Analytical Approaches to Electroacoustic Music Improvisation

This article introduces a framework for musical analysis applied to electroacoustic improvisation. After an introduction about the benefits of interdisciplinary research and research-creation practice there is a description of the different domains of the framework: acoustic analysis, music analysis itself and the design of graphic representations. The framework is based on the extraction of information from the audio signal (music information retrieval) to create data representations, some of which are very efficient for music analysis, such as the brightness standard deviation or the self-similarity matrix. The last part of the article demonstrates the use of the framework on extracts of electroacoustic improvisations performed by the Paris-based group Les Phonogenistes, of which the author is a member.