Partial Objects: A perspective of Spectralism.

Acousmatic music has brought us face-to-face with the idea that the internal structure of sound can be a source of compositional ideas. This resonantes strongly with Spectralist conceptions of musical form (viz. Grisey’s call to ‘no longer compose with notes, but with sounds’). But where Spectralist instrumental music often involves translations of a spectromorphological structure, acousmatic music deals in the moment-by-moment reality of the sonic object itself. Two musical consequences of this are identified: the bypassing of micro-interval approximations necessitated in much Spectralist instrumental music and the capacity to progressively unravel a sound to create new ‘partial’ objects.