An excess of gesture and material
Saturation as a compositional model
Raphaël Cendo
If the phenomenon of sound saturation sends us to the notion of electronic manipulations, it has however more profound and multiple non-evident roots. Saturation is present in all human history (starting from the term satura in ancient Greek, passing through the Baroque era’s characteristics of exaggerated movement, until Jackson Pollock and the “all over” principle, to name but a few) and appears to us a permanent phenomenon. Since a few years, practices of instrumental saturation have brought us to rethink our relationship to sound. In this paper, the author aims to study two main categories: “total” and “infra” saturation, by putting emphasis on the problem of authorship, as well as notation, when dealing with such complex sounds.
