A Spectro-Gestural-Morphological Analysis of a Musical-Tactile Score

Abstract

In the following chapter the author will compare a musical and a tactile score in the specific case study represented by Rieko Suzuki’s tactile score transcription of Friedrich Chopin’s posthume Nocturne n° 20 in C sharp minor. In the intention of the author this comparison will show its correlations between sound, movement and musical representation and will highlight their common features. To conduct this analysis, the movement indicated by the musical score and the ones prescribed by the tactile score will be compared using and expanding Denis Smalley’s spectromorphological analysis towards a spectro-gestural-morphological analysis. For this reason, the author invite the reader to refer to Smalley’s explanation of spectromorphological analysis (Smalley D, Organ Sound, 2:107–126, 1997). This research must be considered as a contribution related with the actual debate on sonification (Hermann T, Hunt A, Neuhoff JG, The sonification book, Logos Publishing House, Berlin, 2011) musical cognition (Launay J, Empiric Musicol, 10(1), 30–40, 2015, Schaefer RS, Empiric Musicol, 9(3–4), 161–176, 2014) and mediation (Leman M, Embodied music cognition and mediation technology, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2007) and will implicitly suggest a possible artistic application of tactile scores as basis of new compositional techniques.