Meaning in Musical Gesture

Technique and technology are two cultural aspects that have been deeply involved with music, not only in relation to its production, but also in relation to the development of its theory and to the establishment of its cultural role. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the relation between music and technology became more intense due to a series of reasons, among them, the increasing knowledge about sound physics and sound cognition; the access to low cost electricity; and the use of electronic and digital technology to artificially generate and manipulate sounds. Before that, musical sounds were produced only by mechanical means. Although musical instruments, such as the violin, the piano or even the human voice, represented a wide variety of forms and mechanisms, all of them were based on the same principle of sound production, that is, the mechanic vibration of an elastic body. However, the appearance of electrical technologies and the use of electromagnetic signals brought the possibility of generating sounds without using mechanical devices. Although the sound waves coming either from a clarinet or from the electronic oscillators inside a synthesizer have the same nature, their processes of production are quite different. On one side there is the concrete, visible and mechanic universe of the traditional instruments where the body of the instrument and the body and movements of who is playing that instrument are intrinsically related to the qualities of the sound they are producing. On another side, in the era of electricity and electronics, we start listening more and more to the sounds of invisible bodies contained in the electronic components of synthesizers, samplers, and computers. For many centuries, people learned to listen to sounds that had a strict relation to the bodies that produced them. Suddenly, all this listening experience accumulated during the long process of musical evolution was transformed by the appearance of electronic and recorded sounds. When one listens to artificially generated sounds he or she cannot be aware of the same type of concrete and mechanic relations provided by traditional acoustic instruments since these artificial sounds are generated by processes that are invisible to our perception. These new sounds are extremely rich, but at the same time they are ambiguous for they do not maintain any definite connection with bodies or gestures. Until the development of sound recording systems early in this century, the contact with music occurred only trough the performance. The listener, even if not involved in the sound production, participated in the music realization by mentally reconstructing the connections between the sounds and the physical and cultural context where the music was taking place. When recording technologies became socially effective, they brought about two different alterations.