Some Thoughts on Musique Concrete and Electronic Music Notation

One thing that surprised me recently is how we had spent several lectures discussing music created by physically manipulated external sounds only. When we began discussing synthesis on Wednesday, it hadn't even occured to me that we had not touched the development of synthesis for quite some time and had dealt purely with musique concrete and its offshoots. I had previously not recognized this dichotomy between synthesis and manipulation of existing sounds before, and now it somehow seems obvious.
I feel that often during the early development of electronic music, listenability was sacrificed in the name of creativity. This was usually worthwhile and interesting (pieces that come to mind are the breathing piece, whose title I cannot recall, and Come Out by Steve Reich), but was often overdone just as often as not (for example, the piece It's Gonna Rain by Steve Reich, which did not add much from Come Out, and the helicopter orchestra piece, where I found the almost-random screams coming from the quartet unintentionally hilarious, a reaction I don't think the composer intended). Of musique concrete, the pieces I enjoyed most are I am Sitting in the Room by Alvin Lucier and Visage by Luciano Berio, the former for incorporating the medium into the piece itself and the latter for showing the diversity of sounds generated by human speech possible.
I find the attempts to notate electronic music, particularly Stockhausen's Studies, fascinating. In particular, the notation video for the Studie we saw in class was far more visual than standard music notation. While standard music notation does somewhat allow the reader to determine the form of the music to a slight degree by sight alone (through vertical pitch shifts and horizontal density changes), most readers will need to pay more attention to determine what the music actually sounds like. By contrast, the notation that we saw for the Studie was highly visual, and it appeared to be trying to let the reader be able to parse the music left to right and construct a highly accurate model in his or her head in real time. Though I don't think such notation will ever live up to that ideal, alternate forms of notation seem to be very useful in the realm of electronic music, including current ones such as piano rolls.