Sound Thinking And Presentation

French musicologist Jules Combarieu once said, "Music is the art expressed by sounds" From the era of sound analog technologies till the present, sound gradually has had its own exclusive aesthetic status and performance capability in the field of art, which allows composers on the platform of the digital technology to have new missions:to create sophisticated art belonging to our epoch by using sound and to comprehend our current culture and ideas by music. Interactive electronic music is considered as the combination of music and technology and the art of visual and auditory senses, which could not exist without the two elements sound and performance. During the creation of interactive electronic music, "interactive" emphasizes on thinking and pays attention to formats, while the core of "electronic music" is sound. No matter how the sound interacts and what kinds of performance formats are, they must serve music based on expressing and presenting sounds. A high-level artistic work of interactive electronic music should not only reveal a certain technical nature, but also reflect the artistic features of emotional expression. The realization of the both cannot be independent from composers’ creation thinking and aesthetic pursuit.This dissertation studies on the interactive electronic music written by the American composer Jeffrey Stolet, profoundly analyzing his creation from three perspectives of creation technique, expression methods and aesthetic significance. Firstly, analyze and summarize his thinking’s application in the three technical aspects, such as sound design, technical design and real-time performance design. Secondly, combine technical analyses with his aesthetic concepts to get various art expression characteristics, such as sound thinking, digital technology and aesthetic culture in his music creation. Thirdly, to ponder over the interactive electronic music on diverse aspects and think deeply about theoretical significance of "thinking and presentation of sound"The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One generally describes the composition of interactive electronic music, involving three aspects:interactive electronic music’s concept, development history and creation thinking. Chapter Two gives overall summary about Jeffrey Stolet’s music creation, including the contents of his personal experiences, teaching experiences, composition classification and main works’introduction. Chapter Three combines real examples to analyze his thinking’s application in the three design aspects of sound, technology and real-time performance. Chapter Four discusses three expression features of his music from sound thinking, digital technology and aesthetic culture:"to reveal performance by sound, to present sound by performance", "to reveal sound by technology, to present technology by sound", and "to reveal art by aesthetics, to present aesthetics by art". Chapter Five, the paper primarily explores the innovative thinking, limitation and existing problems in the creation of interactive electronic music and reflects upon its future development direction.