the neglected realm of contour

An area of musical theoretical analysis that does not seem to garner much press in the "serious" academic realm - unless it's paired up with a lot of quasi-fictitious mathematics and corresponding metaphysical argot - is the idea of contour. Despite the slowness of radicalization of contour within the musical academic community, there is a considerable amount of literature on issues of pitch and harmonic contour, though largely rooted in the Western canon of Common Practice. Looser motivic contour, though a touch more abstruse, has been discussed in fair amounts dealing with 20th and 21st Century music. Still, contour seems relegated to the margins of acceptable academic society. I would like to slowly facilitate changing that. In some ways - and in many ways, especially when dealing with electroacoustic music¹ - contour is the second-most recognized feature of music to a lay listener or experienced musician alike, typically behind rhythm. Listeners have a much easier time understanding when a sound moves "up" or "down", or the overall shape of a melody, than they do hearing counterpoint, harmonic rhythm, spectral density, textural shifts, or many of the other hefty details.

Ironically, perhaps, my areas of curiosity have nothing to do with pitch contour, or very little to do with it, but more to do with the more recondite aspects of music. In the coming days/weeks/whichever, I'll hopefully enter in some essays here discussing various contour approaches dealing with (at least) three specific issues, how to interpret them, and how to assess and disseminate the measurements - if possible. The key facets are as follows: spatial contour, including stereolocation, aural proprioception and kinetics, and depth perception, as both an effect and determinant in (at least) electroacoustic music; timbrel (or spectral) contour - not to be confused with harmonic contour - tracing the activity levels of "tone color" change, not least through orchestration, not most through a reappropriation of spectral density;² and, third, and possibly not last (and possibly least obscure or meta), the idea - often overlooked, I've found - of rhythmic contour: to be clear, I won't be venturing into far-too-wordy diatribes about Time, but, rather, looking at rhythm as temporally decontextualised (I know, the mind boggles, given the "standard" - often misnamed - definition of rhythm), as though waves, or as though putty that can be stretched and reshaped, and divorced from the organizational prison known as "metricization." (That's putting things in a meter or time signature.)

I really can't say how reader-friendly these essays will be; I have yet to write them. I've been thinking about these ideas for years, and, well, why not codify them now? I promise there will be pictures, pretty pictures (maybe), that do or do not have anything to do with what I'm talking about at the time. I can state with certainty that they will be long - I may or may not break them into parts.

So, in short, my apologies for leading you all on with a "coming attraction" - but with any hope, these will be good pieces of writing, and, maybe, just maybe *tears of hope in my starry eyes and oh who am I kidding I'm embittered and salty* I can eventually turn these into standalone, readable academic articles that a journal may want to publish. That is, if they're looking to put themselves out of business. ZING!

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1. I plan on writing about problems of interpretation and analysis of electroacoustic (fixed media) work later on once I've set upon paper the beginnings of my myriad thoughts upon it. Never fear!
2. I have coined somewhere in my history the term "orchestrational velocity" and its fraternal twin "spectral velocity." I have yet to Google-search these terms to see if someone else has used them academically, and I don't care to. Just plan on seeing these terms a lot after I define them later.