumentality in that it blends electronic synthesis/transformation with established performance practices from pop and classical music.
As with the electroacoustic transformation of acoustic sound into electronic recordings, the use of software to simulate performative musical gestures creates room to engage with changing interpretations of liveness and virtuosity that can be derived from acousmatic music. The use of electronic and digital technologies in music/sonic arts practices has expanded the concept of instrumentality beyond the notion of how a device is played by a performer. In writing about composer relationships with musical instruments, Philip Alperson discusses how digital audio workstation software, with its functions for automatically changing features such as instrumentation or producing musical accompaniment, is analogous to the historical use of the piano as a platform for developing a new musical work (2008: 42-43). Instrumentality has also been conceptualized as being process-oriented and relational. This is increasingly apparent in works that impose instrumental performance techniques on objects that do not typically take on musical roles. For example, percussionist Louise Devenish have explored the use of bones and shells in her collaborative ecologically inspired composition Alluvial Gold, to explore 'the way in which things in the world possess a certain musical potential, and the way in which drawing attention to the musicality of things can alter a person's relationship with the world, however slight' (McAuliffe and Devenish 2023: 36).
The entanglement of a process-oriented notion of instrumentality and liveness as an aesthetic condition in electroacoustic music can be found in earlier fixed media works. For example, in the opening movement of Yves Daoust's Suite Baroque, the foreground features imitative gestures consisting of a harpsichord and the sound of a phone ringing. These are accompanied by panned fragments of a woman speaking on the phone and a car quickly passing. Here, the mediatization of the harpsichord sounds draws the recorded samples of ordinary conversational and street sounds into the compositional narrative, destabilizing their original sense of place. Daoust's quotation of harpsichord compositions from Girolamo Frescobaldi's Premier livre des toccatas (1615) leverages instrumental playing techniques as rhetorical devices that point to the mood projected by other sound sources, such as the speaker/performer (Daoust 1991). The use of computer-generated sounds, effects processing, and algorithmic patterns in Obsession reduces the distinction between actual and virtual sounds. This use of software affirms electronic and inharmonic noise sounds as integral parts of the guitar's various positions in culture, and also in comments on the historical significance of instrument simulation as a resource for experimentation in electroacoustic music.
This composition also builds on earlier electroacoustic works that rely on the guitar as a principal sound source without performing on the actual instrument. While there are acousmatic pieces that transform the sound of the instrument to the point at which it is completely unrecognizable, Obsession was influenced by works such as Manuella Blackburn's Vista Points (2009). Here, the ambiguous nature of the effects processing for the guitar is presented with an opening section featuring distorted plucking and scratching sounds and superimposed echoes that are more characteristic of effects processing from software than guitar pedals. Composer John Gibson's Thrum (1998) is a significant point of reference for instrumentality in digital music with the use of both actual and simulated guitar sounds. It is built on 'balancing human qualities against the regularity of machines' (Gibson 2012) by using real recordings and physically modeled guitar sounds. Gibson's sound synthesis also foregrounds inharmonic/non-melodic guitar sounds, such as with the layering of percussive pulses resembling the noise from a plectrum. As in my own composition, Thrum references instrumental virtuosity without the constraints of the physical instrument, creating moments that can feel idiomatic while also being physically impossible outside of a software environment.
Obsession is structured around three main sections that present distinct approaches to dealing with technologically mediated guitar sounds. Section 1 lasts from 0:00-3:08, with subsections occurring from 0:00-1:30 and 1:30-3:08. The primary focus of this first section is to present recorded fragments of actual guitar sounds in which there is a fluctuation between highly textural abstract sounds and rhythmic gestures that almost reveal the instrument as a source. The material is unified by a latent reference to tapping, both using the wooden components of the body and with semi-pitched percussive sounds from hitting the strings themselves. The layering of rhythmic pulses based on the gradual obfuscation of characteristic performance techniques (time-stretching, unusual microphone placements to record tapping sounds) becomes a unifying device.
The opening gesture acts as a microcosm for the entire first section. At 0:07 a degraded but recognizable recording of a strummed guitar chord is played. While discernable in terms of pitch, the strumming articulations, the repeated percussive plucking of the strings, is intentionally made to feel artificial. This digital strumming is accomplished with an elaborate delay effect in which fourteen consecutively louder copies of the guitar sound are placed within just over half a second of each other. From 0:00 in the recording, the growth to this initial moment of impact consists of additional elements that shape the next few minutes of the piece: percussive tapping on the sides and top of the guitar, tapping on the fretboard to produce sounds that are pitched yet somewhat percussive, and electronic noises from detaching an instrument cable.
Regardless of how a piece unfolds, opening with assertive or rhythmically complex gestures is common practice in acousmatic music. The diversity of source materials in electroacoustic music has created the need for structural devices that are not dependent on pitch-rhythm relationships established from playing music on concert instruments. The composer Denis Smalley explains how structural hierarchies in tonal music rely on groupings of musical pitches within a defined meter, but that there is 'no permanent type of hierarchical organization for all electroacoustic music, or even within a single work' (1997: 114). For Smalley, gesture, texture, and a sense of growth contribute to different levels of structure in an electroacoustic work. The use of complex or assertive opening gestures in acousmatic compositions such as Obsession introduces the listener to timbral hierarchies and degrees of source abstraction that inform their experience of an entire piece.
The GRM Tools Classic audio plugins were the main tool used to simulate unusual strumming sounds using densely layered delay effects. The Shuffling and Freeze plugins from this package were used to create a similar relationship with the pitched and unpitched tapping sounds that unify Section 1. The pitched tapping consists of quickly repeating notes that first fade in around 0:18. As with the strumming effect from the opening, an actual guitar recording is used as source material, and the finger tapping technique is realized with software. A sound recording of myself tapping pitches on the fretboard of an acoustic guitar is processed using the GRM Freeze plugin to create dozens of overlapping looping patterns that gradually move from a single guitar into an ensemble kind of sound with slight variations from the slight use of the randomization parameter in the plugin. The GRM Shuffling plugin can be used for dense granular sounds with minute durations, or as a kind of rhythmically asynchronous looping effect. Starting around 0:36 in the recording, an actual recording of tapping on the wooden body of the acoustic guitar oscillates between acting as a textural device with an ensemble effect consisting of many randomly tapping guitars, later becoming audible as a single pulse.
In keeping with the use of musical instruments as sources in other fixed media electroacoustic works, Obsession consistently explores the idea of using software to augment the sounds from established instrumental techniques – in other words, referencing actual techniques in a way that is not beholden to the limitations of a live performer. The elaborate treatment of percussive sounds from the guitar helps establish a level of structural development in the music, in lieu of a sense of tension and release from organizing chords and melody over time. The sound of repeatedly tapping wood or strings retains an intelligible sense of cause and effect that gives more compositional license to experiment with textural density by continuously layering these pulses in unusual ways. This idea of referencing performed actions is supported by writings on references to physical characteristics of bodily sound generation in the phrasing and pacing of acousmatic music. Composer James Andean mentions that exploring embodiment in these aspects of acousmatic music 'is at risk of becoming a defining characteristic of the genre' (Andean 2012: 83).
The second part of Section 1 accompanies the abstracted fragments of guitar recordings using the Native Instruments FM8 software to create sounds that resemble the wooden tapping effects but are somewhat more artificial sounding. During this subsection, a custom software preset was made with FM8 to mimic the distortion and feedback effects that come from the use of intense delays and audio filtering effects as applied to acoustic guitar recordings from the first minute of the piece. The use of low-frequency oscillators creates the rhythmic effect that was previously established by applying delay, freezing, and shuffling effects to the recorded sounds of tapping on the body of the guitar. Digital FM allowed composers to approach instrument synthesis with a level of detail that would not be attainable using earlier techniques without a tremendous amount of equipment. The Yamaha Corporation licensed John Chowning's FM synthesis patent during the 1970s and 1980s for use as a sound engine for influential digital synthesizers such as the GS-1 (1981) and the DX7 (1983). Its considerable use through these devices established a distinct sound, audible characteristics that point to this specific approach for instrument synthesis, which can also be understood as a marker of electroacoustic music of this time.
While FM8 is used to produce feedback effects that approximate those from amplification and guitar effects pedals, this section also introduces the use of physical modelling for such purposes. In terms of Obsession as a form of electroacoustic composition as artistic research, this subsection is where the piece begins to address the third research question, about using software to reinforce the idea of the guitar as a uniquely electroacoustic instrument, by continuously juxtaposing different approaches to recreating the sound of electric guitar feedback (recorded, reconstructed through FM synthesis, and modeled using computer music techniques). Having an instrumental feature that stems from electronic noise allows the instrument to interact with machine-generated sound sources seamlessly.
RTcmix is a programming language used for composing algorithmic music. The language includes a software instrument called STRUMFB, which models a plucked string but also offers discrete controls for the pitch of the feedback (separate from the pitch of the string itself) and how present distortion and feedback appear in relation to the string sound. Aside from the technical features or audible artificiality of FM vs. earlier physical modeling approaches, these synthesized guitar noise sources work together strongly to reference a source that is not actually present in many of the recordings that form the piece. This is present at 2:00 in the recording of the piece, where the periodic swells of distorted feedback from FM8 are placed alongside a STRUMFB instrument with less synchronous lower notes and similar feedback sounds that sometimes match the pitch from FM8. Combining different synthesized guitar sounds in this fashion contributes to what Denis Smalley describes as source bonding in electroacoustic music, where there is a "…natural tendency to relate sounds to supposed sources and causes, and to relate sounds to each other because they appear to have shared or associated origins (Smalley 1997).