On Sonic Art, by Trevor Wishart

In the text On Sonic Art by Trevor Wishart (Wishart 1985), the reader is offered a perspective on new methods of making music in light of advancing computer technology during the 1970s. The book is packed with Wishart’s diagrams, drawings and is accompanied by two cassette tapes that replay hundreds of numerically ordered examples of various sounds. The audio examples illustrate points made throughout the chapters. Tape one largely consists of examples of recorded music and other sounds. He has addressed the qualities of the recordings and found material in terms of pitch, duration and timbre, in many cases blending sounds together to create original sounds.

The book’s prelude is a description of the term Sonic Art. Wishart defines this term as an artistic handling of music, electro-acoustic music and categorisations such as text-sound and sound-effects. Wishart states that he sees no distinction between these areas.

This is why I have chosen the title “On Sonic Art”, to encompass the arts of organising sound events in time. This, however, is merely a convenient fiction for those who cannot bear to see the use of the word music extended. For me, all these areas fall within the category I call music. (Wishart 1985 p.4)

The first of the following four sections of the book is entitled The Sonic Continuum. Wishart quickly identifies the lattice’s primary function in western classical composition to date. The lattice is characterised by three intersecting planes; pitch (frequency), duration and timbre, each of which when combined can produce a diagram or model of sound. He acknowledges the importance of pitch, duration and timbre in music but states how written composition has developed a dependence on the lattice that has led to a restriction of freedom, especially improvisational freedom. Methods of scribing musical composition have become synonymous with political and religious power structures in the same way as the written word. Wishart describes the similarity of speech and musical gesture in a historical context. He looks at hieroglyphs, ideograms and alphabets and relates them to historical and contemporary methods of analytic musical notation.

Wishart discusses the perceived primary nature of pitch as opposed to the perceived secondary nature of timbre by means of measurements made possible thanks to mathematics. He takes the reader through Pythagoras’ stable vibrations and the practical discovery of the octave. Wishart offers a clear explanation of Helmholtz’s breakthrough made while attempting to study the behaviour of heat in solids. The relationship of a lowest tone (fundamental) to higher tones (partials) corresponds directly to the timbre of the composite sound. Wishart goes on to explain indeterminacy by reference to Fourier analysis and that a fundamental is not necessarily the source of higher partials.

We can say that a system vibrates five times in a second but we cannot talk about how many vibrations it undergoes at an instant in time. Hence the instantaneous energy of a system is not definable. (Wishart 1985 p.33)

He discusses the topology of sound spaces and contextualises oscillatory motions. This reflects his concerns on electro-acoustic music and is backed by the comprehensive study of the dimensions of music found earlier in the book. Wishart also interrogates spoken language via expletives, paralanguage and the sounds of animals. He is known for working with his vocal skills as the second accompanying cassette tape confirms.

WISHART, T. (1985). On Sonic Art. York, Imagineering Press.