Elizabeth Hoffman’s research while affiliated with The Graduate Center, CUNY and other places

Adorno's theory of musical reproduction is unfinished, inconsistent and attuned only to score-based acoustic music – but it has relevance for electroacoustic performance as well. His theory prompts contemplation about what ‘good’ interpretation, and interpretation itself, means for fixed electroacoustic music. A digital sound file is frequently, if not typically, viewed as more rigid and precise than a score. This article uses Adorno's theory to compare ontologies of score and digital file realizations respectively, thus questioning the above assumption. Do electroacoustic works truly exist apart from their performed features, or is a given work only its performances? Different answers imply different work concepts and interpretive strategies. Toward the essay's goals, we examine three features often viewed as nonontological to an electroacoustic work, namely performed spatialisation, equalisation, and amplitude balance. We consider the impacts of these features when they are manipulated in real time, or performance to performance. As Adorno asks how choices of timing or dynamics dictate a notated work's aesthetic ‘clarity’, this paper asks how performed choices contribute to an electroacoustic work's clarity, and to the unique interpretive potential of electroacoustic music. Tape music and acousmatic music, with its diffusion tradition, are central to this paper's thesis; but multi-channel works are circumscribed by it as well.

Representational aspects of a computer music composition may forge a perspectival conduit into the music, partly through conceptual boundary structures described here as "frames." The perspectival conduit includes the illusion of subjectivities inside the music and is called here the work's "point of view." These internal subjectivities shape a listener's sense of self, including role, location, and identity. Where and how does the given sound world let the listener in, conceptually, to interact with the work's point of view? This essay considers musical discourse that draws on literary theories of narrative, but it also examines techniques that derive directly from computer music's distinctive features and capabilities.