Tesi presentata dall’autore lungo il suo percorso di Dottorando in Composizione elettroacustica, Arti sonore e Applicazioni intermediali presso il Conservatorio «U. Giordano» di Foggia.

«This article studies a single alto saxophone multiphonic, number 67 in Daniel Kientzy’s catalog, played and recorded thirty times with two modes of emission and at three dynamics, and in five continuous transitions from one emission to the other. Of the three notes with which the catalogs write this multiphonic, two are produced by the performer; the third arises from their simultaneous presence, at a frequency that coincides with their sum within an imperceptible deviation, and its pitch cannot be tuned. Its presence, on the other hand, depends on the way of blowing. At piano, with the same fingering and the same notated dynamic, changing only the emission takes the summation tone from barely perceptible to a constitutive component of the sound, a change of more than twenty decibels relative to the dominant component; and when it appears at the start of the note, it does so gradually.

Traditional notation writes the three notes in the same way and does not record the gesture on which the resulting sound depends. The article proposes a model of analysis that a musician can apply to other multiphonics, a way of notating them that entrusts to the sign what always holds and to a descriptive performance note what holds only under certain conditions, and some proposals for the composer, with the instrument alone and with electronics, including a synthetic multiphonic written in Csound, with a resonator that simulates the body of the instrument and a third-order nonlinearity, and a graphical interface for listening to it, analyzing it, and saving its sounds. The perceptual level is discussed in the form of predictions, because no listening tests were conducted.»