graph notation

In music, an invented sign language representing unorthodox sounds objectively in pitch and time, or alternatively representing sounds of orthodox music in a visually unorthodox manner. A form of graph notation for speech patterns used in phonetics was adopted by Karlheinz Stockhausen in Carré/Squared (1959–60).

Graphic representation of sounds begins with medieval plainchant, which originally aimed at recording the real inflection of a singing voice. Its reappearance in modern times dates from 1856, with the invention by León Scott of the phonautograph for recording visual traces of speech sounds. The possibility of drawing sound for direct reproduction was raised by composer Ernest Toch in 1928; with the arrival of optical sound on film during the 1930s A M Avraamov and B A Yankovsky in Russia and Rudolf Pfenninger in Germany successfully devised methods of optical waveform synthesis for music production.

The artists László Moholy-Nagy in Berlin, Germany, and Jack Ellit in London, England, were experimenting at this time with freely drawn soundtracks incorporating found images, thumbprints, and so on, of predictable rhythm but noisy character, a technique later adopted by the Canadian film-maker Norman McLaren. In 1940 Heitor Villa-Lobos composed New York Skyline based on the outline of a photograph projected onto graph paper and thence to music manuscript. Percy Grainger's proposed Free Music Machine (1948), designed by Burnett Cross, applies optical sound principles on a larger scale, a technique continued in digital synthesizers such as the Fairlight. Development of the sound spectograph in 1944 by engineers at Bell Telephone Laboratories introduced a much improved projection of audio events in pitch and time, providing a model for Stockhausen's iconic score Elektronische Studie II/Electronic Study II (1953–54). John Cage's graphic scores of the 1950s revive memories of film experiments in the 1930s, as may be said of many European composers of graph scores from the period 1959–70.