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Toward a Universal Music Sound-Writing for Musicology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Charles Seeger
Charles Seeger*
Affiliation:
Santa Barbara, California, U.S.A.
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Extract

Six years ago I reported upon an attempt to graph instantaneously a single melodic line in such a manner as to permit ready correlation with the auditory sense, without employment of costly and time-consuming photographic apparatus, film development and printmaking, their mathematical interpretation and hand-written graph. The trial was conducted in my son's radar-telescopic laboratory at Cornell University in 1949, where an assembly of separate units, currently used in his observations that happened to be available for a scant two hours one Sunday morning, was wired together. Of the three sources of input—voice, guitar and whistling—the limited filter and smoothing systems at hand gave a readable graph of the last mentioned only.

Type
Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the International Folk Music Council Held at Trossingen and Stuttgart, Germany
Information
Journal of the International Folk Music Council , Volume 9 , January 1957 , pp. 63 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © International Council for Traditional Music 1957

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References

1. “An Instantaneous Music Notator,” Journal of the International Folk Music Council, III (1951). PP- 103-106.

2. Grützmacher, M. and Lottermoser, W., “Uber ein Verfahren zur tragheitsfreien Aufzeichnung von Melodienkurven,” Ahustische Zeitschrift, II, 5 (Sept., 1937), pp. 242–248.Google Scholar

3. Gurvin, Olav, “Photography as an Aid in Folk Music Research.” Reprinted from Norweg, 3. 16 pp.Google Scholar

4. I would have preferred inclusion of a double, instead of a single, channel recorder, so as to produce frequency and amplitude graphs simultaneously, as in my earlier experiment at Cornell. But the budget did not permit the additional $500 initial expense and resulting doubling of the cost of paper. As it is, frequency and amplitude graphs have to be made separately and aligned by hand.

5. Lomax, Alan (Ed.), Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Vol. I, Side I, No. 8, Ireland (n.d.).Google Scholar

6. Cf. Hood, Mantle, Patet in Javanese Music. Groningen, Djakarta, 1954, p. 6.Google Scholar

7. Yasser, Joseph, A Theory of Evolving Tonality, New York, 1932.Google Scholar