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Joji Yuasa: Projection Esemplastic for white noise (1964)

From the album OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music

One of the most fascinating aspects of electronic music in its early phases was the attempt to create sonic forms on the basis of simple sound phenomena.  In the early 1950s, the composers working at the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne identified three fundamental sound materials on which they were to base their work:

1) The sine wave, a pure periodic tone not found in nature, yet which formed the theoretical basis of complex waves in accordance with the Fourier theorem;

2) The impulse, a burst of sound so short that the human ear cannot resolve any pitch or timbral quality beyond a “click”;

3) White noise, a sound having equal energy in the entire frequency spectrum across a given bandwidth.  Colored noise refers to similar sounds in which certain frequency ranges are attenuated.

Though these three sound phenomena were thought to be equally elemental, most of the music to come out of the Cologne studio was based on sine waves.  Because these could be precisely tuned and superimposed, they provided the ideal substance for the rigorously mathematical constructions of the Cologne school.  The impulse and white noise proved less amenable to a model of composition that, for all its radicality, was still attached to the idea of stable, periodic tones as the building blocks of music.

Along with Henri Pousseur’s Scambi (1957) and Halim El-Dabh’s Meditation in White Sound (1959), Joji Yuasa’s Projection Esemplastic is one of the first serious compositions to use white noise as its sole sound material.  By creatively filtering particular frequency ranges, the otherwise static white noise is “colored” and given life and movement.  The high-pitched whistling sounds at the beginning of the piece result from a very narrow “bandpass” filter, which blocks frequencies on either side of a central point, allowing it to be heard as a single pitch.  These note-like sounds, often sliding up and down in broad glissandi, are juxtaposed with less filtered, raw bursts of noise, creating a subtle and haunting effect.

April 16, 2009, 11:38am