Mon Sep 29 — Unit 1: The Sonic Object/Organized Sound
Wed Oct 1 — Unit 1: The Sonic Object/Organized Sound
"Hullo!" Edison screamed into the telephone mouthpiece. The vibrating diaphragm set in motion a stylus that wrote onto a moving strip of parafin paper. [...] Upon replaying the strip and its vibrations, which in turn set in motion the diaphragm, a barely audible "Hullo!" could be heard.
Friedrich Kittler - Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986)
...technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway...
Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935/36)
Steven Schoenherr - Recording Technology History
Recording technologies problematize the relationship between sound and source: the sound is effectively disembodied from its originating source. What are some implications for listening? What are some implications for composers working with recorded sound?
When in 1948 Pierre Schaeffer gave the name Concrète to the music which he invented, he wanted to demonstrate that this new music started from the concrete sound material, from heard sound, and then sought to abstract musical values from it. This is the opposite of classical music, which starts from an abstract conception and notation leading to a concrete performance.
Michel Chion - Guide des Objets Sonores (1983)
The principal difference between the brain and the phonograph is that the metal disk of Edison's still rather primitive machine remains deaf to itself; there is no transition from movement to consciousness. It is precisely this wondrous transition that keeps occurring in the brain.
Jean-Marie Guyau - Memory and Phonograph (1880)
Écouter, is listening to someone, to something; and through the intermediary of sound, aiming to identify the source, the event, the cause, it treats the sound as a sign of this source, this event.
Ouïr, to perceive by the ear, to be struck by sounds, it is the crudest level, the most elementary of perception; so we "hear", passively, lots of things which we are not trying to listen to nor understand.
Entendre, here, according to its etymology, means showing an intention to listen [écouter], choosing from what we hear [ouïr] what particularly interests us, thus "determining" what we hear.
Comprendre, means grasping a meaning, values, by treating the sound like a sign, referring to this meaning as a function of a language, a code (semantic hearing).
from Michel Chion - Guide des Objets Sonores, trans. John Dack and Christine North (source: Quatre Écoutes)
Mode one [écouter] takes the listener outwards from the sound itself, reaching out into wider relationships with the objects, events and experiences beyond. Mode three [entendre] draws the listener into the sound itself, into a contemplation of its sounding shape. The crux of the mode one—three relationship is the continuum between reaching outwards and being drawn inwards.
Denis Smalley - The Listening Imagination: Listening in the Electroacoustic Era (1995)
My view is that in order to recreate the sense of danger you have to make the listener into the performer. The listener has to take an active part in the experience in fundamentally different ways than in live performance, and in order to do this I think that it's necessary to compose elements into the music that are non-linear, sometimes random, sometimes noisy and not discursive in the ways that a lot of traditional music is. I want the music to challenge the listener anew on each hearing, so that identical sounds will end up sounding different depending on the performance the listener creates in his own mind or ear [...] The essence of the music doesn't lie as much in its details as in the act of trying to understand them.
Paul Lanksy on Notjustmoreidlechatter, in Mark Katz - The Uncommon Parlance of Paul Lansky
How can we make pieces that require a listener? What's the difference between composing music and "composing listening" (Chris Mann)?
[...] Lansky strikes a balance between familiarity and strangeness, in which listeners instinctively "squint" their ears, as Lansky puts it, in an attempt to understand what is being said. [...] This is a canny compositional strategy, for it not only encourages attentive listening but also addresses the problem of repeatability. Even the most careful scrutiny will not reveal the text, but with every successive hearing the listener cannot help trying to extrapolate meaning from these verbal scraps. Here Lansky exploits the human tendency to fill in missing or unclear information to form whole structures.
Mark Katz - The Uncommon Parlance of Paul Lansky
Pierre Schaeffer - Acousmatics (1966)
Audio Culture: 76-81
Mark Katz - The Uncommon Parlance of Paul Lansky
in Capturing Sound (2004): 142-144
N.B.: If you're still waiting for your copy of Audio Culture to arrive, the Schaeffer article can be found here.
Pierre Schaeffer - Etude Aux Chemins De Fer (1948)
Hugh Le Caine - Dripsody (1955)
Paul Lansky - Notjustmoreidlechatter (1988)
Paul Koonce - Pins (1995-6)
Matmos - Lipostudio...And So On (2001)
Ted Coffey - Georgia, etc. (2003)
Fri Oct 3 — Unit 1: The Sonic Object/Organized Sound
In listening to sonorous objects whose instrumental causes are hidden, we are led to forget the latter and to take an interest in these objects for themselves. The dissociation of seeing and hearing here encourages another way of listening: we listen to sonorous forms, without any aim other than that of hearing them better, in order to be able to describe them through an analysis of the content of our perceptions ... Deliberately forgetting every reference to instrumental causes or preexisting musical significations, we then seek to devote ourselves entirely and exclusively to listening, to discover the instinctive paths that lead from the purely "sonorous" to the purely "musical."
Pierre Schaeffer - Acousmatics (1966)
The acousmatic situation renews the way we hear. By isolating the sound from the "audiovisual complex" to which it initially belonged, it creates favourable conditions for a reduced listening which concentrates on the sound for its own sake, as sound object, independent of its cause or its meaning.
Michel Chion - Guide des Objets Sonores (1983)
To what extent are we able to deliberately forget the original cause of a sound when listening to a recorded version? Do certain recorded sounds, or classes of sounds, lend themselves more easily than others to a forgetting of their sources? Are we more likely to forget the sources of recorded sounds over repeated listenings? As listeners, can we practice "deliberate forgetting?"
Schaeffer thought the acousmatic situation could encourage reduced listening, in that it provokes one to separate oneself from causes or effects in favor of consciously attending to sonic textures, masses, and velocities. But, on the contrary, the opposite often occurs, at least at first, since the acousmatic situation intensifies casual listening in taking away the aid of sight.
Michel Chion - Audio-Vision (1994)
In Schaefferian theory the term sound object refers to every sound phenomenon and event perceived as a whole, as a coherent entity and heard by means of reduced listening which targets it for itself, independently of its origin or its meaning.
The sound object is defined as the correlate of reduced listening: it does not exist "in itself" but by means of a specific foundational intention. It is a sound unit perceived in its material, its inherent texture, its own qualities and perceptual dimensions. On the other hand, it represents a global perception, which remains identical through different hearings; an organised unit which can be compared to a "gestalt" in the meaning of the psychology of form.
Schaeffer suggests that there is some confusion concerning the notion whilst adding: a) The sound object is not the sound body, b) The sound object is not the physical signal, c) The sound object is not a recorded fragment, d) The sound object is not a notated symbol on a score, e) The sound object is not a state of mind (it remains the same across different listening modes).
from Michel Chion - Guide des Objets Sonores, trans. John Dack and Christine North (source: Sound Object)
A 3-dimensional schema for the analysis of sonic objects - from Pierre Schaeffer - À la recherche d'une musique concréte (1952)
The five stages of PROGREMU: Typology, Morphology, Characterology, Analysis, Synthesis.
The six Typological Criteria: Mass/Facture, Duration/Variation, Balance/Originality.
The seven Morphological Criteria (adapted and condensed from Schaeffer 1966, Chion 1983, Dack 1999, Landy 2007, Thoresen 2007):
Mass: The area of pitch space occupied by a sound object.
Harmonic Timbre: The sound object's spectrum.
Grain: A qualitative measure of irregularities in the "surface" or "texture" of the sound object.
Dynamic Profile: The sound object's loudness envelope.
Allure: A "generalized vibrato" in the sound object's pitch, loudness, or both.
Melodic Profile: The trajectory of the sound object in pitch space.
Profile of Mass: The trajectory or evolution of the sound object's mass, encompassing the spectral envelope.
A simplified frequency domain snapshot of the spectrum of the tenor bell at Winchester Cathedral.
Synthetic recreation/transformation of the bell sonority (in SuperCollider).
Leigh Landy - Pierre Schaeffer in Understanding the Art of Sound Organization (2007): 77-86
John Dack - Systematizing the Unsystematic (1999)
Lasse Thoresen - Spectromorphological analysis of sound objects: an adaptation of Pierre Schaeffer's typomorphology (2007)
Pierre Schaeffer - Etude Aux Allures (1958)
Pierre Henry/Pierre Schaeffer - Prosopopée - from Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950)
Bernard Parmegiani - Incidences/Résonances from De Natura Sonorum (1974-75)
Jonathan Harvey - Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980)
Kaija Saariaho - Jardin Secret I (1984-5)
Denis Smalley - Wind Chimes (1987)
Natasha Barrett - Industrial Revelations (2001)