Xenakis, Iannis

Until recently, the supremacy of pitch over other sound attributes prevailed in Western music theory. Time and timbre, for example, were considered to be of secondary importance. Today, however, this ideology is changing, and the tendency is now to consider that attributes such as pitch, time and timbre are all descriptors for the same phenomenon, but from different perspectives. For example, pitch may be considered as one aspect of the perception of timbre and timbre as one aspect of the perception of time. Pitch may, in turn, be considered as a quantifier to measure time. The music and theoretical work of composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Iannis Xenakis, Jean-Claude Risset, Horacio Vaggione, Trevor Wishart and Joi e Antunes have helped to emancipate the role of time and timbre in Western music (Stockhausen, 1959 Schaeffer, 1966 Xenakis, 1971 Risset, 1992 Vaggione, 1993 Wishart, 1985, 1994 Antunes, 1995). 

The composer Iannis Xenakis is conunonly cited as one of the mentors of granular synthesis. In the 1950s, Xenakis developed important theoretical writings where he laid down the principles of the technique (Xenakis, 1971). The first computer-based granular synthesis system did not appear, however, until Curtis Roads (1988) and Barry Truax (1988) began to investigate the potentials of the technique systematically in the 1970s, in the USA and Canada respectively. 

This technique was developed by the composer Iannis Xenakis at Cemamu (Centre for Research in Mathematics and Music Automation) in France. Xenakis also designed a synthesis system called Gendy (Serra, 1993). Gend) s primary assumption is that no wavecycle of a sound should be equal to any other, but rather that it should be in a constant process of transformation. The synthesis process starts with one cycle of a sound and then... 

Serra, M.-H. (1993). Stochastic Composition and Stochastic Timbre GENDY 3 by Iannis Xenakis, Paris Cemamu. 

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