More than 100 students and community members gathered in the Talley Student Union Ballroom Tuesday evening to listen to electroacoustic, or computer-made music presented by the Circuit Bridges group. 

The concert was brought to NC State as a part of the Arts NOW Series and featured a variety of electroacoustic musical pieces from composers in North Carolina and New York. 

Electronic music has roots in musique concrete, according to Rodney Waschka II, the director of the Arts NOW Series and an interdisciplinary studies professor at NC State.

“Musique concrete is music that takes sounds from the world and uses it as material,” said Waschka. “It doesn’t worry about c sharps, quarter notes and that kind of stuff, but instead, it takes recordings from the world and uses that as compositional material.”

 At the beginning of the concert, Waschka asked the audience to lose all their preconceptions about what music is or should be. 

“Just let this stuff come at you, give it the benefit of the doubt and then figure out how to like it,” said Waschka. 

The pieces that were presented featured a variety of sounds, including that of a train, household objects and computer-synthesized pops and tones. 

Travis Garrison, composer and performer of electroacoustic music, presented his piece titled “selectric.metal,” which featured sounds from a typewriter, camera and a sewing machine. 

“My piece comes directly out of this musique concrete direction,” said Garrison. “I use real world recorded sounds and then spent time processing them, manipulating them and layering them on top of each other to create basically a sound sculpture.”

When listening to electroacoustic music the audience has two means of interpreting the sound, according to Garrison.  

“We have the choice when we hear referential sounds, i.e. sounds that remind us of something in the real world, to respect that reference, or completely ignore it,” said Garrison.

Garrison encouraged the audience to ignore what the sounds traditionally stand for and treat them instead as sound objects. 

“When the sound comes out of the speakers and goes into your ears that kind of really doesn’t matter,” said Garrison. “What matters is the connections you are able to make, moment by moment, as far as what you are hearing, what you are doing and how you chose to hear these sounds.”

Garrison also said it is important to sit back and appreciate electroacoustic music on its own terms. 

“Much of the time when we talk about this kind of music, we tend to emphasize the composer’s compositional procedure or the technologies that went into the making of the music, instead of the music itself,” said Garrison.

The concert also presented some of the first pieces of musique concrete, with composition dates as early as 1948. 

While the audience applauded after each performance, some audience members left before the end of the concert.

Next month, the Arts NOW Series will be presenting two more events. 

On Feb. 10 and 12, photographer Alan Dehmer will be discussing alternative photographic printing and will present some of his works. 

On Feb. 26, Michael Burns, bassoonist and composer, will perform new electroacoustic music.