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Timbre: From Sound to Meaning - Research Article Seizing the Life of Sounds in Contemporary Instrumental Music: Claude Vivier's Zipangu (1980), a Spectromorphological Perspective Mylene Gioffredohttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-6967-7066 Abstract This essay has been conceived as an invitation into the workshop of the contemporary music analyst.After a brief presentation of an analytical problem concerning Claude Vivier's Zipangu (1980)--the limitations of "traditional" analytical tools that focus on pitch distribution when studying a work emphasizing timbre and texture--and an introduction to some aspects of the music analyst's practice, the first part of this essay ("How to Seize the Life of Sounds?") presents essential theoretical foundations. On the one hand, it deals with the rationale behind my choices, my rejection of a signal-analysis-based approach (sometimes considered more "objective"), and my adoption of Pierre Schaeffer's ideas and analytical propositions as discussed in his Traite des objets musicaux (1966), as well as the graphical adaptation proposed by Lasse Thoresen in Emergent Musical Forms: Aural Explorations (2015).It aims to familiarize scholars who are interested in but unfamiliar with the practices of music analysis by discussing one of our most important challenges: how can we integrate features such as texture, timbre, and space into our analytical discussions?On the other hand, it summarizes key concepts necessary to fully appreciate the analysis that follows--from Schaeffer's notion of a new solfege and its associated typomorphology to Thoresen's principles of symbolic annotation.

Timbre: From Sound to Meaning - Research Article
Seizing the Life of Sounds in Contemporary Instrumental Music: Claude Vivier’s Zipangu (1980), a Spectromorphological Perspective
Mylène Gioffredohttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-6967-7066
Abstract
This essay has been conceived as an invitation into the workshop of the contemporary music analyst. It aims to familiarize scholars who are interested in but unfamiliar with the practices of music analysis by discussing one of our most important challenges: how can we integrate features such as texture, timbre, and space into our analytical discussions? After a brief presentation of an analytical problem concerning Claude Vivier's Zipangu (1980)—the limitations of “traditional” analytical tools that focus on pitch distribution when studying a work emphasizing timbre and texture—and an introduction to some aspects of the music analyst's practice, the first part of this essay (“How to Seize the Life of Sounds?”) presents essential theoretical foundations. On the one hand, it deals with the rationale behind my choices, my rejection of a signal-analysis-based approach (sometimes considered more “objective”), and my adoption of Pierre Schaeffer's ideas and analytical propositions as discussed in his Traité des objets musicaux (1966), as well as the graphical adaptation proposed by Lasse Thoresen in Emergent Musical Forms: Aural Explorations (2015). On the other hand, it summarizes key concepts necessary to fully appreciate the analysis that follows—from Schaeffer's notion of a new solfège and its associated typomorphology to Thoresen's principles of symbolic annotation. In the second part, “Towards a New Conception of Form in Claude Vivier's Zipangu (1980): A Spectromorphological Perspective,” I demonstrate the existence of a (latent) multidimensional space within which the piece operates by applying this analytical framework to several excerpts from Zipangu.
Keywords
Aural analysis, Claude Vivier, instrumental contemporary music, music analysis and theory, Pierre Schaeffer, spectromorphology, timbre, visual representation
CNRS-PRISM (Perception, Representations, Image, Sound, Music), CGGG, InCIAM, Aix-Marseille Université, Marseille, France
Corresponding author(s):
Mylène Gioffredo, CNRS-PRISM (Perception, Representations, Image, Sound, Music), CGGG, InCIAM, Aix-Marseille Université, 92 chemin colline Saint-Joseph/ 13009 Marseille, France. Email: [email protected]
In memoriam Bianca Ţiplea Temeş
I think that interdisciplinarity never works as well as when it is embodied in the same person. There are already communication difficulties within myself between the musician and the scientist, even though I can be both but not necessarily at the same time. But then if it's about getting around a table… For instance, interdisciplinarity with specialists if each one of them doesn’t go part of the others’ way, it seems extremely heavy to me.
Jean-Claude Risset (Tiffon, 2021, p. 664)