Alonso_The Listener in François Bayle’s Works: A Resonant Subject in a Living Space

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The Listener in François Bayle’s Works: A resonant subject in a living space

Edith Alonso

Organised Sound / Volume 20 / Special Issue 03 / December 2015, pp 308 - 315DOI: 10.1017/S1355771815000230, Published online: 16 November 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1355771815000230

How to cite this article:Edith Alonso (2015). The Listener in François Bayle’s Works: A resonant subject in a living space. Organised Sound, 20, pp308-315 doi:10.1017/S1355771815000230

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The Listener in François Bayle ’s Works:A resonant subject in a living space

E D I T H A L O N S O

International University of la Rioja, Gran Vía del Rey Juan Carlos I, 41, 26002 Logroño, La Rioja, SpainEmail: [email protected]

Bayle ’ s aesthetic radicalism is based on a conception of a livingspace in which there is not an opposition of an inner space to anouter space. This idea will be discussed by looking at themorphology creation, temporal evolution and sound spatialityon François Bayle ’ s works. Sound events as ‘ images-of-sounds ’

are characterised by a philosophy of dynamic production andenergy transformation which creates a space in movement.

However, the organisation of time structure in Bayle ’ s workscan be divided into three categories (discrete time, time basedon independent moments and circular time) corresponding tothree periods of his creative life. We can conclude that thisorganisation led him to realise how important the activebehaviour of the listener is for the construction of space. As aresult, the spatial experience does not create a constructedspace but rather a subjective one in which the listener is aresonant subject with the space surrounding him.

1. DYNAMIC PROCESSING OF ACOUSMATICMORPHOLOGY AND ITS COSMIC

DIMENSIONAfter a detailed study of the compositions of Frenchcomposer François Bayle (Tamatave, Madagascar1932 – ), follower and reformer of Pierre Schaeffer ’steachings, we can conclude that sound events not onlyrefer to real images but also go beyond a guralrepresentation and tend to an abstraction of the mainfeatures. François Bayle considers acousmatic soundsto have special characteristics because one does notsee the source production; a sound coming from aloudspeaker is an image-of-sound or i-sound (Bayle1993) and it is characterised by its faculty of movement

and its power to deform original sound traces. Wecan establish a correspondence between the image-of-sound and some of the ideas of French philosopherGaston Bachelard (1884 – 1962) (to whom Bayle oftenrefers). First, in Bachelard ’s writings, imagination, aswell as an image-of-sound concept, is the faculty todeform images, not to create them. The imagination isconsidered as an organising dynamism related to thatwhich is imaginary and not to the images themselves.Due to this, imagination is open, is evasive, goesbeyond images and is an ‘imagination without images ’(Bachelard 1943), which is what de nes its mobility.

The image-of-sound also re ects this imaginationwithout images since there is one continuous itinerary

from the real to that which is imaginary throughmovement and without speci c images. This move-ment of the images-of-sound, from both a spatial andan acoustic level to a mental level, contributes to thecreation of their own speci cations; it also constitutesthe typical register of poetic forms because, in our

opinion, both in acousmatic music and in Bachelard’stheory, it is a matter of replacing a cinematic descrip-

tion philosophy with a dynamic production philosophy:‘to constitute the self as both moved and moving, asmobile and engine, thrust and aspiration ’ (Bachelard1943).1 The dynamic value of duration can bringtogether the past and the future. Acousmatic music isde ned by its mobility, its continuous ux generation;the being is pure movement. The importance of thedynamic production of the i-sounds contributes, as willbe discussed below, to the creation of a living space.

However, this dynamism is re ected in the transformation processes of i-sounds. Sound images do notremain unaltered but rather undergo transformationsas they appear. At the end of his Tremblement de terretrès doux, in Climat 4, Bayle creates some sounddistortions, changing the points of view of the soundobject; the electronic sounds are repeated and alteredin different ways by means of acceleration, transposi-tion, superposition and accumulation. These opera-tions also have an impact over the projectedsigni cance and the sense of the image; there is asemantic modi cation. 2 When François Bayle trans-forms certain human sounds (such as a voice, a cry, ora murmur), he usually hides a number of features

or characteristics, leaving little clues behind so thatthey can be recognised. We can identify a sound but weremain uncertain. A dialectic game is establishedbetween knowledge-recognition and pure discovery:this state between the two movements leads to a certaintension. As we listen, we can also create an ‘axis of source recognition ’ (Smalley 1986). The origin of thisaxis can be found in the sounds the listener may

1 All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.2 Bayle ’s theory about the signi cance of the music is in uenced byCh. S. Peirce ’s semiotic. The concept of image-of-sound is de ned bythe icon, index and symbol, which represent a progression from a

concrete to an abstract level. See previous articles for more on thissubject (Alonso 2014).

Organised Sound 20(3): 308 – 315 © Cambridge University Press, 2015. doi:10.1017/S1355771815000230

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unambiguously identify as coming from a real sourcein the world. The further away we get from the origin,the less recognisable the source of the sounds will be.For example, in Voyage au centre de la tête (1980 – 3)we can feel the presence of someone using a coffeemachine but the sounds around the person (a mon-astery chant, someone opening a door) make thelistener doubt when identifying the object. In fact,what counts is the ‘effect ’: the character leaves atrace that evokes unde ned situations. However,what matters is not what these situations are but theevocation (the logic of evocation shall be discussed inthe last section of this article) that has occurred, theimaginary worlds they create.

Researcher Jean-Christophe Thomas (Bayle 1993)points out that in Bayle ’s music there is always oneitinerary between two ‘opposite ends ’ of transforma-tions: between diffuse and clear, continuous and

discontinuous, informal and formal, banal (noise) andunusual (form), stability and movement. By exploringthese opposite ends, a range is generated whosescales are conceived as attempts to give new values.However, from our point of view, the most importantthing is not the opposite ends in the scales, but thepassage from one value to another, the minimalvariations or gradations that occur between thedifferent states of perception.

The dynamism of images is also re ected in Espacesinhabitables, a piece in which the static position of thesound objects disappears and electronic sounds seemto overlap organic lines. There is a process of energetictransformation, a metamorphosis from one energy toanother. Reality is no longer a xed entity but becomesmobile; it is conceived in a dynamic way. The rstmovement, Jardins de rien, is organised by an energeticcriterion that goes from uid to solid taking intoaccount the different dynamic processes. Theseprocesses are based on the creation of gures resultingfrom the metaphorical elaboration of the images-of-sound: ‘By process or dynamic species I designatethe various “ gures ” that appear in the temporaldevelopment of sound phenomena ’ (Bayle 1967).

Finally, I would like to point out that the image-

of-sound theory is part of a philosophical and cosmological approach through which Bayle wants tounderstand and to experience the world:

Music (to me) in its current state rejoins from within theromantic project of describing the world. Not to portrayit from the outside but to penetrate the mechanisms,internal constitutions, shapes of emergence, of disappearance, of resurgence. (Bayle 1993: 77)

This can lead us to François Bayle ’s evolution towardsthe idea of a spiritual union of humanity and cosmos inwhich the image-of-sound carries out the fusion

between the former and nature, and through whichmankind gets in touch with the universe. The image-of-

sound holds in itself the union of the spiritual and thematerial and helps humanity get closer to the mostbasic primary forces. This theory of i-sounds is alsoinspired by Bachelard ’s thoughts on how poetic imagesdraw mankind closer to the basic and deepest forces of the universe:

every image is an operation of the human spirit. It has aninternal spiritual principle, even when we think of it as asimple re ection of the outside world … The task of thepoet is to gently push images to be sure that the humanmind operates on them with humanity, to be sure thatthey are human images, pictures humanizing the forces of the Cosmos. So we are led to the cosmology of the human.Instead of living in a naïve anthropomorphism, we returnman to basic and profound forces. (Bachelard 1943: 6;Bayle 1993: 242)

The cosmic dimension of Bayle ’s works appears in hiswork Jeîta represented by the cave sounds, which,recorded and transformed, are the intermediariesbetween nature and humanity. Outside and inside areunited; the man and the cave become one. While we arelistening to Jeîta, the cave does not reveal itself in anabrupt way; it is rather the different sonorities thatevoke its presence and let it speak. The cave ’s absenceis present and shows its reality: there is a presence of anabsence, in which the object – the cave – is transformedinto a subject. Additionally, Bayle ’s interest in thecosmic dimension of music is evident if we carry out athematic analysis of his works ’ titles. They are essen-tially based on nature, humanity and movement, all of which together give us a vision of the Cosmos.Examples of the rst topic – nature – would be: Troisrêves d ’ oiseau, La forme de l ’esprit est un papillon,Jardins de rien (Three Bird Dreams, The Form of theSpirit is a Butter y, Gardens of Nothing ). Titles relatedto the second topic – humanity – speak of bodymovements, such as Respiration (Vibrations Compo-sées) (Breathing – Vibrations Composed ), humanactivities or emotional situations such as Faim, peur, amour (Hunger, Fear, Love) from Aeroformes(Aeroformes), Le sommeil d ’ Euclide (The Sleep of Euclid ). The third topic – movement – is expressed bythe following words extracted from some of Bayle ’s

titles: spinning top, trembling, vibration, velocity, etc.The meeting of man and nature in a joint movement isrevealed in one of his last works: Univers nerveux(2004 – 5) (Nervous Universe).

In this way, the images-of-sound generated byacousmatic music recover a romantic vision of music,considering it something inextricably linked withNature and Humanity. In acousmatic music therewould be a union of body and world and these, in turn,would enter into resonance with other unknownuniverses: ‘An acousmonium … would be an agreedprocess of listening to worlds that are unknown to us

and from which we are separated only by the virtualthickness of a vibrating membrane ’ (Bayle 1993).

The Listener in François Bayle’s Works 309

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2. TIME CONCEPTIONS

A gradual change in Bayle ’s way of understanding thetemporality of music can be observed when analysinghis career. His rst works are characterised by a lineartime conception with ruptures that break the

continuity (in uenced by René Thom ’s catastrophetheory). With Son Vitesse-Lumière (1980 – 3) (Sound Speed-Light), however, Bayle introduces a timeconception based on the circle and in a continuous uxthat will reach its full realisation in La forme du tempsest un cercle (1999 – 2000) (The Form of Time is aCircle). Although in his rst works the successions of sound events were characterised by the presenceof ‘catastrophes ’ that fractured the musical discourse – as happens in Tremblement de terre très doux (1978)(Very Soft Earthquake) where a horizontal time isvertically cut by catastrophes – there are also signs of acircular treatment when, for example, in Substance dusigne (1972) (Substance of Sign), he tries to create per-ceptual states that refer to a suspended and hypnoticsense of time. In these states, past and present aremixed and listeners do not know if what they arelistening to has already appeared or not, because theyare in a xed and eternal moment in time. The fact thatthe change in the conception of time is more obviousin Son Vitesse-Lumière raises the question on thein uence of technological tools in the process of composition, since it is precisely in this work thatFrançois Bayle began to use digital tools, giving upanalogue ones. Between these two time conceptions, that

is, the discontinuous and the circular one, the ‘momentform ’ of Stockhausen will also play an important role.

We will now analyse the evolution in Bayle ’stime conception by looking at some of his works:discontinuous time in Tremblement de terre très doux(1978), the moment form in Espaces inhabitables(1967), and, nally, circular time in La forme du tempsest un cercle (1999 – 2000).

2.1. Discontinuous time

In Tremblement de terre très doux, there is, in myopinion, a conception of time constructed by means of

breakpoints in the continuity. This work, composed in1978, was later included as a second movement in thecycle entitled Érosphère (1978 – 80), a work in uencedby the surrealist movement (as was the case withCamera oscura). Just as Surrealism explored the freeassociations carried out by the subconscious, inTremblement unexpected relationships are emphasised(between sounds with a realistic nature and soundswithout a direct causal reference), making us think of an imaginary universe in which reality and dream areintermingled. In Paysage 3, the sounds of a person ’sfootsteps moving from one place to another bring us

closer to a real universe but, being as they are mixedwith electronic sounds, it is dif cult to know where the

person is going; an imaginary space is created in whichtransformed voices betray the presence of someone.However, Bayle ’s af nity with Surrealism is alsoobvious in the work ’s title, taken from Max Ernst ’s1925 picture, L’An 55, tremblement de terre fort doux.The image of an earthquake is taken as a model for thework ’s structure: as is the case in an earthquake, thereare jolts produced by crashes which bring about anenergy release. The unstable sound material shiftssearching for stability and creating displacement.

The most remarkable feature in Tremblement deterre très doux is its continuous to-and-fro betweenstability and instability, regularity and irregularity,continuity and rupture. In spite of its fragmentarynature – given that it has 11 movements (divided inClimats, Transits and Paysages) – it is, in fact, a piecewith a unitary nature surprised by ‘critical points ’ of rupture. The dramatic quality of this piece is brought

about by ruptures and tilting states, or catastrophes.These ruptures occur amongst movements or withinthe movements themselves. In the rst case, the changefrom movement Climat 1 to the next one, Transit 1, isrevealed by the sudden rupture of a door noise leading,in turn, to the sound of a lift which opens Transit 1; inthe second case, when the ruptures are within themovements, as happens in Transit 1, the spring noiseand the voices are abruptly cut off by silence and thesound of footsteps. In Climat 4 there is a stream of sounds – produced sometimes by an accumulativeprocess achieved by means of a feedback loop – thatkeeps on moving closer to us. However, despite thiscontinuous ow (which brings to mind repetitiveAmerican music), there are some blows that mark thediscourse and little crashes which resemble catastrophepoints. In some other occasions, these ruptures areclearly exposed by the use of gestures: sonorities thatredirect us to the action of the person producing them – for example, in Climat 2, we can hear somebodymaking a hitting noise. Another example of a stronggesture is the beginning of Transit 2 where we can heara noise made by glass that reminds us of the beginningof Grande Polyphonie (appel). However, besides theruptures, there is also a continuity between movements

created by gliding sounds: the change from Paysage 3to Climat 3, for example, is carried out by the ascend-ing and descending glissando of a ball moving.

Through these dialectics between continuity andrupture, stability and instability, a longer listening timeis created without returning to the procedures used inL’expérience acoustique (1972) (The Acoustic Experi-ence). Whereas in L’expérience acoustique there is ahorizontal time, in Tremblement de terre très doux thecontinuous, horizontal time is cut by vertical moments.All the hypnotic shaking of L’ éxpérience acoustique issweetened by the sound of steps or female voices.

A sweetness, however, which does not prevent theexistence of moments of strength, the ickering

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movements are disturbing because they seem small butthey are actually strong.

2.2. The moment form

Besides the ideas of a discontinuous time and a circular

time, we must consider the concept of moment form(asproposed by Karlheinz Stockhausen) which in uencedBayle ’s way of composing. Stockhausen developed hisidea of moment form in works such as Kontakte (1960)or Momente (1969). In these works the form doesnot aim for a climax or a group of climaxes alreadyprepared and therefore expected, and nor does itprovide the usual phases of introduction, intensi ca-tion, transition and resolution:

I wonder if an auditor feels compelled to listening beyondhis or her limits; especially when a composition … doesnot have a continuous story, is not composed following a‘red wire

’ that must be followed from the beginning to theend in order to understand the whole – that is, when there

is not a dramatic form with an exposition, intensi cation,development, peak effect and end effect (not a closedform), but each moment is linked to all others and cansurvive by itself. . (Stockhausen 1988)

Therefore, every ‘now ’ is not the result of what pre-cedes it and the exit of what goes after it, but somethingindividual, autonomous, that can exist by itself.Stockhausen called it ‘eternity ’, an eternity that can beexpected within every movement. We are talking aboutmusical forms in which he searches for the explosion of the concept of time, or its over owing, in order toachieve a certain timelessness.

François Bayle does not explicitly develop the con-cept of moment form but we suppose that he rathertakes it as inspiration in order to re ect the autonomyof the different movements that compose many of hisworks. For example, in Espaces inhabitables (1967)(Uninhabitable Spaces), every movement is consideredas an independent moment with its own personality(Desantos 1997). Each one of them is independent,contains the past, the present and the future in itself,and is different to the others because of the context inwhich it appears; duration is only one of its attributes.

Also, in works such as Toupie dans le ciel (1979)(Spinning Top in the Sky) the directional and lineartemporality is cancelled since it is impossible to predictwhen the work will nish. This allows us to interpretToupie dans le ciel as a moment stopped in time wherethere is no past and no future, only a perpetual present.

2.3. Circular time

When analysing the temporal structures in FrançoisBayle ’s works, we nd that the conception of circulartime appears in those pieces composed from the 1980s

onwards ( Son Vitesse-Lumière, Motion-emotion) and isalso developed in his later works ( La forme du temps est

un cercle and La forme de l ’esprit est un papillon). Inaddition, Bayle used to group his works in what hecalled ‘cycles ’: a cycle gathers several movements, thelast of which takes up again elements from the begin-ning of the piece. Thus, the formal structure can berepresented with the gure of a circle since there is acontinuity with no beginning and no end but onlya sound trace that returns over and over again.The feeling of an endless work is generated, a workthat could begin again an in nite number of times.Furthermore, the structure of circular time not onlyappears in each individual piece but also could be usedto explain all Bayle ’s production as a large circle inwhich the same questions are considered by means of different approaches. Also, over the last few years,Bayle has created new versions of earlier pieces: inPetite Polyphonie au jardin (2008) he took thesound material of Grande Polyphonie and created anoctophonic version and in Espace, etc … (2007) hecreated an octophonic remix of several works.

Circular time can be found in nature, in the seasonsand in the movement between night and day. Baylewants to reproduce a time closer to that of nature andrejects the chronological or historical time based on asuccession of events following a certain order in thepast, present and future. The time of life is a cyclic timein which everything is renewed; in La forme de l ’espritest un papillon, the butter y is used as a metaphor of change, life regeneration and music. We would like topoint out that this concept of time, closer to that of nature, is linked on another level to what we discussedearlier as Bayle ’s intention of bringing humanity andnature together in a uni ed movement.

Musicologist Gianfranco Vinay ( 2001) considersthat the history of Western music can be explained as a

ght between two temporal principles: a Chronos time,linear and dialectical, and an Aîon time, circular,pagan and repressed but always present in the collec-tive subconscious. Chronos time is at the origin of therhythmic regularity coded by music and the harmonictension/release dialectics. However, Aîon time opposesthis rhythmic regularity with all kinds of ights.For Gianfranco Vinay, time uidity, the circular

characteristic of images and the linking of sonorousmetamorphoses of Bayle ’s last pieces show the latter ’svocation (as well as that of acousmatic music) to bringAîon time back in an age where Chronos time prevails.These thoughts on the two conceptions of time alsoappear in the writings of philosopher Gilles Deleuze(1925 – 95) who, in his book Logique du sens (1989),points out that in Chronos time there is only a presentin time, past and future being two dimensions relatingto this present; in Aîon time, however, there would beonly one past and one future continuously dividingthe present. Aîon is the instant without thickness

that subdivides every present into past and future,unlike the vast and thick present of Chronos: ‘In short,


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two times, one of which consists only of embeddedpresents, the other merely decomposed into elongatedpast and future. One is always de ned, active orpassive, the other, eternally in nitive, eternally neutral ’(Deleuze 1989).

When examining Bayle ’s works, especially thosecreated after 1980, we realise that time is not thick butrather disappears in a million particles; it is an Aîontime that moves continuously from one instant toanother. There is a pure, non-identi able and immea-surable development in which time never stops divid-ing itself into a before and an after. Every sound eventis mobile, restless and, unable to stay in the same place,always replaced by another: ‘The entire line of the Aîonis run through by the instant which is endlesslydisplaced on this line and is always missing from itsown place’ (Deleuze 1989). Chronos time is the time of material succession, the time of the action of bodies,

while Aîon time is the extra-temporality that acts onthe surface of bodies. Bayle ’s music also acts in thistemporality that re ects the lightness of sound eventswhich are continuously escaping.

Aîonis populated by effects that haunt it without everlling it and is unlimited like the future and the past, butnite like an instant. That is what happens in a way with

Bayle ’s works: they are full of impacts and sensationswhich, instead of occupying all the time, allow it tobreathe. At the same time, each one of his works is nitebut also unlimited because the sound material appearsto be never-ending, as if there was a perpetual naturalreserve ready to offer us its sounds. In the instant of Aîon, singularities and points projected to the past andfuture are extracted. Likewise, in Bayle ’s music there aresome gures that stand out from an in nite circular line.Aîon time is close to the time of pleasure and desire,the time of ecstasy and of the listening-experience(as happens in L’expérience acoustique); it is a time inwhich the listener gets closer to the sound events, as aresonant subject (as will be discussed below). Baylehimself insists on the relevance of the ow of desire: ‘Itisabout the precise organisation for a different andspeci c system of listening, thought of like the owof a movie. Or, of desire ’ (Bayle 1993: 193).

The idea of time as a circle leads to the idea of a non-nished time. Time evolves through the evocation of

one image-of-sound to another image-of-sound in anun nished process which is different every time. Thereis a development marked by non-linear parametersand, even though there is an ending, the listener ’sfeeling is that everything could begin again an in nitenumber of times. In this in nite time there is a spaceproliferation caused by an absent space positioningitself in a present space; different temporalities areblended accounting for this ambiguity. Thesecompositions could be considered as open works in

the sense that we cannot foresee the sound eventsthat will appear.

La forme du temps est un cercle (1999 – 2000) showsan interesting interpretation of this circular time. Thiswork was inspired by La cifra, Jorge Luis Borges ’collection (1899 – 1986) of 45 poems written between1978 and 1981. In one of these poems, Borges showshow Pythagoras taught his disciples that time is shapedas a circle and that everything happens for the rst timebut in a way that is eternal (Borges 1996). In fact, theidea of a circular time is common to all of Borges ’sproduction and can be found in other poems such asLa Noche Cíclica (The Cyclic Night) with the poemending in exactly the same way it had begun, andwhere the suspension points imply an inde niterepetition. Another early work in which Borges wroteabout circular time is the essay included in his Historiade la Eternidad (La doctrina de los ciclos). This

rst idea of a circular time, based on in nite cyclicrepetition, is related to the image of the eternal return;

an image not taken as a set-back but as an in niteprogress towards the departure point, moving alongthe nite circumference in order to return to the samepoint. The concept of a nite matter implies that time isnot an absolute concatenation in which a before and anafter can be recognised, but rather a cyclic concept. Inthe same way, sound material in Bayle ’s work returnsinde nitely but always in a different way. In La formedu temps est un cercle, he studies possible time statescorresponding to a sensation of ux. The last of the

ve movements of this work, Cercles, is made up of sonorities close to those in the rst movement so thatthe piece ’s form is that of a circle in which everythingcould begin again several times. Here, Aeolian sounds,electronic cracklings, in nite glissandi and circularimages that never stop in their trajectory alsoexpress uidity.

2.4. The in uence of technological tools

Technological tools have evolved as much as ideas inthe history of electro-acoustic music (Racot et al.1999). As these authors suggest, in a rst phase, thechange from analogue to digital techniques in uencedall the composers who arrived in the electro-acoustic

music scene in 1970. A knowledge of digital techniquesled to the discovery of the power of precision andthe accumulation of treatments, keeping the soundquality. The rst digital studio of GRM (Groupe deRecherches Musicales, founded in 1958 by PierreSchaeffer and directed by François Bayle from 1966onwards) was 123 studio. Here there were someprograms in non-real time which, despite a mono-tonous and slow ergonomics, obtained very originalresults. Later, with the Syter system it was possible tomake music in real time, and the simultaneousmanipulation of several parameters was made possible

by their interpolation in value sets within abi-dimensional space. After that, with GRM tools,

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all algorithms were clari ed in their presentation and agraphic explanation allowed the beginner a quickunderstanding of what was going on. From then on,the path was opened for the search of new ergonomics.Bayle was aware of the in uence these tools had had onhis music ’s aesthetics and he classi ed his compositionsin three historical periods (Bayle 2003: 50):

1. The use of editing techniques and stereophonicmixing with a magnetic tape from 1963 to1994 (some works from this period are:L’oiseau chanteur, L’ expérience acoustique, GrandePolyphonie, Camera oscura, Érosphère).

2. From 1980 onwards: computerised processing andthe rst digital audio tools in non-real time. Later,in 1988 the launch of Syter and in 1994 of MIDI Formers (works such as: Eros, SonVitesse-Lumière, Théâtre d ’ ombres, Fabulae).

3. Around 1995, he adopted the dynamic mediumand the digital multiprocessor editor with GRMtools plug-ins (in, e.g., La main vide, Morceaux deciel , Si loin si proche).

Taking Bayle ’s technological auto-analysis as a start-ing point, we can take a step forward and associatethese periods with important changes in his composi-tional ideas. At the beginning of the second period(since the 1980s), Bayle modi es his way of conceivingtime (from a linear development with ruptures to acontinuous and circular time); the third period (around1995) corresponds to his growing interest in adaptingold stereo works into multichannel ones. Thus,consciously or not, Bayle brought onto his career thecircular time he applied to his very work. We can saythat in François Bayle ’s works there is a mutualbidirectional in uence between the technological toolsused and the temporal structure emphasised withineach work. At the same time, as will be discussedbelow, this evolution in the conception of time leadsBayle to consider space as an expressive place in whichthe subject lives the sound experience.

3. A RESONANT SUBJECT IN A LIVING SPACE

The study of the use of space in François Bayle ’s workstakes as its starting point the de nition of acousmaticsas ‘the art of projected sounds ’ (Bayle 2003). FromBayle ’s rst works the sound position in space is afundamental parameter in the composition process.Each sound ’s itinerary is registered in the medium;space is de ned in the work and is, at the same time,a consubstantial part of it. This allows us to speak of a composition of space.

French musicologist and composer Michel Chiondistinguishes between an outer space and an innerspace in acousmatic music (Chion 2001). The outer

space is related to the listening conditions of the work(acoustic pro le of the concert hall, the number, type

and position of the loudspeakers) as well as to thesocial space of the work. However, the inner space is

xed on the recording medium and is characterised bythe different layouts of presence of the sounds, the

xed or variable distribution of the elements inthe different tracks, the nuances of their reverberationor absence, or other characteristics typical of thecomposition. Bayle de nes the inner space as a‘psychological volume ’ (Bayle 2003) which isdeveloped in the composition time expressing thevelocity and all the ‘differences ’ that structure thespace. The problem with the interaction of these twokinds of space is clearly presented by Bayle ( 1998) andraises not only an acoustic problem but also aphilosophical one: we have hic et nunc soundproductions which do not belong to the same reality.At the concert two spaces are present: the real space, inthe sense of an actual space (outer space), and at the

same time, the recorded space from the medium itself (the inner space). Our mental space is disruptedbecause there is an uncertainty related to space – timeparameters: inside the real world (the concert hall)another world is built (the one created in the medium).Also, the real world recorded from the outside isinscribed on a technological device; it is a matter of bringing the outside into the inside. Therefore, welisten to sonorities that do not actually exist but existedpreviously: there is the ‘presence of an absence ’.However, we cannot clearly distinguish the differencebetween a real sound and its projected simulation, thatis, we cannot distinguish whether what we are listeningto is really happening or is recorded. This clearly showsthe big gap separating the presence from the absenceby emphasising the perception of a difference of spaceswhich is dif cult to retain. As a consequence, we areaware of the presence of a space that comes fromanother place. Thus, according to Bayle, what we arelistening to is a space hole, a void; we are listening to aspace that is not there.

From our point of view, in François Bayle ’s musicthere is not an opposition of an inner space to an outerspace: against the pure interiority of music itself or of amusic that refers only to the outside, acousmatic music

appears as a ‘wild being ’ (as French philosopherMerleau-Ponty would say) between the two states.Acousmatic music unfolds itself onto outside andinside, it is visible and invisible. In no case is there afusion of these two aspects but a continuous reversi-bility of both, a reversibility that is, at the same time,not complete. The auditory perception is possible inthe continuous metamorphosis that goes from one tothe other. As French philosopher Merleau-Pontyshows about the other ’s presence:

It is necessary and suf cient that the body of the other thatI see and whose word I hear, which is given to me as

immediately present in my

eld, shows me in its own waythat which I shall never be present for, which will always


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Alonso_The Listener in François Bayle’s Works: A Resonant Subject in a Living Space

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