@ -10,6 +10,19 @@ Access to music technology is universal for anyone with a computer, but educatio
Many sound design tools aren’t difficult technically—they become approachable once you understand their basic mechanics. The real challenge is knowing what to do with them. Most tutorials cover the “how,” but rarely the “why” or “what next.” This book aims to fill that gap by offering compositional strategies and aesthetic direction that make these tools composable. We’ll explore how to select source material, set meaningful constraints, and create signal paths that lead to expressive, intentional outcomes. You’ll also learn to work with techniques that go beyond conventional use—like clustering wavesets or reshaping impulse responses—not just applying synthesis, but inventing it.
Many sound design tools aren’t difficult technically—they become approachable once you understand their basic mechanics. The real challenge is knowing what to do with them. Most tutorials cover the “how,” but rarely the “why” or “what next.” This book aims to fill that gap by offering compositional strategies and aesthetic direction that make these tools composable. We’ll explore how to select source material, set meaningful constraints, and create signal paths that lead to expressive, intentional outcomes. You’ll also learn to work with techniques that go beyond conventional use—like clustering wavesets or reshaping impulse responses—not just applying synthesis, but inventing it.
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.HEADING 2 "Art and Meaning"
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Art isn’t inherently or universally communicative. What it means and how it lands depends heavily on the cultural, social, and personal contexts of both creator and audience. To really connect with a piece of art, you have to share certain predispositions — attitudes shaped by subcultures, communities, and lived experience. So the idea that art is either “universal” or purely “subjective” is way too simple. It’s not subjective in the sense of being purely individual or isolated, because art can’t exist outside of social relations. Instead, meaning is split and segmented across scenes, movements, and educational contexts, each with their own languages and codes.
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Fell 79-82
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Art connects people who share certain values and ways of thinking, creating a space for shared inquiry rather than universal truths. But honestly, above all that, art should be beautiful first. The audience should be able to feel it before they’re thinking about it if you care about reaching anyone. Mark Fell, <signal phrase>, says, "what's the point of art in which you need to read an essay in order to understand? I think this speaks more to the curator's ambitions and an industry that has fully internalized a contentist agenda, than it does about the shortcomings of 'non-expert audiences'.
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Fell 94
.]
.LIST
.LIST
The chapters build conceptually in this order:
The chapters build conceptually in this order:
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@ -27,7 +40,10 @@ IDM has a unique role in pushing experimental sound design into the mainstream,
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This book is aimed at intermediate electronic music composers working within the IDM tradition, which generally doesn’t rely on formal music theory—and often for good reasons. Personally, I don’t use theory in my compositions, and IDM rarely builds its complexity through traditional music theory. Instead, that complexity often comes from experimental sound design, processing, and texture. Overly elaborate musical structures can actually get in the way—dense harmonies and melodies tend to clash with detailed timbres, muddying the results. Many Boards of Canada tracks, for instance, use simple modal ideas—often just Mixolydian or pentatonic scales—but achieve emotional and sonic depth through dense processing. That is to say, complexity doesn’t have to come from synthesis itself.
This book is aimed at intermediate electronic music composers working within the IDM tradition, which generally doesn’t rely on formal music theory—and often for good reasons. Personally, I don’t use theory in my compositions, and IDM rarely builds its complexity through traditional music theory. Instead, that complexity often comes from experimental sound design, processing, and texture. Overly elaborate musical structures can actually get in the way—dense harmonies and melodies tend to clash with detailed timbres, muddying the results. Many Boards of Canada tracks, for instance, use simple modal ideas—often just Mixolydian or pentatonic scales—but achieve emotional and sonic depth through dense processing. That is to say, complexity doesn’t have to come from synthesis itself.
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By contrast, Mark Fell’s work exemplifies algorithmic rigor, using formal systems to explore how sound structures behave under constraints. Though this book doesn’t focus on algorithmic music or data sonification, those practices are part of the broader sound art ecosystem that IDM overlaps with.
By contrast, Mark Fell’s work exemplifies algorithmic rigor, using formal systems to explore how sound structures behave under constraints. He has also criticized the way some artists use data sonification—particularly when they map arbitrary musical scales onto non-musical sources like plant data—as if those mappings were intrinsic. A scale isn’t inherent to a plant’s structure; it’s a projection, a metaphor. This kind of aesthetic imposition can distort the reality of the source and flatten its complexity. By contrast, Ryoji Ikeda’s work with data sonification embraces abstraction more honestly. Rather than anthropomorphizing data, Ikeda uses raw binary streams—digital noise, sine tones, pulses—to let the system speak in its own language. His work doesn’t interpret data; it reveals its materiality. You feel it as a technological presence, not a musical narrative. Though this book doesn’t focus on algorithmic composition or sonification, these practices still inform IDM’s ecosystem of sound art, especially when they’re approached with this kind of formal clarity and respect for the data.
\".[
\"Fell <which page is the critique on conventional data sonification?>
\".]
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If you’re struggling with basics like melody, harmony, or rhythm and want explicit tools to develop those, traditional music theory can help—but keep in mind IDM typically stays simple on the theory side while exploring rich sonic detail.
If you’re struggling with basics like melody, harmony, or rhythm and want explicit tools to develop those, traditional music theory can help—but keep in mind IDM typically stays simple on the theory side while exploring rich sonic detail.
