Harald Münz: "Fruitful misunderstandings - musical composition using phonetic elements"

Abstract:
To deal with speech as music may entail to transfer artistic methods onto phonetic materials considering analogies between musical parameters and those from speech production. This mapping process is often facilitated by similarities in terminology between language and music (e.g. speech 'melody' or speech 'rhythm'), although, on a phenomenological level, quite different things may be addressed. For the listener this often leads to a multifaceted perceptual situation oscillating between broken semantics and phonetics. My own musical imagination often applies phonetic thinking to instrumental music, even when no actual speech sounds are involved. In hindsight, part of this may be linked to my studies in Cologne under Clarence Barlow in 1989, as well as to my studies of 'Aesthetic Phonetics' in the Phonetics Department at the University of Cologne. With musical extracts at hand, the talk will illustrate some ways of treating phonetic material in a musical way comparing approaches from my own work to that by other composers.

see also:
https://soundcloud.com/harald-muenz
www.brunel.ac.uk/people/harald-muenz