7 Sounding Methods in Music

In the mid-twentieth century, a number of artistic works were produced that in retrospect can be assigned to the area of sonification, as they apply techniques such as audification or parameter mapping in an analog way.

A well-known example of a musical work is Atlas Eclipticalis (1961) by John Cage. Here, our relationship to the cosmos plays an important role, because Cage plots celestial maps on a musical score and out of these develops distinct playing instructions. Apart from the degrees of interpretational freedom, the piece uses the inherent structure of the starry sky as a compositional basis. This reference to natural occurrences exhibits a conceptual proximity to data sets that during sonification are translated into synthesized sound figures.^[20]

An important work representing the artistic appropriation of the EEG stems from the composer Alvin Lucier. In his piece Music for Solo Performer from 1965, Lucier amplifies his brain waves, which have been derived from an EEG, and converts them into acoustic signals. Various percussion instruments standing on loudspeakers are caused to vibrate by the strength of the audio signals emitted by the loudspeakers connected to the source. Thus, the activation of the percussion instruments indirectly reproduces the degree of brain activity.