the recent publication of Estética da sonoridade [Aesthetics of Sonority] (2011), by the Franco-Brazilian musicologist Didier Guigue [Didier 2011]. In agreement with international studies, Guigue attaches the notion of sonority to Claude Debussy’s music, and from there carries out a musical analysis of works by several composers, creating a group that is quite heterogeneous, yet allied around the idea of sonority. Estética da sonoridade confronts the methodological problem that has been revealed in writings on the subject; namely, how to address the “I-don’tknow-what” that intuitively arises in such an easy way in the collective image of instrumental concert music. Far from having its borders completely drawn and formally clarified, this I-don’t-know-what has been given many pseudonyms. Some authors opt to expand the conception of timbre, distancing themselves from its purely acoustic meaning by broadening its cognitive dimension. Others refer to Pierre Schaeffer, making an effort to adapt the concept of sonorous object to the field of musical analysis, giving it much more elasticity. There are also other attempts that, instead of starting from already solidified terminologies, propose new nomenclatures, such as the category of sound-based music or even the notion of sonority. It is not a mere theoretical whim to put up for discussion the very designation of the phenomenon in question. It exposes, in fact, a broader methodological problem, which encompasses issues such as how the phenomenon is understood and the development of tools that can capture and make it available for segmentation, quantification, and comparison. In its complexity, this I-don’t-know-what seems to withstand the scientific-analytic method. However, it is there that Guigue’s writing acquires even more distinction within the recent international studies regarding the subject. Besides the musicological advancement, Guigue’s book offers a rich contribution to the field of theory. It proposes an analytical methodology specifically focusing on sonority. Guigue’s method does not rely on the tools of acoustic analysis, such as the use of spectrograms, rather his approach is centered on the notion of writing, and therefore is entirely structured by codified data from the score. 1 This analytical methodology allows for describing and interpreting the way in which sonority operates in the articulation of musical structures.
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Guigue's methodology requires calculations that can become quite complex. Therefore, within the Open Music environment Guigue created a library called SOAL (Sonic Object Analysis Library), capable of aiding the analyst in gathering and processing data. Besides being an open library, the tool permits works from MIDI files.