Le 28 juin 2017
de 14h00 à 14h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3208
Séance - Sounds of Popular Music (I)
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteurs : Ángel Faraldo, Sergi Jordà et Perfecto Herrera
In this paper, we present a study of tonal practises in Electronic Dance Music, an umbrella term referring to a variety of electronic music sub-genres intended for dancing at nightclubs and raves. In particular, we look at how commonplace digital production techniques, mostly revolving around the Digital Audio Workstation, might have an impact in the development of tonal language. Such techniques, seem certainly closer to cinematographic montage (based on splicing, layering and processing sound files) than to traditional musical operations on symbolic data (i.e. musical notation). Electronic Dance Music presents an optimal choice for such study, for it completely embraces digital production techniques and, given its strong orientation towards the dance floor, it is rather open-ended regarding its harmonic language. Furthermore, its cyclical structure based on loops, seems to have implications in the ways listeners integrate tonal units together, which are unlikely in other tonal dialects. For example, we found that simultaneous layering of several audio files often leads to poly-modal or atonal excerpts; in other cases, fragments with sparse pitch content (a simple bass line or a tuned bass-drum) should be seen as amodal (i.e. with a clear tonic but no sense of modality). We often observed modal variants other than the traditional major and minor, and confirmed that its structural organisation based on loops neutralises the tonal dialectics present in other types of music.
