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Old Tricks New media : Schillinger Techniques are Relevant to All Kinds of Contemporary Music Irrespective of Style

Originality: This paper makes new and original claims about Schillinger’s theories and their relevance to electroacoustic music in the light of contemporary theories in the field of music psychology. Schillinger’s techniques can be used to structure the medium and large-scale form of electroacoustic music, determining the onset and relative weighting of complex spectromophologically conceived sounds. The same procedures are also highly useful in live electroacoustic performances and music that involves improvisation. This is a new approach and brings together two sharply divided compositional disciplines.

Significance: This paper lead the special Schillinger edition of CMR and thereby affirms a field of scholarship in a hitherto unacknowledged subject area, one in which the author is a leading authority. The Contemporary Music Review is a prestigious publication and this special edition will have reached a wide academic readership.

Rigour: My paper shows how Schillinger’s theory of psychological time in music and temporal saturation (related to the density of musical events per unit of time) are borne out by later scholarship, especially the famous Shannon-Weaver equation (The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948.) which underpins the field of information theory and the groundbreaking music psychology of L.B Meyer (Music, The Arts, And Ideas, UCP1994). The contributions of Meyer and Shannon-Weaver are still felt strongly today and underpin contemporary research in music psychology, for example in the work of David Huron. (Huron. D. Sweet, Anticipation, music and the psychology of perception, MIT 2006).