Abstract

In my music I try to control the chaos inside and outside me. I try to write in the freest way and to realize it in the most consequential manner. Hence, I try to find a balance between the material and its implicit existential possibilities, focusing on the clarity of its elements and the variety of its possible complex temporal evolutions. In this sense, my pieces could be reduced, in most cases, to a set of contrasting original elements that are embedded in the thematic character of the structure of the material. However the theme is at the same time the starting and the final point of the composition, a journey in the discovery of the poetical and formal proprieties of the musical idea. The theme is the first and the last element. I reduce the musical material to a limited number of elements that are developed following a limited number of more abstract categories that allow a control of musical complexity. This double bond through an opposition with the material reveals my abstract compositional categories. This makes the process of composition a process of dialectic personal awareness of my subjective limits reflected through the manipulation of the musical material. In this sense, my music results from an intimate and subjective confrontation with the realization of the musical idea. For this reason the notion of the thematic idea is central. It resumes the pure temporal character of the musical idea and refers to the semantic element of linear profiles that I craft in my compositions. The following analysis highlights the dialectics between the material and the abstract categories that derive from it. In the conclusion I explain my compositional position from the perspective offered by this analysis. Publisher: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, Milano "Celestografia has distant origins. It took me years to understand that the basis of the music I wanted to create was in the writing itself; writing in the sense of tracing sound in a visible form, as a possibility for the memory and as an impossibility of the single origin of the creative act. I have always dreamed of a drama of musical writing, slowing the composing down almost to a standstill. A vision of the essence of musical content. I have tried to achieve this in some of my more recent pieces. However, when I was almost completely unaware of this, I actually achieved it, ten years ago. Lately I have composed a lot trying to take the compositional gesture to its extremes, trying to think of music not from the exterior, but from within. In this sense I owe many discoveries to the ensemble L'Imaginaire from Strasbourg. This is how this piece was born, as my own drama of writing a form, as a constant refusal of musical automatisms, as a search for a logic that is only and exclusively musical, beyond words, beyond memory and rhetoric, which I try to capture by taking it by surprise. Celestografia takes its title from a photographic practice from the end of the 19th Century used by August Strindberg. It consists in letting a metal iodated plate become impressed in the daylight. The pattern that is created is a completely abstract figure that was interpreted as the landscape of the soul. For me, it represents the impossibility to distinguish between inside and outside, between the sensations of my body and the existence of other bodies. These are the sensations that are translated into the emotion of the form and into the psychological force of music, that points to a theatre that perhaps will one day exist".

Portfolio and presentation of compositions

Ritratto Voce (2011) 7' for mezzosoprano

First Performance, Huddersfield, CERENEM, November 28 th 2011, Lore Lixemberg, mezzosoprano Publisher: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, Milano " How can the voice be portrayed? In this piece I try to give a personal light to the voice. The text, by Spinoza, is the starting point for the division and definition of the values of the notes and the rests. The text and the particular type of emission of the voice are intended to indicate the possibility for music to reveal itself and disclose something. A lilting rhythm accompanies the declamation of the text in an attempt to construct the form from within".

Autoritratto (2011-12) 10' for string trio and piano

First Performance, Copenhagen, Glyptoteket Museum, August 8 th 2012, Ensemble Open End.

Publisher: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, Milano "Making a self-portrait means being ruthless and also going against oneself. Formal construction, scales, showy virtuosity and speed lie at the heart of this selfportrait that presents my idiosyncrasies and forces me to observe them without mercy. A sort of rondo with variations occupies the main part of the piece. The rondo stops and so does the spirit of the piece, which returns to the noise and emptiness that seem to underpin some of the aesthetic choices that I often make for myself. Music is also this, letting oneself go and impressing the audience with speed, which is the vortex of perception".

Le Cose (2011-12) 19'

for solo violin CD Recording, Saori Furukama, violin Publisher: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, Milano "This solo violin piece presents a kind of reflection on the objectivity of the musical material. The material, posed in time, could not be composed in time. It is my first attempt, realised, to present and represent musical objects". "The perfect listening position is where the musical object and the listener are observed simultaneously. It is a question of highlighting this indissoluble relation between the elements. Endeared means both "dear" and "cared for".

The term comes from a poem by John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn". The musicians depicted on the urn performs music whose true magic lies in the fact that it cannot be heard, leaving to our imagination what it might bethe most beautiful thing, that does not belong to the tangible world. The text is an elaboration of what remains of a madrigal by Monteverdi. The idea is that music is basically made up of audible and inaudible things that coexist, from the emotion until the writing. In this sense the writing is strictly and rigorously thematic, where the concept of theme implies not only a perceivable unit but also a semantic one, and colours the whole piece. It is a study of the psychological colour of sound and the interval, broken into transitions and developments of the idea, not in an abstract manner, but also trying to develop its meaning". This experience, which is common to all of us when we rely on technology, the separation of sound from its source, is a representation of the mystery of listening. Visioni is a video and audio piece, based on the relationship and on the mystery of this alchemy. We will tell the story of the transition from an idea of source to the actual source itself: the transition from an object that hypothetically makes a sound to instruments that play within the cultural context of our history. Thus Visioni illustrates the transition from absence to presence. The objects are initially inanimate, then they come alive. The game of representing sound, as an invisible element that is then reified evokes an illusion, the relationship with technology and machines. Publisher: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, Milano "Setting oneself in front of a musical object and drying it up, placing it in time and space is the main idea of this piece. The writing seen as objectification and investigation of the psychological resonances that the constitutive elements of music provoke in the association of ideas. The basic logic of this new piece consists in taking the instruments as objects; imposing the music before composing it. For the first time the electronics have no anonymous source, as happens in most of electronic pieces -where the categories of enrichment of the instrumental material or acoustic counterpoint to the score prevails. In this case the electronics feature as an instrument in its own right. Since the electronic sound is defective, I try to eliminate this defect by balancing the acoustic aspect and the instrumental one. In this sense a solution can be found, I believe, in the discourse started by Nono in Soferte onde serene and then continued by Marco Stroppa and his development of the timée -a loudspeaker that projects the sound spherically and localises the source. La visione delle cose is a piece for this strange new object, similar to an instrument without being one, which encloses the electronics in a box. This step gives rise to other aspects, a modular loudspeaker divided between magnet and membrane. In this way La visione delle cose experiments with this new approach, achieved only after many experiences in electronic diffusion and composition". "Tre Case is a title intended to evoke a certain simplicity in the vision of the elements that make up the musical discourse, its grammar and in particular its syntax. If we imagine seeing three houses in the distance in the countryside, we see three profiles and three objects that, with any real, premeditated reason, create between them a necessity for the simple fact of being there and not being elsewhere. This necessity/non-necessity, this chance that with the passing of time created the necessity, is a strong factor in my creative process, perhaps its main fulcrum. And so the houses are things dispersed within a vast territory that by pure chance, unconsciously, defines a story. Colloquially "tre case" can also mean "some houses", we do not know exactly how many, but not many, as if the landscape were in our memory but not completely clear and distinct".

Four Walls (2013) 11'

for two pianos and two percussionists Essences that are purely sonic or emotive, enriched sound. The essence of the piano, of electronic sound, of power, the essence of dynamics; the essence of forte and of piano. One of the most difficult, and dangerous, things is to work with the essences of the musical emotions. The essence of sadness, of emotional impact, to transform inert material into volatile material that goes beyond the instantaneous perception and becomes emotion". To preserve this anarchic approach I need to fix a clear starting point that can support the continuous stream of invention that I require to compose.

Introduction

Fixing the horizon, I try to compose the musical means that allow me to reach it in the simplest way.

My compositions begin with the definition of a thematic element. I strictly develop the material in order to fragment or recompose it, discovering its implicit injections and projections. In my compositional procedures I analyse the relationship between the intuition of the compositional horizon and the intuition of the material that constitutes it. The radical subjective choice of both the beginning and the end is balanced by the objective analysis that the composition involves. The notion of theme informs the basic material. In my point of view, it allows the biggest extemporaneous inventive analysis, thanks to the simplicity of the manipulated matter. 1 This material is freely composed, stretching durations, filling pauses, deviating from the starting material rhapsodically, constructing the harmonic context from the pitch relationship inside the theme.

Variations and manipulations are based on processes of focusing and defocusing of the theme. This procedure defines recurrences in the treatment of the materials that ground my compositional categories.

The aim of this text is to highlight the link between the use of themes and the freedom of their treatment, focusing on the abstract categories that guide this compositional procedure. My objective is to reveal the relationship between the material and the compositional strategies. In this sense the categories are the conceptual material of the composition. sounding and thematic material is the perceptive starting point the categories are the conceptual starting point. In my hypothesis they emerge consequentially from the concrete sound material, extracting and reducing qualia 2 of musical elements that are the base of the abstract construction that I aim to highlight. This description allows to reveal the compositional choices under the light of the elements of the thematic material. 3 The reduced thematic material has the effect of multiplying the possibilities of the nuances in the manipulations that are based on simple abstract operational categories. I will try to outline the characteristics of the raw material, focusing then on the categories that guide its manipulation. I will describe my compositions from the "outside", defining links of which I am aware but that are not, for the moment, inside the perimeter of my musical consciousness.

In the first chapter I highlight the structures of the themes, focusing on their intervalic futures. I show how my pieces refer to a unique structural element. For this reason my analysis starts from the notion of theme. 4

2 Qualia are emergent characteristics of an object. Goodman defines qualia as sensible quality presented by the perceived object (Goodman, 1951). The same notion is used by Patton, 2007: 123, to frame his spectromorphological notation.

From this perspective qualia and spectromorphology, as analysed before, are correlated.

3

The categories emerge themselves from the compositional process. This circularity of the compositional process guides the musical dynamic of the raw material and the consequential abstract strategies that derive from its manipulation. In my music I try to find a balance between the creative process with the understanding of the process itself.

4

This approach is inspired by Webern's thematic construction that is discussed in: Boulez, P., Leçons de musique (Points de repères, III), Christian Bourgois, Paris, 2005, pp. 228-229. In Webern the theme aquired a strong structural dimension that differentiate his music from Berg's and Shoenberg's. The theme in Webern allows to highly structure the compositional dimension. In this sense the theme has the function to base uniquely the compoosition. As claimed by Webern: "To develop everything else from one principal idea! That's the strongest unity when every body does the same,as with the Netherlanders, where the theme was

Themes emerge in the creative process as the concrete starting point of the conscious compositional process. In the first chapter the interval structure of the musical ideas is considered in relation to the harmonization procedure.

My harmonic strategies consist of a free extraction of interval elements from the chromatic scale.

In the second chapter I illustrate my compositional categories, stressing the importance of the concept of continuity and discontinuity, dilatation and compression. Themes are analyzed in the context of their formal interaction, focusing on the dialectics between two notions borrowed from Denis Smalley's spectromorphological analysis: the motion of textural behaviours and motion coordination. 5 The spectromorphlogical analysis allows for a definition of directional and textural properties from the point of view of the propriocentric perception: the internal analytical decomposition of the material is contrasted by an external projection outside the thematic idea.

I will show that the material and its manipulation creates categories that generate compositional materials that generate categories etc. This circle-like process makes me think about the interaction between the creative process and the representation of my existential state. This observation opens questions that are beyond my compositional process and, at the same time, the conditions of my poetics. The theme-that is, the beginning of the composition-is not the beginning of the creative process. The theme appears as a sign of a hidden, creative, and existential process that is behind; it appears as implied by the horizon, but it doesn't allow an understanding of the origin of the chosen compositional horizon. 6 introduced by each individual part, varied in every possible way, with different entries and in different registers". (Webern, 1933, 1960: 40)

The Material

In this chapter I analyse the configurations of the material of my pieces with their original form. Through this analysis I introduce the notion of theme in my music.

Thematic reduction

In Ritratto Voce, for solo voice, the initial repetition of the same notes points out a stable structure that characterizes the piece: the F#, repeated irregularly; then the F, in the higher register; the G and the E quarter-tone sharp. Other pitches progressively appear: the B b and the E, p. 2. This progression creates an underlying structure (Figure 1). the embodied cognition theory. The chosen composition horizon is concrete and abstract at the same time: perception, cognition and action are involved in a circular movement. Compositional practice result also from the actionperception cycle. In this sense the compositional act is the result of the internal perception of the musical constraints and the projection of musical actions via the score towards an indeterminate future horizon.

7

It is worth noting that the transition to the last section of the piece is a long crescendo "messa di voce" on the C (p. 5): this geometrical organisation of the musical form wasn't previolusly conceived but result from an explicit unawareness of the structural constraints of the initial material.

emerges . These intervals point towards a centrifuge progression (Figure 2).

These structures have two opposite characterisations: centripetal and centrifuge.

The emergence of melodic and harmonic structural elements is common to The repetition of the minor second motif gives it a hierarchical importance in relationship with the other elements that appear in the foreground. In fact it is worth noting that the structural element of the pieces are shared in the entire portfolio.

17 profile to the second idea of Ritratto Voce (Figure 6). The octave relationships of the intervals are common elements between both structures.

This idea is based on a descending major seventh quartertone sharp interval followed by a minor seventh quartertone flat interval. The second idea of the piece is based on the major seventh quartertone higher, extrapolated from the first half of the first theme (Figure 7). A third idea is extrapolated from the second half of the first theme (Figure 8). The fourth idea is deduced and enlarged from the minor seventh of the first theme (Figure 9).

18 This element is contrasted by a second idea based on larger diatonic intervals that are repeated, inverted and transposed from bar 67 (Figure 11).

These ideas characterize two contrasting poles.

These elements are manipulated through free trajectories, merged and constructed on free interpolations of the intervals that characterize both themes: i.e. the melodic profile is harmonized with an enlarged minor third -the f is a quarter tone higher -that belongs to the second idea (Figure 12). The minor second -which characterizes Celestografia, Endeared and Due Parole -is also structural in Autoritratto, for piano and string trio: i.e. its inversion, the major seventh at the beginning of the piece, characterizes the entire piece (Figure 13).

Due Parole (Endeared III) develops a material derived from Endeared II (Figure 14). In the first example shown in the figure, we see the minor ninth, quarter-tone higher, between the first soprano and the first mezzo; at the same time the viola plays the minor seventh interval that is the second idea of Endeared II, but also Le Cose and further Visioni.

21 In this second part the electronics are composed with the instrumental part starting from the same thematic material. The objective is to fuse instruments and electronics in a unique compositional process. Both are written synchronously, in order to make them interact through the development of harmonic relationships derived from the theme. Indeed, the musicians, behind the loudspeakers, interact with the electronics creating a fused texture (Figure 18).

Visioni develops consequentially the thematic ideas. The idea that appears at bar 171 derives from the major seventh of the first idea. It is constructed by a fragmented superposition of minor seventh (minor second inversion):

F#-E, F-Eb (Figure 16). In the electronics the interval structure of the instrumental part is multiplied and interacts with the instrumental part in the composition, as an orchestra interacting with the solo group (Figure 19). The zyther speaker is a modular loudspeaker that I conceived for La Visione delle Cose. It is a speaker with a transducer amplifier and a wooden membrane with resonating metal strings. The transducer was commissioned and conceived especially for this piece. The electronics are conceived as a contrasting part with the instrumental part. The aim is to alternate and superimpose two instruments and to make explicit the instrumental nature of the loudspeaker. As in Tre Case, the theme is constituted by a major sixth, major ninth and minor sixth.

Each section of the pieces considered above could be observed from the perspective offered by the thematic structural idea. The theme appears as a semantic and structural unit with a perceptive clear profile that serves as formal anchor and harmonic reservoir.

The objectivity of the material is the base for the subjectivity of the compositional work. It allows hierarchies between the multiple aspects of the composition and a balance between the freedom of the manipulation and the logical rigour of the construction. This approach permits me to constantly compose the material in order to create links between the pieces and to freely compose the sound.

In conclusion, I find three thematic groups (Figure 23). These groups are a common material that proliferate freely in my compositional imagination, making them the methodological bases of these pieces. The first group is characterized by large intervals that are reducible to minor sevenths, octaves and minor thirds. The second group of themes is based on minor second 28

Developments

The thematic approach underlines a repetition process that creates complex configurations of fragmentations "inside" the material and directionalities "outside". These features will show two typologies of repetition: involute and evolutive.

. 2 . . I n j e c t i o n : r e p e t i t i o n a n d s u s p e n d i n g directionalities

In Ritratto Voce, the first element of the piece, an F#, returns cyclically on itself. The repeated note of the beginning is understood as a unique element

in a free open space (Figure 24). This repetition functions as a recursive echo.

The fragmented repetition enlarges the structure of the thematic idea with pauses and variation of values; it is an expansion "inside" the theme. The centripetal cyclic movement of the first theme injects a looping energy "inside" the linear continuity of the melodic line (Figure 25); the second thematic idea appears as an evolution of the first, closing the endless repetition of the previous section (Figure 26). This passage reveals two directional tendencies of the repetition 31 27). The single repeated note, with a diminuendo at the beginning, is then inverted into a crescendo in the second part and multiplied in the third. In fact, the crescendo at the centre of the piece, p. 5, guides the transition from the first to the second section (Figure 28). This rhetorical strategy stresses the contrast of the injective/projective opposition (Figure 29).

This analysis underlines the direct relationship between pitch organisation and rhetorical figures. The suspended repetition is related to the chromatic element of the first theme, while the evolutive repetition to the diatonic one.

The figures are strictly related to the pitch organisation, indicating a proportional dynamic between the temporal evolution of the figures and the constraints of the interval organisation.

This dynamic relationship, based on the contrast between short and long values, diminuendos and crescendo, is a common strategy in my pieces. The repetition is used to suspend the directionality in a fixed dimension, or, as in Celestografia, to engender a linear repetitive directionality based on the accumulation of the material (Figure 33). This form of repetition creates pressured passages based on causal links and anacrusis in the development.

33 aspect is clearly directional (Figure 33).

In the last section of Celestografia, from bar 181 to the end of the piece, the note A is repeated by the strings, creating a suspended atmosphere. The harmonic field of this section is again based on a clusterized minor second.

In this last section, a new theme based on a descending fifth and a rising 34 These functionalities explore the transitional space between the first and the second theme. This dimension characterizes the open space in which I move freely, working on the allusion of the thematic elements.

Projection: repetitive directionalities

The In Due Parole, the section starting from bar 84 follows a similar strategy. In this section two elements are alternated: a rapid rhapsodic element followed by an emerging chord (Figure 38). These two elements interact dialectically until the climax at bar 116 (Figure 39).

42 Injection and projection are opposed compositional process. Injection is characterized by the cyclic and analytical use of material, while projection is characterized by a constructive, synthetic approach that extrapolates the formal potentialities of material (Figure 46). These dimensions interact in my pieces at different levels. The following schema gives an overview of the portfolio from this perspective (Figure 47).

Categories

The strategies discussed in the first chapter are the result of a more abstract compositional approach that defines the typologies of the elements. The thematic procedures appear as mobile structures that are used to control and compose complex textures, directional or non-directional. The thematic structure then is embedded in more abstract categories based on the concrete sound morphologies of the musical themes. In this sense the concept of sound-shape seems to be crucial in the analysis of my works. Which compositional categories control the thematic material? How does the dialectic of the sound-shapes reveal abstract compositional categories that influence the structural and hierarchical utilization of thematic elements? Is there then a relationship between sound-shapes and themes? Is there a categorical dialectic in my compositional strategies?

Denis Smalley introduces the notion of spectromorphology. As defined by Smalley, spectromorphology merges the temporal and the atemporal aspects of sound textures:

I have developed the concepts and terminology of spectromorphology as tools for describing and analysing listening experience. The two parts of the term refer to the interaction between sound spectra (spectro-) and ways they change and are shaped through time (-morphology). 10 Smalley uses the metaphor of behaviour in order to highlight the relationship between spectromorphologies. This model, developed through the analysis of electroacoustic music, fits also for the instrumental. The first reason is that the freedom in composing textures is now often similar in electronic and instrumental music; the second reason is that, as suggested by Smalley again, the spectromorphological vocabulary can be used for the analysis of instrumental or vocal music. 11 In this sense spectromorphology is useful to reveal the listening strategies at the basis of my cognitive listening. 12 The notion of behaviour may be applied at a variety of levels, for example, discrete events, low-level texture motion, or the much higher level of relations between groups of textures or growth processes. Behaviour has two interactive, temporal dimensions, […] one vertical the other horizontal. The vertical dimension is concerned with motion coordination (concurrence and simultaneity), while the horizontal dimension is concerned with motion passage (passing between successive context). 13 It is important to relate these notions to the thematic analysis made before and the utilization of figures, repetitions and progression that defines my melodic style. There is a direct relationship between static and kinetic sections, groups of themes and intervals. The constructive and deconstructive 11 D. Smalley, op.cit. p. 3: "Some contemporary instrumental music can also be approached spectromorphologically -for example, the music of Xenakis and of younger composers like Grisey, Saariaho, Murail, Dillon and many others concerned with spectral and textural complexity. In this music there is often a loss of instrumental identity as the orchestra is 'resynthesised' into a kind of spectromorphological hyper-instrument. While we may sometimes be conscious of instrumental identity, we can equally be persuaded to forget individual notegestures as these individuals are subsumed in streams and collective motions.

Even though this music is represented and achieved through musical writing, the score itself is a very inadequate representation of perceptual qualities. An aural approach which treats recordings of such works in the manner of an acousmatic tape work is often much more fruitful". 12 F. Lévy, Le compositeur, son oreille et ses machine à écrire : Déconstruire les gramatologies du musical pour mieux les composer, Vrin, Librairie Philosophique, Paris, 2014. 13 D. Smalley, op.cit. p. 12. approach is related with the tense directionality of the developments of my pieces and the non-directional composition of the introductions or transitions in the pieces of the portfolio. The themes outlined in the previous chapter constitute the basic material of the construction of my complex spectromorphologies. The utilization of the theme is related to the "vertical" and "horizontal" textural behaviour analysed by Smalley. The theme is used as a framework to allow the fragmentation of the musical space through transpositions and time stretches, or as intervallic material that allows directional textures. In this sense the contrast between motion coordination and motion passage coherently describes a dualism in my compositional I introduce the notion of un-pressured behaviour in order to stress the opposition between motion coordination and motion passage. The suspension of directionality, as analysed above, belongs to the category of un-pressured textural behaviour. The element of this movement that interested me is the observation made by Smalley regarding the "degree of coordination freedom":

Th e loose-tight continuum represents the degree of coordination freedom.

Whereas synchronicity has been the rule in tonal art music, it is no longer the case. Today there is an extreme distance between a very tight, perhaps rigidly controlled, punctual, homorhythmic, minimal music, and the very relaxed, malleable associations found in some electroacoustic music. Indeed, spectromorphologies could be so different in their character and motion that the only relationship they seem to have is that they exist in the same space at and by its directionality. The first one is defined as voluntary and second one a s pressured. The connection of events is due to the perceived degree of causality.

The pressured dimension corresponds to the degree of causality, the unpressured with the degree of uncausality -that is, near to the absence of togetherness. The motion passage morphology, then,

[…] expresses how one context or event yields to the next. We are reminded that such questions as the degree of motion coordination, the energy-motion trajectory of gesture, the pressuring urgency of onset rates, and the type of motion are strong determinants. Causality, where one event seems to cause the onset of a successor, or alter a concurrent event in some way, is an important feature of acousmatic behaviour. The arrow leading from the voluntary-pressured continuum shows that causality can be weaker or stronger, depending on the influence or impact one spectromorphology has on another. On the whole, a strongly causal music relies on gesture, and impact-coordination points which will be regarded as goals in the structure. 15 The vertical and horizontal dimensions are closely related: the degree of causality could be considered from the absence of causality-the un-pressured -and the presence of causality-pressured. The themes provide the coherence of the work and are used as a reservoir and are structured vertically and horizontally.

In this sense I borrow the notion of pressured a n d un-pressured spectromorphology from the analysis of textural behaviors. 16 Consequently, the aim of this chapter is to clarify textural areas that define the compositional categories that dialectically collide in my music. These categories are considered from the point of view of the notion of textural causality. This notion exemplifies my way of defining injective or projective manipulations of the material; these larger categories are defined by the degree of causal internal relationship. The interest in the use of spectromorphological terminology is the common aspect of the content of sound and its envelope: movement and the internal content of the texture are aspects of the same complex configuration.

The category of un-pressured defines the open space in which each sound event is unrelated to the other; the vertical dimension of this category is characterized by the degree of togetherness. The category of pressured behavior, on the other hand, is based on the causal relationship between sound events; this category is based on the horizontal behaviour characterized by the degree of textural causality.

Connections between events are guided by the type of pressured/causality or unpressured/uncausality continuum. The "free-space" continuum-in which the material is exposed in static sections, un-pressured-is in a formal dialectical relation with a vortex-like direction in which the motion passage transforms an open situation into a process whereby the succession of events is based on causality. This dialectic is constructed around the thematic material with specific figures that will be highlighted below.

Connections functions

In the context characterized by the reducing thematic approach previously described, the notions of decomposition and recomposition, directionality and suspension of the theme constitute the technical categories of my compositional method. The decomposition/recomposition is related to the degree of togetherness, while directionality/suspension is related to the energy motion causality. The process of decomposition/recomposition is based on horizontal and vertical fragmentation.

Un-pressured

The spectromorphological concept of un-pressured behavior describes the free relationship between objects in an open space in which the causality between events tends towards zero. Un-pressured spectromorphologies are the result of the fragmentation of the theme in long values, octave transpositions and microdirectional events.

Fragmentation

Fragmentation is characterized by horizontal and vertical processes through This process is similar with the decomposition of complex events in smaller parts. In my music this method is related to the analysis and abstraction of the elements of the musical idea.

Fragmentation process in past music literature

Processes of fragmentation delineate a category of procedures used by In Beethoven, the fragmentation process acquired a more important role, for instance, at the end of the Eroica Symphony's second movement (Figure 49). In the following bars the theme is ulteriorly fragmented, even destroyed and senseless (Figure 50). This final résumé fragments the first thematic idea, denaturing it in its rhythmical and phraseological unity (Figure 51). In the last bars, the horizontal fragmentation includes both rhythm and dynamics (Figure 52). Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, the theme is reduced to one single note (Figure 53). The transition is the result of the elimination of all the links of the theme and opens up possibilities for further developments. This approach is similar to the one I use in Ritratto Voce and Visioni, where the elements of the theme are transposed by an octave, losing any directionality. 17 Similarly, in Mahler's Symphony No.9, the listener assists in the "birth" of the first theme (Figure 54).

17 My pieces could be considered as expansions of transitional sections.

61 The notes are positioned as decomposed elements of an already unknown theme. The simple timbre of the instruments resonates in the space of the orchestra. The cellos, the horn, the harp and the violas cover a horizontal fragmented space on the stage. This decomposed strategy of introduction of the theme is similar to the beginning of Visioni; it is for me a prototype of the fragmentation in Le Cose and Ritratto Voce, which are an expansion of this hypothetical "birth of a theme".

Vertical Fragmentation

The un-pressured textural behaviour that I highlight presents two different tendencies. The values fragmentation and the register amplification define two contrasting compositional spaces that reveal the un-pressured compositional strategy. In the first example, Endeared II, the theme is decomposed horizontally. Values are different and the continuity of the theme is destructed by the insertion of pauses, the alteration of the accent of the phrase, and the isolation of intervals. In the second example, La Visione delle Cose, the transition is accomplished with transpositions and octaviations. In fact, the octave transposition weakens the directionality of the figures and reduces the movement to a circular opening repetition. This procedure exemplifies the vertical fragmentation of my works. In Endeared II the decomposition of the theme in different registers characterizes the entire piece. This fragmentation engenders harmonic processes, suspending the consequentiality of the theme and enriching the linear scroll of the melody.

The departing material is deployed from the first measure, fragmented vertically in two registers (Figure 55). Themes belong to the same octave, being the center of register variations via octave transpositions and timbre fragmentations (Figure 56). The notes that deviate from the basic line are based on minor thirds detached by the theme.

63 Due Parole (Endeared III) presents a similar fragmentation. The minor second theme is fragmented between the soprano, viola and first mezzosoprano. The harmonization is also based on minor third and its major sixth inversion (Figure 57). In Le Cose the vertical fragmentation is used as a unique means of generating secondary themes. For instance, the minor seventh of the beginning becomes a minor 14 th (Figure 58). Similarly, as highlighted previously (Figure 18) the second theme of Visioni derives from the first one (Figure 59). The major seventh is divided in The fragmentation in the vertical space is basically based on octave transpositions. This fragmentation creates suspended sections of the thematic line, separating it in more instruments. The directionality of the musical gestures as short intense crescendos engenders micro-directionalities, which indicate possible pressured motions. In that sense themes have a texture unity that allows deviation. The theme is vertically fragmented, exploded in opposite registers in order to lose its melodic unity. This typology of fragmentation allows the enlargement of the harmonic space of events; thus the instrumental gestures fill the space with polyphonic micro-articulations (Figure 60).

66 For instance the "horn" sound at bar 28 (Figure 66). The following examples underline two typologies of echoing related to the horizontal prolongation of the theme. In the first, the echo is tied to the echoed note (Figure 67). In the second example the echo is disengaged from the source (Figure 68). Another form of echo is applied to a larger fragment (Figure 69). In Due Parole (Endeared III) echos are used in several forms. The following example is based on the repetition of a high B by the first violin.

This use of the echo is similar to the repetition in Ritratto Voce (Figure 70).

A similar variant of this echo function appears in Tre Case. In this example the echo is a recursive element (Figure 71). This timbre typology has a role in the fragmentation process. The echoed source is shifted temporally and harmonically in the horizontal and vertical space. A strong attack is fragmented in multiple layers. For instance, at the beginning of Tre Case the violin plays three notes that are the response to the first forte. In this example the vertical fragmentation joins the horizontal fragmentation because the first note is repeated as transposed and echoed in three registers. In Le Cose, echo is the starting point of a development based on repetitions (Figure 72). The repeated note interacts with fragments of past events.

Things posed at the beginning of the piece interact, recomposed in a dynamic space. Repetition is applied through different elements, for instance a high note with a slight vibrato (Figure 73). Another variation of the detached echo typology is the "ninna nanna" -lullaby in Le Cose (Figure 74). The last element of the piece is characterized by the resonance of the body of the violin: the tuning fork resonates the body of the violin (Figure 75) s effect is also a variation of the "echo-like" figure.

. Fragmentation processes in Le Cose

Le Cose is the piece that best shows the process of fragmentation. The piece is conceived as a collection of "things" and is composed following this rhapsodic collection ordered around an accumulative invention of themes. 18

The piece presents an extremely complex web of echoes, repetitions, and transpositions of the basic thematic elements.

The process of composition is based on the enunciation of the thematic idea and its following fragmentations through three typologies of process:

1. deviations from the main idea by : a)

Pressured

As Smalley claims, the pressured behaviour aims to create a fictional causality in which each event "seems to cause the onset of the successor". 20

This fictional essence is assumed in my music in the formal construction of the pieces: the categories of causality and consequentiality are dialectical elements in my compositional method.

If fragmentation processes characterized the un-pressured behaviour, pressured configurations are characterized by concentration, accumulation and compression-reduction of values. Un-pressured fragmentation is based on prolongation of values, while pressured accumulation is characterized by horizontal compression and reduction of values. In the next paragraphs I will highlight the application of these smalleyan categories in my pieces.

Spectromorphology is not a compositional theory or method, but a descriptive tool based on aural per-ception. It is intended to aid listening, and seeks to help explain what can be apprehended in over four decades of electroacoustic repertory.

How composers conceive musical content and form -their aims, models, systems, techniques, and structural plans -is not the same as what listeners perceive in that same music. What the composer has to say (in programme notes, talks, sleeve 20 D. Smalley, "Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes", Organised sound, 2 (2), 1997, p. 12: "In motion passage, the voluntary-pressured con-tinuum expresses how one context or event yields to the next. We are reminded that such questions as the degree of motion coordination, the energy-motion trajectory of gesture, the pressuring urgency of onset rates, and the type of motion are strong determinants. Causality, where one event seems to cause the onset of a successor, or alter a concurrent event in some way, is an important feature of acousmatic behaviour. The arrow leading from the voluntary-pressured continuum shows that causality can be weaker or stronger, depending on the influence or impact one spectromorphology has on another. On the whole, a strongly causal music relies on gesture, and impact-coordination points which will be regarded as goals in the structure.

notes) is not unimportant, and it undoubtedly influences (both helping and impeding) the listener's appreciation of music and musical ideas, but it is not always perceptually informative or relevant.

Although spectromorphology is not a compositional theory, it can influence compositional methods since once the composer becomes conscious of concepts and words to diagnose and describe, then compositional thinking can be influenced, as I am sure my own composing has been.

Horizontal compression

In Celestografia, from bar 105 to 146 there is an accumulation process divided in three parts characterized by three states of the material that augment the degree of directionality and the compression of values, passing from a quaver to a triplet quaver tremolo (Figure 83). The scale fragment is repeated, then accelerated, granulated until it brings the listener to the following state of the progression: the violins repeat a pattern of six notes ascending in registers and viola and cello profile a line in counterpoint, bars 126-138 (Figure 84). There are two main categories of pressured space. The first one is the largescale process in which linear events are connected to a simulation of connection. The second one is the smaller scale event in which small events accumulate tension in order to achieve an explosion of the material from the gestural and harmonic point of view. Causality is related with directionality that is defined by reduction or expansion of rhythmic values, ascending profiles and dynamic accumulation. These categories interact freely around the material (Figure 93).

92

Conclusion

The reductive simplicity of the starting material increases the possibilities of manipulation of the material. For that reason, the elements are the most simple and clear. To compose the reduction and improve the complexity of the perceptive result of the musical form I stress the concepts of injection and projection, making a link between the harmonic qualities of the themes, development strategies and textural typology.

The fixed repeated elements of the composition emerge as anchors for invention: I try to follow the material suggesting its possible temporalities, in the sense of the notion of "form-bearing" element. 22 This metaphor brings me to the development of my rhapsodic compositional approach, defining a material that conforms to my compositional categories. Through this approach I try to know the material through the unveiling of my subjective interaction with it. The composition becomes, in this sense, a method of research of my subjective abstract categories in the interaction with a material that is chosen by me. This research is embedded in the path of composing.

The hazard that accompanies my compositional choices is balanced by an objective manipulation that analyzes the reasons of my instinctive choice. I try to preserve the radical instinct and the radical construction. In this sense I aim to analyse the rational with the irrational and vice-versa.

The thematic approach allows a double preservation of the objectivity of the musical material and the subjectivity of my movement inside the material. Although these sensations are part of general compositional sensations, they are more than that as, in my music, they constitute the very core of my poetical motivation. The recursive process of my compositions is to start from complexity to arrive to the simplest elements that characterize this complexity; they are the result of this reduction, which is the consequence of a necessary need for clarity. I try to reduce the whole to the last element of the piece, objective and subjective, purely acoustical and purely emotional, trying to touch the matter that constitutes the material and to create the most direct path to the piece.

Looking at the compositional process from this perspective, composition is an act of conscious expansion of acoustic awareness through the existential experience. Therefore music could be considered as a transparent mirror that reflects the internal and external experience, allowing a continuos superposition of these two dimensions. In a nutshell, the final position of that interstice, the internal and the external experience, is the place where the piece of music is generated.

In ---, "La poétique du " live " en musique électroacoustique", RFIM, vol. n°2

-automne 2012, s.d.

---, "Live versus Real", Contemporary Music Review, vol. 10:02, 1994, pp. 95-101.

---, Music, Electronic Media and Culture, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000.

Fedele, Ivan, Ali di Cantor, Suvini Zerboni, Milan, 2004.

---, Arco di Vento, Suvini Zerboni, Milan, 2003.

Feldman, Morton, "Between Categories", Contemporary Music Review, 1988.

---, Durations III, Peters Editions, New York, 1961.

---,For Franz Kline, Peters Editions, New York, 1962.

---, The O'Hara Songs, Peters Editions, New York, 1962.

---, De Kooning, Peters Editions, New York, 1963.

---, Between Categories, New York, 1969.

---,Patterns in a Chromatic Field, Universal, London, 1981.

---,Three Voices, Universal, London, 1982, ---,Crippled Symmetry, Universal, London, 1983.

---,For Philip Guston, Universal, London, 1984.

---, Piano and String Quartet, Universal, London, 1985.

  During the analysis of my works I have become aware of the importance of the notion of limits in my music. For instance, I try to limit invention with the strictness of the composed object. In this manner I have immediate control of each passage of the piece. The relationship between the clarity of the musical object and the possibilities of free creativity is fundamental as it allows awareness of musical choice. Thus this relationship gives the key to go through the existential chaos that grounds my creative choicesIn my pieces I need a precise evolution of envelopes, a precise sound projection and the possibility to work on a wide range of dynamics. I seek a strong coherence in the succession of musical events, which must be at the same time clear and mysterious. I point firstly to the unity of the piece as the most important element, which influences the local compositional strategies as a far horizon, clear, but extremely far. The colours, figures and forms are the means to reach this fixed horizon. The composition is considered as a free route to the piece; the discovery of the constraints of the piece implies choices in the material developments that obliges a selection of a reduced material that derives the majority of the composed elements. In this manner my intuitive research finds a resistance in the construction that illuminates the implicit order of the piece in the path of the composition.

This

  structure is characterized by three intervals: major seventh, minor seventh and major sixth quarter-tone sharp. It is devised in two registers in contrary movement: the bass line, ascending semitone -F#, G -and the melodic line, descending semitone -F, E. This thematic configuration has a centripetal directionality: both profiles focus towards the centre of the octave, converging, by minor second progressions, to the central C 7 . At p. 4 a new profile based on the intervals of perfect fifth and octave

Figure 1 :Figure 2 :

 12 Figure 1: Ritratto Voce 1st theme. The structure of the theme is centripetal. The progression of the intervals, divided in two opposite registers, converge towards the centre of the octave between f#4 and f5

Figure 3 :Figure 4 :

 34 Figure 3: Celestografia, first section chords. Chords are built on the superposition of major seventh (eb4-d5) and minor ninth intervals (c5-d#6)

Figure 5 :Figure 6 :Figure 7 :Figure 8 :Figure 9 :

 56789 Figure 5: Celestografia, second part chords

Figure 10 :

 10 Figure 10: Le Cose, themes meiosis

20Figure 11 :Figure 12 :

 1112 Figure 11: Endeared II second theme

Figure 13 :Figure 14 :

 1314 Figure 13: Autoritratto, beginning, minor second theme

  23

Figure 16 :

 16 Figure 16: Visioni, second theme Figure 15: Visioni, first theme derived from Le Cose's first theme

Figure 20 :Figure 21 :

 2021 Figure 20: La Visione delle Cose, zither speaker

Figure 22 :Figure 23 :

 2223 Figure 22: Four Walls' intervals. Derived from the original forms of the musical ideas of Le Cose, Endeared II and Due Parole. The material is common also with the typology indicated for Visioni and Celestografia. In this sense the portfolio appears as strongly connected around a reduced number of intervals and materials.

Figure 24 :

 24 Figure 24: Ritratto Voce, hesitating repetition of the first note

Figure 27 :

 27 Figure 27: Ritratto Voce, dynamic chiasma

Figure 28

 28 Figure 28 Ritratto Voce

Figure 29 : 35 Figure 30 :Figure 31 :Figure 32 :Figure 33 :

 293530313233 Figure 29: Ritratto Voce, thematic connection point

Figure 34 :Figure 35 :

 3435 Figure 34: Autoritratto, melodic element in the higher register

Figure 36 :

 36 Figure 36: Autoritratto, third configuration, central section

Figure 37 :Figure 38 :Figure 39 :Figure 40 :Figure 41 :Figure 43 :Figure 45 :

 37383940414345 Figure 37: Autoritratto, alternation of the dynamics in the development

  49

Figure 46 :

 46 Figure 46: Injection and projection of themes

Figure 47 :

 47 Figure 47: degree of injectivity and projectivity of themes in the portfolio

  approach.As suggested by Smalley, textural behaviour has two interactive time dimensions: the vertical and the horizontal. Both belong to two different configurations, the un-pressured category of motion coordination and the directionally pressured motion passage (Figure48).

  53

Figure 48 :

 48 Figure 48: Denis Smalley 's textural behaviour diagram. Denis Smalley, "Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes", Organised Sound 2 (2): 107-126, p.119.

  the same time. That, of course, is in itself a behavioural relationship. 14 In fact in my music un-pressured textures are characterized by the free movement of sounds in the compositional space. It is represented by an open space without causal links between musical elements. And in my music I try to re-construct a hypothetical causality. For instance in Ritratto Voce the possibilities of the themes are constructed as two parallel hypothesis. In the reconstruction process the un-pressured configuration allows one to indicate and go through the compositional possibilities. On the opposite pole the vertical coordination, which I interpret as un-pressured, Smalley defines the horizontal dynamic through the concept of continuum. Th e voluntarypressured continuum is characterized by the common energy of the amalgam

  which the components of the musical material are modified by changing the dimension of the melodic elements and the range of registers used, distancing the pitches and changing the values of the original notes. Horizontal fragmentations are based on expansion or reduction of the values and the extension and compression of phrases; vertical fragmentations are based on the spreading of the line in the different registers.

  classical and contemporary composers. The procedures of romantic composers inspired my compositional work in the sense of the coherence of the utilisation of the material. The development of the thematic ideas implies the compositional formal profile. Fragmentation is a technique used to suspend the discourse and to build transitions to new movements, or to introduce some important musical element.

  58

Figure 49 :Figure 50 :Figure 51 :Figure 52 : 248 Figure 53 :

 4950515224853 Figure 49: Beethoven, III Symphony, 2nd movement, bar 239

  In the last Beethoven example, the note E is fragmented, transposed and repeated in the horizontal and vertical space. The flutes and violins repeat the note, first in fast repetitions and then fragmented by larger pauses. This transition is for me a model of vertical fragmentation.

Figure 54 :

 54 Figure 54: Mahler, IX Symphony, 1st movement, bars 1-6

Figure 55 :Figure 56 :

 5556 Figure 55: Endeared II, 1 st theme

  64

Figure 57 :

 57 Figure 57: Due Parole (Endeared III)

  two parts: Bb and B in the vibraphone and piano, and C and Db in the piano and flute.

  65

Figure 58 :Figure 59 :

 5859 Figure 58: Le Cose, bar 51

Figure 60 :

 60 Figure 60: La Visione delle Cose, page 19, vertical fragmentation

  68

Figure 61 :Figure 63 :Figure 62 :Figure 65 :

 61636265 Figure 61: Le Cose, bars 14-15

Figure 69 :Figure 68 :Figure 67 :Figure 66 :Figure 70 :Figure

 6968676670 Figure 69: Le Cose, bars 86-87

74Figure 72 :Figure 73 :Figure 74 :Figure 75 :

 72737475 Figure 72: Le Cose, bars 154-155

Figure 76 :Figure 77 :Figure 78 :Figure 79 :Figure 80 :Figure 81 :Figure 82 :

 76777879808182 Figure 76: Le Cose, beginning

Figure 84 :Figure 83 :Figure 87 :Figure 88 :

 84838788 Figure 84: Celestografia, bars 126-127

Figure 89 :Figure 92 :

 8992 Figure 89: Tre Case, pressured dynamic event

Figure 93 :

 93 Figure 93: circular dialectics in abstract categories

The

  themes and categories that I try to reveal insert my compositional activity in a larger context. The horizon provided by the image of the piece guides my musical choices, which I try to define in the most precise and necessary manner: I try to find the piece. The free open space based on the chaotic dimension of experience finds a momentary order in the continuous process of disambiguation of which music is part. The processes of "tuning" and "retuning" are not rhetorically filled in the composition but instead give the concrete fundamentals that form the basis of my compositional work. I try to grasp the moment in which the whole composition appears coherent, trying to suspend that instant before it disappears in the chaotic stream of connections.

  that sense my music is an attempt to represent and indicate my transparent mirror. My music is a mirrored double representation of the internal experience of sound by means of its external definition. Time is conceived as the internal experience that achieves an intersubjective dimension in the compositional process. Therefore time and space interact towards the acoustic medium, taking the subjective and the objective to a larger dimension. This existential relationship of me as subject and the objectivity of sound itself creates the two poles of my musical creativity whereby the absence of the subjective underlines the presence of the objective and vice versa. This dialectic is defined, technically, by oppositional categories that inform my compositional research: presence and absence, continuity and discontinuity, addition and subtraction, homogeneity and heterogeneity, subjective and objective, pressured and un-pressured. My music could be interpreted as the result of the challenge between the internal and the external representations of sound. This analytical presentation of the characteristics of my works could lead to new perspectives based on a study of my technical choices. I have tried to fix the points that constitute the first bricks of a deeper understanding of philosophical questions that inform my composing practice. It is difficult to clearly analyse these problems because of the invisible and unrepresentable nature of the experiences considered in the analysis. In fact, music carries the correct form of expression of these perspectives, compensating for the lack of vocabulary possibilities of the rational discourse. This research constitutes the first attempt to shed light on how I can achieve a perspective closer to representation spatio-verticale du caractere musical grave-aigu et l'elaboration de la notion de hauteur de son dans la conscience musicale occidentale", Acta musicologica, 1979. Dufourt, Hugues, Mathesis et subjectivité. Des conditions historiques de possibilité de la musique occidentale. Essai sur les principes de la musique I, Paris, MF, 2007. Einarson, Einar Torfi, Nine Tensions, 2008. Emmerson, Simon, "Acoustic/Electroacoustic: The Relationship with Instruments", Journal of New Music Research, 1998.

  First performance, Torino, Unione Musicale, April 11 th 2012, Valentina Coladonato, soprano, Prometeo Quartet, Commissioned by Fondazione Spinola-Banna per l'arte.

	Celestografia (2010-12)	11'
	for soprano and string quartet

Endeared II (2012) 9' for soprano, mezzosoprano and cimbalom

	First Performance, St. Pierre-le-Jeune, Strasbourg, May 19 th 2012, Ensemble La Dolce
	Maniera, commissioned by La Dolce Maniera
	Publisher: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, Milano

  The perturbing relationship of vision and illusion on which we base our perceptive relationship with what we experience." Due parole is based on the association of ideas. A pair of words leads to others and the composition of the text is parallel to the composition of the music, to the point of almost becoming the same thing. The piece presents masses and contrasts based on harmonies created by the distortion, through frequency modulation, of a handful of pitches that successive counterpoints form into outlines. In a nutshell, the construction of the piece is related to pure form: the sound source, the dynamic violence and the harmonic construction bring me increasingly closer to the world of Edgard Varèse".

	Due Parole (Endeared III) (2012)	9'
	for vocal quartet and string quartet
	First Performance, Fondation Royaumont, Voix Nouvelles, September 22 nd 2012, Atelier
	Vocale de Royaumont/Les Cris de Paris, Diotima Quartet, G. Jourdain, conductor.
	Publisher: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, Milano
	"La Visione delle Cose (2012)	25'
	for ensemble and electronics

First Performance, Without Cage Minifest de Musique de Demain, Strasbourg, October 19 th 2012, Ensemble Vortex, Commissioned by Ensemble Vortex and dedicated to Francisco Huguet.

  In the confusing, wide-open sound-world, composers need criteria for selecting sound materials and understanding structural relationships. So descriptive and conceptual tools which classify and relate sounds and structures can be valuable compositional aids.

21

Spectromorphology isn't a compositional theory, but it is a strong conceptual tool that allows to understand the musical relationships of the musical objetcs via the experience of sound reception. In this sense spectromorphology helped me to become aware of the perceptive results of my compositional choices.

Denis Smalley, "Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes", OrganisedSound, 1997, pp. 107-26, p. 119.

MarcLeman, Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, MIT Press, 2007. In this text Marc Leman defines the notion of projection in the sense of

D. Smalley, "Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes", Organised Sound 2(2), 107-126, p. 1.

Denis Smalley, "Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes", Organised Sound, 1997, pp. 107-26, p. 118.

Ibid.

D.Smalley, op.cit.

+ quarter tone higher; -quarter tone lower

Figure 91: Tre Case, bars 193-195

Marie-Elisabeth Duchez, "An historical and epistemological approach to the musical notion of "form-bearing" element", Contemporary MusicReview,

Acknowledgments I would like to thank my PhD. supervisor, Dr. Aaron Cassidy, for his patience and ability to adapt his advice. The work on this thesis obliged me to formulate my implicit internal perception, projecting it in the external world. I am happy about that. Thank you. I want to thank Prof. Monty Adkins and Prof. Pierre Alexander Tremblay, Dr. Scott Mclaughlin and Dr. Alex Harker, whose convolution VST was very important for the realization of my piece Visioni.

I will be forever thankful to Adam Starkie, Gerardo Gozzi and Gaja for their friendship and help.

LIST OF CONTENTS


Kamel Smaïli
email: smaili@loria.fr-

Salma Jamoussi
email: jamoussi@loria.fr-

David Langlois
email: langlois@loria.fr-

Jean-Paul Haton

Statistical Feature Language Model

à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Introduction

Statistical language models are widely used in speech recognition to constraint the decoding process to choose at each step the best words. They are based on the prior probability of a linguistic unit (often word) given a history of the same type (typically n-grams). Other linguistics units can be taken into account by integrating them in a specific model (typically n-classes). In this case, separate models are constructed and their output are combined. Another method, more interesting but more complex, is based on the maximum entropy [1] and integrates in the same framework the features which come from each model. The chosen model satisfying all the constraints is the one with the highest entropy. Other methods contribute to the improvement of perplexity by making the context larger and more significant without increasing the complexity [2]. One of the problem of statistical language models is to consider the word depending on only precedent words or classes. Whereas, in natural language the production of a word depends on several features: lexical, syntactic, semantic, ... In fact and particularly in French for instance, the gender and number of the left context of a word affect the production of the next word. In the evaluation of a speech recognition system, if the word mangé has been recognized instead of mangées 1 , the system considers it as an error. In order to take into account a maximum number of word features, we propose in this paper a new statistical method based on features (SFLM).

Statistical Feature Language Model

In inflected natural languages like French, linguistic features are very useful to reduce speech recognition errors due to homonyms. Therefore, we propose a Statistical Feature Language Model in which a word is viewed as an array of m features, so that:

W =      f 1 f 2 . . . f m     
Each f i is a linguistic characteristic of W . These characteristics or features could be the word itself, its syntactic class, its gender, its number, its semantic class, ... The classical n-gram model is defined by:

P (w 1 . . . w n ) = n i=1 P (w i |w i-1 . . . w i-k+1 ) (1)
By analogy, we define a SFLM by:

P (w 1...m 1 , . . . w 1...m n ) = n i=1 P           f i 1 f i 2 . . . f i m           f i-1 1 f i-1 2 . . . f i-1 m      . . .      f i-k+1 1 f i-k+1 2 . . . f i-k+1 m          
(2) where w 1...m i is the feature array corresponding to the i t h word and (f j 1 , f j 2 , . . . , f j m ) t indicates the j th feature array word of the history. Bilmes [START_REF] Bilmes | Factored language models and generalized parallel backoff[END_REF] proposes a similar model supported by a graphical model. The model we propose here is very simple to implement with the 1 mangé and mangées have the same pronunciation classical language modeling toolkits (CMU, SLRI). In fact, what we propose is to replace each word in the training and test corpora by its feature array and let a LM toolkit to run a SFLM.

SFLM in practice

The implementation of SFLM consists of assigning to each word its m features. In order to validate our approach in a real case, in the following experiments, we decided to use a SFLM of two features. We choose as first feature the word itself, and its syntactic class as second feature.

Syntactic classes

To syntactically cluster the vocabulary, we use the following rule : A word is put in a class if any other word of the same class can be substituted to it in a context without any change in the syntactic structure of the sentence. To make that possible, we defined some syntactic contexts and checked all the words of the dictionary on these contexts. In this clustering a word can belong to several classes. This leads to a set of 230 classes which have been used to tag all the corpora with the Viterbi algorithm [START_REF] Smaïli | Automatic and manual clustering for large vocabulary speech re cognition: A comparative study[END_REF].

Corpora and vocabulary

The training and test corpus have been extracted from "Le Monde" newspaper. We used 40 million words for training and 1,8 words for tests. Both corpora have been labelled as described before. For the vocabulary, we selected all the words occurred more than 20 times. This leads to a vocabulary of 47000 units.

An Overview of the Shannon's Game

The Shannon game [START_REF] Shannon | Prediction and entropy of printed english[END_REF] has been adapted in [START_REF] Bimbot | An alternative scheme for perplexity estimation and its assessment for the evaluation of language models[END_REF] in order to give an alternative method to perplexity for evaluating language models. The aim of this new evaluation protocol is to estimate the prediction capacity of a language model. This protocol has been used in a comparative evaluation campaign for language models organized by AUPELF-UREF in which we have taken part [START_REF] Jardino | A first evaluation campaign for language models[END_REF].

A set of truncated sentences is provided to the model and is used as a test corpus. The goal of this protocol consists of supplying a list of candidate words for each truncated sentence. To each word is associated a bet which estimates the likelihood of the candidate word. To do that, based on the history (the truncated sentence), the language model bets on each vocabulary word by assigning a value between 0 and 1. Therefore, the perplexity is evaluated as the inverse of the geometric mean of the bets placed on the correct words. To control the volume of data, the number of candidates for each truncated sentence has been limited to the top list.

All the candidates are sorted in decreasing bet. If the correct word is not in the ordered list of candidates, its probability is set to a floor value.

In the experiments we did, we have investigated:

• the number of times the word to guess is proposed at the first rank,

• the number of times the word to guess is proposed in the five first ranks,

• the mean rank of words to guess calculated over all the truncated sentences,

• the Shannon perplexity,

• the percentage of correct words retrieved in the top list, over all the truncated sentences.

In our experiments, we randomly truncated each sentence of the test corpus. This leads to about 57500 truncated sentences (and as many words has to be guessed). We fixed the size of the top list to 5000 [START_REF] Bimbot | An alternative scheme for perplexity estimation and its assessment for the evaluation of language models[END_REF].

Results and comments

SFLM has been tested in terms of perplexity and Shannon's game on large corpora and has been compared to baseline models. The classical perplexity has been obtained with CMU toolkit. The SFLM we used is based on two features but can be obviously extended to several other features. In order to make the comparison relevant, we decide to test the models with the same vocabulary and the same training and test corpora. Each word in the training corpus C word has been replaced by its features vector (FV) which leads to a new corpus C f eatures . Therefore, from C f eatures we extract a vocabulary V f eatures of about 47000 FV (each of them occurred more than 20 times). Then, with this material we run a 2-gram, a 3-gram and a 4-gram models with several discounting methods as shown in table 1. For the baseline models we construct a vocabulary V words from V f eatures by eliminating all the features of a word and by keeping only one occurrence of each word. Some interesting points are brought to light by this table that are worth mentioning in passing. For all n-grams, SFLMs outperform the corresponding baseline methods when the perplexity is considered without UNK. The improvement reaches 7% for 2-grams, 6% for 3-grams and 4, 8% for 4-grams. On the other hand, this observation is not true when we take into account UNK. This does not constitute a drawback of our approach because language models have to be evaluated in terms of perplexity by excluding UNK. The UNK has an important probability due to the sparseness data and this makes the perplexity decreasing abnormally.

Another important remark concerns the perplexity obtained by the trigram SFLM (105.65) which is equivalent or more exactly slightly better than a classical 4-gram (105.94). This illustrates the importance of integrating in statistical language model the linguistic characteristics of words. In order to investigate deeply this approach and before testing it in a real speech recognition system, we tested its capability to predict words. For that we did several experiments in the framework of Shannon's game. In this experiment we use a vocabulary of 20K feature word and a bigram a trigram language models. The truncated corpus (57500 sentences) is the the one we used in the experiments described in table 1. Table 2 shows that, by using SFLM more than 200 words have been recognized in addition in the first rank and more than 400 words in the first five ranks. This result is very important for a speech recognition system, it shows that it will be possible to improve the word error by recovering more correct words. Even if the percentage of correct words has not changed, the mean rank of recognized words has been improved by 8 points by using a bigram FLMS.

Some tracks of improvement

FLMs leads to increase the size of the vocabulary, therefore the data sparseness problem increases, and as for classical n-gram models, we have to develop an efficient backoff strategy. We can backoff as usual to the smaller model by considering the feature word as a single block. This what we did in this work, but we can backoff more efficiently by using a smaller word array feature. In order to highlight our matter, let us to give an example. If a word feature array (f 1 , . . . , f i , . . . , f m ) is not seen in the training corpus, then the vector ( * , . . . , f i , . . . , f m ) or (f 1 , . . . , * , . . . , f m ), etc. may have more chance to be in the training corpus. This could lead to the notion of parallel backoff graph as proposed by Bilmes [START_REF] Bilmes | Factored language models and generalized parallel backoff[END_REF]. There are several ways to backoff and only few paths are interesting. For each history, across the backoff graph, we have to find the best path(s). This issue is very important to benefit of the whole potential of the approach we proposed. In such a complex set of word features, we must, for each history, find towards which features we do backoff. In precedent work, we developed a method named the Selected History Principle [START_REF] Langlois | Clustering words contexts based on statistical language models prediction capability[END_REF][START_REF] Langlois | Retrieving phrases by selecting the history: application to automatic speech recognition[END_REF] which can partially gives a solution to this problem. This principle allows to measure the prediction capacity of a language model (and therefore the best backoff strategy) for one history. This principle will be the cornerstone of our backoff strategy.

Conclusion

In this paper, we present a new approach for statistical language modeling. This approach considers that linguistic units are complex objects including several kind of informations: orthographic form, syntactic features (gender, number, possible syntactic role in the sentence), semantic features (related topic, paradigmatic relationships with others 'words'. . . ). Classically, one develops a different language model dedicated to each kind of features and then models are combined. We argue that all features should be involved in the same model. The response we give consists in integrating them into lexical units by creating Feature Vectors.

We present first experiments on SFLM by using only two features. The results show that this new approach is capable to outperform the classical models in terms of perplexity and predictable words. In terms of perplexity, a trigram SFLM model improves the perplexity of a classical trigram model by 6% and reaches the performance of a classical 4-gram model, when unknown words are not included. The Shannon game provides a better oracle for future integration in speech recognition. Our approach allows to rank more words at rank 1 than classical n-gram models. This is promising for speech recognition because, at final, only the 1-best output is provided by the speech decoding system.

We think improving this approach by investigating three directions:

• First, we will add new features coming from our precedent works: topic features [START_REF] Brun | Contribution to topic identification by using word similarity[END_REF], semantic concepts [START_REF] Jamoussi | Understanding process for speech recognition[END_REF], gender, number. . .

• Second, we will estimate the benefit of including continuous valued features. The estimation of parameters will have to be adapted, but in a first step, it will be possible to go back to the discrete case by using quantization.

• Third, as explained in previous section, we will develop a strategy based on the Selected History Principle, in order to find efficient backoff strategies among backoff graph [START_REF] Bilmes | Factored language models and generalized parallel backoff[END_REF].

The good results we obtained encourage us to introduce this model in our speech recognition system based on Julius open source [START_REF] Lee | Julius -an open source real-time large vocabulary recognition engine[END_REF] as part of the first step-pass decoding process. This will be done easily due to the facility of using features in our approach. The current vocabulary of our speech recognition system will be transformed by replacing each word by its feature vector.

[1] R. Rosenfeld, "Adaptive statistical language modeling: A maximum entropy approach," Ph. [2] I. Zitouni, K. Smaili, and J.-P. Haton, "Statistical language modeling based on variablelength sequences," Computer Speech and Language, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 27-41, Jan 2003.

Table 1 :

 1 Comparison of SFLM and baseline models performance in terms of perplexity with and without unknown word

	D. dis-

Table 2 :

 2 Comparison of SFLM and baseline models performance in terms of perplexity with and without unknown word Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, April 1994.


Efficient linear combination for distant n-gram models

The objective of this paper is to present a large study concerning the use of distant language models. In order to combine efficiently distant and classical models, an adaptation of the back-off principle is made. Also, we show the importance of each part of a history for the prediction. In fact, each sub-history is analyzed in order to estimate its importance in terms of prediction and then a weight is associated to each class of sub-histories. Therefore, the combined models take into account the features of each history's part and not the whole history as made in other works. The contribution of distant n-gram models in terms of perplexity is significant and improves the results by 12.8%. Making the linear combination depending on sub-histories achieves an improvement of 5.3% in comparison to classical linear combination.

Introduction

In classical statistical language models (SLM), the whole history is used as a single block in order to recognize or to predict the next word (Fig 1). The aim of this paper is to show that the history contains words which have different influence and consequently weights for prediction (Fig 2).

In order to measure the usefulness of each history's part, distant n-gram models seem to be a good way to deal with this problem [START_REF] Langlois | A new distance language model for a dictation machine: application to maud[END_REF]. The following examples illustrate this. In the sentence "The book I bought is brown", "brown" is related to "book". The other words between them do not participate directly to this relationship. In the sentence "This changed conviction into certainty", we guess there is a relationship between the words "conviction" and "certainty". This is a semantic relationship: the two words cover the same idea of "evaluation of a fact". 0000 0000 1111 1111 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 In this paper, we present:

• A simple linear combination between a classical model and a distant one. A unique weight is assigned to each model.

• A linear combination as in previous point but the models' weights here depend on each history. More exactly, a model's weight depends on the class of each sub-history (i.e. history's part).

The originality of this research is concerned by the development of a well chosen weights set for each language model. These weights are dependent on:

• the language model participating in the combination,

• the history's part used by the language model to predict the next word.

In other words, the weights are estimated not on the entire history but on each used component.

The reminder of this paper is organized as follows: section 2 gives an overview about distant language models dealing with the histories part by part. Section 3 presents a simple linear combination between classical and distant language models. In section 4, the proposed model is enhanced by integrating language model weights depending on histories or more exactly on sub-histories' classes. Experiments are presented in each section and the results confirm the thesis defended in this paper. Finally, conclusions are drawn in section 5.

Modelization of distance in SLM

The two most common distant models used in literature are the cache model and the trigger model [START_REF] Mori | Language model adaptation[END_REF].

David Langlois, Kamel Smaïli, Jean-Paul Haton

The former deals with the self-relationship between a word present in the history and itself: if a word is frequent in the history, it has more chance to appear once again. This is a distant relationship because the history spans other a larger number of words: several hundred words for a cache model against one, two or three words for a n-gram model.

The latter modelizes the relationship between two words. It deals with couple of words v → w such that if v (the triggering word) is in the history, w (the triggered word) has more chance to appear. For example, "exportation" → "corn" could be a trigger. Such a model is distant because the respective occurrences of the two words can be distant. As just said, this last model deals with couple of possibly distinct words. But, in fact, the majority of triggers are self triggers (v → v): a word triggers itself.

These two models deal with distant relationships but loose a great part of local and syntactic relationships. The relationship is just between a bag of words in the history and the word to predict. In addition, the purpose of this research is to study the usefulness of each history's part in terms of prediction. That is why we decided to work on distant n-gram models [START_REF] Huang | The SPHINX speech recognition system: an overview[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenfeld | A maximum entropy approach to adaptative statistical language modelling[END_REF]. These models use a distant part in history to predict the word to follow. Such models could be defined by two parameters: the size n -1 of the history's part or sub-history and the distance d between this sub-history and the word to predict. More formally, we define a d-n-gram model by:

P d (w i |w 1 . . . w i-1 ) = P d (w i |w i-n+1-d . . . w i-1-d ) = N d (w i-n+1-d ...w i-1-d ,wi) N (w i-n+1-d ...w i-1-d ) (1) where N d (w i-n+1-d . . . w i-1-d , w i ) is the frequency of w i-n+1-d . . . w i-1-d . . . w i . Note that a 0-n-gram model is the classical n-gram model.
This model allows us to study separately each history's part by varying d and n. In the following, we show the efficiency and the contribution of distant models when they are combined with classical models.

Evaluation of distant n-gram models

The following models are developed by using a vocabulary made up of 20 000 words, and a training corpus extracted from the French newspaper Le Monde (38 Million words). A corpus of 2 million of words has been devoted to development and another one to test (also 2 million of words). Performance of the baseline models are given in Table 1. Each model is linearly combined with its lower-order models to prevent from unseen events. The parameters of these linear combinations are estimated using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm [START_REF] Dempster | Maximum-likelihood from incomplete data via the em algorithm[END_REF] 1: Baseline classical n-gram models: performance when using the linear combination.

Integration of distant n-gram models

It is obvious that a distant n-gram model could not be used alone. In fact, it takes into account only a part of the history. Experiments shown that when we use it alone the perplexity could reach a very high value (717 for n = 2 and d = 4, see [START_REF] Langlois | Notions d'événements distants et d'événements impossibles en modélisation stochastique du langage : application aux modèles ngrammes de mots et de séquences[END_REF]).

In the light of this remark and to take advantage of distant models, we decided to combine them with classical n-grams. Several models with distance up to d are combined with the baseline model.

Figure 3 shows the performance of such combinations for bigram models. In the same way, Figure 4 shows the performance for trigram models. The use of different distant bigram models achieves an improvement of 7.1% in terms of perplexity. Also, distant trigram leads to an improvement, but it is less important than in the previous case (3.1%). We explain this difference by the overlap between the history of d-trigram and (d + 1)-trigram. In other words, the intersection between two distant trigram models could be not null as in Figure 5.

To sum up, these experiments confirm that a distant language model provides information which is necessary for combination. But the utility of distant n-gram models decreases with the distance: a distance greater than 2 does not provide more information.

Back-off smoothed models

The back-off [START_REF] Katz | Estimation of probabilities from sparse data for the language model component of a speech recognizer[END_REF] principle, as the linear combination, allows to prevent from unseen events. In this section, we test the same combination as in the previous experiment, but each model is smoothed with the back-off principle. Whereas, in the previous section all the models have been interpolated with unigram and zerogram. In our case, after several experiments, we used the absolute discounting method [START_REF] Federico | Spoken dialogues with computers, chapter Language Modelling[END_REF].

We propose in the following to combine two models, both are smoothed by using the back-off principle. The first one is a distant n-gram smoothed by lower-order models until zerogram. The second one is a classical n-gram smoothed also with lower-order models. This combination is formulated by equations (2) to (4) for a distant bigram model. Table 2 presents the performance of the proposed models. We can conclude that our adaptation of the back-off principle leads to better results than the linear combination. Finally, the contribution of a distant bigram model amounts to 7.9% in comparison to the baseline. In the

P (w i |w i-1 ) = f r * (w i |w i-1 ) if N (w i-1 w i ) > 0 α 1 (w i-1 )P (w i ) elsewhere (2)
P (w i |•w i-2 ) = f r * (w i |w i-2 ) if N (w i-2 • w i ) > 0 α 2 (w i-2 )P (w i ) elsewhere (3)
P (w i |w i-2 w i-1 ) = λP (w i |w i-1 )+(1-λ)P (w i |•w i-2 ) (4

Efficient combination of distant n-gram

It is known that constant weights for interpolated models don't lead to the best performance. In order to improve the model one could use dependent history weights [START_REF] Federico | Spoken dialogues with computers, chapter Language Modelling[END_REF]. The model presented in the previous section is now enhanced by assigning a weight depending on the sub-history used by the combined model. More formally, in order to combine K models, M 1 , . . . , M K , a set of weights α 1 ,. . . ,α K is defined and the combination is expressed by:

P (w|h) = K i=1 α i (h)P i (w|h) (5)
The problem, here, is that the weights are estimated using a finite development corpus. This corpus is not sufficient to estimate a huge number of parameters. The idea is then to classify histories and to set a weight to each class. Let C(h) be the class of the history h. Then (5) can be rewritten as:

P (w|h) = K i=1 α i (C(h))P i (w|h) (6)

Classification of sub-histories

A classification based on the entire history does not take into account the features of each part which constitutes it. What we propose in the following is to break the history into the several parts or sub-histories used by the combined models. Each sub-history is associated to a specific model. Each sub-history is analyzed in order to estimate its importance in terms of prediction and it is then put into a class. Such a class is directly linked to the value of the sub-history frequency: this class gathers all sub-histories which have approximately the same frequency. The final objective is to classify the whole history by combining the sub-histories or more exactly by combining classes. EM algorithm is then used in order to find the best weight for each model and each history. For example, let h = w 1 . . . w i-2 w i-1 be a history. The distant bigram model uses the part w i-2 and the classical bigram model uses the part w i-1 . These sub-histories correspond respectively to the classes C(w i-2 ) and C(w i-1 ). Then, to combine these two models, we propose to define the class of the history h as to be the couple C(h) = (C(w i-2 ), C(w i-1 )). In our experiments, the set of sub-histories is split into MAXCLASS classes. In order to find the best number of classes, we experimented several values of MAXCLASS.

Figure 6 plots a history dependent linear combination of distant and classical bigram models. Whereas, figure 7 plots a history dependent linear combination of distant and classical trigram models. Figure 6 shows that the perplexity decreases and reaches 115.4 when the number of classes increases until 8000 classes and the performance is worse for more classes. We can achieve the same conclusion for trigram except that the optimal number of classes is 4000 and the perplexity reaches 85.2. When these models are compared to the baseline ones (bigram respectively trigram) we achieve an improvement for both about 12.8%. This original way to combine models leads to an improvement of 5.3% in comparison to a classical linear combination.

Conclusion

In this paper, we present a study about distant n-gram models and an original efficient method to combine them. We quantify their performances using the perplexity measure. In our knowledge, such a study is achieved for the first time. To discover the sub-histories which are truly useful for prediction, we showed that distant n-gram models are well suited. The contribution of distant bigram and trigram models is significant. This improvement is due to two reasons.

The first one concerns the adaptation of back-off principle for both distant and classical models. The second one concerns a relevant choice of the linear combination parameters in order to combine the models. These parameters are dependent on each history. More precisely, these parameters are dependent on each sub-history used by each model. This new model achieves an improvement of 12.8% in terms of perplexity. Beyond this improvement, we show in this paper that it is possible to estimate more efficiently the linear combination parameters by taking into account the history's usefulness for each model. This method outperforms the classical linear interpolation by 5.3%. In order to make this method relevant in a speech recognition system, it has to be integrated in the decoding algorithm. This necessitates an adaptation of Viterbi's algorithm. Our objective is now to adapt this algorithm.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Contiguous relationship taken into account by a classical n-gram model (here a 4-gram model).

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Example of possible distant relationships between the word to predict and several components of the history.In this paper, we present:

Figure 3 :Figure 4 :

 34 Figure 3: Combination of several distant bigram models with distance equal or less than d.97.8

Figure 5 :

 5 Figure 5: Overlap of the sub-histories used for prediction by a distant trigram model (here a 1-trigram) and a distant trigram model with lower distance (here a 0-trigram).

) where α 1

 1 and α 2 are normalization terms. f r * is a discounting factor. We use the following notations: formula (2) defines the model b u z, (3) defines the model db u z and (4) defines the linear combination (b u z)•(db u z). The classical linear combination is noted by db•b•u•z. In the same way, t denotes the trigram model, and dt denotes the distant trigram model.

  same way, the contribution of a distant trigram model amounts to 11.6%. Combination Perplexity b•u•z 132.4 db•b•u•z 123.9 (b u z)•(db u z) 121.9 t•b•u•z 97.8 dt•t•b•u•z 95.2 (t b u z)•(dt db u z) 86.5

Figure 6 :Figure 7 :

 67 Figure 6: Performance of the history dependent linear combination of a distant bigram and bigram models.

Table

  on the development data.

	Models Perplexity
	unigram	739.9
	bigram	132.4
	trigram	97.8

Table 2 :

 2 Contribution of distant bigram and distant trigram models by using or not the back-off principle.