Sound Formulary: The Score as Pharmaceutical Compendium

       

                            

Sound Formulary: The Score as Pharmaceutical Compendium

By Bil Smith

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I’ve never believed in the sanctity of the score. I believe in its volatility. Its ability to behave like an unstable molecule defined by interaction, shaped by temperature, duration, resistance. In Sound Formulary, I have built not compositions but compendia.  These are scores that behave more like pharmacological guides than musical texts. Each symbol, each material inclusion, is not a note or cue, but an active agent with conditional efficacy.

Much like a formulary (the curated list of therapeutics permitted within a health system) my scores prescribe sounds through layers of permissions, black-box warnings, delivery vectors, contraindications, and dosage thresholds. I’m not interested in telling performers what to do, but under what conditions they may act. A score isn’t a set of instructions; it’s a permission structure laced with embedded contradictions.

I’ve always admired the absurd specificity of the pharmacopoeia: a drug’s classification, its delivery mode, its systemic effects, its inactive binders. This architecture became a model for me. In these works, an “active ingredient” might be a harmonic artifact. A “delivery mechanism” might be a performer’s breath timed against a page’s margin. An “excipient” (what pharma would call a non-active filler) is, in my scores, the whitespace, the metallic ink, the absence of gesture that supports the act without being it.

There is a score in this series titled RECOMBINANT TEXT / for Aural Bioequivalence Studies. It includes boxed labels, sample vial silhouettes, schedules of administration, and sequence variability dependent on circadian staging. Not as parody. Not as gimmick. But as structural syntax. These are protocols the way extended technique was for 20th-century composition: an invasive, sometimes alien, vocabulary forced into the system until it naturalizes.

This is the kind of music that doesn’t get played; it gets metabolized.

I’ve included materials like powdered gallium, scored cellulose, metallic inks, and blister pack embossings, not as texture, but as data. These elements are not ornamental; they hold notational function, they mediate performance possibilities, and they invite compliance or resistance. Every performance becomes a clinical trial.

In the world of drug development, a compound is tested, dosed, evaluated for efficacy and tolerability. I view my scores the same way. A first performance is a Phase I trial... does the concept survive contact with the body? Phase II is refinement. Phase III is confrontation. The FDA has no role here, but I have always imagined my notation under regulatory scrutiny: Is it legible? Is it dangerous? Does it induce affective disruption?

The musician becomes a pharmacologist. The sound becomes an off-label event.

The score: a diagnostic artifact.

The mistake: a necessary adverse reaction.

Music, in this formulary, is never safe.

It is investigational. And never intended for general use.

Scent as Score: Toward an Olfactory Notation in Contemporary Music

Contemporary music has long transcended the constraints of sound alone. From the visual scores of Cornelius Cardew to the algorithmic environments of generative music, the act of composition increasingly draws from multi-sensory vocabularies, challenging the boundaries of perception and authorship.

Amid these expansions, olfactory notation (the use of smells as formal compositional device) emerges as one of the least explored, yet most potent, vectors of aesthetic and emotional resonance. Consider the theoretical foundations, historical precedents, and experimental possibilities for using scent as a notational element in the domain of contemporary music.

What if a scent could function like a dynamic marking, a modal shift, or a temporal anchor? What if the audience did not only hear a piece, but inhaled its structure?

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Olfaction as Aesthetic Medium

The Neurological Power of Scent

The olfactory system bypasses the thalamus and connects directly to the limbic system, the part of the brain associated with emotion, memory, and instinctual behavior. Unlike sound, which is processed linearly and decoded over time, smell is immediate, immersive, and involuntary.

This neurological immediacy gives scent a unique power in compositional frameworks, not as illustration, but as a trigger for atmosphere, affect, or even structural memory.

Synesthetic and Multimodal Precedents

While synesthesia has often been invoked in visual-music mappings (color for pitch, shape for rhythm), olfactory correspondences have been less codified. Nevertheless, composers like Scriabin (who envisioned a “perfume organ”), and artists like Marcel Duchamp (who deployed scent in installations), suggest a latent sonic-olfactory field awaiting exploration.

In the 21st century, scent has been integrated into performance art, immersive theater, and even branding.  Its formalization is a compositional tool in music remains underdeveloped.

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Approaches to Olfactory Notation

There are several conceptual models through which scent may function as a notational element, either directly within the score or as a live, time-based performative gesture.

Scent as Structural Marker

In this model, distinct scents function like rehearsal letters, section markers, or thematic identifiers. Each scent denotes a specific part of the compositions signifying:

• The transition from one movement to another

• A modulation in key or texture

• A shift in ensemble configuration

Example: A lavender mist signals a shift to a drone-based harmonic field; a burst of citrus marks the entry of rhythmic counterpoint.

Scent as Emotional Dynamic

Rather than symbolizing structural shifts, scent can also operate as a dynamic indication analogous to dolce, agitato, or sotto voce. Here, the scent is emitted to evoke a specific mood, influencing both performer and audience perception.

Example: A faint smoke aroma may darken the perceived tonality, encouraging slower, breathier bowing techniques.

Scent as Tactile Score

In experimental contexts, scent-infused objects (scratched paper, perfumed pages, microcapsules) can act as embedded cues in the physical score. Performers interpret these cues through inhalation, associating scents with sonic gestures rather than notated symbols.

This gives rise to a kind of “olfactory tablature,” where smells become signs—just as graphic symbols do in experimental notation.

Scent as Temporal Envelope

Scent can be deployed as a durational field, much like a sustained chord or atmospheric texture. Diffused over time, it becomes an envelope for the sonic experience, framing the listener’s temporal awareness.

This method is particularly effective in site-specific or immersive works, where sound and scent are spatially choreographed.

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Practical Considerations & Constraints

Diffusion & Timing

Scents do not behave like sound. Their diffusion is slow, nonlinear, and spatially complex. Composers working with scent must consider:

• Room size and ventilation

• Scent volatility and dissipation rates

• Audience placement and olfactory fatigue

Timed-release technologies, such as scent projectors or wearable olfactory nodes, are increasingly available and offer more control in performance settings.

Standardization of Scent Symbols

Unlike musical notation, there is no universally accepted symbolic system for olfactory cues. A developing lexicon of scent symbols, shorthand, and olfactory grammars is needed much like Labanotation for movement or Braille music for tactile reading.

Audience Variation

Individual perception of scent varies widely based on genetics, memory, and cultural context. One person’s nostalgic vanilla is another’s medical trauma. Composers must navigate this unpredictable interpretive field carefully.

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Case Studies & Artistic Integration

Sissel Tolaas

While not a composer per se, Tolaas’ pioneering work in scent as material offers profound implications for music. Her synthetic recreations of fear sweat, city odors, and domestic spaces suggest a semantic scale for olfaction, akin to pitch or dynamic range.

Peter Ablinger

Known for pushing the limits of audibility and perception, Ablinger’s work invites a parallel in olfactory strategy: how scent may border or blur the threshold of perception, requiring heightened awareness.

Toward an Olfactory Score: Prototypes & Possibilities

A scent-based score could take multiple forms:

• Layered scent staves, with timed deployment instructions

• Scent-symbol hybrid notation (e.g., lavender spiral = harmonic suspension)

• Scent-mapped rehearsal spaces, where walking through scent fields generates improvisational cues

• Programmable scent releases, linked to MIDI triggers or gesture sensors

The future may even see the development of "olfactory patches" consisting of compositional units akin to electronic presets, blending multiple notes of scent to create mood profiles.

The Breath as Listening

To smell is to breathe, and to breathe is to time. In bringing scent into the notational field, composers enter the visceral register of listening, where perception is not only cerebral, but corporeal, cellular, and olfactorily inscribed.

"Some Remarks on the Notational Archetypes of Detonated Modernism" by Robert Castillo

Some Remarks on the Notational Archetypes of Detonated Modernism (as evidenced in the Scores of Bil Smith Composer)

by Robert Castillo

It would be neither precise nor helpful to say that Detonated Modernism is a notational “style.” It is not.

What Bil Smith has constructed through some mix of patentable madness, Dadaist engineering, and a deep if mostly misanthropic regard for post-Boulezian compositional ambition is better described as a recursive framework for symbolic implosion.

The scores themselves resemble something you might find rolled up in a tube at an abandoned space agency, labeled “Classified Temporal Folding Experiments / Music.” They exhibit the graphic residue of high-modernist architecture (Corbusian grids, constructivist diagonals), only interrupted by obliterative overprinting, typographic sabotage, and diagrammatic seizures.

Glyphic Overload and the Semiotic Failstate

What distinguishes Detonated Modernism from its historical predecessor (i.e., Modernism before the detonation, let’s call it) is the deliberate weaponization of notation’s authority. These scores present themselves with the visual grammar of institutional control. Clean staff systems, vectorized symbols, occasional appearances of F-clefs that behave like bureaucrats, but then sabotage that structure with delaminated syntax.

Archetypes emerge:

The Unanchored Ledgerline. A note floats far above or below the staff, tethered to nothing.

The Redacted Measure. Bars that contain only erasure marks or slashed diagonals.

The Scriptive Grenade. Bursts of dense verbal instruction interrupting a passage that otherwise looks playable until it suddenly isn’t (e.g., “Initiate sustained timbral contradiction at the point of mnemonic failure”).

The Speculative Clef. A mutated clef symbol of Smith's own design that may or may not signify transposition.

Performers trained on standard repertory encounter in these archetypes the sensation of being lied to by a typeface. The notation, while graphically consistent, withholds musical stability as it promises form but delivers semiotic volatility.

Temporal Instability and Notational Compression

One particularly destabilizing aspect is the temporal compression-rift phenomenon. Time, in Detonated Modernist scores, is not indexed linearly but compressed like coal: durations are nested within spatial metaphors (folds, coils, inflection points). As a result, performers must interpret chronological density as a spatial function, e.g.:

“If a down-bow gesture intersects a topographical ridge, accelerate through three notated systems simultaneously until pitch dissolves into a referential echo.”

This does not mean anything until you try to do it, and then, horrifyingly, it does. Performers don’t so much follow time as fall through it.

The Paradox of Instruction

In Detonated Modernism, the instruction itself becomes the performance. One of Smith’s notorious pieces for euphonium and three granulated carbon sheets, Scordatura Compendium (Torsion-B), includes a 17-page legend explaining the various types of circle overlays, hyphenated commands, and spatial interruptors. By the time one finishes reading the performance directives, the score feels less like music and more like a cryptographic war document.

Some instructions are brutally literal (“Detach the notehead at this point and reassign it to the dominant non-pitched resonance field”). Others are profoundly useless (“play this phrase as if it had just been refused citizenship”). Yet somehow the result elicits a sonic field so charged with tension that one senses the paper itself is trying to exhale.

What Smith’s Detonated Modernism does, whether we like it or not, is rescue notation from its utility. It blows apart the presumption that music is something that flows in straight lines, obeys logic, or behaves itself in public. His scores are both maps and mutinies... impossible until they’re attempted, profound because they fail productively.

You don't play them. You occupy them.

Which is perhaps the whole point: a score that refuses to be a score, a modernism that has already detonated but hasn’t stopped resonating.

Interdisciplinary Palimpsests: Scores as Layered Maps of Cinematic, Architectural, and Musical Meaning

 

Interdisciplinary Palimpsests: Scores as Layered Maps of Cinematic, Architectural, and Musical Meaning

In the evolving landscape of experimental music notation, a growing number of composer-artists are embracing what might be called interdisciplinary palimpsests: scores that function as densely layered cartographies, in which the structural features of Western musical notation intersect with the aesthetics of architectural blueprints, cinematic storyboarding, and abstract visual systems. These scores are not static documents but dynamic terrains, replete with visual, spatial, and temporal ambiguities. At their most radical, they operate not simply as instructions for sound production but as multi-referential maps.

Distorted Notation as Spatial Architecture

Traditional Western notation, with its staff lines and rhythmic regularity, provides a linear grammar for musical time. However, in these palimpsestic scores, that grammar is warped, disoriented, and layered. Staff systems may drift across the page, rotate, or collapse into architectural renderings of grids that resemble floor plans or sections of urban infrastructure. Composer-artists employ these disruptions to propose a new ontology for the score: no longer a temporal conveyor of information, but a spatial artifact that insists on navigation.

These architectural insertions often mirror the density of built environments: fragmented stairwells, exploded isometrics, and scaffolding metaphors all drawn onto or embedded within the notational grid. The result is a conceptual hybrid: notation becomes blueprint, and performance becomes a kind of spatial enactment, wherein the musician must navigate zones rather than read measures.

Cinematic Frames and Narrative Polyphony

In tandem with architectural motifs, cinematic references proliferate within these works. Frames, stills, and fragments of storyboard sequences interrupt or replace traditional notation. These images are not ornamental; they are signifying elements within a multilayered performance script. Much like a film editor’s storyboard, they provide moments of affective, gestural, or rhythmic guidance, cuing the performer toward psychological states or dramatic timings.

The cinematic logic also manifests structurally. Just as films jump between timelines or intercut narratives, palimpsestic scores juxtapose non-continuous segments comprised of split frames, montages, and asynchronous cues that imply simultaneity without synchrony. This narrative fragmentation demands a non-linear approach to both interpretation and realization. The performer becomes an editor as much as a player, assembling meaning from discontinuous parts.

Semiotic Overload: Performing the Palimpsest

To engage with such a score is to enter a semiotic labyrinth. Performers must decode multiple registers: musical, architectural, cinematic, and visual-textual. Each layer speaks its own language, yet all contribute to the emergent behavior of the piece. A dashed architectural line might imply phrasing; a film still might suggest pacing or dynamic intensity; a notated glissando could trace the path of a building’s contour.

This multiplicity places significant interpretive burden on the performer, but it also enables a form of radical subjectivity. Rather than being a passive conduit, the performer becomes an active interlocutor with the score’s multilayered signs. They must select which layer to prioritize, which axis to follow, and how to translate conflicting cues into cohesive action. In this sense, the score becomes a map not only of the work but of its own performance.

Toward a Polymorphic Ontology of the Score

These interdisciplinary palimpsests challenge the idea of a score as a transparent transmission device. Instead, they assert the score as a polymorphic object. It is a field of contested meanings rather than a fixed set of instructions. The performer’s labor is one of excavation: unearthing layers, resolving contradictions, and rendering the invisible legible.

Such works exist at the threshold of disciplines: they are at once music, visual art, architecture, and cinema. They participate in what could be called semiotic synthesis, wherein each mode of representation amplifies and distorts the others. For composers working within this framework, the goal is not clarity but richness; not legibility, but multiplicity.

In this emergent field, the score itself becomes a performative space.  It is an artifact that performs, provokes, and resists. It is a site where the act of reading becomes interpretive choreography, and where sound emerges from the collision of media. Interdisciplinary palimpsests ask us to rethink not only how music is written, but how it is imagined, embodied, and ultimately lived.

B Flat trumpet. Pedal Tones.

 

This is a score for B Flat Trumpet. Pedal tones only.

Let that sit for a moment.

Pedal tones are the notes a trumpet is not supposed to produce. They live below the instrument's practical range, in the register where the physics of the brass tube and the physics of the human body negotiate an agreement that neither party is fully comfortable with. They are not extended technique in the fashionable sense. They are extended existence. The trumpet playing a pedal tone is not performing. It is confessing.

This page is where that confession happens.

Look at what the notation is doing to the single stave running through the center of the page. It is not supporting the notation. It is barely surviving it. The stave is a horizon line across which five extraordinary events are occurring simultaneously above and below, each one orbiting the line the way weather systems orbit a pressure front, each one named.

Intra by ColloSurria. The first event cloud, rendered in burnt orange and deep blue, is not a chord cluster or a multiphonic. It is an atmospheric condition. ColloSurria is a word I coined through my Brand Acumen's https://brandacumen.co/ neological process for exactly this phenomenon: the state of colliding tonal atmospheres that cannot be separately identified because their boundaries have dissolved into each other before the ear can locate them. The notation inside the cloud is real. The cloud is also real. Both are instructions. Neither is metaphor.

Abtoxicalleraphy. The second event above the stave is the one that required the longest naming process. Abtoxicalleraphy describes the specific somatic condition of a brass player producing a pedal tone in the extreme low register while simultaneously maintaining embouchure control sufficient for the notated pitch content inside the event. It is toxic to the body in the way that any act of sustained physical extremity is toxic. It is also therapeutic in the way that sustained physical extremity always is. The word needed to hold both truths without resolving the contradiction and it does.

PISTO, RELECTIO, NEVITerseo. This vertical text cluster, rotating around its own axis in the lower center of the page, is the score's pharmacopeia in concentrated form. These are not performance instructions. They are not dynamics. They are states of being that the performer must inhabit before the notation can be executed. PISTO: the compressed interior pressure of the breath before release. RELECTIO: the act of reading something you wrote and no longer recognizing it as yours. NEVITerseo: the specific dizziness that arrives approximately forty seconds into a sustained pedal tone when the oxygen balance in the blood has shifted enough to alter perception without yet altering consciousness. Every trumpeter who has played in this register knows this state. This is the first score that names it.

WHOLE. The black rectangle at the lower right contains a single word in white. Not a note name. Not a duration. Not a dynamic. WHOLE. In the tradition of Ruscha's word paintings this is the score at its most reduced and most complete: the entire instruction for the final event compressed into a single word that is simultaneously a note value, a philosophical proposition, a demand, and a joke. The notation that follows it to the right, the cluster of accidentals and note heads accumulating around an open whole note, is the elaboration of that single word into something playable. But WHOLE came first. The notation is the footnote.

AnsevR and DisceRna-Poli-T. The two event clouds at the lower center and upper right are the score's Carson moments, the typography refusing to hold still, the letters rotating and fragmenting and partially dissolving the way David Carson dissolved type when he understood that legibility was a convention rather than a requirement, and that breaking it produced not confusion but a different and more honest kind of reading. AnsevR names the specific quality of resonance that a pedal tone produces in a large acoustic space, the sound returning altered, as if the room has edited it. DisceRna-Poli-T describes the perceptual condition of the listener rather than the performer, the moment when a sustained very low frequency ceases to be heard as pitch and begins to be felt as pressure, the threshold where music becomes weather.

And then there is the Thomas Demand dimension of this page.

Demand builds architectural models of real spaces and then photographs them, the photograph revealing its own constructedness only slowly, the surfaces too perfect, the shadows too even, the paper grain eventually visible as the wrong kind of grain for the space it is replicating. This score does the same thing. The notational elements are real notation. The stave is a real stave. The clef is a real clef. But the event clouds are not illustrations. They are not generated by any conventional notation software. They are constructions, physical in their own register, that reveal their constructedness only after extended looking. The score is a model of a musical event that has not yet occurred, and the photograph of that model is this page.

The pedal tone is the note the trumpet makes when it stops pretending.

This is the score for that note.

When a score stops pretending that the page is flat.

I want to talk about what happens when a score stops pretending that the page is flat.

This is a page from my new score for trumpet. Before you ask what any specific symbol means, I want you to look at something more fundamental. Look at the shape the notation is contained within.

The staves do not run from left to right and stop at a margin. They are encircled. They are held inside a form that curves back on itself, that routes the musical material through a closed architectural system before releasing it into the open white space of the page. The score is not a road. It is a circuit. And a circuit implies something that a road does not: that what travels through it returns changed by the journey.

There are three staves visible on this page. They do not occupy the same logical plane. Stave one runs through the upper register of the encircling form at full notational density, a hyper-chromatic field of material so compressed that the tuplet groupings, 4, 6, 7, 9, 14, begin to function less as rhythmic specifications and more as pressure readings, measurements of how much material is being forced through a given unit of time. At tuplet 14 the notation is doing something I have never seen another score ask a brass player to do: it is specifying a density of simultaneous events that exceeds what a single instrument can produce, which means the score is not describing what the trumpet will play. It is describing what the trumpet will attempt.

The attempt is the performance.

Stave two occupies the middle register with a different logic entirely, its material sparser and its notation incorporating a parallelogram, a geometric object with no conventional meaning in any notational tradition I am aware of. It is not a rest. It is not a dynamic marking. It is a shape that the performer must interpret as a durational and timbral instruction without any legend to guide them. The interpretation is the composition.

Stave four, at the bottom, is the one that keeps me awake. It opens with a time signature of 5 over 24 and closes with 11 over 24. These are not unusual time signatures in the sense that they represent unusual rhythmic groupings. They are unusual in a more fundamental sense: they specify a relationship between a numerator and a denominator that produces a beat unit no human body has a natural pulse correspondence for. The score is not asking the trumpeter to count. It is asking the trumpeter to find a relationship to time that cannot be felt, only calculated, and then to perform as if it were felt.

The yellow form in the upper left is the element I want to leave you with. It is not a dynamic marking. It is not a key signature. It is not an illustration of the trumpet's bell or its sound wave or any other representational object. It is a form that exists in the score the way a weather system exists in a landscape: as a condition rather than an instruction, as something the performer must pass through rather than execute. It precedes the notation. It frames the notation. It is the first thing the eye encounters and the last thing the mind resolves.

I designed it to be unresolvable.

The camera object in the lower right corner is there for a reason I am not going to explain. But I will say this: the score knows it is being watched. And it is performing for the camera as much as for the trumpet.

What does notation owe a performer? I used to think the answer was clarity. I no longer think that. I think the answer is a problem worth solving. This page is that.

 

Performance Guidance - Work for Guitar