Music, Electronic Media and Culture

Simon Emmerson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317091714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Technology revolutionised the ways that music was produced in the twentieth century. As that century drew to a close and a new century begins a new revolution in roles is underway. The separate categories of composer, performer, distributor and listener are being challenged, while the sounds of the world itself become available for musical use. All kinds of sounds are now brought into the remit of composition, enabling the music of others to be sampled (or plundered), including that of unwitting musicians from non-western cultures. This sound world may appear contradictory - stimulating and invigorating as well as exploitative and destructive. This book addresses some of the issues now posed by the brave new world of music produced with technology.

PART ONE

Listening and interpreting

CHAPTER ONE

Through and around the acousmatic: the interpretation of electroacoustic sounds

Luke Windsor

Introduction: electroacoustics and the acousmatic

It has become common practice to use the term ‘electroacoustic music’ to describe a wide variety of musical praxes involving the mediation of loudspeakers. Music created using all kinds of sound synthesis, music using recorded sounds and music which uses amplification all fit into this broad category. Such music varies in its reliance upon technological mediation. One can, for example, imagine a performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with or without sound diffusion and amplification, and in both live or recorded execution. However, one cannot say the same of Henry’s Variations pour une porte et un soupir (Henry, 1987), nor of Stockhausen’s Kontakte (Stockhausen, 1992): these pieces require diffusion by loudspeakers for their realisation. Nor could one say this of the music of Motorhead, which although often performed live, relies extensively on the use of amplification for its musical effect. This is not to suggest that some music is more inherently electroacoustic than others, but it does serve to illustrate that for certain pieces and kinds of music electroacoustic mediation is technically essential.

In this chapter I will interrogate the perceptual and music-theoretical consequences of music which not only requires this kind of mediation but also denies a visual source for its constituent sounds. Such music has been termed acousmatic, reflecting the theoretical ideas of Pierre Schaeffer (1966). In its broadest sense acousmatic music might be said to be all music which is presented for which we are unable to see the sources of the constituent sounds. A concert performed by musicians seated behind an opaque screen, directly mimicking the pre-Socratic concept of aurally transmitted akousmata, would fit into this category, as would an audio-only recording of an acoustic concert. A concert of amplified live musicians or a multimedia presentation in which the sources of sounds were visible would not.

Schaeffer’s view of the acousmatic was a complex one, but it is clear that his conception of acousmatic music was a music in which the composer attempted to ignore the physical causation of his or her source materials. The acousmatic was intended not just as a description of how listeners would perceive sounds, but of an attitude composers should develop towards their material. The phonograph, closely followed by analogue tape recording, made it possible to create a technical separation between sound source and sound which had hitherto been impossible. The two terms objet sonore and écoute réduite (Schaeffer, 1966) had particular importance in delineating this approach. ‘Sound objects’, isolated and repeated on tape, and ‘reduced listening’, the manner with which composers were exhorted to analyse them both took their place within a larger and highly prescriptive endeavour to propose a recherche musicale (Schaeffer, 1966). These terms point towards the development of new compositional listening strategies rather than toward an attempt to propose a method for either describing or prescribing how music should be perceived by an ordinary listener. Schaeffer himself stresses the varieties of aural experiences available to listeners in his etymological and structuralist notion of les quatres écoutes (Schaeffer, 1966, pp. 103–28). He distinguishes between an indexical mode of listening, concerned with the identification of the events that are responsible for the emission of sound (écouter), and listening as a symbolic mode, to do with sounds as signs, the relationship of sounds as signifiers to signifieds that are extra-sonores (comprendre). An example of the former would be the recognition by a listener that a sound was caused by a gong being struck, whereas the latter type of listening would involve the interpretation of this gong sound, perhaps as signalling the beginning of a meal. Similarly, he identifies two other modes of listening which do not refer beyond the sound itself; ouir, the naïve reception of a sound’s occurrence (‘I heard something’), and entendre, attention to certain qualities of a sound itself, without reference to its source or significance (‘it sounded “vibrant”’).

Schaeffer proposed a programme of musical research which aimed to develop the everyday (banale), active, yet non-referential listening of entendre into a specialised (praticienne) semiotic system, equivalent to pre-existing musical and linguistic systems in its relational and abstract nature, yet wholly different in its development of ‘natural’ listening (Schaeffer, 1966, especially pp. 360–85). Unlike écoute traditionelle, the traditional musical model, where a ‘repertoire of timbres’ (écouter) and a system of musical values (comprendre) leads to the types of listening appropriate to a traditional sound-world, la recherche musicale would ideally be derived from the development of a system of musical values and structures based upon a return to the sound itself, mostly through the type of listening Schaeffer identifies as entendre. For this reversal of musical practice Schaeffer proposes a radical and specialised form of listening: l’écoute réduite, or reduced listening (Schaeffer, 1966, pp. 261–79, 349–59) in order that familiar sources and semiotic systems should not play any part in this research. The objet sonore as an ‘in-itself’ is to be explored while placing significations and causes in ‘brackets’.

Hence one might think of ‘acousmatic music’ (as opposed to music that is acousmatic) as a kind of music in which the listener would be drawn into an acousmatic approach to listening. One might assume that, like the composer, the listener should attempt to concentrate upon listening to the non-referential, non-symbolic aspects of sounds. In this chapter I will argue that although such a view is far from realistic, the concept of the acousmatic in music is important to our understanding of how we listen to and interpret both intentionally acousmatic music and music that is more coincidentally acousmatic. By doing so, it will become clear that for the listener at least, attempts to break through the acousmatic ‘screen’ in order to ascribe causation to sounds are an important facet of musical interpretation. I will begin by showing how a consideration of the relationship between action, perception and meaning can provide a more perceptually relevant analysis of the acousmatic situation. This will be done by exploring the relevance of an ‘ecological’ acoustics. I will then apply this approach to the perception of acousmatic music, and provide some analyses of pieces by György Ligeti, Pierre Henry and Fred Frith to show how a more subtle and perceptually motivated view of the acousmatic has important aesthetic consequences.

Ecological acoustics and the aesthetic consequences of acousmatic presentation

Gaver (1993a) notes that the concentration upon ‘musical’ sounds in acoustics, psychoacoustics, and latterly music perception, can be seen as a primary factor in our ‘ignorance’ regarding ‘everyday listening’:

an account of hearing based on the sounds and perceptions of musical instruments often seems biased and difficult to generalise. Musical sounds are not representative of the range of sounds we normally hear. Most musical sounds are harmonic; most everyday sounds inharmonic or noisy. Musical sounds tend to have a smooth, relatively simple temporal evolution; everyday sounds tend to be much more complex. Musical sounds seem to reveal little about their sources; while everyday sounds often provide a great deal of information about theirs. Finally, musical instruments afford changes of the sounds they make along relatively uninformative dimensions such as pitch or loudness, while everyday events involve many more kinds of changes – changes that are often musically useless but pragmatically important. Our current knowledge about sound and hearing has been deeply influenced by the study of a rather idiosyncratic subset of sounds and sources (Gaver, 1993a, p. 3).

A growing body of research is attempting to study the perception of sounds which do not resemble traditional speech or music in a manner that takes account of the perception of sound sources and their potential to us as active (rather than passive) organisms. Within the field of ecological acoustics, sounds are not viewed as being perceived as abstract entities related only one to another, as ‘tone colours’ or timbres, nor are they perceived as standing for concepts or things, as signs. Instead they are seen as providing unmediated contact between listeners and significant environmental occurrences. In an ecological framework, sounds provide an organism with information that allows it to locate, identify and successfully interact with food sources, predators or members of its own species with which it may mate, collaborate or challenge for territory. It is within such a context, I will argue, that the concept of the acousmatic begins to make fresh sense. Before applying such a theory to acousmatic presentation, however, I will describe the ecological approach and outline its application to auditory perception.

The ecological approach to perception

According to Gibson (1966; 1979), perception does not require the mediation of mental representations of the external world. This is contrary to the dominant view of perception in which the processing, storage and manipulation of information by the mind is primary (see Costall and Still, 1991). Rather than assuming that the sensations passed from the sense organs to the central nervous system represent a chaotic source of information that mental processes organise and store in the form of meaningful percepts and memories, the ecological approach assumes that the environment is highly structured and that organisms are directly ‘sensitive’ to such structure. If this were the sum of Gibson’s approach accusations of naïve realism would indeed be justified. How could such a view ‘explain’ the way in which human beings utilise language, mental imagery, knowledge and memories in their experience of the world? Merely stating that an organism is ‘sensitive’ to environmental structure seems to beg too many questions. Gibson’s work is much subtler than this. He does not claim that memory, language and other symbolic systems play no role in our experience of the world. However, he is keen to distinguish between perception itself and the symbolic systems that facilitate the mediation, storage and communication of perceptions (Gibson, 1966; 1979; Reed, 1991).

Action, perception and affordances

The core of Gibson’s contribution to psychology lies in the way in which perception is seen as the result of a dynamic relationship between organism and environment. Organisms and species evolve, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, to become sensitive to information that will increase their chances of survival. Moreover, the dynamic relationship between a perceiving, acting organism and its environment is seen to provide the grounds for the direct perception of meaning. Gibson’s term for this kind of meaning is ‘affordance’. Objects and events are related to a perceiving organism by structured information, and they ‘afford’ certain possibilities for action relative to an organism. For example, a cup affords drinking, the ground, walking. For different organisms, affordances will differ; for a human being an open body of water might afford swimming or immersion, but for a water bug the same stimulus information, picked up by different perceptual systems and relative to different organismic structure, would afford support (Gibson, 1979, p. 127). Moreover, affordances are fluid relative to individual perceptual development: for a surfer, certain patterns of waves afford surfing, whilst to a non-surfer they might afford drowning. Affordances ‘point both ways’ (Gibson, 1979, p. 129) in that they can neither be explained purely in terms of the needs of the organism, nor in terms of the objective features of the environment. The affordance is a relationship between a particular environmental structure and a particular organism’s needs and capacities.

As each organism, or species, evolves it will develop certain effectivities (possible actions) and its perception of an environment will reflect those features of the environment that allow for, constrain or demand such actions. Conversely, as an environment develops it will offer certain affordances, features of survival value to an organism. An organism can be said to exhibit an effectivity structure, a complex of actions that reflects its relationship to the affordance structure of an environment.

Event perception: the primacy of source recognition

Event perception attempts to identify the invariant properties of events that specify both the permanent and changing features of the environment that are significant to an organism. The aims of this approach are neatly encapsulated by Shaw, McIntyre and Mace (1974, p. 280):

By analyzing the organism’s context of physical stimulation into events with adaptive significance, we have a means of conceptually distilling from the ambient flux of stimulation those aspects most relevant to the maintenance of equilibration in the organism’s ecosystem.

Any event will be perceived in terms of its affordance structure, its potential to evoke adaptive behaviour. The affordance structure of an event will vary according to the particular effectivities of an organism, its potential for performing adaptive behaviour. The properties of events that make up a particular affordance structure are termed invariants and may be divided up into two classes, those that specify styles of change and those that specify persistence, or permanence (Warren and Shaw, 1985). An event can be defined as a process that leaves some physical properties unchanged and transforms others. The identification of the styles of change and persistent features of events that are ecologically significant is a primary motive in studying event perception. For example, the perception of facial growth seems to be the result of specific geometrical functions that transform certain elements of facial structure whilst leaving others permanent (Shaw, McIntyre and Mace, 1974; Mark, Todd and Shaw, 1981). Such geometrical functions can be termed transformational invariants, whilst those features left unchanged can be termed structural invariants.

In summary, events can be described in terms of their adaptive significance to an organism and are the result of the coevolution of the perceptual systems of organism and an environment. Within such a perspective, an event’s ‘meaning’ is determined directly, not by mental processes or representation: an event produces structured information that affords further perception or action.

Auditory event perception

Gibson’s discussion of invariances is largely dominated by the visual (Gibson, 1979), despite some preliminary work on audition (Gibson, 1966). As the concern here is with a primarily auditory phenomenon, it seems reasonable to move straight to work in audition although other sources of information will prove relevant when we return to the ‘acousmatic’ listening context itself. Moreover, the research cited will betray a concentration (maintained throughout this chapter) upon invariants that specify sound producing objects, leaving aside work upon sound localisation. The motivation for adopting an ecological approach in this context is to redress the balance between abstract approaches to musical structure and those that take into account the connections between sounds and the environment that produces them.

Heine and Guski (1991) point out that although research in ‘ecological acoustics’ is as yet an underdeveloped area within ecological psychology, the concern with studying real sounds in realistic situations has a considerable history. Psychoacoustic research in many domains has consistently shown our ability to identify sources despite complex and noisy signals (for example, Solomon, 1958; 1959a and b; Howard and Ballas, 1983) and the influence of source classification and the semantic interpretation of individual sounds upon the syntactic parsing of sound sequences (Howard and Ballas, 1980; 1982). It seems that our ability to identify the causation of sounds depends upon our ability to classify certain acoustic attributes and that, even when we are not explicitly asked to perform such classifications, these acoustic structures tend to be hard to ignore:

the order of transient components within a pattern is not arbitrary, but rather reflects the temporal structure of the generating events. In an everyday example, one would expect to hear the garage door open before hearing the car being driven out. On the other hand, a car door opening could either precede or follow the sound of the engine being shut off. Although the temporal or syntactic structure which exists in patterns of this sort is clearly less rigid and well s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part One Listening and interpreting
• Part Two Cultural noise
• Part Three New places, spaces and narratives
• Index