UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Los Angeles

Sound Objects: Speculative Perspectives

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology

By

Mandy Suzanne Wong

2012

© Copyright by

Mandy Suzanne Wong

2012

   

ii

The dissertation of Mandy Suzanne Wong is approved.

__________________________________ Joanna Demers

__________________________________ Nina Eidsheim

__________________________________ Mitchell Morris

__________________________________ Roger Savage __________________________________ Robert Fink, Committee Chair

University of California, Los Angeles

2012

   

iii

This work is dedicated to Joanna Demers, my dear friend and mentor, who saw this

project through from the beginning all the way to the bittersweet end.

   

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Sound Objects: Introduction as Glossary 1 Chapter 1. Sound Objects in Music 19 Chapter 2. Sound Object as Metaphor: Reification and Ideology 59 Chapter 3. Convergences: Sound Objects, Aesthetic Autonomy, Musical Works 97 Chapter 4. Sound Object Analysis 122 Chapter 5. Subjectivity, Discourse, and Truth in Sound Object Analysis 145 Chapter 6. Listening, Dialogue, and Embodiment in EDM: A Case Study in Sound Object Analysis 165 Chapter 7. Object, Sound, Materialism 185 Bibliography 211

   

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My tremendous thanks to the entire faculty of the UCLA Musicology Department,

as to its tireless Student Affairs Officer, Barbara Van Nostrand, for welcoming me into

your midst at an incredibly late stage in my graduate student career. By going out on a

limb on my behalf, you enabled my thinking to develop in ways I never would have

imagined possible.

I am especially grateful to Bob Fink, not just for lending his invaluable expertise

and support to this project, but also for encouraging me to let my thoughts take me where

they would, to make mistakes and try to work through them, and to probe the most

awkward conclusions to their darkest depths. The intellectual value – and, for me, the

sheer joy – of working with an advisor who shares my deep regard for experimental

music cannot be overstated. Bob also deserves tremendous thanks for rising to (and well

above) the occasion when his position as Chair summoned more energy than we could

ever have imagined.

I’d also like to thank Mitchell Morris for our quarter-long battle with Adorno, as

with other philosophical and psychoanalytic ideas. And the dissertation could not have

been what it is without the input of Roger Savage, whose unique philosophical

perspective shaped my earliest work on sound, and who was the first to ask me this vital

question: Who says sound objects aren’t real?

I’d like to extend special thanks to Nina Eidsheim, who raised the possibility of

sound object analysis, served unendingly as my sounding board, and permitted me to

watch as her own unique, ground-breaking ideas on the materiality of music began to

   

vi

take shape. Your friendship and guidance pulled me through the most difficult twists and

turns that my academic life has taken.

This dissertation would not have been possible without Joanna Demers, who first

introduced me to Schaefferian thought, to philosophy in general, and to the notion that

musicology doesn’t have to be what it is. Your work, your insight, and most of all your

friendship continues to give me so much hope.

Finally I’d like to thank my family: Mom, Dad, Mark, and Heather, who enable

me to keep after this wild dream I have, of a life spent in play with ideas.

This dissertation was supported by a number of fellowships, including a UCLA-

Mellon Fellowship of Distinction and a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship, which

made it possible for me to work through the tangle of questions engendered by a mere

two words.

   

vii

VITA

May 24, 1979 Born, Bermuda 2001 B.A., Music Wellesley College Wellesley, Massachusetts 2003 M.M., Piano Performance New England Conservatory of Music Boston, Massachusetts 2005 Graduate Diploma, Piano Performance New England Conservatory of Music Boston, Massachusetts 2008 M.A. Qualification, Music History and Literature University of Southern California Los Angeles, California 2009 Teaching Assistant University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS Eidsheim, Nina and Mandy Suzanne Wong (forthcoming 2012). Corporeal Archaeology:

Embodied Memory and Improvisation in Corregidora and Contemporary Music. In Sounding the Body: Improvisation, Representation, and Subjectivity, ed. by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

___________________ (2011). Frances Dyson’s Sounding New Media. Organised Sound

16(3): 284-286. Wong, Mandy Suzanne (forthcoming 2012). Sound Art. Oxford Bibliographies Online,

New York: Oxford University Press. ___________________ (forthcoming 2012). Sound Art, Sound Sculpture, Sound

Installation, Christian Marclay, Yann Novak, Steve Roden, Mem1, Charlemagne Palestine, Max Neuhaus, Henry Gwiazda, Matmos, Phill Niblock, and Trimpin. In The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, New York: Oxford University Press.

   

viii

___________________ (forthcoming 2012). Hegel’s Being-Fluid in Corregidora, Blues Song, and (Post)Black Aesthetics. Evental Aesthetics, 1(1).

___________________ (forthcoming 2012). Listening to EDM: Sound Object Analysis

and Vital Materialism. Volume! The French Journal of Popular Music Studies. ___________________ (forthcoming 2012). Sound Objects in Musical Discourse. Paper

to be presented at the meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Providence, Rhode Island.

___________________ (2011). Hume and the Problems of Automobile Aesthetics. Paper

presented at the meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, Tampa, Florida. ___________________ (2010). Hegel’s Ontology of Musical Sound. Paper presented at

the meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, Victoria, British Columbia. ___________________ (2010). Sound Object Analysis. Paper presented at Beyond the

Centres: A Conference on Avant-garde Music and Aesthetics, Thessaloniki, Greece.

___________________ (2009). Action, Composition – Morton Feldman and Physicality.

Paper presented at the meeting of the College Music Society, Pacific Chapter, Northridge, California.

___________________ (2009). An Argument for Reduced Listening as a Function of

Memory. Paper presented at the Musicology Graduate Student Conference, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

___________________ (2009). Sonic Materialism. Paper presented at the Hawaii

International Conference for the Arts and Humanities, Honolulu, Hawaii.

   

ix

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Sound Objects: Speculative Perspectives

by

Mandy Suzanne Wong

Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology

University of California, Los Angeles, 2012

Professor Robert Fink, Chair

The terminology that listeners, composers, performers, and scholars use to

describe music and sound affects their functions and ontologies. Terminology alone can

transform music and sound from experiences to things, from encounters to commodities,

from interaction to domination. In other words, terminology influences the qualities and

forms of our attitudes and responses toward music. My dissertation is concerned with one

instance of influential terminology: the term “sound object,” a cornerstone of electronic-

music discourse. Conceptualizing “sound objects” as the atomistic “elements” of music

implies that music possesses a tactile, embodied way of being. Sound objects therefore

elicit inquiries from several perspectives. I consider sound objects from nominalistic,

ontological, epistemological, music-analytical, and historical points of view, all of which

differ considerably from one another.

   

x

The “sound object” first appeared in the 1950s as Pierre Schaeffer’s

conceptualization of music’s “raw element,” which he believed listeners could learn to

hear. Post-Schaeffer, the sound object acquired several definitions and exists today in a

variety of contexts. A sound object may be a sampled or recontextualized sound, as the

author Chris Cutler describes. Alternately, as in the electronic music of Curtis Roads, a

sound object is simply a sonic unit, comprising anything from a noise to a melodic

segment. The sound object is also a musical genre for ringtone composers such as

Antoine Schmitt. Elsewhere, it is a sonic evocation of physical gesture, as in Rolf Inge

Godøy’s research on motor-mimetic music cognition.

My objectives are to assess the term “sound object’s” potential as an increasingly

prevalent aesthetic category, and to theorize and critique the sound object as a

materialistic manner of description too often taken at face value. To be sure, the “sound-

as-thing” may serve as a basic analytical category that may foreground the importance of

subjective listening to analysis. But the tactility implied by the word “object” may

misrepresent sonic and musical experiences as tangible and stable, despite their actual

temporality. That said, the word “object” may elicit reflections on music’s relationships

to embodiment, and critique habitual assumptions concerning musical experience and

music’s ability to communicate truth.

   

1

Sound Objects:

Introduction as Glossary

Public Sound Object:

A sound file on a public server accessible via Internet to home-computer users.

The goal is musical performance globally networked. Users draw from the library of

sound objects (shown in the cylindrical canister above), and join fellow users around the

world in inserting the objects into the collaborative musical improvisation already going

on in cyberspace.1

Experimedia | Sound Objects:

Recording label and online distribution company for experimental music,

established in Kent, Ohio in 2000. A sound object is also any musical selection available

at Experimedia.

Flash Sound Object:

A segment of computer code that tells a computer to access an archived, digitized

sound in the multimedia software Flash. According to an instructional site, “[a] sound

object is not the actual sound used in the Flash file; it is simply a reference to the sound

resources [available on the computer]...Think of it as a translator between a sound’s

                                                            1 Alvaro Barbosa, "Public Sound Objects: A Shared Environment for Networked Music Practice on the Web," Organised Sound 10, no. 3 (2005).

   

2

properties – such as volume, balance, or duration – and the actual sound in the

[computer’s digital] library.”2

Untitled Sound Objects:

Kinetic sound sculptures by Pe Lang and Zimoun (2008): hundreds of tiny motors

hung from white walls.3

Unidentified Sound Object:

Discovered in 2002 by film theorist Barbara Flueckiger in several Hollywood

films, usually from sci-fi and horror genres.

[A] chief characteristic of the USO is that it has been severed from any

connection to a source. In the case of the USO the source is neither visible

on screen, nor may it be inferred from the context. In addition, spectators

are denied any recognition cues, so that in general the level of ambiguity is

not reduced...The USO can be understood as an open, undetermined sign

whose vagueness triggers both vulnerability and tense curiosity...The

ambiguous sound object poses a question...4

                                                            2 Instructional site for programming Flash. http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=463006. Accessed 29 November, 2010.

3 http://www.pelang.ch/works.html

4 Barbara Flueckiger, "The Unidentified Sound Object" (paper presented at the ASF Conference, Paris, 2002), 1-4.

   

3

Like many other theorists, Flueckiger credits Pierre Schaeffer with coining the

term sound object. Schaeffer was a composer, a theorist, and the inventor of musique

concrète. Thus, the term sound object first came about in music, rising with the dawn of

electronic music. Since then, the term has found its way into countless other contexts.

Musical Sound Objects:

Pierre Schaeffer, 1950s: A sound object is a sound “in itself,” the essence of

sound and the universal foundation of all auditory experiences. One arrives at the sound

object by means of a technique that Schaeffer called reduced listening: a mode of hearing

in which one ignores the origins and potential meanings of a sound. For Schaeffer, then, a

sound object is an aestheticized sound to which only its intrinsic qualities are relevant. At

the same time, it is the “raw element” of music, which Schaeffer believed listeners could

learn to hear.5

After Schaeffer’s death in 1995, composers and analysts of electronic music took

up his terminology, in many cases altering its definition. Today, sound object has

multiple definitions, and is used in a variety of musical-discursive contexts.

Chris Cutler, electroacoustic composer and musicologist, 2000: A sampled or

recontextualized sound is a “found (or stolen) object,” hence a sound object.6 The same

reasoning applies in Alvaro Barbosa’s Public Sound Objects, described above.

                                                            5 Pierre Schaeffer, Solfège De L'objet Sonore, trans. Livia Bellagamba (Paris: Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, 1998), 65.

6 Chris Cutler, "Plunderphonics," in Music, Electronic Media and Culture, ed. Simon Emmerson (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000), 97.

   

4

Rolf Inge Godøy, researcher of motor-mimetic music cognition, 2003: A gestural-

sonorous object is a sonic evocation of physical gesture.7

Curtis Roads, microsound composer and theorist, 2004: A sound object is an

“elementary unit of composition” meant to replace the musical note: anything from a

noise to a melodic segment, but with a specific duration (“from about 100ms to several

seconds”).8

Antoine Schmitt, ringtone composer, 2004: A sound object is a composition for

mobile phone, and the name of Schmitt’s recording label dedicated to the ringtone genre:

Sonic()bject.

Sound Object – A Term in Electronic-Music Discourse

Though it is doubtlessly telling that the term sound object has grown from a

musical term to an interdisciplinary phenomenon, permeating a variety of enterprises

from film scholarship to computer programming, sound objects in music are the focus of

this dissertation. Music’s mode of being depends to a significant extent on what we call it

– on the terminology that listeners, composers, performers, and scholars use to describe

it. With its undeniable influence on our attitudes towards phenomena in general,

terminology alone may transform music and sound from experiences to things – from                                                             7 Rolf Inge Godøy, "Gestural-Sonorous Objects: Embodied Extensions of Schaeffer's Conceptual Apparatus," Organised Sound 11, no. 2 (2006), ———, "Music Theory by Sonic Objects," in Polychrome Portraits: Pierre Schaeffer, ed. Évelyne Gayou and translated by François Couture (Paris: Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, 2009), ———, "Images of Sonic Objects," Organised Sound 15, no. 1 (2010), ———, "Gestural Affordances of Musical Sound," in Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning, ed. Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman (New York: Routledge, 2010).

8 Curtis Roads, Microsound (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 16-17.

   

5

encounters to commodities, from interactions to forms of domination. The present inquiry

concerns the influence of one term, sound object, on electronic-music discourse.

My objectives are to assess the sound object’s potential as an increasingly

prevalent aesthetic category, and to theorize the sound object as a materialistic manner of

description too often taken at face value. To be sure, the sound-as-object may serve as a

basic analytical category that, unlike the musical note, may address electronic music on

its own terms and account for the importance of subjective listening to analysis. But the

fixity implied by the word object may misrepresent sonic and musical experiences as

inert and passive, despite their actual temporality and activity.

That said, the word object may elicit reflections on music’s relationships to

embodiment and truth. Moreover, terms like sound object, sound wave, musical note,

musical work, and their underlying premises, may shed light on the ideologies and

epistemologies specific to the cultural eras in which the terms arose. In the following

chapters, I speculate on how and why sound object arose where and when it did, in the

evening of the twentieth century but at the dawn of electronic music, and suggest how the

sound object may have stemmed from existing philosophical preoccupations. I

demonstrate that, as a catalyst of change in prevailing conceptions leading to new

creative and analytical perspectives, the term sound object summons philosophical

questions to the forefront of a musicological inquiry, and illuminates new avenues of

critique for traditional Western musicological and aesthetic presuppositions.

The most basic premise of this endeavor – the notion that terminology for sound

affects how it is treated and how it is understood as functioning artistically and

   

6

discursively, i.e. in several kinds of actual, practical experience – amounts to the

suggestion that naming and experiencing are two diverse ways of approaching what we

may call “experience.” Philosophically, this suggestion highlights a difference between

nominalism on one side, and phenomenology and hermeneutics on the other.9 The power

of nominalism, or even simply of naming, is a primary issue at stake and under inquiry

here. Where suggestions may arise (for instance in Pierre Schaeffer’s work) of

nominalism masquerading as ontology, I attempt to evaluate such implications. Although,

due to the nature of speculation, this project may seem at times to be itself a claim for a

nominalistic ontology, this claim is precisely what is under investigation.

Speculative Perspectives

A word on the title of my project. As we’ll see, a sound object is itself a

perspective on sound. In its multitudinous definitions, the term sound object connotes an

array of listening standpoints: myriad points of view from which to hear and characterize

sound. Additionally, because it is multiplicity itself, because it stands for polymorphous

aural outlooks, the term sound object invites consideration from numerous theoretical

perspectives. In other words, because a sound object is a sound-as-heard, a relationship

between a listening subject and a sonic phenomenon, it references several other

relationships which (I believe, as did Pierre Schaeffer) no single academic discipline is

                                                            9 It is possible to theorize this gap as the chasm between philosophical traditions: analytic and continental. However, I hesitate to qualify it as such in this project, because recent work suggests that this chasm may not be as wide as it has thus far appears, if it even exists at all. The issue of its breadth or existence are far beyond the scope of this inquiry. But the reader may refer to: Dascal, Marcelo (2001). “How Rational Can a Polemic Across the Analytic -Continental 'Divide' Be?” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 9 (3):313 – 339. See also Simons, Peter (2001). “Whose Fault? The Origins and Evitability of the Analytic-Continental Rift.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 9 (3):295 – 311.

   

7

equipped to address on its own. Therefore I try to listen as a music historian, a music

theorist, and a philosopher, and to integrate these perspectives in a flexible,

interdisciplinary outlook. I attempt to move fluidly between various philosophical points

of view, some of them drawn from opposing philosophical traditions.

Altogether, my multifarious perspective is speculative. Based primarily in

thought, speculation embraces paradox. Speculative thought begins with the

equivocalness latent in seemingly innocuous words. This stipulation comes from GWF

Hegel, whose Science of Logic theorizes and proceeds according to speculative

principles. As Hegel says (albeit without any awareness of linguistics, which had yet to

become a veritable science) it is a joy to find

words [that] even possess the further peculiarity of having not only

different but opposite meanings so that one cannot fail to recognize a

speculative spirit of the language in them: it can delight a thinker to come

across such words and to find the union of opposites naïvely shown in the

dictionary as one word with opposite meanings...10

The term sound object affords just this unique opportunity. On the one hand, the

term is a metaphor, describing electronic composers’ treatment of sounds as though they

were material objects. Microsound composer Curtis Roads uses sound objects to

conceptualize short sounds that he “stitches together” into longer sounds via granular-

                                                            10 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 1969), 32.

   

8

synthesis techniques.11 Drew Daniel of Matmos, a duo which creates electronic dance

music using “everyday” sound sources (water droplets, coughs, glassware, and more) also

describes his compositions as constructions built from sound objects. He enjoys working

with sound as “a material thing with some stability...in its own space.” For him, “a

composer is someone who puts things together.”12 Since much electronic music does not

require “live” performers, the sound object perhaps evinces an underlying desire for

corporeality where none is readily apparent. Perhaps electronic composers’ mobilization

of the term sound object suggests an appeal to a metaphor based in the familiar, the

material, for help in conceptualizing near-indescribable experiences.

There are instances in which sound objects may be actual, non-metaphorical

entities. Nina Eidsheim’s work investigates the tactility of sound, music’s consequent

appeal to all the physical senses, and the ramifications of music’s ability to act upon our

bodies. Adding an epistemological component to Eidsheim’s argument, I inquire as to

how sounds may acquire the characteristics and capabilities of material bodies, and how

listeners and artists come to expect them to do so (Chapters 6 and 7).

The allure and precariousness of the term sound object stem not only from its

contradictory definitions but also from its invocation of terms that quotidian parlance

“naïvely” takes for granted: terms like sound, object, music, listening. Speculative

examination of sound objects reveals these other, “basic” terms to be self-contradictory

as well – or at least to be subject to contradictory expectations in musical, philosophical,

                                                            11 Roads, Microsound, 87.

12 Personal communication with Drew Daniel, April 2010.

   

9

and quotidian discourses. Moreover, although the term sound object facilitates analytical

descriptions of certain sonic phenomena and creative processes, the term runs the risk of

oversimplifying the multifaceted relationships between listeners, music, and sounds into

subject-object relationships. We are driven to re-inquire as to what our most basic

relationships with sounds and music really are.

Other Perspectives

Since the aim of this project is to reflect on how the term sound object is used in

musical discourse, I often rely on the exact words of composers and authors who have

used the term, and of philosophers who have investigated related issues. Having arisen

with Schaeffer’s phonograph-based musique concrète, the term sound object pertains

primarily to the creation and audition of electronic music. To date, references to sound

objects are more prevalent in composerly reflections than in scholarly analyses. Few

extant writings confront the sound object with analytical rigor. Schaeffer and Roads are

among the few authors to even attempt formal definitions of the term. For Schaeffer, a

sound object is the result of reduced listening, in which one consciously ignores any

associations implied by a given sound. He cites as inspiration Edmund Husserl’s

phenomenological reduction, which brackets the sensible world out of consideration with

the hope of seeing beyond it to the essence of things. For Roads, the sound object has

similar metaphysical aspirations. Roads’ sound object is a musical, structural unit of very

short duration, made of smaller but still materialistic “sound particles.” Roads follows

Edgard Varèse and Iannis Xenakis, who at the dawn of the nuclear age forged a

   

10

metaphoric connection between discrete sounds and atomic particles. Microsound

composers like Roads later took this connection to a logical extreme in their search for

the irreducible unit of sound. Microsound is an electronic genre typically confined to

short, quiet sounds, sonic clicks and pops. As Mitchell Whitelaw observes, “A click is, in

a sense, the tiniest sound imaginable – so why not call it a sound particle, a sonic

atom?”13 This metaphor shapes not only microsound’s aesthetic, but also its approach to

composition as a kind of “molecular synthesis” of sound objects from sound particles.

Whitelaw is among the few musicologists to openly question whether objectified

sound might just be an illusion, thereby hinting at the contradictions posed by the term

sound object. Whitelaw observes that “through the intermediary of sound, digital data is

figured [in microsound] as exactly the thing that it is not: matter.”14 Thus the sound-

object metaphor becomes a “distraction from what is most interesting” about microsound:

the interactions of “data systems with sound, embodied experience and culture.”15

Carolyn Abbate and Patricia Carpenter join in Whitelaw’s objection to the

disembodiment, the independence from human acts and bodies, implied by such notions

as sonic and musical “objects.”16 Brian Kane, Simon Emmerson, and Luke Windsor offer

similar criticisms of Schaefferian theory: reduced listening and sound objects suggest an

                                                            13 Mitchell Whitelaw, "Sound Particles and Microsonic Materialism," Contemporary Music Review 22, no. 4 (2003): 37.

14 Ibid.: 93.

15 Ibid.: 99.

16 Carolyn Abbate, "Debussy's Phantom Sounds," Cambridge Opera Journal 10, no. 1 (1998), Patricia Carpenter, "The Musical Object," Current Musicology, no. 5 (1967).

   

11

impossible immunity to our historical and cultural surroundings.17 In addition, Joanna

Demers’ work on intellectual property warns that to objectify sound is also to commodify

it.18 As Amy Wlodarski suggests, the practice of sampling runs the risk of reifying and

commodifying entire socio-historical eras and their participants, and of “suturing” them

into contemporary contexts without enough thought to the implications of such

transcontextual moves.19

Yet theories of listening are more likely to include discussions of sound objects

than music histories or analyses, probably because, as Schaeffer claims, sound objects

may come to light only when we listen in certain ways. To my knowledge, my work and

Godøy’s offer the only applications of sound objects to listening as it pertains to music

analysis.20 Emmerson’s monographs and collections, along with essays by Ambrose

Field, Simon Waters, Luke Windsor, and Eric Clarke critique the assumption, basic to the

existence of sound objects, that it is possible to listen in a variety of modes which may or

                                                            17 Brian Kane, "L'objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction," Organised Sound 12, no. 1 (2007), Simon Emmerson, Living Electronic Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), Luke Windsor, "Through and around the Acousmatic: The Interpretation of Electroacoustic Sounds," in Music, Electronic Media and Culture ed. Simon Emmerson (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000).

18 Joanna Demers, Steal This Music (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2006).

19 Amy Lynn Wlodarski, "The Testimonial Aesthetics of Different Trains," Journal of the Americal Musicological Society 63, no. 1 (2010).

20 Rolf Inge Godøy, "Motor-Mimetic Music Cognition," Leonardo 36, no. 4 (2003), Godøy, "Gestural-Sonorous Objects: Embodied Extensions of Schaeffer's Conceptual Apparatus.", ———, "Music Theory by Sonic Objects.", ———, "Images of Sonic Objects.", ———, "Gestural Affordances of Musical Sound.", Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman, eds., Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning (New York: Routledge,2010).

   

12

may not ascribe meaning to sounds.21 Meanwhile, Demers’ theory of aesthetic listening

implements precisely the kind of listening that Emmerson decries: aesthetic listening

permits intermittent attention in a variety of ways, only some of which may yield sound

objects.22 We may situate Demers and Emmerson alongside critiques of other modes of

listening, for instance critical thought by Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Roger Savage,

Andrew Dell’Antonio and others on the merits of “structural listening,” which attends

primarily to form as opposed to style, gesture, or sound.23

“Ancestors” of the term sound object – pervasive heuristic categories such as

musical work – have received a great deal of philosophical attention. Efforts to negotiate

the controversies of the work-concept in the history of Western music include those of

Lydia Goehr, Roman Ingarden, Stephen Davies, Julian Dodd and others.24 But

philosophical investigations of sound object itself are scant. Casey O’Callaghan discusses                                                             21 Simon Emmerson, ed. Music, Electronic Media, and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate,2000), ———, "Living Presence," in Living Electronic Music (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2007), Simon Emmerson and Denis Smalley, "Electro-Acoustic Music.", Ambrose Field, "Simulation and Reality: The New Sonic Objects," in Music, Electronic Media and Culture, ed. Simon Emmerson (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000), Simon Waters, "Beyond the Acousmatic: Hybrid Tendencies in Electroacoustic Music," in Music, Electronic Media and Culture, ed. Simon Emmerson (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000), Windsor, "Through and around the Acousmatic: The Interpretation of Electroacoustic Sounds.", Eric F. Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

22 Joanna Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

23 Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Andrew Dell'Antonio, ed. Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing (Berkeley: University of California Press,2004), Roger W. H. Savage, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2010).

24 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, ed. Jean G. Harrell, trans. Adam Czerniawski (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), Julian Dodd, Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

   

13

“auditory objects,” but in the context of hearing in general, not specifically in music.25

Demers enlists the sound object in Listening Through the Noise, her comprehensive

aesthetics of electronic music.26 Kane offers a brilliant critique of Schaefferian theory

through the lenses of Roger Scruton, Stanley Cavell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.27

Schaeffer himself took inspiration from Husserl’s phenomenology, which warrants

comparison with other phenomenological theories of listening and perception by Don

Ihde, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.28 But none of these inquiries theorize

sound objects as such. There does exist an ample body of philosophical work on sound

alone, as on objects and materialism. Recent contributions to the philosophy of sound

include theories by O’Callaghan and Robert Pasnau.29 And the past few years have seen

new thinking about objects, including the emergence of “new materialist” philosophies

which rethink the Cartesian-Newtonian standard notion of matter as inert and passive,

arguing instead that it is alive, self-generating, and possessed of agency. Jane Bennett,

                                                            25 Casey O'Callaghan, "Object Perception: Vision and Audition," Philosophy Compass 3, no. 4 (2008).

26 Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music.

27 Brian Kane, "The Music of Skepticism: Intentionality, Materiality, Forms of Life," (PhD Diss.: University of California, Berkeley, 2006), Kane, "L'objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction."

28 Pierre Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten, 2 vols. (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), Don Ihde, Listening and Voice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002).

29 Casey O'Callaghan, Sounds: A Philosophical Theory (Oxford University Press, 2007), Robert Pasnau, "What Is Sound?," The Philosophical Quarterly 49, no. 196 (1999), Ihde, Listening and Voice, Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

   

14

Diana Coole, Samantha Frost, Graham Harman, and Timothy Morton are among those

who have recast objects and objects in this radical way.30

Overview of Chapters

Sound objects raise many provocative questions, but rather than address them all,

I undertake in-depth exploration of just a few issues that may interest philosophers and

musicologists. Collectively, the various definitions of the term sound object may also

offer a potentially valuable vocabulary for the analysis of several musical genres to which

traditional aesthetic categories cannot entirely do justice. This includes all kinds of

electronic music, from experimental electroacoustic to electronic dance music, as well as

sound art and non-electronic experimental music. In the following chapters, where

relevant, I discuss examples from various genres of electronic music and sound art. I do

not address the presence of materialism in discourses surrounding non-electronic music,

although I have done so elsewhere.31 My choice here is grounded largely in my personal

aesthetic preferences, as well as in the happenstances that: the term sound object was

coined as part of Pierre Schaeffer’s attempt to theorize electronic music; and the term is

employed today, almost exclusively, by electronic musicians.

                                                            30 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press,2010), Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), Timothy Morton, "Materialism Expanded and Remixed" (paper presented at the New Materialisms Conference, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 2010).

31 Mandy-Suzanne Wong, "Action, Composition - Morton Feldman and Physicality" (paper presented at the College Music Society, Pacific Chapter Meeting, 2009).

   

15

Now, speculation continually begins, and begins again, as it considers what could

be, and thus uncovers various angles of thought. Each angle offers wholly different

possibilities for what could be, and itself reveals new angles. From each new angle or

perspective, speculation begins anew. Each of my chapters is therefore a beginning.

Chapter 1, “Sound Objects in Music,” examines the various types of sound object

found in electronic-music discourse, and the qualifying terms used to differentiate them

throughout the dissertation. I compare Schaeffer’s reducible sound object, a non-

referential sound divested of communicative responsibilities, to Roads’ structural sound

object, a tiny musical unit; Cutler’s transcontextual sound object, the “found” or sampled

sound; Godøy’s gestural sound object, the musical invocation of gesture; and the sound

object genre favored by ringtone composers. Although Post-Schaefferian composers and

theorists tend to discard his initial definition of sound object, they are almost unanimous

in crediting Schaeffer with the coinage of the term. Altogether, then, the contingent of

sound objects available to electronic-music discourse possesses a Deleuzian rhizomatic

structure, with Schaeffer at the root.

Although Schaeffer did not conceive the sound object as a metaphor, its

application today may be primarily metaphorical. In Chapter 2, “Sound Object as

Metaphor: Reification and Ideology,” I speculate on how the sound object may have

acquired its metaphoricity. I analyze its entailments, drawing on seminal theories of

metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. I argue that one (but not the only)

powerful entailment of the term sound object is that sounds are conceived and treated just

as other objects are – objects such as commodities, tangible and visible things. Such

   

16

reification makes sounds easier to conceptualize and to work with – to master – but does

not necessarily provide an accurate account of sound. Drawing on the well-known

critique of reification by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, I suggest that ideologies

of domination enable the term sound object to persist in musical discourse, despite its

technical inaccuracies. I investigate how the work of sound sculptor Bill Fontana

unwittingly endorses these ideologies by embracing materialistic metaphors for sound.

Sound object is a relatively young term, dating from the late 1940s. However,

Chapter 2 hints that older philosophical preoccupations may be at work in it. Chapter 3,

“Convergences: Sound Objects, Aesthetic Autonomy, Musical Works,” identifies

foundations for certain aspects of sound-object theories in post-Kantian philosophies of

aesthetic autonomy (“art for art’s sake”), and “pure perception,” a notion in which

perception ignores aspects of experience in the hope of alighting upon essentialities. Also

in this chapter, I speculate on how certain preexisting terms in musical discourse may

have provided inspiration for the term sound object, in particular the term musical work.

Drawing on philosophies of the work by Goehr, Ingarden, Michael Morris, and others, I

attempt to demonstrate how sound objects exacerbate the impulses and problems that

attend upon the musical work.

Chapter 4, “Sound Object Analysis,” takes an entirely different road, investigating

the term sound object’s ability to serve as a primary category in musical analysis. I define

sound object analysis as, basically, sound object taxonomy: identifying and describing

various kinds of sound object that may be heard in pieces of music. As I approach a few

examples from this perspective – pieces by Alvin Lucier and the electroacoustic duo

   

17

Mem1 – I consider sound objects’ varied and flexible relationships with listening. We

could say, in fact, that since the various kinds of sound objects are sonic phenomena

heard in singular ways, a sound object is an occurrence of a singular act of listening upon

a given sound. As an analytical technique, sound object analysis has several advantages,

the greatest of which is that it is grounded in sound and listening. In active, fluid

interactions with sound, listening subjectivities participate in determining what they hear.

Sound object analysis thus serves as a telling contrast to traditional methods, founded in

predetermined categories such as pitch classes and tonal forms.

However, a consequence of subjectivity’s predominance in sound object analysis

is that it can never determine sounds’ characteristics with absolute certainty, therefore

cannot pinpoint whether or not sound objects are ever actually present. Where I hear a

certain kind of sound object in a piece of music, another listener may hear a melody or

something else. In sum, sound object analyses are relativistic. Chapter 5, “Subjectivity,

Discourse, and Truth in Sound Object Analysis” therefore attempts to address the

implications of the fact that sound object analysis can never say anything for certain

about music, listening, or sound. Sound object analysis offers no foundation for

agreements about music, and cannot even pinpoint the object of discussion (“a” particular

sound object or piece of music) with any manner of certainty. I therefore question the

potential of sound object analysis to function as a kind of discourse.

Nevertheless, I also propose that although sound object analysis cannot provide

ontological certainties about music, it can lead us to a truth of music. If, following Gianni

Vattimo and others, we understand “truth” to mean change and that which produces

   

18

change, as all genuine phenomena do, then sound objects can be and indicate truths by

functioning as fluid listening perspectives.

Chapter 6, “Listening, Dialogue, and Embodiment in EDM: A Case Study in

Sound Object Analysis,” further explores the interactions between listener and sound in

sound object analysis, via Yasushi Miura’s electronic dance music (EDM). An extended

case study that links sound-object theories to Jane Bennett’s philosophy of vital

materialism, this chapter poses a response to a pressing question in EDM-studies: is mere

listening a viable response to EDM? Without dancing, can listeners respond to electronic

dance music in a way that does justice to the music? By attempting to demonstrate that

the listening acts involved in sound object analysis are embodied interactions between

embodied entities, I propose that listening is comparable to dancing as a bodily response

to EDM. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how sound object analysis can

participate in a current musicological debate.

As my discussion draws to a close, I find that it has wrought more questions than

answers. Chapter 7, “Sounds, Objects, Materialisms,” begins anew with a fundamental

question: If a sound can be an object, what does this imply about the ontologies of sounds

and of objects? In contrast to Chapter 2, my final chapter argues that sound objects need

not be metaphorical: that they may be actual entities. Drawing on Casey O’Callaghan’s

recent philosophy of sound, and on theories of matter by René Descartes, Isaac Newton,

Diana Coole, and Jane Bennett, I speculate on how sounds might just be embodied,

material things, with the ability not only to be acted upon by musicians and listeners, but

also to act on us.

   

19

Chapter 1.

Sound Objects in Music

Rhizome

The Introduction as Glossary displays sound objects as objects in a collection:

things exist alongside one another. In the glossary, the relationships of terms to one

another remain obscure, unsaid. So this chapter begins again, in the aftermath of glossary

and introduction, with an attempt to theorize those relationships.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari propose the rhizome as a

perspectival approach to multiplicities. The opposite of a rhizome is a tree, or root-based

structure: a single root becomes two roots, two roots become four, and so on until the tree

is grounded. Up above, the same structure repeats: one trunk gives two branches, each of

which gives another two. An analogy for teleological generation, the tree structure is that

of the family tree or genealogy. The rhizome, on the other hand, is contingent, not

teleological, and eschews binaries. To see a rhizomatic structure in the relationships

between things is to observe a wealth of different connections between them, not just the

inevitable “one-becomes-two” relationship between parents and children that recurs in

genealogies.

A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains,

organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences,

and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very

diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and

   

20

cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic

universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized

languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a

homogeneous linguistic community.32

A rhizome yet possesses a principal root, but its authority as “founding father,” which it

would possess in the tree structure, is aborted. This is not to deny the root’s existence as

one of the rhizome’s constituents, all of which are not necessities but possibilities. In the

rhizome:

the principal root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate,

indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a

flourishing development. This time, natural reality is what aborts the

principal root, but the root’s unity subsists, as past or yet to come, as

possible.33

Sound objects in musical discourse collectively form a rhizome, with Pierre

Schaeffer as the aborted but subsistent root (and, as the glossary reveals, with tendrils

reaching far beyond music).34 It would be inaccurate and misleading to suggest that the

                                                            32 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 7.

33 Ibid., 5.

34 I must underscore that the rhizome to which I am referring is that which is theorized by Deleuze and Guattari, but which botanists would find horrifyingly inaccurate. I would like to thank Mitchell Morris for pointing this out to me. I do think, however, that Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic structure can serve usefully as an image; it has been helpful to me in my attempts to think the contingent web of relationships and non-relationships that exist between various definitions of the term “sound object.” Bearing in mind that my project as a whole is an exercise in skepticism concerning the general efficacy of metaphors, figures, “images,” and even names, I do believe that such structures are useful to processes of

   

21

term sound object’s definition developed over the years in teleological fashion, or that

gradual changes in its usage followed sensibly on one another. In fact, when composers,

theorists, etc. adopt the term sound object, they define it to suit their objectives with little

or no regard for how the term is used in other contexts. There is one exception. Schaeffer

is credited almost unanimously by those who think in terms of sound objects. Yet no one

who appropriates Schaeffer’s terminology retains his definition. Were it to have a family

tree, the sound object would have a genealogy consisting entirely of cousins,

simultaneous and distant, who shared little more than a name. The rhizome is therefore a

stronger analogy for sound objects’ relationships.

The remainder of this chapter suggests how each musical-discursive treatment of

the term sound object may participate in a rhizomatic web of connection that includes all

the others. Along the way, I describe the various musical-discursive uses of the term

sound object in more detail than a glossary can provide. I emphasize: suggestion and

description, not explanation. As in Deleuze and Guattari:

we will not look for anything to understand in it [the sound object]. We

will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it

does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own

are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it

makes its own converge.35

                                                                                                                                                                                 conceptualization (as I will argue in Chapter 2) and that Deleuze and Guattari formulate a worthy conceptual structure in the rhizome. 35 Ibid., 4.

   

22

Convergences

When the denizens of a rhizomatic structure come together, they do not form

unities. Instead they assemble at points of convergence, so that these points themselves

consist of the multiplicities of bodies and phenomena that congregate. Deleuze and

Guattari would emphasize the assembling and the multiple rather than the point.

Nonetheless, some common tendency or theme draws the multiple to assemble. In

musical sound objects, there are a few such themes: details and propensities that summon

the term sound object’s divergent manifestations to convergences.

First, sound object consistently implicates a phenomenon with definite borders,

analogous to the surfaces and skins that maintain the shapes of tangible objects. As a

result, sound objects may be dragged and dropped (or torn and sutured) to and from

various contexts, or contemplated in isolation from contexts, like single cells.

Second, all sound objects result from specific listening acts. One identifies and

distinguishes sound objects by attending to sound in ways that apply the aforementioned

boundaries and pinpoint the particular characteristics implied by one or several of the

term sound object’s definitions. Hence in all sound object theories, listening experience is

paramount: to define, categorize, and thenceforth theorize sound objects means to

experience sound. To clarify this point via contrast: where musical note falsely implies

that music is only notated text, written down and thus un-sonic, and where musical notes

are unable to account for the timbral, corporeal, and signifying aspects of sonic

experience, sound objects foreground music’s sonic mode of being, and only exist when

   

23

they are experienced. Those who work with sound objects do so with the intention of

thinking beyond musical notes.

Third, as I have mentioned, musicians and analysts who utilize the term sound

object are usually aware that it began with Schaeffer. Their uses of the term respond, with

affirmation or contestation, to his complex theories of sound objects and listening. Some

such responses are unconscious. Some adopt the term simpliciter and bestow a new

definition. Others, however, employ qualifying phrases to underscore the distinction

between Schaeffer’s notion of the sound object and their own. In what follows I qualify

all sound objects, so as to permit their comparison. I identify them according to how

listeners may experience them. I also rely heavily on the words of the artists and theorists

in question, so that I may be sure of properly representing their intentions.

Finally, the term sound object tends to refer to electronically generated sound,

even though its definitions may apply equally well to non-electronic sounds. The

definitions themselves tend to result from the conscious converging of individual creative

proclivities, informed by socio-historically predominant modes of thought, with

technology.

Thus: the diverse manifestations of the term sound object in musical discourse

converge with Schaeffer and his work; with listening experiences and attempts to explain

them; with tangible objects via common attributes; with electronic technology; and with

the notions, bodies, and circumstances that in turn converge with these phenomena from

the outside. The following chapters hopefully enact these convergences with greater

   

24

clarity. For now, let us look with more discerning eyes at the various definitions of sound

objects in music.

Reducible Sound Objects: Schaeffer

Music history remembers Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) as the inventor of

musique concrète: music made from recorded sounds. For him the word concrete denoted

where and how he acquired these sounds: by confronting “concrete,” quotidian life with

sound-recording equipment, venturing to street corners, train stations, concert halls, toy

closets, and kitchens with his microphone, phonographic disc engraver or, after 1955,

tape recorder. Concrete also describes his method of musical composition, which he

understood as “hands-on” experimentation, in contrast to the techniques of serial and

traditional composers. Schaeffer could not hold with these other techniques because they

relied on musical notes. To him, musical notes were both abstract (they are not sounds

but dots and circles) and limited (translatable only into the prescribed sounds of

traditional musical instruments). Contrarily he conceived his own music-making as the

“direct” manipulation of sound, the “material” of music captured on disc and tape, which

aimed at the listening perception – whereas only the eye can immediately access musical

notes.36 Granted, any notion that recorded sounds are unmediated is misguided, since

discs and tapes are themselves media. The point is that Schaeffer sought to emphasize,

first, that music and the study of music – of sounds configured into art – could not rely on

silent, notated schema as their foundations; second, that every sound is as musical as the                                                             36 Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 132.

   

25

next, regardless of its origin, and that music may therefore include any sound imaginable.

His first concrète pieces were the Noise Studies of 1948, which include his famous

Railroad Study, made from recorded train sounds. To commend his radical suppositions,

Schaeffer proposed that all music possesses a foundational, audible essence common to

every sonic experience.37 He called this elementary phenomenon a sound object.

For Schaeffer, a sound object is what we hear when we listen in a “reduced”

manner, in which we ignore all implications of sources or meanings that a sound may

make, and “reduce” our experience to that of the sound itself. I will refer to sounds heard

in this manner as reducible sound objects. Schaeffer wrote, “a sound object in the strict

sense of the word…[is a product of] 'reduced hearing' (écoute réduite) [which] enables us

to grasp the object for what it is...”38 Because he recognized that in “habitual experience,”

visible and tangible objects present as “given” (données) – readily there in front of us,

obvious – he chose the term object to connote the “given” basis of aural experience. He

believed that only reduced listening could lead us to an encounter with such an essential

object. In typical experience, we hear not the sound object but “structures” of meaning

that we impose on what we hear.39 In contrast, as Schaefferian disciple Michel Chion

explains:

                                                            37 Schaeffer scholars do in fact use this term, essence, to describe what he was after. See for instance Kane, "L'objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction." Emphasis added.

38 Schaeffer, Solfège De L'objet Sonore, 53. Emphasis added.

39 “Limiter ainsi l’investigation musical serait oublier que “les objets sont faits pour servier” et le paradoxe fundamental de leur employ: que, dès qu’ils sont groupés en structures, ils se font oublier en tant qu’objets, pour n’apporter, chacun, qu’une value à l’ensemble. C’est d’ailleurs une pensée naïve qui s’exprime ainsi en langage ordinaire: les objets, dans notre expérience habituelle, nous semblent “donnés”. En réalité, nous

   

26

The name sound object refers to every sound phenomenon and event

perceived as a whole, a coherent entity, and heard by means of reduced

listening, which targets it for itself, independently of its origin or its

meaning...It is a sound unit perceived in its material, its particular texture,

its own qualities and perceptual dimensions. On the other hand, it is a

perception of a totality which remains identical through different

hearings...40

Reduced listening is an acquired skill.

Sound still remains to be deciphered, hence the idea of an introduction to

the sound object to train the ear to listen in a new way: this requires that

the conventional listening habits imparted by education first be

unlearned...If one wants to get at the raw sound material [of music], one

must be far more brutal…this naturally means giving up meaning, no

longer turning to the context for help and finding criteria for identifying

sound which go against the habits of instinctive analysis.41

This “deciphering” of sound, meant to yield sound objects, is not a decoding of linguistic

signs. For Schaeffer, music is not a language, in which words point to things that are not

words. As he heard it, “music is, of course, listened to for its own sake and not as the

                                                                                                                                                                                 ne percevons pas les objets mais les structures qui nous permettent de les identifier. Ces structures ells-mêmes ne nous surprennent pas dans un expérience originale de l’écoute. Nous n’avons pas cessé d’entenre des sons depuis que notre sens de l’ouis s’est éveillé…” ———, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 33.

40 Michel Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, trans. John Dack (http://modisti.com/news/?p=14239, 2009.), 32.

41 Schaeffer, Solfège De L'objet Sonore, 11, 67.

   

27

vehicle of any explicit message”: music should communicate nothing but the absolutely

sonic beauty of sound.42 Thus to “decipher” sound means, for Pierre Schaeffer, to

examine its intrinsic, essential qualities as though it were a curious shard placed under a

microscope.

Schaeffer modeled the technique of reduced listening on Edmund Husserl’s

phenomenological reduction or epoché.43 “For years, we had often done phenomenology

without knowing it,” he wrote, in his 1966 Treatise on Musical Objects.44 On the

following page, he elucidated that it was Husserlian phenomenology which he and his

colleagues had pursued, quoting extensively from Husserl’s Logical Investigations and

Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Pure Philosophy. Brian Kane provides a

thorough analysis of Schaeffer’s relationship with Husserl, which the boundaries of my

inquiry impel me to describe more briefly.45

Husserl sought a foundation for the philosophical science of logic which, as we

will see, became a metaphysical quest for the essence of all things. He theorized a mode

of reflective thought in which one would abstain from any judgment of the kind we’d

normally take for granted, for instance the assumption that there is a physical world.

Since, following Descartes, Husserl believed that we cannot be certain about those kinds

                                                            42 Ibid., 65.

43 “Pendant des années, nous avons souvent fait ainsi de la phénoménologie sans le savoir...” ———, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 262-63. See also 30, 132.

44 Ibid., 262.

45 Kane, "L'objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction."

   

28

of judgments, to locate facts of which we can be certain we must ignore, put aside, or

bracket out those contingent judgments in what amounts to a series of reflective

reductions. Schaeffer thought the same:

It is a readily admitted fact that different people hear differently and that

the same person does not always hear in the same way. We must therefore

stress emphatically that an object [that is, a sound object] is something

real, in other words that something in it endures through these changes and

enables different listeners (or the same listener several times) to bring out

as many aspects of it as there have been ways of focusing the ear, at the

various levels of “attention” or “intention” of listening.46

The first “level of attention” that listeners must attain, as the first step in our

approach to the sound object – to that enduring, common “something real” at the basis of

every auditory experience – is what Schaeffer named the acousmatic. According to his

Treatise, acousmatic listening “forbids us” from inferring any relationship between what

we hear and anything “visible, touchable, measurable.”47 In effect, acousmatic listening

abstains from associating sound with any instrumental sources. Kane, from whom a

book-length study on the acousmatic situation is forthcoming, provides a lucid

description.

                                                            46 Schaeffer, Solfège De L'objet Sonore, 59.

47 “[L]a situation acousmatique, d’une façon générale, nous interdit symboliquement tout rapport avec ce qui est visible, touchable, mesurable.” ———, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 93.

   

29

The acousmatic experience reduces sounds to the field of hearing alone.

This reduction is really a matter of emphasis; by shifting attention away

from the physical object that causes my auditory perception, back towards

the content of this perception, the goal is to become aware of precisely

what it is in my perception that is given with certainty, or “adequately.”

This reduction is intended to direct attention back to hearing itself...48

Once we have achieved the acousmatic reduction, a further reduction in the form

of reduced listening enables us to hear the “sound itself,” which Schaeffer named “sound

object.” In other words, reduced listening is a double reduction: it encapsulates the dual

abstention from associating sound with instrumental sources (generating the acousmatic

situation) and with any other kind of meaning.49 Reduced listening prevents sound from

serving as a signifier of anything other than itself.

A key point here: it is listening experiences that bring reducible sound objects to

light, not visual and thoughtful analyses of silent, notated scores. Thus Schaefferian

theory remains true to its roots in phenomenology which, says Husserl, is “a new kind of

descriptive method...and an a priori science derived from it...[based on] a clarification of

what is peculiar to experience, and especially to the pure experience of the psychical...”50

Just as reduced listening attempts to reach the essence common to all listening                                                             48 Kane, "L'objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction," 17.

49 See Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 270-72.

50 Edmund Husserl, "Transcendental Phenomenology and the Way through the Science of Phenomenological Psychology," in The Essential Husserl, ed. Donn Welton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 322-23. Emphasis added.

   

30

experiences, Husserlian phenomenology uses a particular kind of “psychical” experience

– the phenomenological reduction in reflective thought – to try to get to:

the psychical experience as such, in which these things [experiences] are

known as such. Only reflection reveals this to us. Through reflection,

instead of grasping simply the matter straight-out – the values, goals, and

instrumentalities – we grasp the corresponding subjective experiences in

which we become “conscious” of them, in which (in the broadest sense)

they “appear.”51

Focused on experience, phenomenology provides Schaeffer with an alternative

method of studying music – alternative, that is, to musicology and acoustics, which he

believed incapable of fully addressing musical experience. As he saw it, musicology aims

first at schema made of abstract, notated symbols, which a fixed set of instruments may

or may not concretize in sound. Sound and listening, the actual constituents of musical

experience, are secondary. Similarly, though acoustics can diagram sound waves and

generalize sound’s behavior through the laws of physics, Schaeffer points out that those

diagrams and laws cannot precisely describe the listening experience, since our memories

and predilections influence what we hear.52 For him, music is a physical experience that

encapsulates both natural and cultural experiences. In turn, only experience – physical,

naturally and culturally conditioned listening – can convey what music is. Hence, he

                                                            51 Ibid., 323. Emphasis original.

52 See Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 22.

   

31

writes, “If music is a unique bridge between nature and culture, let us avoid the double

stumbling block of aestheticism and scientism, and trust in our hearing...”53

The centrality of experience to Schaeffer’s method may have motivated his choice

of the term object (objet sonore) to describe his results. Philosophers speak of phenomena

that are or may be experienced as objects of experience (Kant, for example, throughout

the Critique of Pure Reason). Tangible objects indeed constitute many of our

experiences, although they are not all there is. Things shape the spaces we inhabit and

navigate; they are the surfaces we walk upon, the morsels we devour, the instruments of

our trades. We interact with things bodily, sensuously, and intellectually. Things are and

are molded by nature and culture. It therefore makes sense that in his quest for a

foundation of musical and auditory experience, to which experience itself can attest,

Schaeffer sought an object.

Further, Schaeffer’s sense that sound possesses a physically perceptible essence,

as corporeal as a thing, may have stemmed from the way in which he himself “handled”

sound, which he believed to be tactile. I refer once more to his compositional method,

which he may have understood as a working-upon sound itself, captured inside tangible

discs and tapes. As Mark Katz explains, especially in the early days of recording

technology, phonograph records were not seen as media that stood between listeners and

sounds, but as the sounds themselves, “frozen.”54

                                                            53 ———, Solfège De L'objet Sonore, 15.

54 “[O]ne of the most remarkable characteristics of recorded sound [is] its tangibility. Taking the disc out of its paper sleeve, he held the frozen sound in his hands, felt the heft of the thick shellac, saw the play of light on the disc’s lined, black surface. He was holding a radically new type of musical object, one whose very

   

32

At times, though, Schaeffer acknowledged that “[t]he instants that we hear cannot

be assessed in terms of inches of tape.”55 He knew that:

A sound object is not a magnetic tape [L’objet sonore n’est pas la bande

magnétique]. Though it is materialized by magnetic tape, the object, that

which we are trying to define, is no longer on the tape. On the tape, there

is nothing but the magnetic trace of a signal...56

Again, Schaeffer maintained that listening experience, not tape, is the key to the sound

object. Yet, at the same time, he asserted that recordings are like photographs: they are a

kind of framing (cadrage) that yields access to fixed objects (fixation sur l’objet),

circumscribed or excerpted from the continuum of experience, which may then be studied

and compared.57 We could read this comparison of sound recording to the visual, tactile

art of photography as an attempt to foreground the visual and tactile aspects of sound

recordings. Note as well that both photos and recordings reveal perceptible “objects.”

Given Schaeffer’s assertion of this relationship, it is my supposition that he understood

the unearthing of sound objects as a tactile and visual process as well as an aural one.

                                                                                                                                                                                 physicality led to extraordinary changes in the way music could be experienced.” Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), 12.

55 Schaeffer, Solfège De L'objet Sonore, 39.

56 “L’objet sonore n’est pas la bande magnétique. Quoique matérialisé par la bande magnétique, l’objet, tel que nous le définissons, n’est pas non plus sur la bande. Sur la bande, il n’y a que la trace magnétique d’un signal...” ———, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 95. Emphasis original.

57 “[S]on enregistré...[est une type du] cadrage d’autre part, qui consiste à ‘découper,’ dans le champ auditif un secteur privilégié. On retrouve ice, bien sûr, les expériences déjà connues et comprises, depuis la photographie, dans le domaine visuel. On sait que si la photographie nous prive de la fluidité de lavision, elle nous apport, à l’intérieur d’un cadre (qui nous cache fort heureusement le reste), une fixation sur l’objet, sur un détail de l’objet...” Ibid., 80.

   

33

Indeed, in musique concrète, which relies on recorded sound, manipulating or even

hearing sound means handling tangible objects, engraving and inspecting discs and tapes.

It is my contention that Schaeffer therefore equated sounds with objects not just in his

theoretical deliberations but also in his compositional and experimental intuitions.

In fact, his experiments aimed to make sounds lend themselves to reduced

listening by manipulating the discs and tapes on which the sounds were stored. Looping

the discs, speeding up or slowing down their rate of play, splicing tapes together or

clipping them to remove attacks and decays, all helped to obscure sounds’ origins,

creating the acousmatic situation that facilitated reduced listening. Following Husserl,

Schaeffer believed that subjecting recordings to endless variation would reveal sound

objects that remained the same throughout and despite the variations. Hence for Schaeffer

himself, the reductions that produced sound objects were not only listening acts but also

bodily movements that relied on tactile manipulations of tangible things. Perhaps, then,

the term sound object resulted from his belief that tinkering with tangible things would

yield more tangible things. In other words, what Schaeffer hoped to discover, by

dissecting discs and tapes in the manner of a laboratory scientist, were more elementary

sound objects.

Certainly Schaeffer harbored a scientific outlook on his work, the purpose of

which was “to re-create the materials and the circumstances of an authentic ‘musical

experience,’” just as physicists and biologists recreate and isolate natural situations in the

lab for the purpose of study.58 Trained as a radio engineer, he also maintained the attitude

                                                            58 ———, Solfège De L'objet Sonore, 11.

   

34

of a handyman or “tradesman.” He says, “Homo faber is a born meddler, a manipulator,

and sometimes a tinkerer. Wherever he finds himself, he will look around and Heaven

help whatever he lays his hands on.”59 And of his own composition studio, Schaeffer

writes, “on one side the studio, on the other the workshop.”60 This is simply more

evidence that he was aware of composition as a tactile experience, and thence of the

tangible qualities of manipulated sound. This awareness may help us to understand why

he conceived sounds as objects that may be uncovered by corporeal experiences based in

the sense of touch, as well as by aural experiences. (I will unpack the relationship

between sound objects and tangibility in Chapters 2 and 6.)

It is worth reiterating that even though reduced listening is a subjective experience

(only I can instigate the necessary reductions in my own mind, and only I can confirm

their success), Schaeffer was convinced that this experience would ultimately reveal

sound objects to be objective phenomena. In other words, for Schaeffer, sound objects

exist independently of any human mind. Hence the term sound object is not a metaphor

but refers to something real, possessed of “objective reality.”61 Schaeffer’s experiments

therefore sought “some rule which would provisionally hold true for any sound string and

enable us to extract from it that raw element which we have called the sound object...”62

What he means by “sound string” is not clear, but he does suggest that the “raw element,”

                                                            59 Ibid., 53.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid., 59.

62 Ibid., 65.

   

35

which he believed to be the essence of music, is again akin to a corporeal object: a “brick

of sensation” from which complex sounds and compositions may be constructed.63

Schaeffer’s search for a “raw element” is a metaphysical as well as

phenomenological investigation. In a way, it is a quasi-Aristotelian search for a “first

cause” or origin, of music – a sonic cause, rather than a notated or conceptual one. Like

great metaphysicians from Thales to Hegel, Schaeffer seeks foundations, essences.

Husserl also conceived his work as phenomenological psychology that was

simultaneously transcendental ontology. This is because the “phenomenological

reduction (to the pure ‘phenomenon,’ the purely psychical)” involves the “methodical and

rigorously consistent epoché” of every naive assumption about the physical world as well

as the “seizing and describing of the multiple ‘appearances’ [of things as they appear to

us when we are conscious of them] as appearances of their objective units.”64 In other

words, that which appears to us in consciousness is “objective” for Husserl, just as the

products of reduced listening are objective for Schaeffer. And this is how both Husserl

and Schaeffer generate ontology from psychology: the appearances that

phenomenological reductions (psychical operations) yield can be taken as eidetic,

therefore objective and universal, units of being. In addition, the same reductive method

we use to find the basis of our psychical processes can be applied to the world in general,

to locate the essence of all things. Says Husserl:

                                                            63 ———, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 60-61.

64 Husserl, "Transcendental Phenomenology and the Way through the Science of Phenomenological Psychology," 325.

   

36

Phenomenology as the science of all conceivable transcendental

phenomena and especially the synthetic total structures in which alone

they are concretely possible – those of the transcendental single subjects

bound to communities of subjects [–] is eo ipso the a priori science of all

conceivable beings...[that is, of] the full concretion of being in general

which derives its sense of being and its validity from the correlative

intentional constitution. This also comprises the being of transcendental

subjectivity itself, whose nature it is to be constituted transcendentally in

and for itself. Accordingly, a phenomenology properly carried through is

the truly universal ontology...65

For both Husserl and Schaeffer, investigating a psychical process – in Schaeffer’s case, a

mode of selective listening – unlocked the methodological tool that would set them on the

path to ontology: the science that promised to discover the essence of being.

To summarize, then: the first sound object – the doubly reducible sound object, a

sound heard in isolation from meanings and source-associations – has its roots in

Schaeffer’s faith that music cannot be abstracted from experience, and hence that

listening subjects take active roles in shaping what they hear. For Schaeffer the

phonographic tinkerer, the experience of music was tactile as well as aural. He believed

that, by means of phenomenological endeavors grounded in such experiences, listeners

and composers may unearth the stable, objective essence of music and sonic experience,

and so experience music’s ontology. Schaeffer named this essence a sound object in

                                                            65 Ibid., 333.

   

37

recognition of its audible and tactile facets, and of the surface-like boundaries that sounds

incur when reduced listening brackets out extra-sonic associations.

Schaeffer identified sub-types of reducible sound objects, classifying them “typo-

morphologically” according to their intrinsic, sonic features, i.e. the shapes of their sonic

envelopes.66 Thus he offered a unique vocabulary for the analysis of music in terms of its

actual, “concrete” sounds, posing a useful alternative to “abstract,” score-based analysis.

He enumerated impulsive sound objects, which are sounds of particularly short duration

with sharp attacks and quick decays (e.g. a click, a single staccato chord); iterative

sound objects made of repetitive attacks (e.g. a drum roll); and sustained sound objects,

continuous sounds with rare attacks and decays (e.g. drones).67 Note however that for

Schaeffer, all sound objects are of “medium duration,” neither too long nor too short for

the listener to memorize.68 Even sustained sound objects constitute continuous sounds

that nevertheless last only as long as this admittedly vague “medium” duration. In

Chapter 4, I will explore the taxonomy of sound objects, as a tool for music analysis, in

all its possibilities, including that of hearing several sound objects or types of sound

object at once. But at this point I must emphasize that these sub-categories do not in any

way conflict with reduced listening: rather they pinpoint sonic characteristics that are not

contingent on the sources or connotations of the sounds in question. I mention these

                                                            66 Schaeffer, Solfège De L'objet Sonore, 67.

67 Ibid., 67-69.

68 Michel Chion, Guide Des Objets Sonores (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1983), 35.

   

38

terms here because, as we’ll see below, they proved particularly influential to post-

Schaefferian theories in which sound objects converge with human gestures.

It is also worth mentioning that not all of Schaeffer’s music reflects his theories –

a discrepancy of which, in his preface to Chion’s Guide to Sound Objects, he was

painfully aware, and which disheartened him considerably at the end of his life.69 For

example, in Tourniquets Study, the fourth of his Noise Studies, several sounds are readily

identifiable as those of traditional instruments, including xylophone and contrabass. Nor

are the sounds expressly “framed” or delineated as individuals. Hence neither reduced

listening nor an approach to sounds as objects is encouraged here. In contrast, though,

Etude Pathétique, from the same set of studies, uses more adventurous timbres, some of

which are indeed mysterious: perhaps at the opening something metal falls onto a floor,

perhaps a fan or an engine begins to chug. All we can say is “perhaps,” because here

Schaeffer successfully effaced the relationships between sounds and their sources,

coaxing listeners toward the “reduced” perspective. Nonetheless the question remains:

does the fact that we can imagine sources for the opening sounds of Etude Pathétique

preclude their reduction to fully uncommunicative objects? (And this is why I choose the

term reducible to qualify Schaefferian sound objects instead of the less equivocal, more

wholehearted reduced.) Moreover, in the middle of the piece, we hear human voices

speaking, coughing, moaning; the timbre is unmistakable, although words are

unrecognizable. Again it seems impossible for reducible sound objects to be part of our

experience. Even so, we should not underestimate Schaeffer’s achievements. Both his

                                                            69 Ibid., 9-11.

   

39

theories and his music draw attention to timbre, which traditional analytical perspectives

tend to overlook. The tense relationship between his music and his thought raises a

possibility of which later theorists would take full advantage: a sound does not have to be

unrecognizable, meaningless, or context-free in order to be a sound object.

Transcontextual Sound Objects: Sampling

In analyses of popular music by Chris Cutler (2000) and Mark Katz (2010),

sampled sounds – sounds electronically transplanted from one context to another –

constitute “found (or stolen) objects.”70 Yet in many instances of popular music, albeit

certainly not all, the sources of sampled sounds are readily identifiable, hence reduced

listening is difficult if not impossible to apply to them. Hearing meaning in these sounds,

or associating them with particular contexts, is difficult to avoid. In fact, musicians who

use sampled sounds often intend to address the contexts from whence they came, and

manipulate the meanings we may hear in them, as much as the sounds themselves.

Nevertheless, musicians and musicologists tend to describe sampled sounds as sound

objects, even though they do not suit Schaeffer’s definition. I therefore use the term

transcontextual sound objects to differentiate contextualized, meaningful sound objects

from Schaefferian sound objects. The authors and musicians who conceive sampled

sounds as objects do not add the qualifier “transcontextual”: as we’ll see, they simply use

the unqualified term sound object. But as the following discussion evidences, for my

                                                            70 Cutler, "Plunderphonics," 97. Emphasis added.

   

40

purposes it is useful to differentiate sound objects when they have different definitions, so

that we may lucidly compare them to one another.

A transplanted sound’s suggestion of multiple interpretations, based on its new

and initial contexts, is what Denis Smalley terms “transcontextuality.”71 Following the

same vein, Katz calls sampling an “art of transformation. A sample changes the moment

it is relocated. Any sound, placed into a new musical context, will take on some of the

character of its new sonic environment.”72 Such is the “transformative power of

recontextualization.”73 A listener may or may not recognize the sample’s original context,

and then make, decline, or overlook its further implications, such that a single sampled

sound may imply multiple divergent interpretations. For instance, I could hear the roaring

sound that recurs in Eat Static’s psychedelic trance track Crash and Burn as a sampled

automobile engine, or as a reference to Trevor Wishart’s experimental electroacoustic

piece, Fabulous Paris. Thus Crash and Burn could seem at once, or seem to oscillate

between, commentary on car culture and commentary on experimental music.

Transcontextual sound objects are related to Schaefferian, reducible sound objects

not only in name. Hearing a recontextualized sound means recognizing that what we hear

remains the same while its surrounding contexts change. Thus, transcontextual sound

objects are products of a deliberate mode of listening. This mode is similar to reduced

                                                            71 See Denis Smalley, "Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes," Organised Sound 2, no. 2 (1997). And for a valuable clarification of Smalley’s theory, see Vesa Kankaanpää, "Displaced Time: Transcontextual References to Time in Kaija Saariaho's Stilleben," Organised Sound 1, no. 02 (1996): 88.

72 Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, 174. Emphasis original.

73 Ibid.

   

41

listening in the sense that both are attempts to listen for something that endures

throughout variations of perspective. However, reduced listening is also fundamentally

different from listening for recontextualization. The point of borrowing sounds from other

contexts is that listeners stand a chance of recognizing them, and thence deriving

meaning from the relationships between the sounds’ original and present contexts.

Source-association and meaning are therefore paramount to transcontextual sound

objects, despite being disregarded in reducible sound objects. Moreover,

transcontextuality entails a certain ambiguity – a single sample may connote different

meanings to different listeners, depending on their points of view – whereas reduced

listening seeks an unambivalent, universal essence. Overall, reducible and transcontextual

sound objects are related, but their relationship is negative, a relationship of opposition

that therefore cannot be a parent-child relationship. Instead, both are “secondary roots”

that belong to the multi-tendriled rhizome in which all sound objects assemble.

Like Schaeffer’s sound objects, transcontextual sound objects converge with

creative interactions between musicians and technology. As Katz notes, sounds become

“things” when they are fixed on recording media, which also makes them portable and

repeatable: “[w]hen music becomes a thing it gains an unprecedented freedom to

travel...losing its unique spatial and temporal identity.”74 When sound becomes

simultaneous with a tangible object, like a compact disc, it gains the potential to be

found, gathered, reused, hoarded, or stolen. A sound that belongs to no one and everyone,

everywhere and nowhere, resembles a book shelved, always temporarily, in a library:

                                                            74 Ibid., 17, also 13.

   

42

“standing-reserve” (Bestand), Heidegger would say, as I will address in Chapter 2. Katz

describes the “libraries” of samples maintained by battle DJs for use at a moment’s

notice. He chronicles how the tape composer Vladimir Ussachevsky “kept dozens of

individually boxed and labeled loops in his studio as a painter might keep jars of paint,

ready for use in any future work.”75 And here Katz’s materialistic language is just as

remarkable as Ussachevsky’s practice. He writes that “sampled sounds are really only

raw materials, waiting to be mined and refined.”76 Thus “[c]omposers who work with

samples...becom[e] more like their counterparts in the visual and plastic arts.”77 In fact, in

an analysis of collage pieces made by John Oswald from samples of well-known pop

songs (e.g. Plexure from 1993, and Plunderphonic from 1989), Cutler expressly draws

connections between sampled sounds and the “directly imported objects” that comprise

Duchamp’s readymades and Rauschenberg’s collage paintings.78

In her aesthetics of electronic music, Joanna Demers offers a similar interpretation

of the tactility of sampling, as it is understood by experimental composers Christian

Marclay and Steven Takasugi. In these musicians’ thinking, samples or

“reproductions...explicitly display the frame enclosing a sound, a frame that identifies a

sound as originating from another place or time.”79 This frame – audible as any sense of

                                                            75 Ibid., 54.

76 Ibid., 175.

77 Ibid., 176.

78 Cutler, "Plunderphonics," 97.

79 Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, 51.

   

43

discrepancy between a sampled sound and what we expect to hear in the present context

– can harden into shell-like boundaries, causing the sound to seem just as rigid, just as

palpable as a thing. Like Katz, Demers emphasizes that “recordings change the

ontological status of sound from fleeting and impermanent to eternally present.”80 She

therefore endorses interpretations of Marclay’s work as musical equivalents of

readymades which, like sampled sounds, are typically sculptural works made of found

objects, intended for “repeated contemplation.”81 Like Schaeffer, Marclay embraces the

materiality of the CD, tape, and LP record, and in their mass-produced quality finds a

terrifying but somewhat awe-inspiring “disposability.”82 Moreover, like the LPs Marclay

used to create his album Records (1982), asking audience members to walk on them

before he sampled them, sounds are for Marclay unsentimental things to be consumed,

thrown away and destroyed or maybe, by some inadvertent chance, recycled.83

Contrastingly, for Steven Takasugi, the practice of sampling brings to mind the typical

biological laboratory, which houses shelves of jarred and pickled animal corpses and

body parts – recalling Ussachevsky’s analogy between sampled sounds and jars of paint.

In an interview with Demers, Takasugi described “samples as sound specimens culled

from their natural environment and subsequently embalmed in containers of other sounds

                                                            80 Ibid., 54.

81 Ibid., 54-55.

82 Ibid., 55.

83 Ibid., 56.

   

44

or pure silence.”84 He understands digitizing sound as a “pulverizing” process, an

electronic mortar and pestle that grinds sound up into auditory powder.85 Demers reads

his “materialist approach toward sampling [as] a natural consequence of a musical

environment where all sounds are viewed as objects.”86

But there is another side to transcontextuality, evident in Cutler’s work, which

makes it more insidious than the materiality of paints or organisms. Because Oswald

samples copyrighted music, Cutler names his “plundered” sounds “found (or stolen)

object[s],” at the risk of his own argument against popular conceptions of sounds as

possessions.87 It is not his invocation of Schaeffer as a founding father of sonic

materialism – despite that, as I explained above, vast differences separate Schaefferian

sound objects from transcontextual ones – that endangers his polemic. Merely the term

object brings Cutler into difficulty. Both his article and Oswald’s music justly condemn

the notion, advanced by the recording industry and American lawmakers, that sounds are

saleable and stealable belongings. But what Cutler fails to realize is that, in his use of the

term object, he explicitly associates sounds with tangible objects and all kinds of

individuated commodities, defeating his own goal. Moreover, it was the very

transcontextuality of sampled sound that first enabled copyright law to conceptualize all

sounds as pieces of property. As Demers points out in her study of intellectual property,

                                                            84 Ibid., 60.

85 Ibid., 61.

86 Ibid.

87 Cutler, "Plunderphonics," 97.

   

45

American copyright law considers sound a form of property because sounds may

“possess secondary meaning” – which in effect is transcontextuality.88 For example,

where the roar of an engine connotes a passing car in its primary meaning, its secondary

meaning refers to a specific passage of copyrighted music composed by Trevor

Wishart.89 Thus: because a sampled sound possesses multiple interpretations, US law

recognizes it as a thing, a piece of property with specific owners.

Musicians also insist on the corporeality of sampled sounds, and therefore on

composing as a tactile experience. For instance, Matmos makes frequent use of sounds

sampled in real time. Taking these sounds as things, visible and stable on a computer

screen, enhances the band members’ creative experience. In an interview, Matmos’ Drew

Daniel described the enjoyment and productive efficiency that he experiences from

conceiving and working with sound as “a material thing with some stability...in its own

space.”90 For him, composing and performing are like “cooking shows...A composer is

someone who puts things together”: someone who, Daniel means, arranges sonic blocks

rather than writing continuous melodic or teleological harmonic lines – just as Daniel

himself arranges digital representations of “sound material” into patterns on his computer

screen.91 In a similar turn of phrase, elucidating the multiple processes of translation that

                                                            88 Demers, Steal This Music, 62.

89 In Demers’ example, “[t]he primary meaning of the word ‘apple’ refers to the fruit, but when used within the context of digital technology, the word’s secondary meaning pertains to a specific brand of computer” whose name and products are protected by copyright law. Ibid., 61.

90 Personal communication, April 2010.

91 Ibid.

   

46

sampling requires (from sound to digital data to analog signal), Katz describes them as “a

jigsaw puzzle: a sound is cut up into pieces and then put back together.”92

Altogether, materialistic descriptions of sampled sounds are appropriate because,

first, these sounds converge rhizomatically with production techniques and modes of

listening related to the techniques that conditioned the first (Schaefferian) sound objects.

Second, because of their transcontextual portability and precise repeatability, facilitated

by their stable existence on tactile media, sampled sounds lend themselves to being

treated as tangible, even fungible, objects.

Structural Sound Objects: Microsound

In musique concrète, any sound may be a sound object, regardless of its origin.

This flexibility made the sound object an attractive concept to microsound composers.

Microsound is digital music that is typically created from synthesized (not sampled)

sounds of minimal volume and duration. Composers of this genre often eschew

traditional scores, because their electronic blips and clicks are inaccessible to musical

notes. Continuing Schaeffer’s search for terminological alternatives to the musical note,

microsound composer Curtis Roads invokes the sound object. He writes in his 2004

treatise, titled Microsound:

The sound object time scale encompasses events of a duration associated

with the elementary unit of composition in scores: the note. A note usually

lasts from about 100 ms to several seconds, and is played by an instrument

                                                            92 Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, 147.

   

47

or sung by a vocalist. The concept of sound object extends this to allow

any sound, from any source.93

For Roads, all that is required for a sound to constitute a sound object is that it fall within

his arbitrarily “stipulated temporal limits”: between 100 milliseconds and several

seconds.94 Hence, like Schaefferian sound objects, Roadsian sound objects are timbrally

flexible: they can consist of anything from noises to brief melodies. This Roads sees as

sound objects’ advantage over musical notes. Whereas the note is the “homogeneous

brick of conventional music architecture,” meaning that “every note can be described by

the same four properties” – which Roads calls “invariants”(pitch, timbre, volume, and

duration) – sound objects may consist of any kind of sound, may be wholly different from

one another and may even “mutate” over time (as, for instance, when a recorded sound is

played so slowly that its pitch turns to rhythmic pulses).95 A sound object’s only

necessary quality, according to Roads, is that it be “perceived as a unitary event.”96

Therefore the same sound objects used by microsound composers could occur in other

musical genres. In effect, what Roads calls sound object, a sonic unit of brief duration, is

but a small musical structure, which I call a structural sound object.

A re-disclaimer: the word “structure” does not appear in Roads’ treatise in

connection with sound objects. Like Cutler and Schaeffer, Roads uses only the term

                                                            93 Roads, Microsound, 16-17.

94 Ibid., 17.

95 Ibid., 18.

96 Ibid., 17.

   

48

sound object, without qualification. Since some term is required to differentiate his usage

from Cutler’s and Schaeffer’s, I am adding the word “structural,” which I derive from the

way in which Roads employs the term sound object to describe a unit of musical

structure. We may hear structural sound objects at work in Roads’ Half Life, Part 1:

Sonal Atoms (1999). It is tempting to describe this piece as “monophonic”: as a single

electronic sound that mutates timbrally as the piece progresses. However, we could

describe the same phenomenon as a succession of structural sound objects; that is, of

brief sonic units juxtaposed but delineated from one another by their distinctive timbres.

Incidentally, it is also tempting to invoke reducible sound objects to describe Sonal Atoms

as well as its companion piece Half Life, Part 2: Granules (1999), since the synthesized

timbres involved in both these pieces bring to mind nothing at all in terms of instrumental

sources – nothing except “electronics,” a vague notion at best. Without aid from Roads’

liner notes or an interview with the composer, my ears cannot discern what kind of

synthesizer he employed – whether it is analogue or digital, whether it is a piece of

hardware or software; or, indeed, whether he sampled the sounds of other synthesized

music in the manner of John Oswald. In general, as later examples will demonstrate

(Chapter 4), structural sound objects may also be reducible or transcontextual.

Schaeffer’s constructivist notion that composition entails building music out of

sonic “bricks” is highly appealing to microsound composers. A standard microsound

technique is granular synthesis, a digital process that constructs complex sounds from the

smallest possible sonic units: “sound particles” or elementary “atoms” of music.97 Sound

                                                            97 Ibid., 51.

   

49

particles have the timbral flexibility of sound objects, but are shorter in duration: from

100ms down to the very “threshold of auditory perception.”98 With distinct attacks and

decays, sound particles also possess the same perceptible boundaries that individuate

sound objects. In Roads’ Sonal Atoms, showers of staccato tones – sound particles –

collectively form the brief but sweeping textures of sound objects. Alternately, in the

sonic pinprick that opens Kim Cascone’s cathodeFlower (1999), we may hear a single

sound particle in isolation. In its commitment to sound particles, microsound exhibits the

same foundationalist drive, the quest for the ultimate essence of music, displayed in

Schaeffer’s thought.

Yet it is possible that Roads’ dedication to materialism has a different, more

literal tenor than Schaeffer’s. Roads insists that because sounds move through “the

physical medium of air – a gaseous form of matter” – they exist in three dimensions and

possess shape and size, occupying space just as tangible objects do.99 This assertion

contrasts the Schaefferian point of view, in which it is sounds’ fixation on recording

media that allows them to converge with tangible objects. Moreover, eschewing

Husserlian phenomenology, Roads adopts atomistic theorists of matter as his

philosophical ancestors: from ancient atomist philosophers such as Democritus and

Lucretius, to Niels Bohr and other twentieth-century quantum physicists.100 In general,

observes Mitchell Whitelaw, materialistic, atomistic discourses are pervasive among

                                                            98 Ibid., 21.

99 Ibid., 39.

100 Ibid., 51.

   

50

microsound composers.101 Take for instance the musician eM’s invitation, in a weak but

provocative metaphor, to “swim in an ocean of zeros and ones” – as though the data that

constitutes his music were as tangible as liquid, and binary digits were (somehow) this

liquid’s constituent molecules.102

Furthermore, Demers discovers convincing correlations between microsound

music and minimalist sculpture. “At stake in minimalist sculpture is a shift in ontology,

away from art that identifies itself explicitly as art and toward an objecthood that at times

makes serious claims for its status as nonart.”103 Objecthood (a term coined by art critic

Michael Fried) is the quality, possessed by minimalist sculptures, of being mere

objects.104 Viewers must conspire with both the sculpture and its creator in a deliberate

decision that what they are seeing is a piece of art as well as a meaningless thing. A

worthy example is the box sculpted in featureless brown by Donald Judd (Untitled,

1972). Demers highlights the similarity between minimalist sculpture and Schaefferian

reduced listening: both supposedly produce objects shorn of meaning (to what, besides

itself, does a brown box refer?).105 Reduced listening also resembles the actual viewing

experience of minimalist sculpture, summoning audiences to participate in making art out

                                                            101 Whitelaw, "Sound Particles and Microsonic Materialism." See also Phil Thomson, "Atoms and Errors: Towards a History and Aesthetics of Microsound," Organised Sound 9, no. 02 (2004).

102 eM, "Liner Notes to Greater Than Zero, Less Than One," (Foundry, 1998).

103 Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, 82.

104 Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

105 Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, 83.

   

51

of what they see or hear.106 Microsound strongly lends itself to reduced listening, Demers

observes: most music in this genre aspires to “abstract, premusical sound, sound so

stripped of any external meaning that it is a blank slate.”107 The tiny “grain” that opens

Cascone’s cathodeFlower serves as an example.108 In another instance from ambient

music, the duo Celer breaks down field recordings into fragments, reorders and

superimposes them, and plays back the result at a protracted speed, producing the

beautiful, seventy-five minute piece Brittle (2009).109 These examples feature sounds

with extreme qualities: exceedingly short, protracted, and/or noisy sounds with complex

envelopes, difficult to describe in telling ways, that therefore lend themselves to being

heard not as semantic or signifying structures, but as reducible sound objects. As Demers

notes, these sound objects of varying size and shape convey a certain sense of scale, and

of large or microscopic aural spaces. In her words, the “semantic function of these grains

and drones is minimized; it matters less what type of grain we hear than the fact that it

suggests a listening space.”110 Thus in microsound, sound objects serve the same function

                                                            106 We could draw the same comparison between the experience of minimalist sculpture and transcontextual hearing, or listening to structural sound objects. In every case, it is the listener who gives the sound its qualities, who decides to hear its objectness or not, decides that it is musical or not, recognizes it or is bewildered by its strangeness.

107 Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, 82-83.

108 Ibid., 83.

109 Celer’s members do not describe their music as microsound, but the techniques used to create Brittle rely on the same principles as granular synthesis: the breakdown and reconstruction of sound.

110 Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, 83.

   

52

as “physical objects [with] density and volume...whose placement communicates the

perceived dimensions of the acoustic space in which they resound.”111

On the whole, then, the term sound object befits microsonic music because this

genre pushes the principle of reduced listening to the limit, by relying on electronic or

typically non-musical sounds of extreme volume and duration – sounds too extreme to be

perceived as anything other than sounds that simply exist there. Microsound thereby

acquires objecthood, a sculptural and anti-aesthetic characteristic. Like any mere thing, a

sound object in microsound circumscribes the shape of the acoustic space in which the

listener seems to experience what she hears. Microsound composers therefore view their

work as an extension of material sciences.

Gestural Sound Objects: Music Cognition Theory

If, literally speaking, a sound object is a hypostatization of the movement of air

which constitutes sound, why not hypostatize other kinds of movement – human

movements, gestures? This is precisely Rolf Inge Godøy’s approach, with the purpose of

isolating precise relationships between musical sounds and human movement. Creating

and responding to sound both require movement. For instance, Godøy’s (2003) research

on “motor-mimetic music cognition” hypothesizes that when listening to music we

“trace” the shapes of sonic envelopes in bodily movement.112 Our imaginations, limbs, or

both respond to what we hear with imagery or imitations of sound-producing, sound-

                                                            111 Ibid., 84.

112 Godøy, "Motor-Mimetic Music Cognition," 154.

   

53

accompanying, or emotive gestures, or by tracing a sound’s envelope in movement.113 In

fact, because movements instigate sounds, and because sound’s manner of being is the

movement of air, Godøy considers gesture to be an “integral element” of sound itself.114

Furthermore, the mind forms “memory images” of sounds and their implicit gestures,

retains and reapproaches these images as though they were “solid.”115 Godøy therefore

coins the term gestural-sonorous object to describe the “holistic,” unified experience of

sound and gesture.116 Drawing on Gestalt psychology, he writes that gestural-sonorous

units of experience “can be perceived and imagined as a whole, ‘all-at-once’ or ‘in a

now,’” just like tangible objects.117 To take a simple example, a climactic point in a

melody and a dancer’s response in the form of a gesture collectively constitute a single

gestural sound object. Such objects offer analysts a way to isolate the gestural aspects of

musical sounds, just as notes isolate their pitches and durations, and to consider how

gesture, specifically, contributes to musical experience.

Godøy consciously appropriates and expands upon Schaeffer’s materialistic

terminology as well as aspects of his methodology. Recall that for Schaeffer, as for

Roads, sound objects are intended to replace musical notes. Hence sound objects and

musical notes are equal in temporal duration: from 0.5 to 5 seconds long, in Godøy’s                                                             113 See ———, "Gestural-Sonorous Objects: Embodied Extensions of Schaeffer's Conceptual Apparatus," 154. ———, "Images of Sonic Objects," 60.

114 Godøy, "Images of Sonic Objects," 60.

115 Ibid.: 54.

116 Ibid.: 58.

117 Ibid.

   

54

estimation.118 His psychoacoustic experiments indicate that listeners take approximately

0.5 to 5 seconds to perceive “salient musical features” to which we may respond with

gestures.119 This is why Godøy correlates hypostatized perceptive acts with sound

objects. In addition, Schaeffer’s fragmentation of the sonic continuum into “bricks of

sensation” that persist for a particular length of time, establishes a precedent and a

vocabulary for Godøy’s research. Further, for Godøy the perceptual act itself shapes the

object and constitutes part of it, just as in Schaeffer’s thought. Godøy also shares

Schaeffer’s concern for experience, and for the hybrid nature (both human and sonic,

subjective and objective) of that which we experience. Godøy writes, “One major

problem in Western musical thought is the lack of a very good conceptual apparatus for

dealing with holistically experienced musical sound...”120 He hears an answer to his

appeal in Schaeffer, for whom, throughout his theory of sound objects, “the point of

departure would always be the seemingly simple question of ‘what do we hear now?’”121

Like Schaeffer, Godøy favors taxonomy as a critical technique. He regards the

methodological isolation of delineated, reified structures, their subsequent close

examination, and the enumeration of their features as a “universal method.”122 He

therefore analyzes gestures by identifying and describing them in order to classify them,

                                                            118 Ibid.: 54.

119 Ibid.: 57.

120 Godøy and Leman, eds., Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning, 113.

121 Ibid., 114.

122 Ibid.

   

55

which is precisely what Schaeffer did with reducible sound objects. By pinpointing sound

objects via reduced listening, then discerning their inherently “musical” characteristics,

Schaeffer distinguished sounds that would contribute to compelling compositions from

sounds that would not.123 Similarly, in order to study music’s relationship to gesture,

Godøy identifies and categorizes gestural sound objects, minus Schaefferian value

judgments. He appropriates Schaeffer’s sub-categories of sound objects – impulsive,

iterative, and sustained – noting that “these typological categories of sonic objects also

correlate well with the distinct categories of impulsive, sustained and iterative body

gestures,” which are “integral elements of the sonic object[s].”124 These elements include

“excitory and modulatory” or “sound-producing” gestures such as air-guitar playing;

“sound-tracing actions” in which listeners shape a sound’s resonant envelope in their own

movements; and emotive or dance-like “sound accompanying actions.”125

Sound objects, and the materialistic analytical techniques that they imply, enable

Godøy to study the embodied aspects of musical experience. Although, as a method of

conceptualization, hypostatization seems to rigidify the mobile into the static – sonic

movements of air into objects, in this case – this method also affords an opportunity for

researchers to study and theorize movement, by forcing it (theoretically, at least) to stand

still for a moment.

                                                            123 Needless to say, Schaeffer makes severe value judgments here, excluding sounds from music on the basis of their lack of “musicality,” which is exactly the kind of judgment that he purportedly aims to avoid in musique concrète. More on this in Chapter 2.

124 Godøy, "Images of Sonic Objects," 58, 60.

125 Ibid.: 60.

   

56

Sound Object Genre: Ringtone Composition

Given the self-contained quality that all sound objects share, it seems fitting that

some composers have come to think of individual sound objects as complete

compositions. As a bounded entity, why shouldn’t a sound object comprise not only

fragments of musical works, but works in their own right?

It is tempting to think that sound objects must invariably be of relatively short

durations, as Schaeffer, Roads, and Godøy believe. However, there is no reason why, say,

an entire techno track by Joey Beltram could not be a single, reduced, iterative sound

object. Take for instance Beltram’s Groove Attack (2001). This track possesses a minimal

texture consisting of a 4/4 bass drum beat underlying syncopated drum-machine rhythms

and a single synthesizer line made of brief melodic figures, all relentlessly looped with

few variations. The track has all the markings of an iterative sound object: a single sound

with repeated, identical attacks. There is also no reason why an entire piece could not be

a structural sound object: a piece is, after all, a unit of musical structure from which

larger units (DJ sets, concert programs, albums) can be constructed. An entire piece may

even serve as a transcontextual sound object, as in mashups by artists such as Girl Talk

and Danger Mouse. In Danger Mouse’s Dirt off Your Shoulder (2004), the vocal track

from Jay-Z’s single of the same title is sampled wholesale and superimposed on the

instrumental tracks from Julia by the Beatles, with the result that both songs are

recontextualized.

   

57

Moreover, even if theorists were to decide that, for some arbitrary reason, sound

objects cannot be any longer than five seconds, why not a five-second composition?

According to examples by Antoine Schmitt and others, composers of ringtones for

mobile phones typically have about two or three seconds to work with: they compose

individual “rings” that reiterate until the phone is answered.126 Perhaps for that very

reason, a collective of ringtone composers, founded by Schmitt, calls itself the

Sonic()bject project. Sonic()bject began in 2004, commissioning seventeen experimental

composers and sound artists from several countries to create short pieces for the mobile

phone. Sonic()bject’s downloadable compositions (more than 200 to date) include

ambient music such as Wild Shores’ ambient1; field recordings such as Antoine

Schmitt’s Data, which samples old-fashioned modems; even compositions by the

eminent microsound composer Richard Chartier (simply titled ringtone), and miniature

atonal works for cello by Didier Petit (e.g. La Content Pour Rien and La Baraka).127 All

works commissioned by Sonic()bject are within the durational limits stipulated by other

sound-object theorists. Although Schmitt does not explicitly credit these theorists, his

choice of the term sonic object to describe his and his colleagues’ compositions is in

keeping with the term’s traditional use.

Moreover, Sonic()bject presents its endeavors to the public not just as music but

also as quasi-sculpture. In 2004, Sonic()bject launched an exhibition of ringtones at the

                                                            126 Available at www.sonicobject.com. Accessed 25 April 2011.

127 Available to download and stream at www.sonicobject.com, except Chartier’s contribution which is available on his own site, www.3particles.com/shop/index.htm. Accessed 25 April 2011.

   

58

Pompidou Museum in Paris, displaying a glass-encased mobile phone that played random

selections from the Sonic()bject archive. Critics described the ringtones as “true sonic

objects” that, like bumper stickers and pin-on buttons, serve as phone owners’ “personal

insignia[s]”: my choice of a ringtone marks my phone, and its contribution to the public

soundscape, with my personal stamp.128 Now, keeping in mind that not all sound objects

are non-referential – in fact, only reducible sound objects call for a reduction to “sound

itself,” while, as we have seen, transcontextual and gestural sound objects rely on non-

sonic associations – in my view, sound objects made for mobile phones are comparable

to T-shirt logos and iron-on patches: fixed structures that help to shape our identities in

the eyes and ears of others.

It is impossible to know what Schaeffer and other sound-object theorists would

think of Schmitt’s appropriation of the term for ringtone compositions. But it seems to

me that Schmitt and his colleagues attain one objective common among theorists of

reducible, transcontextual, gestural, and structural sound objects: to extend the definition

of music beyond its traditional scope, to expand music’s domain by acknowledging the

aesthetic potential of noises, memories, movements, and traditionally non-musical things,

such as mobile phones and the very concept of the thing.

                                                            128 http://turbulence.org/networked_music_review/2007/11/29/sonicbject/. Accessed 3 December 2010.

   

59

Chapter 2.

Sound Object as Metaphor: Reification and Ideology

Throughout the Introduction and Chapter 1, I referred to “the term sound object”

as though a sound object is nothing but a term – as though there are no entities, only

conceptions, that merit the name sound object. I prefer to consider this a question rather

than an assertion: Do sound objects exist as objective, genuinely embodied, sonic entities;

or does sound object merely refer to ways of thinking about sound, concepts that we may,

at will, apply to what we hear? In other words, is the materiality of sound objects literal

or metaphorical? Let us keep these open questions in mind throughout the remaining

chapters. The current chapter examines but one possibility: that a sound object is not a

tangible, observable entity but a conceptual apparatus that may enable us to consider and

treat sounds as though they were material objects. In that case, sound object is a

metaphor, and the tactility attributed to sounds by speaking of sound objects is only

figurative.

Materiality Through Metaphor

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, eminent theorists of metaphor, would probably

call the sound object an “ontological metaphor.” Ontological metaphors figuratively

equate abstract or obscure phenomena with other, more concrete or familiar phenomena.

For example, taking an ephemeral phenomenon, such as an event or a sound, and

metaphorically designating it an entity “allows us to refer to it, quantify it, identify a

   

60

particular aspect of it, see it as a cause, act with respect to it, and perhaps even believe

that we understand it. Ontological metaphors like this are necessary for even attempting

to deal rationally with our experiences.”129 Lakoff and Johnson argue that many of our

most intuitive concepts and ways of thinking stem from metaphors based in human

experiences with tangible, visible objects. We favor such metaphors because we

ourselves are tangible beings that survive by interacting with other tangible entities:

things and other people. We therefore apply the terms of a familiar relationship – that

between our bodies and other bodies – to our relationships with more abstract

phenomena. “[O]ur experiences with physical objects (especially our own bodies)

provide the basis for an extraordinarily wide variety of ontological metaphors, that is,

ways of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc., as entities and substances.”130 In

other words:

Human purposes typically require us to impose artificial boundaries that

make physical phenomena discrete just as we are: entities bounded by a

surface...Understanding our experiences in terms of objects and substances

allows us to pick out parts of our experience and treat them as discrete

entities or substances of a uniform kind.131

                                                            129 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 26.

130 Ibid., 25.

131 Ibid.

   

61

It seems to me that metaphors are vital to discourses concerning sound and aural

experience, because many of our concepts are based in visual experience: the kind of

experience that seems easiest to share with and communicate to others. Generally

speaking, it is easier to describe a visible, tangible object in its own terms (red, shiny,

smooth) than it is to describe a sound without resorting to terms that actually apply to

non-sonic experiences (“rich,” “velvety,” “harsh”) – although we do have some

descriptive concepts that refer directly to sound (e.g. dissonant, consonant). In many

cases, we conceive sound with ontological metaphors that equate sounds with visible,

tactile phenomena: the metaphor A SOUND IS A WAVE, like those of the ocean; A

SOUND IS A PARTICLE, like the dust motes in the air; and A SOUND IS AN

OBJECT. The last is particularly effective at endowing sounds with the qualities of

visible, tangible entities so that, conceptually at least, sounds may be easier to pinpoint,

identify, understand, and employ in the creation of artworks.

Musical discourse is steeped in metaphor, and perhaps could not function without

it. Michael Spitzer argues that “[t]o think, talk, or write about music is to engage with it

in terms of something else, metaphorically.”132 With Lakoff and Johnson, Spitzer

suggests that the metaphors in terms of which we conceptualize music are rooted in our

physical experiences as visible, tangible bodies.

Theorists build models by drawing on domains of human experience – a

knowledge of language and culture, but also the experience of what it is

                                                            132 Michael Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 1. Emphasis added.

   

62

like to have a body that is contained, that can move through a landscape,

that can grasp and manipulate objects, and so on. In short, music theory is

human, just as to create and receive music is human.133

Spitzer notes that music theory relies on several ontological metaphors that are

materialistic or object-based, drawn from the ocular-tactile realm. He identifies a

tendency in music theory to “objectify” musical gestures into “quasi-plastic material.”134

For example, “[a]n ornamental figure, as the word suggests, bestows figurality upon a

concept – gives a physical presence, a body.”135

Spitzer points out that listeners and theorists may combine and shift between

metaphors at will, and/or extend metaphors by extrapolating from their consequences –

their “entailments,” in Lakoff’s and Johnson’s terms – to create vivid narratives of

musical experience.136 For instance, musical analysis regularly combines the conception

of sound as a material entity with notions of this entity moving through a musical form or

navigating the pitch spectrum. Thus, Spitzer concludes, listening and music analysis are

creative, interactive acts.137 Similarly, my Chapter 4 explores how listeners may adopt

certain listening postures at will in order to apply qualifications to sound objects

(reduced, transcontextual, gestural, etc.), in a creative interaction between subjectivity

                                                            133 Ibid., 2.

134 Ibid., 11.

135 Ibid.

136 Ibid., 12, Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 9.

137 Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought, 2.

   

63

and sound that may help music analysis to overcome the rigidity of its traditional

categories.

Entailments: Objects, Materialism, Tangibility

Entailments of the metaphor A SOUND IS AN OBJECT influence not only how

we hear and discuss music and sound, but also how we treat them. The metaphor A

SOUND IS AN OBJECT entails that sounds may be molded to suit musicians’ and

listeners’ desires, just as all artificial objects and many natural objects are. This point will

become clearer if we enumerate the entailments of the metaphor.

First, conceiving sound as an object may imply its association with visible,

tangible, material objects, as with their solid, stable, locatable, and persistent or

permanent presence. Second, to objectify sound may entail conferring upon it an

inviolable unity ensured by firm borders, just as tangible things have surfaces and skins

that define where they end and others begin, that separate the thing’s insides from what is

outside. The metaphor A SOUND IS AN OBJECT therefore contrasts tellingly with the

alternate metaphor SOUND IS A SUBSTANCE, evident in such descriptions as “the

sound ‘flowed’ from the viola.” Despite the temptation to associate both metaphors with

materiality, substances, unlike objects, are fluid and do not necessarily possess skin-like

containers. Thus, unlike the flowing activity implied by SOUND IS A SUBSTANCE, a

certain inertia may be implied by the metaphor A SOUND IS AN OBJECT, which may

associate sound with the stability, unity, and ready identifiability of tangible things. This

inertia or passivity enables sounds and things to serve as the objects of actions performed

   

64

by external subjects. Where sound objects are concerned, such actions may include:

breaking down the object and reconstructing it from elementary units (as in granular

synthesis of structural sound objects); placing the object in various relationships with

other phenomena (e.g. using transcontextual sound objects to create collage

compositions); examining the object as a laboratory specimen (as in Schaeffer’s work

with reducible sound objects); along with buying, selling, or stealing the object, treating it

as property (as in Cutler’s analysis).

One could argue that A SOUND IS AN OBJECT does not necessarily entail A

SOUND IS A TANGIBLE AND/OR MATERIAL OBJECT, hence that sound objects do

not necessarily possess the stability, unity, boundedness, and passivity just described.

However, philosophers of materialism Diana Coole and Samantha Frost note that

humans’ habitual conception of objects, in quotidian experience, parlance, and common

sense, is grounded in strong historical associations between objectness, materiality, and

tangibility.138 I take a moment to describe those associations here, in the hope of creating

a sense of where the entailments of the metaphor A SOUND IS AN OBJECT may have

originated.

According to Coole and Frost, the conception of objects as extended, inert,

corporeal, quantifiable, external to the human mind, and synonymous with matter

originated with René Descartes and Isaac Newton. For Descartes:

                                                            138 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, "Introducing the New Materialisms," in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 7-8.

   

65

the idea of it [matter] is formed in us on occasion of objects existing out of

our minds, to which it [matter] is in every respect similar. But since God

cannot deceive us, for this is repugnant to his nature...we must

unhesitatingly conclude that there exists a certain object extended in

length, breadth, and thickness, and possessing all those properties which

we clearly apprehend to belong to what is extended. And this extended

substance is what we call body or matter.139

Thus for Descartes, all bodies or objects constitute matter. Further, in the

Cartesian system, extension or size is the distinguishing characteristic of matter/objects.

Boundedness, discreteness, and quantifiability, upon which extension (being of a certain

size) depends, are therefore aspects of Cartesian material objects as well. To this

conception of the object, Newton added definitive associations with mass, tangibility,

passivity, and atomism. Believing, with Descartes, that materiality and objecthood are

synonymous, Newton wrote, “It seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed

matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles”: bounded, microscopic

objects.140 “[T]hese particles have not only a vis inertiae, accompanied with such passive

laws of motion as naturally result from that force, but also that [sic] they are moved by

certain active principles, such as is that of gravity...”141 Newton theorized that what

                                                            139 René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. John Veitch (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2009), 33.

140 Newton, Isaac. Quaery 31, quoted in A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, "Newton's Theory of Matter," Isis 51, no. 2 (1960): 135.

141 Newton, Isaac. Quaery 31, quoted in Ibid. It is perhaps worth noting that Newton did not embrace every aspect of Cartesian materialism. For instance, “Newton rejected Descartes’ contention that God could not create extension without matter.” Hall and Hall, "Newton's Theory of Matter," 137.

   

66

applies to microscopic bodies, which comprise visible bodies, also applies to

macroscopic bodies.142 This includes materiality, weight, boundedness, and passivity.

Thus for Newton, “all bodies universally are heavy.” We can reasonably associate

tangibility with weight (we can feel even the weight of humid air on our skin); therefore –

since weight implies materiality, which implies objecthood – it is also reasonable to

associate tangibility with materiality and objecthood, under Newton’s scheme.143

Overall, in the traditional view of matter initiated by Descartes and Newton, all

objects are material (Descartes) and all tangible phenomena are material (Newton),

therefore objects, materiality, and tangibility form tightly knit relationships. As we’ll see

in Chapter 7, other theorists disagree, including Jacques Derrida, Jane Bennett, and

others, for whom not all objects are tangible or material (triangles, for example), and not

all material is tangible. However, the Cartesian-Newtonian view, which remains the

quotidian view of objects today, retains strong associations between objects, materiality,

tangibility, and the entailments thereof. Therefore, while extension, boundedness, inertia,

mass, materiality, and tangibility are not the only qualities of a sound-become-object, we

may consider them among its potential qualities, since they attend upon traditional

conceptions of the term object.

Coole and Frost seem to attribute the resilience of Cartesian-Newtonian

materialism (at least in part) to the fact that Cartesian-Newtonian objects are inert,

                                                            142 Hall and Hall, "Newton's Theory of Matter," 136, 38.

143 Isaac Newton, The Pricipia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I.B. Cohen and A. Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 392.

   

67

passive, therefore ripe for manipulation and domination by sovereign human subjects.

Such objects:

move only upon an encounter with an external force or agent, and they do

so according to a linear logic of cause and effect. [Descartes’ model]

seems intuitively congruent with what common sense tells us is the “real”

material world of solid, bounded objects that occupy space and whose

movements or behaviors are predictable, controllable, and replicable

because they obey fundamental and invariable laws of motion. [As the]

corollary of this calculable natural world...[in] distinction from the

passivity of matter, modern philosophy has variously portrayed humans as

rational, self-aware, free, and self-moving agents. Such subjects are not

only deemed capable of making sense of nature by measuring and

classifying it from a distance but are also aided in such a quest by theories

whose application enables them to manipulate and reconfigure matter on

an unprecedented scale. The Cartesian-Newtonian understanding of matter

thereby yields a conceptual and practical domination of nature as well as a

specifically modern attitude or ethos of subjectivist potency.144

Cartesian-Newtonian materialism provided a foundation for the kind of subjective

mastery that, as we will see, persists today in certain discursive arenas. And this, finally,

is my point: a metaphorical understanding of sound as a kind of object entails that sound

may be treated just as other objects are, that is, they may be constructed and exploited

                                                            144 Coole and Frost, "Introducing the New Materialisms," 7-8.

   

68

according to human desires. The point of objectifying metaphors is to make phenomena

easier to understand, easier to relate to other facets of our existence, and this in turn

makes them easier to manipulate – easier to master.

Reification, Dissimulation

In the interest of subjective mastery, reification, or the metaphorical attribution of

objectness to phenomena which are not things, runs the risk of concealing relationships

represented by the phenomena. A musical sound, for example, constitutes a relationship

between a musician, a sound-producing apparatus, and a listener, all of which are,

themselves, the sound: they generate and constitute its qualities. Chapter 4 will clarify

this point. For now, note that when a sound becomes a sound object – which (under

Cartesian-Newtonianism or the “common sense” view) may well be understood as an

objective phenomenon existentially distinct from human minds and subjective influences

– this intertwining of subjectivities may become obscured.

According to the earliest theory of reification, written by Georg Lukács in 1923,

reification occurs when a relationship “takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires

a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as

to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature.”145 For Lukács, reification seems to

elevate humans to a position of mastery over every phenomenon: conceiving all

phenomena as things gives us an excuse to exploit and consume every phenomenon as

                                                            145 Georg Lukács, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," in History and Class Consciousness (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm., 1923).

   

69

though it were a mere commodity, as though all things were enslaved to human whim.

Thus, although the power and the point of metaphor in general is to make obscure

phenomena accessible by representing them as more familiar, it may well be that

metaphor’s ability to dissimulate is not always desirable – especially where the

understanding and exploitation of music, and indeed its very being, are at stake. For one

thing, according to Lukács, reification is “the essence of commodity-structure,” yet the

commodification and sale of sound, which objectifying metaphors seem to excuse, is a

questionable practice (see my discussion of Chris Cutler in Chapter 1).146

Moreover, to conceive a sound as an object is to conceal what may be one of

sound’s most potent characteristics: its temporality, its transience, the necessity that it

fade away. In contrast, objects are associated with fixity and permanence: they remain, at

least for a while. They are very much unlike the audible movements of air that we call

sounds. This is why ringtone composer Roger Bourland objects to other artists’ use of the

term sonic object in reference to compositions for mobile phones: an object “doesn’t need

time; music does.”147 He therefore prefers the term “micro-composition” to describe his

work.

Bourland’s term accounts for the effort of composing – the human act of putting

sounds together – required to create any piece of music, however brief. Contrastingly, the

term object may imply passivity, hence “standing-reserve” (Bestand, to borrow

Heidegger’s apt term): something that is already there, at hand. The term sound object

                                                            146 Ibid.

147 Personal communication, December 2010.

   

70

therefore risks concealing the human hand in music, the activities that constitute musical

practice. Sounds must be configured by musicians as well as listeners who, at the very

least, mentally arrange what they hear among their other perceptions in an order that their

minds can deal with. As we have seen, listeners can only recognize sound objects if they

undertake such acts of configuration, that is, if they arrange what they hear relative to

what they already know: bracketing out their prior knowledge to create reducible sound

objects, marking what they remember from previous contexts to create transcontextual

sound objects, and so on. Ironically, therefore, in its association with the already-there,

the ready-to-hand, the term sound object may obfuscate the listening acts that must,

necessarily, go into identifying sound objects.

Many theorists feel that the grossest misrepresentation entailed by the metaphor A

SOUND IS AN OBJECT is its implication that sounds have “skins,” boundaries that

rigidly delineate and separate them from other phenomena. Objections to Schaefferian

theories often take this form: reduced listening unrealistically requires listeners to cordon

off and discount any associations that a sound may imply, so that the resultant (reducible)

sound objects are closed off from history and meaning. To Simon Emmerson, reduced

listening is simply impossible: “sounds inevitably have associations.”148 Sounds

constitute facets of non-sonic experience and vice versa, therefore cannot possess the

circumscribed, stable identities that the term object suggests. Luke Windsor adds that

reduced listening must be biologically impossible, because it would impede survival

instincts: animals including humans detect opportunity and avoid danger by associating

                                                            148 Emmerson, Living Electronic Music, 6. Emphasis original.

   

71

what they hear with environmental changes.149 He therefore joins Emmerson’s campaign

against sound-object theory, a project that, Emmerson believes, attempts vainly to destroy

humans’ natural relationships with sound, and that deserves to be not just dismissed but

“undone.”150

I disagree with Emmerson and Windsor. Human beings are not computers fitted

with sensors, that detect only what they are programmed to detect. Furthermore, in

formulating the phenomenological reduction, Husserl did not intend us to irrevocably

forget everything we know about the world, history, and language; only that we hold this

knowledge in abeyance using a deliberate act of mental abstention. Following Husserl,

Schaeffer intended that listeners decide when to associate sounds with meanings and

when to take them “in themselves.” In general, we decide what to hear and how to hear it.

That said, I would not overlook the point, made by Lakoff and Johnson, that “In

allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept...a metaphorical concept can keep us

from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor,”

as reification evidences.151 Along these lines, Brian Kane makes the valid objection that

“by relying on the sound object to lend an ontological grounding to musical experience,

Schaeffer perpetuates an ahistorical view about the nature of musical material.”152 Again

the problem stems from the Husserlian epoché, which requires us to abstain from                                                             149 Windsor, "Through and around the Acousmatic: The Interpretation of Electroacoustic Sounds," 13.

150 Emmerson, Living Electronic Music, 7, 18.

151 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 10.

152 Kane, "L'objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction," 21.

   

72

judgments based in habitual, socio-historial assumptions. But Kane’s argument is less

extreme than Windsor’s in that it appeals not to biological hypotheses but to the fact that

music is a historiocultural phenomenon, hence we cannot hear or create music from a

quarantined standpoint devoid of history and culture. “[R]ather, the compositional act is

engaged, from the very beginning, in a dialectic with history...[S]ounds and notes do not

simply constitute an eidetic realm, but rather are simply a sedimentation of historical and

social forces.”153 To pretend otherwise, writes Roger Savage, entails “masking the

cultural capital vested” in musical sound.154 The point is that the impenetrable “surfaces”

bestowed on musical sounds by materialistic metaphors may dissemble and undermine

music’s relevance to culture and society, hence music’s ability to address and wield

power over society.

Mastery, Standing-Reserve

Instead, the metaphor A SOUND IS AN OBJECT facilitates the opposite: a

feeling of sonic control or mastery on the part of composers and listeners. To reiterate: in

quotidian experience, the stable, bounded, passive presence of tangible objects

(reinforced by the prevalence of Cartesian-Newtonian concepts in discourse) enables us

to physically appropriate them and use them for whatever we see fit. Metaphorically

identifying sounds with objects is to associate them with such quotidian things,

generating the impression that sounds are equally subordinate to our desires, readily

                                                            153 Ibid.

154 Savage, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism, 125.

   

73

available for our use. Electronic musicians may conceive their relationship to sound in

such terms based in domination and consumption. Drawing the Cartesian-Newtonian

equivalence between “objects” and “material,” Cutler emphasizes that “all sound is just

raw material,” meaning that a musician may appropriate, manipulate, and mutilate, even

reconstruct and put up for sale, any and every sound – even those that were previously

created or manipulated by other musicians.155 Thus “recorded sound is always raw – even

when it is cooked.”156 Cutler’s attitude here, with which many copyright holders

understandably disagree, stems from his materialistic view of sound, his subscription to

the metaphor A SOUND IS AN OBJECT. He states: “[a]s a found (or stolen) object, a

sound is no more than available – for articulation, fragmentation, reorigination...” for

whatever use a musician has in mind.157

But by underscoring the passivity of sound, the sound-object metaphor occludes

sound’s ability to act, to make impressions on listeners and musicians. To objectify sound

is to annul its capabilities as an acting subject. As Tara Rodgers points out, objectifying

metaphors for sound “perpetuate values of domination and control.”158 Hence the

preference Rodgers observes in audio-technical discourse, for embodied, locatable

“sound particles” over ephemeral, untamable “sound waves.”159 Similarly, Demers finds

                                                            155 Cutler, "Plunderphonics," 88.

156 Ibid.

157 Ibid., 97. Emphasis added.

158 Tara Rodgers, "Synthesizing Sound: Metaphor in Audio-Technical Discourse and Synthesis History," (PhD Diss: McGill University, 2010), 89.

159 Ibid., 59.

   

74

that the attitude of “base materialism” rampant among microsound composers enables

them to exert “utter control over every aspect of sound.”160 For example, “[w]ith

sampling, synthesis, and digital signal processing, sound can be created from scratch or

else be transformed from recognizable materials to something beyond recognition.”161

The point is: microsound composers’ embrace of materialistic metaphors excuses, in their

minds, their callous treatment of sounds as meaningless things characterized only by their

submissiveness to digital mutilation. Microsound consequently suffers from an “utter

lack of sentimentality with regard to its materials,” a coldness which, to Demers, is

audible not only in composers’ techniques, but also in the resultant music.162

This callous attitude toward sound attends upon its demystification, yet another

consequence of its reification. Sounds are demystified when their independent powers are

rationalized to the point of being explained away.163 As an entailment of the metaphor A

SOUND IS AN OBJECT, the term sound object anchors musical sound to a category

familiar from everyday life, in order to make sounds easier to control. However, Savage

might say, assimilating music to a familiar category negates the suspension of the

familiar that music may allow us to experience. Thus, conceiving music in terms of sound

objects undermines music’s ability to reflect critically upon, or pose alternatives to, the                                                             160 Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, 79-80.

161 Ibid., 79.

162 Ibid.

163 On the demystification of music, see Savage, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism, 87, 91-92. For Savage, the demystification of music perpetrated by various musicological approaches, to which we may add materialism, destroys music’s ability to imply alternate worlds: ways of being alternate to those in which ideologies of mastery hold sway.

   

75

familiar.164 This despite the fact that experimental music, which sound objects were

coined to describe, invites us to listen in unfamiliar ways. Schaeffer theorized musique

concrète alongside unusual modes of listening – the acousmatic and reduced modes –

with the intention that they offer musical perspectives on non-musical sounds, thereby

contradicting traditionally dismissive attitudes toward so-called “noises.” However, by

insisting on habitual, materialistic ways of thinking, the term sound object nullifies an

important motivation of Schaeffer’s project, namely his intent to engage the unfamiliar.

By assimilating sound to object, a category typified by familiarity and unthreatening

passivity, Schaeffer’s materialistic terminology compromises his efforts to engage

sound’s potential to act on us, the potential of sound itself to change our minds about

what constitutes music.

If sound objects nullify their own goals, stripping music of its ontological

complexity to the potential detriment of discourse, why do composers and analysts cling

to the term? One reason might be that electronic sounds and tools also appear in non-

musical contexts, therefore cannot serve as distinctly identifying characteristics of

electronic music. Perhaps sound object is an attempt, on the part of electronic-music

discourse, to delineate musical sounds by metaphorically enclosing them in stable

“skins.” But such an attempt would propagate, and extend to the sonic realm, the

“surface-depth metaphor” integral to structuralist views of music: the idea that a musical

work has an outside and an inside, that the delightful but superficial “surface” of a work

conceals its “deeper” formal structures – in the words of Robert Fink, “[t]he model of

                                                            164 See Ibid., 106.

   

76

music as a skin-like surface stretched over hierarchically structured depths.”165 Via

several examples, Fink successfully demonstrates this metaphor to be irrelevant to music

in our postmodern age. Why, then, do strictly anti-formalists, like Schaeffer, allow such a

term as sound object to encourage a variant of the surface-depth metaphor?

Another possibility. Consider that electronic music is increasingly disseminated in

“disembodied” ways: electronic musicians forsake stable identities, working under

multiple and/or impersonal names (ISAN, Mem1, Celer...); performances may occur sans

performers, reliant only on loudspeakers; tangible recording media like CDs and tapes are

giving way to mp3s, which are essentially groups of electrical impulses triggered by

patterns of data. As Emmerson puts it: “[m]ost music now heard appears to present little

evidence of living presence. Yet we persist in seeking it out.”166 In other words, fearing

both the death of the author and “the dematerialization of the art object” (to borrow Lucy

Lippard’s term), perhaps electronic musicians attempt, by means of object-based

terminology, to confer mastery upon themselves by conferring some kind of stable

embodiment upon their materials.167 These are plausible explanations for sound objects’

persistence in discourse.

                                                            165 Robert Fink, "Going Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface," in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 102, 06. See also 32.

166 Emmerson, Living Electronic Music, xiii.

167 See Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

   

77

However, some electronic musicians, like Daniel and Bourland, acknowledge

sound objects’ merely figurative nature, hence the term’s limited utility.168 Recall that

Daniel favors the term sound object not for the imaginary tangibility that it seems to lend

his work, but because it complements his compositional method, which relies heavily on

“cutting and pasting.” Considering Daniel’s perspective, along with Demers’

interpretation of microsound’s reifying techniques, I propose that materialistic metaphors

persist in electronic-music discourse not because they attach figurative materiality to an

increasingly disembodied art form, but because these metaphors complement and excuse

the various kinds of mastery that electronic musicians seek. By definition, sound objects

are sounds conceptually subjected to manipulation by listeners and composers. A sound

object is what we discover when we listen in a certain way (reducible sound object); it is

a sound that has been contextually relocated by a musician or sound artist

(transcontextual); it is a unit, a specimen, that can be broken into particles, subsequently

resynthesized into a new sonic entity (structural sound object). It is this multifaceted

mastery that composers and analysts are after, clinging to materialistic metaphors despite

the metaphors’ dissemblance.

It is easy to take sound objects’ passivity and ready utility for granted, because we

are accustomed to conceiving material objects as “standing-reserve”: Bestand, in

Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology.” Standing-reserve is what is there,

ready to hand, meant for humans to utilize. As such, reified sound is not a complex

relationship between sound, composer, work, history, listener, memory and more, as

                                                            168 Personal communications, April 2009 and December 2010, respectively.

   

78

music ought to be. Rather, we may relate to reified sound simply as workers relate to

tools, as microscopes relate to specimens.169 As Heidegger puts it, in standing-reserve

“[e]verywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to

stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about

in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve.”170 Notably, for

Heidegger it is technology and its products that turn Being (Dasein) into standing-

reserve. A bridge over the Rhine lets the river be; a hydroelectric plant changes the river

into a resource for human use and consumption: “a water power supplier, [that] derives

from out of the essence of the power station.”171 Technology “reveals” and “unlocks” the

utile energy in nature and objecthood.172 “[A]n airliner that stands on the runway is surely

an object. Certainly. We can represent the machine so. But then it conceals itself as to

what and how it is. Revealed, it stands on the taxi strip only as standing-reserve,

inasmuch as it is ordered to ensure the possibility of transportation.”173 Similarly, when

microsound’s granular techniques or Cutler’s commodity-based approach to sampling

take sounds as sound objects, they “reveal” sounds to be mere reserves of possibility

(Bestand), rather than agents whose unique activity consists in being (Dasein).

                                                            169 In the words of Adorno and Horkheimer, reified sound boils down to a “single relationship between the subject who confers meaning and the meaningless object...” Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 7.

170 Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. and translated by William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 17.

171 Ibid., 16.

172 Ibid., 16.

173 Ibid., 17.

   

79

The remainder of this chapter examines the relationship of mastery between

sound and composing/listening subject, which likely motivates the persistence of

materialistic metaphors in musical discourse. Critics of this relationship, Theodor Adorno

and Max Horkheimer, will be our guides as we examine how human mastery, as a

materialistic ideal, manifests in critical philosophy and sound art. In Bill Fontana’s sound

sculpture Sound Island, we will see that the mastery of sound by materialistic

terminology manifests ideologies of domination according to which everything, even

other human beings, are objects that exist only to be used.

Reification, Domination, Ideology

In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer declare

that “enlightenment thinking...contains the germ of the regression which is taking place

everywhere today.”174 “Regression” is the nullification of all difference by instrumental

reason, a form of thinking that boils all phenomena down to a common denominator, with

the purpose of gaining mastery over every phenomenon. Schaefferian theory typifies

instrumental reason, as reduced listening demands that listeners identify the common

denominator, or sound object, underlying every possible experience of a certain sound.175

One then classifies the sound object as musical, noisy, iterative, sustained, etc.. In the

sound object, Schaeffer reduces all experiences of a sound to the same experience.

                                                            174 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xvi.

175 For Adorno and Horkheimer, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the instigating prototype of enlightenment thinking. Kant categorizes the various ways in which we understand perception, and suggests that our understanding subjects everything we perceive to those categories – the very same categories to which we ourselves, or at least our modes of understanding, are subjugated.

   

80

“Whatever might be different is made the same,” write Adorno and Horkheimer. “That is

the verdict which critically sets the boundaries to possible experience.”176

One could say that reduced listening attempts an objective or godlike perspective

on sounds: an “instrumental” perspective, typical of enlightened thought, that backs away

from a given sound’s contingent relationships with history, memory, and instrumental

sources, in order to turn it into a sound object. Subsequently, all that characterizes sound

objects are the ways in which they can be used, or the defects that disqualify them from

use, in musical compositions. Thus:

Human beings purchase [their] increase in power with estrangement from

that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same

relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to

the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things

to the extent that he can make them. Their “in-itself” [An sich] becomes

“for him” [Für ihn]. In their transformation the essence of things is

revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination.177

If all phenomena were the same, they would be easier to control. Hence, as

Adorno and Horkheimer cannot reiterate often enough, the motivation of instrumental

reason is the domination and utilization of everything in the world. “What human beings

                                                            176 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 8.

177 Ibid., 6. “Die Menschen bezahlen die Vermehrung ihrer Macht mit der Entfremdung von dem, worüber sie die Macht ausüben. Die Aufklärung verhält sich zu den Dingen wie der Diktator zu den Menschen. Er kennt sie, insofern er sie manipulieren kann. Der Mann der Wissenschaft kennt die Dinge, insofern er sie machen kann. Dadurch wird ihr An sich Für ihn. In der Verwandlung enthüllt sich das Wesen der Dinge immer als je dasselbe, als Substrat von Herrschaft.”

   

81

seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings.

Nothing else counts...For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the

standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion.”178 And I must clarify

that by “enlightenment” in this context, Adorno and Horkheimer , refer to the kind of

calculative thinking brought about by reason’s transformation into an instrument of

domination. This reversal of Enlightenment reason, which aimed at humanity’s

emancipation, betrayed the historical movement known as the Enlightenment – a

movement that, as a whole, was ultimately grounded in a sweeping humanism that was

benevolent at heart. By means of this reversal, instrumental reason and utilitarian

perspectives boil manifold phenomena down to an “essence” that human beings can

easily and intuitively use to whatever end.

The kind of essence that succumbs most readily to our control is the passive

essence of the object or mere thing. Reification is thus integral to enlightened thinking.

“Thought thus becomes illusory whenever it seeks to deny its function of separating,

distancing, and objectifying.”179 For Adorno and Horkheimer, “demythologization” and

technology facilitate reification and domination, just as they encourage materialistic

metaphors for sound in electronic music.180 Furthermore, reification and domination have

become facts of life, so to speak, that seemingly excuse humans’ exploitation of other

things. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it, “domination is...disclaimed by transforming

                                                            178 Ibid., 2-3.

179 Ibid., 31. Emphasis added.

180 Ibid., 1-2.

   

82

itself into a pure truth underlying the world which it enslaves.”181 That all phenomena

may be treated as mere things, and that humans have the right to manipulate and use

every phenomenon to our advantage, are taken as truths of how things are in our society –

even though these so-called “truths” mask the reality that not all things are within human

control. In other words, reification and domination are ideologies. We may glimpse these

ideologies in, for example, Cutler’s notion that sounds are objects available for anyone to

use, a notion that excuses the unauthorized use or “plunder” of copyrighted music.182

Cutler assumes that the metaphorical thingness of sound is real, an excuse for

commodification and theft. Overall, in Cutler’s thinking, in Schaeffer’s method, and, as

we shall see, even in certain works of music and sound art, “art as integral replication has

pledged itself to [enlightened thinking], even in its specific techniques. It becomes,

indeed, the world over again, an ideological doubling, a compliant reproduction.”183

Schaeffer would probably have been horrified to hear his thinking, which he

believed to be the product of a liberating, intuitive phenomenology, described as

utilitarian and domineering. I am almost certain that he consciously intended no such

thing. He was, after all, a member of the French Resistance who struggled hard against

fascism; and I do not mean for a moment to undermine that struggle. However, the

“phenomenology” that Schaeffer believed he undertook “without knowing it” does indeed

                                                            181 Ibid., 6.

182 Cutler, "Plunderphonics," 92.

183 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 13.

   

83

bear traces of instrumental reasoning.184 With good intentions, Schaeffer did what

appeared to him to be phenomenology, and even that “without knowing it.” That his

perspective was not always purely phenomenological but at times closer to utilitarian

does not undermine his achievements. But neither should his misunderstanding of

phenomenology negatively impact the reception of the theories of more diligent

phenomenologists: if Schaeffer had genuinely done phenomenology – or done it “all the

way” instead of simply “without knowing it” – the affinities that appear between his

thinking and instrumental reason would not have existed.

Adorno and Horkheimer find that instrumental reason penetrates all facets of

social life. Nothing escapes reification and human domination: not nature, not

technology, not sound, not art – not even other humans. Ideologies of reification and

domination motivate us to treat even each other as objects available for use. Every

individual human being boils down to the same common denominator: the passive

essence of the thing. Individuals become “mere examples of the species, identical to one

another.”185 Thus: “Enlightenment expels difference from theory. It considers ‘human

actions and desires exactly as if I were dealing with lines, planes, and bodies.’...[I]t treats

human beings as things, centers of modes of behavior...[H]uman beings become mere

material, as the whole of nature has become material for society.”186

                                                            184 Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 262. 185 Ibid., 29.

186 Ibid., 67-68. Here Adorno and Horkheimer quote Spinoza’s Ethics.

   

84

The more accustomed we become to treating complex, transitory phenomena as

objects – especially those so different from ourselves that they are difficult to

conceptualize (sounds, the sensibilities of other people...) – the more willing we become

to turn each other into homogeneous instances of standing-reserve. The problem is, as we

have seen, reifying metaphors really do help us to deal with things conceptually and to

get things done – like creating music. For Adorno and Horkheimer, “The difficulties

within this concept of reason, arising from the fact that its subjects, the bearers of one and

the same reason, are in real opposition to each other, are concealed in the Western

Enlightenment behind the apparent clarity of its judgments.”187 Enlightenment thinking is

so effective that it conceals its faults. To put this another way: ideologies of reification

and domination insinuate themselves so thoroughly into our modes of thinking that we

often endorse them without realizing.

Even Adorno and Horkheimer fall under their sway. In a perceptive critique of

Dialectic of Enlightenment, Robert Pippin finds that neither Adorno and Horkheimer, nor

Heidegger, Habermas, Marcuse, or Feenberg, can effectively argue against reification and

domination, because they overlook the key question: Why do human beings feel the need

to dominate nature, technology, and each other? For Pippin, the problem is not “whether

we [as humans] are becoming the objects of the forces we were the original subjects of,”

and so on, but coming to an “understanding of the necessity for an ever expanding control

                                                            187 Ibid., 65.

   

85

over the forces of nature.”188 Existing critiques leave “unanswered the question, Why...the

imperatives of purposive-rational activity, became so much more extraordinarily

important in the modern age.”189

By failing to recognize this question as the reason why enlightened thinking came

about in the first place – and why it just might be inevitable in our current socio-historical

conditions – critics find themselves unable to suggest plausible alternative ways of

coordinating our relationships with the world, and their critiques pose no threat to the

prevailing ideologies.190 Stymieing critique is the goal of ideology: an ideological

“orientation or form of consciousness somehow prevents, renders even unnoticeable,

contrary evidence or argument.”191 Because ideologies mask the true nature of things by

pretending to be truths themselves, they conceal the questions that would undermine their

authority. Blinded to what should be their key question, critiques like Dialectic of

Enlightenment (which is far from the sum total of Adorno’s work) run the risk of

endorsing the very ideologies they set out to discredit.192

It is horrifying to think that we are so dependent on reification and domination

that it does not occur to us, not even to artists and critics, to ask how we became this way.

Pippin rightfully wonders:                                                             188 Robert B. Pippin, "Technology as Ideology: Prospects," in Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 196-97. Emphasis original.

189 Ibid., 203. Emphasis original.

190 Ibid., 194.

191 Ibid., 188. Emphasis original.

192 Ibid., 205.

   

86

Has our “relation to objects” been so influenced by technical instruments,

the power of manipulation and production, and so on, that our basic sense

of the natural world [along with our understanding of other people and of

social life] has changed and changed so fundamentally that our reflective

ability to assess and challenge such a change is threatened?193

In the next section, Pippin’s fears are realized in a distinguished work of sound art

that, despite its critical aspirations, endorses ideologies of reification and domination by

adopting methods grounded in the objectification of sound. In Bill Fontana’s Sound

Island (1994), sounds made by unwitting human beings serve as the passive, in some

cases forcefully silenced building blocks of a gargantuan sound sculpture. By

appropriating and amplifying or muting sounds, without regard for how this appropriation

affects his human sound sources, Fontana unconsciously subscribes to ideologies of

reification, which risk transforming his sonic-architectural reflection on the human

relationship with place into an authoritarian gesture.

Sound Island

Not all sound sculptures involve reification, since some sound sculptures are or

contain sculptures in the literal, tangible sense: constructed objects that produce sound.194

But some sound sculptures consist of sound alone, or of sound installed in a space, such

                                                            193 Ibid., 189.

194 See for instance Christian Marclay’s Tape Fall (1989), in which a running tape recorder is exhibited on top of a tall ladder; Steve Roden’s above the sand, flown and undone (2006), which is a mobile-like piece with delicate wooden limbs and tiny speakers; multiple pieces by Trimpin, Harry Bertoia, and others.

   

87

that sound, space, and place together make the sculpture. Fontana’s sculptures are of the

latter kind: sound plays continuously in a particular place over a long period of time. His

Sound Island, for example, consisted of continuous sound transmitted from particular

locations to various levels of Paris’ Arc de Triomphe. According to the artist, in this as in

many of his works, sounds’ extremely protracted durations lend to them a figurative

“permanence” or “sculptural” presence.195 Fontana therefore decided to “call [his] art

form sound sculpture,” and to create “sculpture which lasts.”196 Since this “sculptural”

quality is metaphorical, projected, sound sculpture (A [FORMED] SOUND IS A

SCULPTURE) is, in Fontana’s case, an additional metaphor entailed by A SOUND IS

AN OBJECT.

For Fontana, features other than duration also enable sounds to merit the

metaphorical designation “sculptural.” In his insightful essay, “Resoundings,” he argues

that sounds lend themselves to “sculptural” objectification if they possess “spatial

complexity,” meaning that they emanate from multiple channels, speakers, or sources

simultaneously, creating the sense that each may be approached as a complex totality

from multiple perspectives, as one might investigate a sculpture from multiple viewing

angles.197 Interestingly, this notion conflicts with the idea, evident in all sound-object

theories that we’ve encountered so far, of the sound object as a circumscribed thing that

                                                            195 Bill Fontana, "Resoundings," (http://resoundings.org/Pages/Resoundings.html, ND).

196 Ibid. See also ———, "The Relocation of Ambient Sound: Urban Sound Sculpture," Leonardo 20, no. 2 (1987): 143.

197 Fontana, "Resoundings."

   

88

occurs at a single, specific “point.” Moreover, for Fontana, it is not bounded duration but

a “sound process that is perpetual,” as in a repeated or iterative sound, that creates an

impression of “continuousness and permanence.”198 Sounds from ancient sources are thus

“naturally” sculptural, having resounded in the environment for millennia. Fontana

writes:

The environmental sounds that are the most impressive to record, posses a

natural timelessness. The breaking waves of the Atlantic and Pacific

Oceans, Niagara Falls, the Rhine Falls, are all sounds that have happened

continuously for millions of years. When I record them, I am struck by

this fact. Making a recording that is even the length of a two-hour DAT

tape is a trivial excerpt from a sound with no apparent beginning or end, as

close as we can come to experiencing infinity in the acoustic realm.199

The defining feature of Fontana’s work, an intriguing technique with which he

aims to get closer to “acoustic infinity,” or at least to “create the illusion of [sonic]

permanence,”200 is what he calls “relocation.”201 Relocation underlies many of Fontana’s

projects, including Sound Island and Brooklyn Bridge (1983). By transmitting sounds

from one location to another, relocation fills one site with the sounds of another.

According to Fontana, this technique was inspired by other artists’ use of “found objects”

                                                            198 Ibid.

199 Ibid.

200 Ibid.

201 ———, "The Relocation of Ambient Sound: Urban Sound Sculpture," 143.

   

89

in visual sculptures, in particular by the work of Marcel Duchamp, who inserted

traditionally “unaesthetic” objects into artistic contexts (as in his infamous exhibition of a

urinal in Fountain (1917)).202 Fontana “conceived such relocations in sculptural terms

because ambient sounds are sculptural in the way they belong to a particular place.”203 In

other words, Fontana treats ambient sounds as transcontextual sound objects, a decision

that he bases in the sounds’ site-specificity, that is, in their stable identities and

recognizable, locatable sources.

Fontana himself offers the clearest explanation of the rationale underlying

relocation.

In the ongoing sculptural definition of my work I have used different

strategies to overcome the ephemeral qualities of sound, that seem to be in

marked contrast to the sense of physical certainty and permanence that

normally belong to sculpture and architecture. One of the most useful

methods has been to create installations that connect two separate physical

environments through the medium of permanent listening. Microphones

installed in one location transmit their resulting sound continuums to

another location, where they can be permanently heard as a transparent

overlay to visual space. As these acoustic overlays create the illusion of

permanence, they start to interact with the temporal aspects of the visual

space. This will suspend the known identity of the site by animating it

                                                            202 Ibid.

203 Ibid.

   

90

with evocations of past identities playing on the acoustic memory of the

site, or by deconstructing the visual identity of the site by infusing it with

a totally new acoustic identity that is strong enough to compete with its

visual identity.204

I will return to the complex relationship with place that Fontana attempts to

evoke. For now, note that his wording in this passage betrays his awareness that the

sculptural qualities of sound are “illusions.” He believes that his “sound sculptures” result

from listeners’ reification of sound in response to his materialistic conceptualization,

selection, and treatment of sounds as found objects. His precise theorization of the

“sculptural” in sound, described above, also exhibits awareness that the sonically

“sculptural” does not harbor authentic objecthood, in the sense of fixity and boundedness.

Nonetheless, he is unmistakably dedicated to the reifying metaphor, A SOUND IS A

SCULPTURE, having worked with sound sculpture and retained its terminology for

approximately four decades.

In fact, Fontana’s writings imply that the presuppositions of enlightenment

thinking have always informed his methods. Like Schaeffer, as a young composer

Fontana was struck by the beauty of sounds emanating from wildernesses and cities.

Having made several field recordings of such sounds, Fontana decided to do something to

them: he had to configure them, he thought, had to use them to create an audible

structure.205 Thus Fontana’s work began with the premise that sound is readily available

                                                            204 ———, "Resoundings."

205 Ibid.

   

91

material for use. Moreover, for Fontana, the artist’s hand must be perceptible in sound

art. Field recording is not enough: it does not communicate, in his opinion. Although I

cannot undertake an ontology of art at this juncture, I will underscore Fontana’s principle:

in order to be “aesthetically meaningful,” he believes, sound must be configured by a

human agent; sound must become the object of human intentions in order to be

artistically successful.206

Overall, ideologies of reification are evident in Fontana’s terminology and

techniques, ideals of domination in his methods, all of which center around the

conception of sound as an object or sculpture. It is therefore not a stretch for him to

conceive all that goes into his sculptures – sounds, places, buildings, and sound sources –

as “raw materials,” even when some of them are unwitting human beings. This is

precisely what transpired in Sound Island.

Fontana installed his sculpture Sound Island at the Arc de Triomphe in 1994. The

idea was to demonstrate that the view from the Arc, and therefore its significance, is

more complex than the visual realm can convey. To this end, Fontana transported certain

sounds, that originated at a distance from the Arc, to various locations on and below the

Arc. He fitted the Arc with hidden speakers playing sounds transmitted from elsewhere.

In the Arc’s underground tunnels, visitors heard the gurgling of seawater, transmitted

from hydrophones attached to submerged buoys off the Normandy coast. At street level,

standing beneath the Arc, one heard the sounds of ocean waves caressing Normandy’s

seaside cliffs. And atop the Arc, accompanying a panoramic view of Paris, one heard

                                                            206 Ibid.

   

92

sounds transmitted from the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral, and many less prominent

nooks and crannies too small and distant to be visible: the bells of the cathedral, chanting

from within, the clinking of cups and saucers in sidewalk cafés, and myriad

conversations. “It created a situation that you could hear as far as you could see” –

farther, in fact, since from landlocked Paris, visitors to Sound Island could hear as far as

Normandy’s beaches.207

Fontana “realize[d] that the relocation of an ambient sound source within a new

context would alter radically the acoustic meaning of the ambient sound source.”208 With

Sound Island, as with all his applications of sonic relocation, his goal was to muddy the

identity of a place, confounding it with that of another. In Sound Island, commissioned

by the City of Paris and the French Ministry of Culture, relocation played a

commemorative role: Normandy and Paris seemed to merge just as, in 1994, France

celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, the Allies’ landing at Normandy that

liberated Paris from the Nazis.209 However, in an ingenious, mildly Hegelian gesture,

Fontana’s relocation of seaside sounds to the middle of Paris demonstrates not only that

our sense of place is born, at least partly, from memory and history, but also that a place

acquires its identity just as much from what it is not, where it is not, as from what, where,

and when it is.

                                                            207 Ibid.

208 ———, "The Relocation of Ambient Sound: Urban Sound Sculpture," 143.

209 Bill Fontana, "Sound Island," (http://www.resoundings.org/Pages/sound%20island.html, 1996).

   

93

However, the grand gesture that brings the Normandy seaside and a sizeable

portion of the Paris metropolis nigh simultaneously into earshot, also silences those

Parisian denizens who dared approach the Arc without investigating the sound sculpture.

From the Arc’s ground floor, the history and oceanic presence of Normandy muted the

reality of present-day Paris: the millions of commuters making their way around the Arc

in their Peugeots and Citröens. Fontana wrote:

The Arc de Triomphe is an island at the center of an immense traffic

circle. It is an urban architectural island not because it is surrounded by

water, but by a sea of cars. The constant flow of hundreds of encircling

cars are the dominant visual and aural experience one has when standing

under the towering monument, looking out at Paris. This sound sculpture

explored the transformation of the visual and aural experience of traffic.

Live natural white sounds of the sea from the Normandy coast were

transmitted to loudspeakers installed on the facade of the monument. The

presence of the breaking and crashing waves created the illusion that the

cars were silent. This was accomplished in contradiction to the visual

aspects of the situation. The sound of the sea is natural white sound, and

has the psycho-acoustic ability to mask other sounds, not by virtue of

being louder, but because of the sheer harmonic complexity of the sea

sound.210

                                                            210 Fontana, "Resoundings."

   

94

In this passage, the silencing of Paris with Normandy, of motorized urbanity with

oceanic sublimity, and of individual commuters with a grand idea, is not a mere

byproduct of relocation in Sound Island, but its objective. Fontana’s reification of sound

into sculpture entails the reification of the places, sources, and individuals who comprise

the sculpture’s “raw materials.” A SOUND IS A SCULPTURE entails A SOUND-

SOURCE IS UNHEWN STONE or melted bronze, driftwood, clay, or some other

passive substance. For the sculpture Sound Island, the ocean and the commuters of Paris

collectively constituted this raw substance. Human beings become standing-reserve.

Amid this monstrous, partly human, watery-fleshy substance, that simply waited

to be crafted into beauty, there were no individuals. By conceiving the Parisian

commuters as material, Fontana extinguished their individuality: all of them together

comprised the “traffic,” (the “herd,” Hegel would say),211 that the artist aimed to

“transform” into a work of sound art.212 He did so by, on the ground floor of the Arc,

merely replacing one transcontextual sound object with another, traffic with “natural

white [seaside] sound.” In a godlike gesture, Fontana eliminated both the human and the

automotive residents of Paris from its soundscape, and replaced them with what he

believes is “natural.” Thus in Sound Island, just as Adorno and Horkheimer predicted,

                                                            211 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 9. “Abstraction, the instrument of enlightenment, stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate, whose concept it eradicates: as liquidation. Under the leveling rule of abstraction, which makes everything in nature repeatable, and of industry, for which abstraction prepared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the ‘herd’ (Trupp), which Hegel [in the Phenomenology of Spirit] identified as the outcome of enlightenment. The distance of subject from object, the presupposition of abstraction, is founded on the distance from things which the ruler attains by means of the ruled.”

212 Fontana, "Resoundings."

   

95

sound art replicated ideologies of reification and domination, which nullify difference in

the name of utility and place humans in a position of mastery over nature, technology,

and one another. “In their mastery of nature, the creative God and the ordering mind are

alike. Man’s likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in

the command.”213

From a lofty position at the top of the Arc de Triomphe, Fontana simulated God’s

“lordly gaze” by replacing visitors’ limited sensory range with the infinitely acute hearing

of gods, for whom everything far below is simultaneously distant and close enough to

scrutinize. People elsewhere in Paris, chatting in cafés or chanting at Nôtre Dame, among

them individuals who might have never heard of Sound Island, became its marble; their

activities and conversations became the sculpture’s fine and animating detail. Bluntly put,

the entailments of the metaphor A SOUND IS A SCULPTURE obscured the very present

relationship between Fontana’s relocation of sound and governmental acts of espionage,

between Sound Island and Orwell’s Big Brother. At the summit of the Arc, Fontana’s

assumption of an authoritarian stance, looking down on a total society of replicates,

deciding (via the placement of his microphones) who to amplify and who to silence, who

to spy on, who to wipe out of existence, is not, from the artist’s point of view, ethically

questionable. Probably it is not even intentional. (After all, no single listener could hear

all of Sound Island’s transmissions at the same time, hence it may be only the sculptor

who achieves “omnipresent” hearing.) This godlike presumption is excused by the

ideologies of materialism and domination from which it stems.

                                                            213 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 6.

   

96

The assumption, in keeping with these ideologies, that everything constitutes

material for use, is a presupposition to which Fontana subscribes when he embraces the

metaphors A SOUND IS AN OBJECT and A SOUND IS A SCULPTURE. True: Sound

Island is a critical artwork in the sense that it invites reflection on the identity of place,

and on the limited quality of human relationships with place. The piece gives visitors a

sense of the vastness of place, which is always already greater than any human

perspective can encompass, by demonstrating that the visual realm cannot reveal the full

extent of what makes a location the place that it is. At the same time, however, the work’s

unwitting and unthinking subscription to prevalent materialistic ideologies undermines

Sound Island’s critical edge.

It is difficult if not impossible to imagine what Fontana might have done instead,

to create Sound Island without endorsing ideologies of domination or reifying human

beings, turning their actions, their worries and confessions into sonic things. So deeply

are these ideologies ingrained in our conceptual, critical, and creative structures. As

Pippin ascertained, a true critique of reifying ideologies – one that poses viable

alternatives – may be impossible to conceive at this point in socio-cultural history. This is

because, at this tumultuous point, humans cannot imagine organizing our relationships to

the world in any terms other than those of control.

   

97

Chapter 3.

Convergences: Sound Objects, Aesthetic Autonomy, Musical Works

Contingency

“[A]ny point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be,”

according to Deleuze and Guattari. “This is very different from the tree or root, which

plots a point, fixes an order.”214 Bluntly: “[t]he rhizome is an anti-genealogy.”215 The

notions of genealogy, ancestors and descendants in a “family tree,” constitute a “fixed

order” governed by necessity. Children relate to parents in a singular relation; the

characteristics of the children necessarily follow on those of the parents; therefore a child

has one, and only one, particular set of parents. The opposite is the case in rhizomatic

relations. A rhizome undergoes “ramified surface extension in all directions”: it can relate

to anything, and the relations can assume any character.216 Rhizomatic relations are

contingent.

If relations between the various definitions of the term sound object form a

rhizomatic structure, then so do the term’s relations with other phenomena, including

other aesthetic categories and philosophical theories. This means that sound-object

theories do not necessarily follow upon previously coined theories and terminologies; and

sound objects do not necessarily take after other terminologies. Even where said ideas

                                                            214 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7.

215 Ibid., 11.

216 Ibid., 7.

   

98

and terms seem to foreshadow sound objects, this does not mean that sound-object

theories are their direct consequences. Unlike family trees, which conceptually form

hierarchical, “vertical” structures: rhizomes, or “multiplicities,” are “flat,” all members of

the family are cousins.217 As they form webs of rhizomatic relations, sound-object

theories therefore dispel any lingering notions that musical discourse “develops” over

time in a teleological or “progressive” fashion. Instead, connections appear where we

least expect them. In fact, considering a rhizome entails seeking the most startling

connections, the most farfetched relations or “convergences.” Deleuze and Guattari

advise: “Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of

flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of n

dimensions and broken directions.”218

This chapter goes in search of two such ruptures. I attempt to illuminate

convergences between sound-object theories and nineteenth-century notions of aesthetic

autonomy; and between the concept of objectified sound (sound object) and that of

reified music (musical work). I call attention to these particular relationships for two

reasons. First: despite the sense (particularly evident in Roads’ and Schaeffer’s writings)

that sound objects constitute a “step up” from musical notes as discursive components of

musical practice, and that sound-object theories constitute “progress” beyond

longstanding assumptions in musical discourse: the term sound object perpetuates what

came before as much as it serves as an alternative. Therefore, in my view, comprehensive

                                                            217 Ibid., 9.

218 Ibid., 11.

   

99

speculation on sound objects should attempt to give some sense of where and how sound-

object theories converge with earlier ideas.

Second: Schaeffer coined the sound object in part as an analytical tool, to

facilitate the description of electronic music by reducing the aural experience to a

conceptual singularity, a unity.219 Before investigating (in Chapter 4) the capacities and

implications of the term sound object when it is employed in music-analytical contexts, it

is therefore worth assessing its analytical potential by comparing it to a pre-existing – and

highly influential – analytical category.

For a rhizome, these convergences occur everywhere. In fact, let me take a

moment to highlight some of them, of which time forbids a full discussion here. As

Roads suggests, his and Schaeffer’s essentializing notions of the sound object – as,

respectively, the “elementary particle” or the phenomenological “heart” of aural

experience – converge with atomistic theories propounded by Pre-Socratic

philosophers.220 Democritus and Lucretius, for example, posited quality-less “atoms” as

the existential bases of all phenomena: hypotheses that in turn take after Anaximander’s

monistic notion that a single, self-perpetuating element of no or indeterminate quality,

generated all that exists.221 Neither Descartes nor Husserl were monists, yet we have seen

that sound-object theories owe a great deal to their ideas. Add these modern allegiances                                                             219 For more on conceptual unities in music, see Fred Everett Maus, "Concepts of Musical Unity," in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), Fink, "Going Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface."

220 Roads, Microsound, 50-52.

221 See Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2001), Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, ed. John Godwin, trans. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin, 2005).

   

100

to the fact that sound-object theories derive from practical relations between musicians

and twentieth-century technologies, and their relations with the ancient Pre-Socratics may

seem surprising, seem to rupture expectations.

Other theories relate just as convincingly to Schaefferian ideas. For instance, I

argue elsewhere that sound-object theories share important elements with Hegel’s

philosophy of sound.222 In another example, Hermann Helmholtz’s attempt to reconcile

musical aesthetics and acoustic physiology parallels Schaeffer’s attempt at an

interdisciplinary science of music that would encompass both aesthetics and physics.223

Contrastingly, but just as convincingly, the notion of objectified sound also seems to echo

Susan Sontag’s critical enthusiasm for the material aspects of art over and above any

“messages” or conceptual content that an interpreter might extract from art.224 Overall,

sound-object theories converge with several historical eras and philosophical traditions,

despite these traditions’ seeming disparity from one another. Let us now seek the point at

which sound object theories converge with nineteenth-century aesthetics.

                                                            222 Mandy-Suzanne Wong, "Hegel's Ontology of Musical Sound" (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, Victoria, 2010).

223 Hermann L.F. Helmholtz, On the Sensation of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, trans. Alexander J. Ellis (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895).

224 Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 1966).

   

101

Pure Perception and Aesthetic Autonomy

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method presents a detailed, trenchant critique

of nineteenth-century aesthetics, questioning in particular post-Kantian notions of art’s

autonomy from all that lies beyond itself, and of the “pure” manner of perception that

supposedly enables audiences to consider art separately from other phenomena. Even as

such “idealist vocabulary and categories of thought figure prominently in the musical

aesthetics of the [nineteenth-century] Romantics,” twentieth-century sound objects also

assume “pure perception” and its attendant philosophical problems.225

According to Gadamer, it was Kant who sowed the seed that would blossom into

the florid ideal of pure perception, with its consequent aesthetic petals such as reduced

listening. “Kant’s main concern...was to give aesthetics an autonomous basis.”226 Once he

figured out art’s unique function, he was able to liberate art from mundanity. For post-

Kantian aesthetics the “task” of art was “to enable man to encounter himself in nature,”

not to be about nature or to represent that which is extraneous to man.227 Alone together

in a close, exclusive sphere, man and art retreat from the outside world. Within this

bubble, man has nothing to look upon but his own experience. He hypostatizes

experience so that he may regard it. As Kant puts it, because experience is a synthesis of

sensibility and conceptualization, each experience must be distinguished from every other

                                                            225 Mark Evan Bonds, "Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century," Journal of the American Musicological Society 50, no. 2/3 (1997): 405.

226 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 1975), 52.

227 Ibid., 43.

   

102

so that they do not blur together into an overwhelming, indecipherable fusion.228 Thus,

“as contained in one moment no representation can ever be anything other than absolute

unity.”229

In fact, for Kant, “experience” (Erlebnis) and “object” are united: a self-contained

phenomenon in which “the manifold of a given intuition is united.”230 Erlebnis, says

Gadamer, is experience that becomes an experience.231 Erlebnis is thus “immediacy,

which precedes all interpretation, reworking, and communication.”232 A “starting point

for interpretation – material to be shaped,” Erlebnis is also the “lasting result” of

interpretation,233 “the unity of a significant whole” that has significance only to one

particular self.234 To idealist aesthetics of early nineteenth centuries,235 Erlebnis was “a

                                                            228 In Andrew Brook’s commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason: “Prior to synthesis and conceptual organization, a manifold of intuitions would be an undifferentiated unit, a seamless, buzzing confusion. Thus, to distinguish one impression from another, we must give them separate [spatial and temporal] locations.” Andrew Brook, "Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/kant-mind/. Accessed October 6, 2010.), §3.2.1.

229 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 228-29 (§A99). Emphasis original.

230 Ibid., 249 (§137). Emphasis original.

231 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 53. Opposed to Erfahrung, which is experience undergone.

232 Ibid.

233 Ibid.

234 Ibid., 58.

235 The clearest example occurs in the writings of Karl Philipp Moritz, who insisted “that the true artwork must be self-contained and internally coherent, and that it must exist for its own sake.” See Bonds, "Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century," 396-97.

   

103

determining feature of the foundation of art.”236 As an Erlebnis, aesthetic experience was

“removed from all connections with actuality.”237 Thus aesthetic experience could

represent “the essence of experience per se.”238 Gadamer reads the idealist emphasis of

Erlebnis as a form of and reaction to a sense of individuals’ alienation from the world and

each other, which he attributes to Enlightened rationalism, and which results in

philosophers’ preoccupation with self-consciousness and unmediated givens.239 In

contrast, for Gadamer: “the power of the work of art suddenly tears the person

experiencing it out of the context of his life, and yet relates him back to the whole of his

existence.”240

By differentiating between the aesthetic sphere and mundane reality, Schiller and

Fichte cemented the opposition between art and non-art, such that “Art [became] a

standpoint of its own...with its own autonomous claim to supremacy” as a “perfecting of

reality” and thought.241 In this way, aesthetic consciousness determined its objects on its

own terms, refusing to admit “that the work of art and its world belong to each other.”242

To cultivate one’s aesthetic consciousness, one had therefore to perform what Gadamer

                                                            236 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 61.

237 Ibid., 60.

238 Ibid.

239 Ibid., 56.

240 Ibid., 60-61.

241 Ibid., 71.

242 Ibid., 73-74.

   

104

calls “aesthetic differentiation”: a process of distinguishing the “aesthetic” features of an

artwork from those that have roots outside the artwork. Aesthetic differentiation abstracts

the work from “everything that is outside the aesthetic sphere,” including “all the

conditions of a work’s accessibility,” willfully disregarding all extra-aesthetic conditions

of the artwork’s existence.243 Evidently, Gadamer observes, “[a]esthetic consciousness

has unlimited sovereignty over everything.”244 We can learn to take any phenomenon

“aesthetically”; we can do aesthetic differentiation anywhere.

In Chapter 2, I assessed the dangers of the epoché that abstracts the reducible

sound object from its situation in more-than-sonic circumstances. Note, however, that the

the phenomenon of aesthetic differentiation that Gadamer critique sand Husserlian

phenomenological reduction or epoché are not equivalent.245 Aesthetic differentiation is a

process of interpretation, thus a matter for the study of hermeneutics; whereas the epoché

is a psychological thought process designed to get at phenomenological and

epistemological essences. Moreover, as Gadamer theorized it, aesthetic differentiation

entails the (problematic but) permanent separation of aesthetic spheres of experience

from non-aesthetic spheres. Phenomenological reduction, by contrast, leaves sensuous

experience out of consideration only for the duration of the process of eidetic thinking.

Whereas aesthetic differentiation entails the lasting autonomy of the aesthetic from the

non-aesthetic, the epoché does not imply the perennial independence of thinking from

                                                            243 Ibid., 74.

244 Ibid., 77.

245 I would like to thank Roger Savage for making this distinction clear to me.  

   

105

experience. That said, both aesthetic differentiation and the epoché are acts of conscious,

reflective bracketing. Both entail ignoring some aspect of experience in order to focus on

a different aspect. Although the aims of the bracketing are very different in each case, the

act itself is a selective tuning of attention in both cases, between which we may

sometimes identify similarities of technique.

Techniques of aesthetic differentiation include, in Gadamer’s terminology, “pure

seeing and pure hearing.”246 Pure hearing dissembles the inherent mediation and

meaningfulness of perception, claiming to reduce what we hear to “sound itself.” Notions

of the “specifically musical,” of a trained listener’s ability to attend to “music alone,” of

music as an absolute, ruled nineteenth-century music theory.247 In a notorious petition

that many of today’s musicologists vehemently contest,248 Eduard Hanslick “appeal[ed]

to the listener’s faculty of abstraction, and beg[ged] him to think, in a purely musical

sense, of some dramatically effective melody, apart from the context.”249 Thus “[i]n the

pure act of listening, we enjoy the music alone, and do not think of importing into it any

extraneous matter.”250 In its abstraction from the extra-musical, Hanslick’s “pure act of

                                                            246 Ibid., 80.

247 Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, ed. Morris Weitz, trans. Gustav Cohen (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 66, 21. Other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aestheticians who also believed that music exists in an exclusive realm, separate and with a distinct manner of being from all other phenomena, include F.W.J. von Schelling, W.H. Wackenroder, and E.T.A. Hoffman. See Bonds, "Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century," 403, 07, 12.

248 See for instance the polemics against formalism and “structural listening” in Dell'Antonio, ed. Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing.

249 Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, 47.

250 Ibid., 21.

   

106

listening” instantiates the “pure hearing” that for Gadamer exemplifies aesthetic

differentiation, and shares its defining feature with Schaeffer’s reduced listening.

Needless to say, these hearing modes are guilty of the same shortcomings. They conceal

the origin of art in human production; they allow listeners to believe that sounds are not

made but simply and mysteriously are. Adorno would have called them

“phantasmagoria”;251 Gadamer implies that they perpetuate the “cult of genius...found to

be characteristic of bourgeois society in the nineteenth century.”252 Chapter 2 laid bare

this and other difficulties that attend upon sound objects. Suffice it to say here that the

notion of pure hearing accompanies and depends upon a prevailing conception of art’s

autonomy from its others. Aesthetic autonomy is the founding principle of idealist

aesthetics, spawned from the idea that we can reify and set aside our experiences.

In light of this genealogy of ideas, reduced, transcontextual, and structural sound

objects divulge their centuries-old, idealist heritage. Schaeffer’s reducible sound object is

an invitation to exercise the “unlimited sovereignty” of aesthetic differentiation: he urges

listeners to aestheticize every sound, hear every sound as potential music, even the

stumbling of laptop keys and the air conditioner’s whine. Like Gadamer’s

“somnambulatory unconsciousness with which genius creates,” reduced listening, a

mysterious mental process, alights upon the essence of musical sound.253 The reducible

                                                            251 See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 102. And Gadamer, Truth and Method, 82. For more detailed discussion see Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1991).

252 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 80.

253 Ibid.

   

107

sound object has all the reified immediacy of Erlebnis, as well as the latter’s ambiguity.

What Schaeffer does not point out is that, although a reducible sound object is, to be sure,

an objectified sound torn out of context, in order to decontextualize the sound, listeners

must interact with their (perhaps inescapable) preconceptions in attempt to negate them.

Consider this example. One is instructed not to think about elephants. In attempting to

satisfy, conceive or even begin to understand the instruction, one cannot help but think of

elephants – of the word “elephants” at least, and subsequently all the associations one has

formed with the word “elephants” in the past. Similarly, and this is my point: in its

decontextualization, the reducible sound object solicits relationships with memory.

Likewise, through a listener’s memory, reducible sound objects may interact with

other, readily-signifying sounds. Transcontextual and structural sound objects foster

similar relationships with other sounds within and outside their aesthetic contexts. Within

the Liszt sonata we may compare the first occurrence of a theme (structural sound object)

to its subsequent, metamorphosed iterations. We may identify a quotation from Depeche

Mode’s “People Are People” (transcontextual sound object) in John Oswald’s

Plunderphonics by relating what we hear in Oswald to a memory of “People Are

People.” We may associate the sampled sounds (transcontextual) in Matmos’ L.A.S.I.K.

with burning, a raygun-like machine, and all-new clarity, as our extra-musical

experiences permit. Because we can abstract what we hear from the context in which we

presently hear it, sounds may address other phenomena, sonic and otherwise, that occur

in the same and alternate contexts. Sound objects inherit the paradoxically disengaged

engagement of Erlebnis.

   

108

But sound objects’ proponents tend towards a surface anti-Romanticism, keeping

their idealist intellectual inheritance secreted away as though it were somehow shameful.

Schaeffer’s music and ideas seem to subvert the notion of aesthetic autonomy quite

deliberately. Using tape-recorders and phonographs to manipulate sounds “directly,” he

worked against older conventions which dictate that composing should begin with silent

formal templates. Musique concrète rallied noise against traditional attitudes that cordon

off music and musical sounds within the walls of a pitch-centric ivory tower. Yet reduced

listening, the very artifice Schaeffer used to rend those gleaming walls with noise,

fashions philosophical barriers of its own between sound and every extra-sonic Other, in

a deliberate epoché.

I can find no acknowledgment in Schaeffer’s writings of the epoché’s Kantian

roots or reduced listening’s subscription to aesthetic autonomy. Instead Schaeffer insists

that “musique concrète represents an inversion in relation to the traditional musical

approach,”254 and that “an introduction to the sound object” will “train the ear to listen in

a new way...requir[ing] that the conventional listening habits imparted by education first

be unlearned.”255 In Brian Kane’s analysis, Schaeffer’s thought relies on tenets of the

same “traditional” philosophies that it seeks to “unlearn.”256 Recall (from Chapter 2)

Kane’s review of Schaeffer’s acousmatic curtain, the first step towards reduced listening,

                                                            254 Carlos Palombini, "Machine Songs V: Pierre Schaeffer: From Research into Noises to Experimental Music," Computer Music Journal 17, no. 3 (1993): 16.

255 Schaeffer, Solfège De L'objet Sonore, 11.

256 See Kane, "L'objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction."

   

109

as such a conceptual barrier with which a listener bars herself from knowledge of a

sound’s instrumental source. Although post-Kantian Romantic philosophy is not

equivalent to philosophical skepticism, Kane identifies acousmatic listening with the

skeptical proposition (propounded by Stanley Cavell) “that our relation to the world as

such is not one of knowing.”257 He links this idea to the longstanding notion that, faced

with questions about the external world, music is mute; and in turn links this notion to

Schopenhauer’s oft-quoted statement from 1859: music is “quite independent of the

phenomenal world, positively ignores it, and to a certain extent, could still exist even if

there were no world at all, which cannot be said of the other arts.”258 Schaefferian sound

objects have their very being in autonomy from the world, as we have seen. Thus despite

Schaeffer’s assurances, traditions and habits live on in sound objects.

Advocates of sampling and other transcontextual sound objects spurn aesthetic

autonomy by challenging the inviolability of the finished artwork. For Chris Cutler,

because of its particular origins and connotations, a found sound or “debris from the

sonic environment...holds out an invitation to be used” and reused to make new music.259

(As we’ve seen, Cutler’s example is John Oswald’s Plunderphonics, an early mashup of

popular recorded songs that constitutes an original composition.) But the use to which

musicians put found sounds requires that they be “plundered” from their original

                                                            257 ———, "The Music of Skepticism: Intentionality, Materiality, Forms of Life," 18.

258 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols., vol. 1 (London: Dover, 1969), 257. See also Kane, "The Music of Skepticism: Intentionality, Materiality, Forms of Life," 31.

259 Cutler, "Plunderphonics," 91.

   

110

situations. A transcontextual sound object “leaves its genre community and enters the

universe of recordings.”260 A creative project that employs recontextualized sounds

“addresses precisely this realm of the recorded,” and listeners who enjoy its cosmic

scope.261 Cutler emphasizes the “ubiquity” of the “universal [sonic] library” afforded by

recording technologies, in such manner as to castigate intellectual-property law-makers

for refusing to admit all sounds to the public domain and free them (along with those who

would use them to create) from the constraints of copyright.262 However in the vast

universe of recordings, the history and provenance of every sound are not particular, only

“infinitely relative.”263 Every sound is always and everywhere present: as Gadamer

observes, “aesthetic consciousness makes everything it values simultaneous.”264 Thus

despite claims to historio-cultural embodiment made on behalf of transcontextual sound

objects, they necessitate a retreat from context grounded on the same principles as

aesthetic autonomy and “pure perception.” Cutler’s concern for twenty-first-century

copyright law, and his Schaefferian resolution to augment music’s store of resources with

new sounds, camouflage his nineteenth-century proclivities.

                                                            260 Ibid., 105.

261 Ibid.

262 Ibid., 107.

263 Ibid., 91.

264 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 74.

   

111

Musical Works

The term sound object propagates not only nineteenth-century philosophical

ideas, but also an influential aesthetic category that was (conceivably) born in the same

era. Though it is arguable that the deliberate reification of sound began in the late

twentieth century, the reification of (the subset of organized sounds considered as) music

in the form of musical works was an entrenched, defining precept of musical discourse by

the time Schaeffer began his experiments. Also in the twentieth century, philosophers

began to develop critical ontologies of musical works. Just as sound objects may

participate in this ongoing critique of the work-concept, the work-concept may provide a

platform of critique for the concept sound object. However, sound objects can also

exacerbate the epistemological and political problems that attend upon the musical work.

Many musicologists agree with Lydia Goehr’s philosophical proposition that the

musical work can be historicized as a specifically nineteenth-century category.265 Goehr

pinpoints 1800 – more precisely, Beethoven’s middle period – as the moment in which

music-making solidified into an accumulation of works.266 Among the socio-historical

conditions that gave rise to the work-concept, she counts the principle of aesthetic

autonomy which Gadamer identified as a cornerstone of nineteenth-century idealist

aesthetics. Terming this notion “the separability principle,” Goehr theorizes aesthetic                                                             265 See Richard Taruskin, "Foreward to the Imaginary Museum of Musical Works," in The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, by Lydia Goehr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)., Ruth A. Solie, "Review: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, by Lydia Goehr," Notes 50, no. 2 (1993): 605, Gabriel Josipovici, "Review: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works by Lydia Goehr," Music & Letters 74, no. 1 (1993): 86-87, Harry White, "'If It's Baroque, Don't Fix It': Reflections on Lydia Goehr's 'Work-Concept' and the Historical Integrity of Musical Composition," Acta Musicologica 69, no. 1 (1997): 97.

266 Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 150.

   

112

autonomy as a nineteenth-century European custom according to which artists, audiences,

and critics would “speak of the arts as separated completely from the world of the

ordinary, mundane, and everyday.”267 In music, this custom arose when Beethoven

liberated himself from his noble patrons to become a self-governing freelancer, in an

audacious move that other composers swiftly emulated.268 Striving for independent

legitimacy, and to match sculptors and painters in “respectability,”269 nineteenth-century

composers aimed accordingly to produce “independent”, “autonomous” structures.270

“Music would have to find an object that could be divorced from everyday [or mundane]

contexts, form part of a collection of works of art [which we now call the canon], and be

contemplated purely aesthetically…The object was called ‘the work.’”271

For Goehr this object may or may not attain sonic realization; in fact the work

itself is a purely “fictional object.”272 “[W]orks do not exist other than in projected form;

what exists is the regulative work-concept. However, insofar as this concept functionally

involves projections or hypostatizations – for each work composed we project into it

‘object’ existence – the resultant objects are accorded projective or fictional existence.”273

                                                            267 Ibid., 157.

268 Ibid., 206.

269 Ibid., 173.

270 Ibid., 149, 58.

271 Ibid., 173-4.

272 Ibid., 106.

273 Ibid.

   

113

The work-concept is “regulative” in that all aspects of musical practice have something to

do with works: traditional composers create works, performers perform works, and so on.

More importantly, musical practice takes the regulative work-concept as a “given,” not as

an idea that has “artificially emerged and crystallized within [the] practice.”274

Goehr’s attempt to account for socio-historical changes in musical practice as

conditions of particular musical concepts make her theory a favorite among

musicologists, especially those who study post-Beethoven repertoires. Philosophers find

it less agreeable, as it implies that to use the term musical work in relation to pre-

nineteenth-century music would be inappropriate.275 With Goehr I agree that nineteenth-

century aesthetics rely on the notion of the work, and with her dissenters I agree that the

term need not be confined to the music of that era.276 Here is where the sound object and

Goehr’s work-concept coincide. A sound object is regulative in that it proposes a specific

locus of musical experience, a common ground from which musical discourse can begin.

As Savage notes, if we are to learn about sound or any other phenomenon, our

epistemological makeup is such that we must “objectify [the phenomenon] over and

                                                            274 Ibid., 104.

275 See for instance Stephen Davies, Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 86. Also Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 176. And Ibid 185-6.

276 Though pre-Romantic composers may not have used the term musical work as Romantic musicians did, earlier music did possess standards of correctness in that musicians differentiated between performances of a particular piece from incorrect performances of the same piece, as from performances of a different piece or extemporization. The idea that performances were of some determined thing had enough force in composers’ minds that, as Goehr points out, they specified figured bass lines or prose instructions, and they recognized “mistakes,” “interruptions,” and “false starts” with chagrin. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 191-92.

   

114

against ourselves in order to gain some knowledgeable mastery” of it.277 The musical

work has the same function: it fixes musical experience into an experience, which serves

as a basis for certain inquiries and discussions but incurs the problematic autonomy of

Erlebnis. Also like Goehr’s work-concept, the sound-object-concept continues to refine

its shape within particular epistemes and musical practices. In fact Chapter 4 will propose

that individual listeners may determine the presence and characters of sound objects. But

whereas Goehr claims that individual musical works are “fictional,” sound objects are

not. They are actual sounds manifested in objective and subjective phenomena, as

Chapter 4 will hopefully make clear. The reifying function and contingent manner of

existence that are common to sound objects and musical works invite the possibility that

particular musical works are just as actual as particular sound objects. Their comparison

thereby opens avenues by which to critique them both.

The correspondence between sound objects and musical works is more apparent

in other theories, which decline Goehr’s postulation that music’s hypostatization occurs

merely as a fiction. Schaeffer’s conception of sound objects as intentional objects arising

from reduced listening bears affinity to Roman Ingarden’s estimation of the musical work

as an intentional and cultural object. When a real object gives rise to sensations, the acts

of consciousness by which perception synthesizes and interprets those sensations then

give rise to the intentional object. The intentional object comprises the aspects of the real

object to which the mind “intends” or turns its attention in perception.278 Through the

                                                            277 Savage, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism, 101.

278 Kane, "The Music of Skepticism: Intentionality, Materiality, Forms of Life," 30-31.

   

115

intentional object, which he recognizes as a Husserlian concept, Schaeffer consistently

operates at the boundary between the abstract and concrete, subjective and objective: the

Schaefferian “sound object is the meeting point of an [objective] acoustic action and a

[subjective] listening intention.”279 Similarly for Ingarden, musical works are intentional

objects in that they “owe their existence, at least in part, to human consciousness.”280 To

hear a musical work we must undertake an extreme version of reduced listening:281

“selective” attentiveness to certain musical features which we ascribe “to the work

itself,”282 and deliberate inattentiveness to “chance character[istics] either of the

performance or of the listening.”283 We induce the work as a self-contained, ideal

phenomenon from experiential contexts, even from the very sounds that bring the work to

our attention; and we recognize the work as a self-sufficient entity immune to the passage

of empirical time.284 Nonetheless, like Schaeffer, Ingarden tries to avoid wholesale

                                                            279 Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 271.

280 Amie Thomasson, "Roman Ingarden," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta (URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ingarden/>).

281 It may be of some significance that Ingarden’s meditation on musical works and Schaeffer’s Traité des Objets Musicaux were written at the same time, both published in 1966. I have come across nothing to suggest that the two theorists were aware of each other’s work, but that they simultaneously posited some version of reduced listening suggests that the idea moved in the general intellectual currents of the time.

282 Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, 19.

283 Ibid., 19-20.

284 Ibid., 56-77. “Listening to a specific performance with our attention on the work itself, we seem involuntarily to ignore the individual mode of existence of the currently occurring individual concrete sounds. We extract from the manifest concretum the composition itself, constructed from nonindividualized qualities, namely the individual B Minor Sonata [the work] itself…[A]s an object of aesthetic experience, [the work] lacks the character of an event just then occurring or of some other real object in the world. Directed toward this aesthetic experience, I seem to forget about my real surroundings and commune with something complete in itself…”

   

116

subjectivism and idealism by rooting the musical work in objective phenomena (although

as Kane revealed in Chapter 2, neither is successful). By Ingarden’s warrant each musical

work owes its existence to “a whole variety of intentional acts” by a composer, multiple

performers and a community of listeners with shared and idiosyncratic perspectives.285

Thus a musical work is an autonomous, ideal, and “intersubjective aesthetic object,” a

“purely intentional object” that is also a “cultural object” grounded in “real objects.”286

Michael Morris observes that, generally speaking, more recent ontologies of

music “assimilat[e] musical works to other, supposedly more familiar, kinds of thing.”287

By several accounts, musical works are types (Julian Dodd) or kinds (Nicholas

Wolterstorff), just as the Ford Mustang is a type of car and the sea bass is a kind of fish.

Alternately, musical works are classes (Nelson Goodman), actions (David Davies),

semantic structures (Stephen Davies), or the aforementioned intentional (Ingarden) or

fictional objects (Goehr).288 Arguably the notion sound-as-object does the same,

assimilating sounds to tactile things that are familiar from experience. To musicology

                                                            285 Ibid., 119. Also: “musical works, as specific intersubjective aesthetic objects, exist solely by intentional fiat (of creative acts, instructions within the score, or the listeners’ conjectures)…With regard to their properties [the works] are ultimately dependent upon the opinions we hold of them…In the course of debates among experts and lay listeners there gradually emerges a collectively formulated and accepted opinion regarding a work’s character, and correlatively there emerges a single, intersubjective, dominant aesthetic object, constituting the equivalent no longer of the opinions of one listener, but of the musical public in a given country at a given time. The work – we may call it a social object – becomes an element of the world surrounding that society.” ———, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, 154-55.

286 Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, 57, 119-54.

287 Michael Morris, "Doing Justice to Musical Works," in Philosophers on Music, ed. Kathleen Stock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 52. Emphasis original.

288 I am indebted to the summaries of analytic theories of the musical work, given in Dodd, Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology. And Davies, Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration.

   

117

reified works “are essential,” in the words of Philip Bohlman, “because they replace the

timeliness of music as an oral phenomenon with the timelessness of music as a textual [or

objectual] ontology,”289 in which music is “a product brought to completion and

detached, as it were, from the loom…”290 As a “product (res facta, a made thing),” music

achieves the seeming objectivity that enables analysis and discourse, and the showing of

timelessness that legitimizes its contemplation.291

Yet assimilating theories are so diverse that they arrive at no consensual ontology

for the musical work. Moreover assimilation simply assumes “certain kinds of things –

generally things with clear spatio-temporal boundaries – to be familiar and unpuzzling;

and...aims to acknowledge the existence of as few things other than these supposedly

familiar items as possible.”292 Assimilators also overlook manifest differences that would

discredit associations between music and non-musical categories. For instance, Goehr

foregrounds certain historical circumstances in order to accentuate the dependence of the

musical work-concept on the plastic artwork-concept (uncritically assuming the latter’s

ontology to be self-evident), at the expense of the differences between music and the

plastic arts. But arguably musical practice is as much unlike painting and the Ford

Mustang as it is similar to those things – and perhaps it is the differences that make such

practice specifically musical. For Morris, as a product of assimilating ontologies, the                                                             289 Philip Bohlman, "Epilogue: Music and Canons," in Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, ed. Katherine Bergeron and Philip Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 202.

290 Carpenter, "The Musical Object," 60.

291 Ibid. Emphasis added.

292 Morris, "Doing Justice to Musical Works," 53.

   

118

musical work-concept exacerbates the reifying, homogenizing tendencies of Western

language, and foregrounds music’s continuities with other aspects of life only to neglect

the discontinuities between our various activities.293 He therefore prefers a fluid approach

to the definition of musical work, which is also viable for sound objects, as Chapter 4 will

demonstrate.294

But Schaeffer intended sound objects to oppose musical works as dominant

musical-aesthetic categories. Contra Ingarden, he felt that aesthetic autonomy alienated

music from sound:

A musician may analyze a work, no longer as the communication of one

spirit to another, but for its own design, its intrinsic proportions. At its

limit in other words, at a degree of abstraction that represents a perfect

musical score, this analysis no longer depends, not in the least, on [the

music’s] execution...[Rather the] tendencies of the work-itself, which is

not only responsible for its total internal organization and rigorous

ciphering, but also for the composed sounds, could all be expressed in

abstract terms...295

                                                            293 See Carpenter, "The Musical Object," 62, 67.

294 Morris implies that it is their elusiveness of definition that saves musical works from the fixity and stagnation of mere things. “[A]ttentiveness [to music] cannot exist without something which is at least akin to puzzlement: the philosopher’s attentiveness to the nature of musical works depends on keeping alive a sense that musical works are not just any old thing...” Romantic though it may seem, the humility in this view lends it a certain appeal, as it refuses to lose sight of questioning as the foundation of analysis and art. Morris, "Doing Justice to Musical Works," 76.

295 « Une musicien habile peut analyser une oeuvre, non plus comme la communication d’un esprit à l’autre, mais pour son agencement propre, ses proportions intrinsèques. A la limite, c’est-à-dire au degré d’abstraction que représente une partition parfaite, cette analyse ne dépend aucunement de l’exécution... La tendance à l’oeuvre-en-soi, non seulement justiciable d’une totale organisation interne et d’un chiffrage

   

119

In this reading, sounds are only “signs” that may mediate the work’s abstract structure;

relative to the structure “sonic realization is so to speak a matter of indifference.”296 In

contrast, Schaeffer and his colleagues determined “not [to] lose sight of the postulate, for

us fundamental, that all music is made to be heard. Thus we connect all possible musical

language to details at the level of perception.”297 Hence the active engagement with

sound encouraged in reduced listening, “reverses a procedure which seems to have been

self-consciously carried out during the early development of the autonomous musical

work, that of placing it there, at a distance.”298 This notion echoes Patricia Carpenter’s

reflection: whereas a “piece of music is, first of all, music conceived as an object” such

that it “invites us by its clear overall structure to step back and look at its ‘objective’

aspect, i.e., its form”; active listening processes that determine the characters of sounds,

reduced listening and others, “draw me into the musical process...break down the

distance between the music and the listening subject, to obliterate the ‘otherness’ of the

musical object” such that the listener is no longer a mere “spectator” but a participant in

                                                                                                                                                                                 rigoureuz, mais dont les composants sonores eux-memes, totalement connus, peuvent tous s’exprimer en terms abstraits... » Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 132-33.

296 « Il ne s’agit pas de musique désincarnée mais de certaines forms si évoluées de la musique, à partir d’objets si parfaitement connus, ou du moins si exclusivement utilisés comme signes, que leur réalisation sonore est pour ainsi dire indifférente, secondaire du moins. » Ibid., 132.

297« [D]ans cette recherche d’ailleurs, nous ne perdrons pas de vue ce postulat, pour nous fondamental, que toute musique est faite pour être entendue. Nous rattachons ainsi tout langage musical possible à des valeur élaborées au niveau de la perception. » Ibid., 133. Emphasis original.

298 Carpenter, "The Musical Object," 57-58. Emphasis original.

   

120

the music’s creation.299 The point is that the first sound object emerged in direct reaction

to the musical work’s idealism.

In some respects, sound objects do adopt a critical position against the musical

work. Unlike the work, the sound object constitutes sound, necessarily and by definition;

thus as an aesthetic category, the sound object accounts for the fact that today’s

composers compose with sound, manipulate sound “directly.” The musical work, on the

other hand, is a formal schema independent of sound. Aesthetics based in sound objects

confront work-based aesthetics from a “position of resistance” by emphasizing sound and

reflective listening as sensuous experiences, instead of underscoring abstract structure.300

Yet sound objects affirm “objecthood and permanence” as aesthetic priorities, and

entirely evade neither the idealism nor the autonomy, contingency, reification and

assimilation that typify musical works. Thus sound objects “challenge the work concept

from the outside,” by posing “an external and explicit” alternative – and, as descendants

of the work that share a family resemblance, challenge it “from the inside...by changing

conditions that internally compel a change in our understanding.”301

Musical works and sound objects issue from a common impulse: the desire to

situate music outside and before us so that we may gather around it like a sculpture on a

pedestal, so that we may exchange reflections on the music and thus prolong its efficacy.

The fact that twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers produced the most

                                                            299 Ibid. Emphasis added.

300 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 160.

301 Ibid., 85.

   

121

significant ontologies of the musical work underscores the tenacity of this nineteenth-

century category. The rise of the sound object has the same effect: despite its surface

antagonism toward its forebears, the sound object inherits aspects of the musical work’s

ontology and fulfills its reifying function, forming a locus for discourse. The term sound

object affirms the positivistic mindset (evidencing a scientistic episteme, as we’ll see in

Chapter 7) that underlies the concept of the musical work: the assumptions that acquiring

knowledge requires the analysis of objects come to presence “there,” before us, and that

knowledge consists of communicable explanations.

   

122

Chapter 4.

Sound Object Analysis

Even though the term sound object dissembles music’s active, temporal qualities,

and conceals its own idealist underpinnings, the term is useful as an analytical category.

What I call sound object analysis is in fact a worthy alternative to more traditional

analytical modes derived from quasi-objective structures of pitch or rhythm. In sound

object analysis, the role of the subjective listening experience is vital. Individual listeners

decide which sounds and aesthetic categories are relevant to the music at hand, instead of

allowing predetermined systems (such as tonality or serialism) or categories (pitch, key,

etc.) to decide those factors. Sound object analysis may therefore be especially pertinent

to experimental, improvised, and popular genres.

I do not mean to suggest that sound object analysis should replace traditional

methods, or that sound object analysis even is a method in the exhaustive sense of say,

the pitch-class analyses used to describe atonal and dodecaphonic music (as in, for

example, the work of Allan Forte and George Searle). What I’ve named sound object

analysis is really just another perspective from which we might consider music and

discuss it. I’ve employed the word analysis because I believe that this is just what

analysis is, consideration and discussion, not because I harbor any illusions that an

approach based in the subjective and nonsystematic shifting of the listening perspective

ought to be formalized. That said, the subjective emphasis of sound object analysis has

precedents in other recent theories of musical analysis, which I describe below, and

   

123

postmodern philosophical views. However, in its alignment with such theories, sound

object analysis bares its underlying difficulties, including implications (explored in

Chapter 5) of an alarmingly negative relationship between music and truth.

Schaefferian Sound Objects and Subjectivity

The “analysis” of music may constitute a variety of activities (Schenkerian

reductions, pitch-class enumerations, preparing a performance...) that in my opinion boil

down to thinking about music in a way that can be communicated to and discussed with

others. This typically involves an agreed-upon set of norms and categories according to

which the music is described. At some point it certainly involves, in my opinion, listening

in one form or another – whether one listens by performing, by sitting in front of a

loudspeaker, attending a concert, imagining, or in some other way. How might the

singular listening techniques entailed by sound objects contribute to analytical activities?

Typically, in music and quotidian life, we listen for what sounds signify, or assess

the ways in which they might contribute to non-referential but meaningful structures. But

perceiving sound objects requires additional, idiosyncratic listening techniques, such as

the attention to music’s “raw element” advocated by Schaeffer.302 I propose that as the

sound object slowly permeates analytical discourse, it not only broadens its definition to

involve different kinds of listening, but also questions the unspoken, foundational

assumptions of that discourse. Because a sound object’s characteristics depend on

individual acts of listening, analysis via sound objects challenges the presumed stability

                                                            302 Schaeffer, Solfège De L'objet Sonore, 65.

   

124

of every signifying category, and the basic presupposition that it is possible to draw

conclusions about what a sound is. In fact the assumption of fixed analytical categories

may be a form of what Judith Butler calls “ethical violence,” which sound object analysis

avoids by recognizing the critical role of listening subjects.303

The following sections review reducible, transcontextual, structural, and gestural

sound objects, and the listening attitudes that they imply. For examples of these terms “in

action,” I refer the reader to Chapter 1, where I applied these terms to music by

Schaeffer, Roads, Trevor Wishart, Eat Static, and others. A latter section of the current

chapter applies sound object analysis to additional examples.

Schaeffer observed that since the typical aim of listening is to locate referential

meaning in sound, meaning diverts our attention from the intrinsic features of a sound as

soon as we detect its potential for meaning. In contrast, a sound object results from what

Schaeffer named reduced listening: a listening practice that deliberately ignores sound’s

potential to refer beyond itself.304 Reduced listening bars from perception any indications

of sources, semantic functions, or significations that the sound in question may imply.

Thus reduced listening cannot lead to such surmises as, “This sound is an acoustic sign

                                                            303 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 42.

304 Roman Jakobson named this kind of signifying “extroversive semiosis,” in which a complex of signs refers to something other than the complex itself, in contrast to “introversive semiosis” in which the group of signs forms a complex structure in which elements relate to one another. In introversive semiosis, the constituents of the structure relate to each other and the structure itself (the elements “signify” the structure); in extroversive semiosis they relate to (signify) other things. Schaeffer aimed to discourage extroversive semiosis in his postulation of reduced listening, but probably not introversive semiosis, since he encouraged listeners to compare sounds to one another in his notion of sonic typo-morphology. A clear exegesis of Jakobson’s concepts is in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 111-12.

   

125

for the word ‘dog,’” or “This is the sound of a violin.” Instead reduced listening aims at a

notion of sounds’ “intrinsic” characteristics, identifying in sounds themselves the features

that make them musical.305 For Schaeffer, composition involved “gather[ing] concrete

sound material, wherever it came from, and extract[ing] from it the sonorous musical

values which it potentially contained.”306 Since sound objects could be sounds of any

kind, including those commonly called noises, Schaeffer hoped that sound object analysis

would encourage listeners and composers to liberalize their understanding of what

constitutes so-called musical sound. Sound object analysis is my term for what Schaeffer

called the “typologie et morphologie [typology and morphology]” of sound objects,

meaning their identification and description.307 He believed that analysis of sound objects

could lead to new ideas for composition and sound synthesis, perhaps even to new

instruments inspired by the striking characteristics of sound itself.308

Analysis as the morphological description of sound objects offers several

advantages. Rolf Inge Godøy attributes a certain “universality” to sound object analysis:

since a sound object may be perceived in response to any kind of sonic stimulus, analysis

based on sound objects may apply to any kind of sonic art, including but emphatically not

                                                            305 Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 265.

306 Ibid., 23. Translation by John Dack, quoted in Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 38.

307 Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 365.

308 After “classifying objects from various sources without any reference to their instrumental sources,” Schaeffer asks, “Is it possible to do the contrary, that is deliberately manufacture objects which correspond to our typological patterns, thereby proving that we are not committed to the construction of conventional instruments?” ———, Solfège De L'objet Sonore, 69-71.

   

126

limited to music of the Western classical tradition.309 Moreover, sound objects begin with

sound, not notation. Thus sound object analysis centers discourse on sonic details that

score-based analysis consigns to the margins, and is appropriate to experimental,

electronic, and improvised genres that are independent of Western music notation.

Furthermore, sound object analysis begins with sound, not abstract precompositional

systems that few listeners can even detect, such as dodecaphonic and large-scale tonal

forms. For Schaeffer, sound objects are unitary fragments of “medium duration,” neither

too long nor too short for the listener to memorize.310 In his thinking, sound object

analysis therefore proceeds in the same way as he understood perception itself to occur,

in bite-sized, discontinuous “chunks” that the mind synthesizes into a coherent whole.311

In such manageable chunks, listeners may detect and appreciate characteristics

imperceptible in shorter fragments and swallowed up by the abstract structures our brains

use to order and store longer passages of sonic time.312 Based in sound and deliberately

self-reflexive listening, sound object analysis invites the apprehension of sonic

morphologies that neither acoustic measurement nor musical notation can capture.313 In

fact the listening subject plays the defining role in sound object analysis. This will prove

to be the source of its power.

                                                            309 Godøy, "Music Theory by Sonic Objects," 73.

310 Chion, Guide Des Objets Sonores, 35.

311 In his theory of perception, Schaeffer draws on his own psychoacoustic experiments and the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. See Schaeffer’s Traité as well as Godøy, "Music Theory by Sonic Objects," 71, 73.

312 Ibid., 70.

313 See Schaeffer, Solfège De L'objet Sonore, 27, 65.

   

127

Schaeffer recognized reduced listening as only one of many listening techniques,

and noted that we can and do slip between different listening modes within the course of

a single experience.314 He sought to “facilitate” a “swirl” of multifarious listening

modes.315 Discovering new such modes was among the aims of his research.316 Thus,

Schaeffer believed, one listener may hear and interpret a sound in multiple, even

contradictory ways. For instance, according to Schaeffer we may hear a sound object as

objective and subjective: as a sound come from without, potentially manipulated so as to

trigger perceptions, yet wholly contingent on a certain type of perception.

I would therefore venture to make the following surmises concerning sound

objects. A sound object may be cognized as, simultaneously, an element of a structure

and a structure composed of elements. It is thus abstract and concrete, internally static

and unstable. A sound object is also an instinctive and personal as well as culturally-

conditioned perception.317 We could say, then, that a sound object has both “objective”

and “subjective” aspects in the sense that it is determined by factors both external and

internal to the listening subjectivity. My point is that to deal in sound objects is to

acknowledge that it is impossible to describe sound, or music, as any one thing – hence

                                                            314 << Rien ne peut empêcher un auditeur de la faire vaciller, passant inconsciemment d’un système à un autre, ou encore d’un écoute réduite à une écoute que ne l’est pas. On peut même s’en faciliter. >> (“Nothing can impede a listener from vacillating, passing unconsciously from one system [of listening] to another, or from reduced listening to a [mode of] listening that is not [reduced]. We may rather facilitate this [vacillation].”) ———, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 343. Emphasis original.

315 Ibid.

316 Chion, Guide Des Objets Sonores, 30.

317 See Ibid. for clarification of these dialectical pairs.

   

128

no act of listening exemplifies a “proper” or “correct” listening technique. Even in

musical analysis, our often subconscious alternation between listening modes precludes

the coherent narration of musical experience.

Furthermore, Demers proposes that the multifarious and fluid listening involved

in sound object analysis characterizes how many listeners hear electronic music

generally, within and outside analytical endeavors. She describes “a growing sense that

listening to electronic music constitutes an act that is fundamentally different from how

listeners have been used to hearing Western art music for the previous five centuries.”318

Specifically, many Western genres such as symphonies and operas call for continuous,

attentive listening: attempts to listen for recurring melodies, for how themes change

throughout a piece, and so on. But “[e]xperimental electronic music encourages a type of

listening that...heeds intermittent moments of a work without searching for a trajectory

that unites such moments.”319 Each listener notes the music’s various aesthetic qualities –

its “transient delights” and/or “larger-scale patterns” – if and as she desires.320 This kind

of listening is not new, nor is it exclusive to electronic music. As Demers points out,

“[a]esthetic listening resembles the way many listeners hear popular and some non-

Western musics.”321 It is the kind of listening that we do all the time: in the car, in shops

and restaurants, watching movies accompanied by soundtracks, or during classical

                                                            318 Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, 15.

319 Ibid., 151.

320 Ibid., 151-52.

321 Ibid., 16.

   

129

concerts. “In listening aesthetically...we may choose to attend to [musical] development,

or else we may pay only intermittent attention to sound [‘musical’ and ‘nonmusical’

alike] while also attending to other sensory phenomena.”322 The character and focus of

our attention is fluid, constantly shifting. As such, aesthetic listening, “[t]he experience

that electronic music affords[,] reflects more accurately the ways in which humans

actually do hear the world and is less dogmatic,” relative to traditional Western art music,

“about how we should hear it.”323

Sound object analysis is as a kind of aesthetic listening that includes the

fragmentary attention Demers describes, plus an attempt to describe whatever one

chooses to attend to using sound-object terminology – although, in aesthetic listening

generally, a listener could just as conceivably apply different terminology, or none at all,

to the aesthetic qualities of which she takes note. Like aesthetic listening, sound object

analysis takes after Schaefferian reduced listening in the sense that all these techniques

perform a kind of bracketing: isolating a sonic phenomenon by metaphorically “placing a

frame around it,” so that we may scrutinize it closely. However, attending to what makes

a sound aesthetically interesting – its timbre, duration, any metaphorical descriptions we

might apply – “does not [necessarily] preclude hearing the source causes or external

associations of a sound, which Schaeffer advocated as reduced listening.”324 Although

sound object analysis may involve hearing in the strictly reduced sense proposed by

                                                            322 Ibid.

323 Ibid. Emphasis original.

324 Ibid., 152-53.

   

130

Schaeffer, as my hearing of Alvin Lucier’s work suggests below, relating different types

of sound object to one another also includes relating sounds to phenomena beyond

themselves (to listeners, for example, or to other sounds) and to non-sonic information

(the concepts of transcontextuality, reduction, gesture, etc.). Sound object analysis also

involves relating different modes of listening to one another: by comparing the sound

objects that we detect in various listening modes, we compare the modes themselves.

Overall, as a form of aesthetic listening, sound object analysis moves beyond Schaeffer’s

theories of listening while acknowledging a debt to them.

Listening to Post-Schaefferian Sound Objects

Listening beyond Schaeffer, we might rethink the analysis of sound objects along

the lines of Chris Cutler’s work on the illegal use of samples, as attention paid to a

“found (or stolen) object,” a sound copied from one context and pasted verbatim into

another.325 I call this phenomenon a transcontextual sound object, following Denis

Smalley. Smalley defines a sound’s transcontextuality as the suggestion of multiple

interpretations based on the perceived difference between a sound’s initial context, and

any subsequent contexts within which it is presented to an analytical listener.326

Transcontextuality is contingent on recognition of the sound in question from its original

context. Only with such knowledge can one appreciate the sound’s contextual

                                                            325 Cutler, "Plunderphonics," 97.

326 See Smalley, "Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes.", and for a valuable clarification of Smalley, see Kankaanpää, "Displaced Time: Transcontextual References to Time in Kaija Saariaho's Stilleben," 88.

   

131

transplantation. In fact, says Cutler, “as a pirated cultural artifact...a plundered

sound...holds out an invitation to be used because of its cause and because of all the

associations and cultural apparatus that surround it.”327 The transcontextual sound object

thus depends on a highly referential mode of listening diametrically opposed to

Schaefferian reduced listening. Where reduced listening invites singular focus on a

sound’s characteristics independent of every circumstance – drawing attention to what I

call reducible sound objects – transcontextuality presents an opportunity to knit new

experiences out of previous encounters, past and present circumstances.328

Although the listening mode that originates reducible sound objects cannot

constitute transcontextual objects, Schaeffer’s idea persists that sound objects constitute

fragments relative to a larger structure. Both reducible and transcontextual objects

therefore qualify as structural sound objects. The last is a significant concept to theorists

and composers of microsound such as Curtis Roads, who uses the term sound object to

distinguish sounds of a few seconds’ duration from micro-sounds too short for any but a

computer to process, and macro-structures too long for listeners to conceive as single

sounds.329 Perhaps tellingly, musical analysis in terms of structural sound objects would

share a great deal with traditional methods: melodic figures, notes, chords, and tone rows

constitute structural sound objects as much as Roads’ electronic bleeps do. Hence, if we

                                                            327 Cutler, "Plunderphonics," 97. Emphasis original.

328 It’s tempting to assign separate terms to each distinctive mode of listening that every kind of sound object elicits. “Transcontextual listening, structural listening...” But that seems to me a kind of overkill that would add little to my analysis at this point.

329 Roads, Microsound, 3, 17.

   

132

deal only in structural sound objects and ignore the other types, sound object analysis in

fact has little to offer theorists other than alternate terms for the structures in question.

But is this really so little, considering the capacity of terms to influence our attitudes

(mentioned in my Introduction)? This of course is for the listening analyst herself to

decide.

Another kind of structural sound object is the gestural-sonorous object coined by

Godøy. Recall (from Chapter 1) Godøy’s belief that the mind forms “memory images” of

sounds and their implicit gestures, retains and reapproaches these images as though they

were “solid.”330 Hence Godøy’s gestural sound object: a “holistic,” unified experience of

sound and gesture.331 As an analytical category, the gestural sound object provides a way

to isolate the intrinsic gestural features of a sound, just as a musical note isolates its pitch

and duration, and to consider how movement shapes a musical experience. Thus, like the

transcontextual sound object, gestural sound objects are defined by their extra-sonic and

perhaps quite personal connotations. Placing gestural sound objects alongside other kinds

of sound object, we can then relate the gestural side of musical experience to its other

facets. Let us investigate how sound object analysis operates, by examining some

examples. To assess rather than promote sound object analysis, I have chosen works that

will pose challenges to sound object analysis as well as to traditional methods.

                                                            330 Godøy, "Images of Sonic Objects," 54.

331 Ibid.: 58.

   

133

Sound Object Analysis Example 1: I Am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier

Composed in 1969 for a performer and sound recording equipment, Alvin

Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room (ISR) requires the performer to recite and record a short

text. The performer plays back and records his recording, and repeats this process

indefinitely, with the result that the same sounds pile on top of themselves several times

over. Multiple instances of the same frequencies activate simultaneously, reinforcing one

another’s stimulation of the air in the performance space. By the end of the piece, all we

can hear is the space itself ringing at the frequencies of the performer’s voice. Thus

linguistic articulations metamorphose into unbroken sound.

Trevor Wishart interprets Lucier’s work as the evolution of a mysterious sound

object:

At the beginning of the piece we would unreservedly state that the sound-

object is the [sound of the] voice. At the end of the piece the sound-object

is clearly a more “abstract” entity whose characteristics derive from the

room acoustic. Somewhere in between these extremes our perception

passes over from one interpretation to the other.332

Wishart seems to read the vocal utterance as a structural sound object. From a listening

point of view, recording the utterance changes it from a human encounter to a machine

encounter, or to a human encounter mediated by time, memory, and the recording device.

In other words, the recorded-replayed utterance is transcontextual. As a recognizably

repeated sound with a clear beginning and end, the self-contained utterance has the

                                                            332 Trevor Wishart, On Sonic Art (New York: Routledge, 1996), 158.

   

134

marked boundaries associated with sound objects, yet forms a component of a larger

structure. As it stacks upon itself, the monophonic utterance becomes polyphonic and

eventually loses its vocal quality, taking on the anonymity of a reducible sound object.

The layered recordings eliminate the possibility of hearing words in the sound, and invite

us to forget the sound’s origin in a human voice. Soon we can no longer tell when new

iterations of the utterance begin, so that we cannot follow the structure of the piece. In the

end we can infer nothing from what we hear except the sound itself and its intrinsic

features. Overall in ISR, a structural, transcontextual sound object changes into a

reducible sound object when successive layering renders it unrecognizable, its source

indistinguishable from the surrounding space.

For my own part, I’m tempted to hear ISR as a provocative and experimental use

of technology (tape recorders) to represent the process of reduced listening – to put the

bracketing process on display, so to speak. In fact, Frances Dyson suggests that without

machines like the phonographic disc recorder and the tape recorder, Schaeffer couldn’t

have conceived “reduced listening.”333 These technologies enabled him to isolate sounds

from the pianos, trains, and horses that created them, generating the acousmatic situation

that led him to the concept of reduced listening. Dyson argues that Schaefferian and post-

Schaefferian discourses, by emphasizing the effortful, subjective acts of hearing that

generate sound objects, risk overlooking the role of machines in the same effort.334

                                                            333 Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 66.

334 In Dyson’s view, Schaefferian and post-Schaefferian discourses are driven by “a desire to elide the technological apparatus on the one hand, and a romantic, essentializing view of sound on the other.” Ibid., 6.

   

135

Perhaps we could hear Lucier’s ISR – of which the original text spoken by Lucier’s voice

mentions explicitly that he is “recording” – as a performative act of reduced listening

that, unlike the usual discourses (the present inquiry included) foregrounds its

technological as well as its subjective aspects.335

In a complementary gesture, by identifying particular types of sound object amid

Lucier’s sonic textures, sound object analysis accounts for his deliberate attempts to

engage certain receptive modes – his use of layered recordings to propose “reduced”

hearing of speech, for example. Listening for different kinds of sound object, we shift

between listening modes: we experiment with diverse standpoints from which we may

encounter and describe sonic experiences. Thus, as a quasi-gestural metamorphosis of our

attention (which could conceivably involve actual gesture), sound object analysis may

enable listeners themselves to experience or enact the gradual transformation that

utterance undergoes in ISR. And, as I demonstrate above, because sound objects

conceptualize sounds’ provocation of memory or gesture, the various types of sound

object may collectively afford a succinct vocabulary that enables listeners to describe and

hence to share their transformational experience of Lucier’s work.

Incidentally, there is no evidence that any of the interpretations I’ve offered so far

coincide with Lucier’s intentions regarding ISR. As far as I know, there is no evidence to

                                                            335 In its entirety, Lucier’s text reads as follows. “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.”

   

136

suggest that he was interested in Schaeffer’s theories.336 Nonetheless, my readings are

useful because they enable ISR to serve as commentary on sound object analysis and

reduced listening.

Moreover, sound object analysis is appropriate to ISR because, in one sense,

Lucier’s endeavor is about entities in space. A performer’s vocalizing body, his recording

equipment, and their collaborative sounds work upon one another and the surrounding

room, causing the space itself to resonate. Space, sounds, and bodies manifest one

another, evidently and distinctly. Space brings sound to the forefront of attention and vice

versa; both mediate the performing body as it is presented to consciousness.337 In the

same way, in everyday living, spaces articulate objects, objects dictate the contours of

spaces; both interact with and situate our bodies, making us apparent to others. Lucier

accentuates this point with the text for which ISR is named: “I am sitting in a room...”

Sitting in a room, as opposed to speaking or thinking, is one of the few activities that

inanimate objects do as well as humans do. In this sense, Lucier underscores the kind of

presence that humans have in common with other tangible objects. And relating Lucier’s

sounds to tangible objects by thinking them as sound objects may help to clarify the

relations that he subtly brings to the forefront.

                                                            336 Cat Hope does identify certain parallels between Schaeffer’s thinking and Lucier’s. Cat Hope, "Infrasonic Music," Leonardo Music Journal 19 (2009): 58.

337 Brandon LaBelle puts it nicely. In I am Sitting in a Room: “sound and source diffuse into a larger conversational interaction in which the voice makes apparent the surrounding architecture through its disembodied reproduction.” The converse also applies: architecture makes sound and performing body apparent. Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (London: Continuum, 2006), 126.

   

137

At first glance it might seem that the categories of sound object analysis cannot

account for the personal identity of the performer in ISR.338 Brandon LaBelle rightly

understands the performer’s vocal qualities, personality, and various reputations to be

crucial determinants of the piece. So are the text chosen for recitation, the singularities of

the equipment, and the known history and acoustic qualities of the room. On such

grounds, LaBelle disputes Wishart’s reading of ISR, claiming that the word “object”

cannot encapsulate the “psychological and subjective” aspects central to Lucier’s

conception.339 But without compromising the performer’s individuality, it is plausible to

regard her personality, vocal quality, choice of equipment and venue, etc. as contexts in

which she produces sounds and listeners hear them. Thus, LaBelle writes, with every

recording-repetition of its utterance, the performing voice

wears a new face each time...through a kind of recontextualization – from

body to room, from single individual to hybrid multiple, it [the voice] is

thrown beyond and against architecture, and in the process, past the

                                                            338 ISR is not confined to the extant recordings by Lucier of the text he composed for the purpose in 1969. Any performer may perform ISR in any space, using texts and recording media of his or her choice. See for instance the performance of ISR by the artist Residuum, who programmed a computer to speak and record Lucier’s text. Available at http://www.archive.org/details/residuum-i_am_sitting_in_a_room_mp3 (Accessed 10 November, 2010). See also the version by Nick Canzona, who took a video (originally posted to You-Tube) of a performer reciting Lucier’s text, and re-encoded the video a thousand times, defacing the original imagery and sound. Available at http://www.youtube.com/user/canzona#p/a/u/0/icruGcSsPp0 (Accessed 10 November, 2010).

339 Although I do not endorse several particulars of LaBelle’s analysis, his reading of a particular performance of ISR, recorded by Lucier himself in 1969, is interesting and thoughtful. See LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, 126-30.

   

138

psychic ordering of language (interior [to the performer]) and into

compositional possibility (exterior [to the performer]).340

Despite LaBelle’s objection to sound objects, the “recontextualization” he hears in ISR is

fully compatible with the transcontextual sound objects in my and Wishart’s analyses.

Listeners’ personal choices and qualities determine the characteristics of these sound

objects’ fluid relations to various contexts, which include performers’ and composers’

personal choices and qualities.

That said, as we saw in Chapter 2, the term sound object may indeed mask the

temporal ephemerality of sounds and their origin in movement and/or effort. The word

object obfuscates these circumstances by implying that sounds possess thing-like fixity,

self-sufficiency, and, as LaBelle observes, “objectivity.” Thus the word object lends a

givenness to sounds that may obfuscate the listener’s partial responsibility for her

experience, and obscure the foundation of every sound object in subjectivity. But this is

precisely why Wishart emphasizes “perception,” not only sound, as the changing element

in ISR. Perception, the perceiver’s personal qualities, her decisions, and her

circumstances are all qualifying factors of sound objects. To be sure, no analyst, artist, or

terminology can determine how we listen: we respond to their suggestions if and as we

choose. Which means, since the characteristics of sound objects are contingent on how

we hear them, that no sound object needs necessarily possess any particular feature.

This recalls an earlier point: sound object analysis demonstrates that we can never

definitively categorize sound, music, or sound art, as any particular thing. Nor can we

                                                            340 Ibid., 130. Emphasis added.

   

139

definitively say what listening or analysis ought to be. I do not mean that any sonic

experience is ineffable in a transcendent sense. Rather, sound object analysis suggests the

opposite. Sonic experience eludes determinateness because it relies on subjective factors:

interpretations, memories, cultural and epistemological predispositions of individual

listeners. (For instance, my hearing of ISR, as a technological rendering of a theoretical

idea, is influenced as much by my interest in Schaeffer and the fact that I listened as part

of my preparation for this chapter, as by any of Lucier’s processes.) Analysis is

correspondingly elusive because the variety of possible listening modes may be close to

infinite.

Sound Object Analysis Example 2: Barents by Mem1

Thus sound object analyses are specific and personal to the performing analyst.

Sound object analysts must accept that their conclusions are contingent on their

personalities, circumstances, and conscious choices, and are therefore likely to be fluid, if

not entirely temporary. Sound object analyses expressed in writing can and should reflect

the inherent self-reflexivity of the analyst as she adopts various perspectives and the

personal, performative qualities of analytical activity. As I see it, sound object analyses

should not eschew the first-person active voice since, as listeners, this is how we hear,

how we analyze: listening, analysis, and writing are first-person activities. In effect, as

I’ve argued elsewhere, music-analytical writing is an act of musical performance.341 I

                                                            341 Mandy-Suzanne Wong, "The Glammogr and the Present Inquiry," Newsletter of the UCLA Center for Research on Women: Special Edition - Writing and Music (2010).

   

140

arrange conceptions of sound in my thinking and my words just as Matmos’ Drew Daniel

does in his digital compositions, just as Mem1 does in its improvised recordings. In such

manner, I will discuss Mem1’s electronic piece Barents (2005) via sound object analysis.

Formed in 2003, the Los-Angeles-based duo Mem1 creates improvised music

using live cello, played by Laura Cetilia, and custom electronics, designed and operated

in real time by her husband Mark Cetilia. Mem1’s music is improvised, minimal, often

quiet and very slow, and does not shy away from extended durations, repetition,

distortion, or noise. It is also cybernetic. Laura connects her cello to amplifiers and

computers which, controlled by her feet and toes, record, replay, and distort the sounds of

the cello as she plays. In performance, Laura’s body, her cello, the wires, input pads, and

computers form part of a single entity, another part of which is Mark, his laptops, and

homemade equipment. As a unit, Mem1 takes Laura’s improvisations – usually single or

widely dispersed sounds, often made with extended cello techniques – and gradually

mutates them beyond recognition. In many Mem1 pieces, what we hear is something like

a life: a birth and gradual growth that sometimes encounters obstacles as it matures and

eventually dies.

A traditional musicological analysis would reasonably begin with this kind of

background information on Mem1, and the circumstances in which Barents came about.

Sound object analysis does not require this information because listening does not

necessarily require it. This is not to say that “background” details are always irrelevant.

Quite the contrary: “background” is vital to hearing in certain ways, for example from the

traditional musicological standpoint. Even in sound object analysis, knowledge of the

   

141

work’s history may help listeners to detect and describe transcontextuality where it is

present. But transcontextuality is not decisive for a sound object analysis to be viable.

Listeners may describe what they hear in terms of reducible, structural, or gestural sound

objects, the discernment of which requires no “background knowledge” about the

inception of the music in question.

Moreover, a sound object analysis need not necessarily account for the form of

the piece in question, only for its sounds. Therefore there is no need for sound object

analysis to work through the piece from beginning to end, or even to assume that any

individual sound is necessarily part of a larger sonic complex. As in Demers’ aesthetic

listening, a listener’s attention may wax and wane during the course of the piece. Even

under such circumstances, listeners can describe what sound objects they did attend to

and produce a viable analysis. It therefore follows that the focus of a sound object

analysis may be an excerpt, or even a single sound.

For instance, a thirty-second excerpt from the final minute of Barents (8:00-8:30)

catches my attention. I consider, attempt morphological description: a noise of

indeterminate origin. A reducible sound object, then? I turn my attention to its “shape”:

pitch and articulation are indeterminate. But, on the other hand, perhaps it reminds me of

an engine; I imagine large, rusting turbines cycling in the dark. Is this a field recording,

where the transcontextual nature of the sound object comes to the fore? I imagine

cranking a handle to keep the engine going. I imagine the movement of my arm, around

and around, the resistance of mechanical parts almost too big for me to budge, the effort.

Gestural-sonorous objects, sound-producing gestures, emotive gestures. Though I myself

   

142

enjoy the sound, I imagine others’ discomfort in the face of this inert, ambiguous noise. I

imagine shoulders tensing, emotive-gestural objects. I listen still more closely.

This half-minute is like a jungle swarming with sonic life. Seemingly beneath the

so-called turbine, there is a rhythmic chugging that soon fades. Because I have seen

Mem1 perform, though I have not seen this particular piece, I speculate that the

chugging, wheezing, beating, is in fact a cello looped and sampled in real time by the

cellist herself. But I cannot be sure, considering the other inhabitants of the jungle. Thus:

a transcontextual sound reduced to uncontextual by its context amid the turbines.

Conjecture, all of it. Only three things do I know for certain: One is that within this active

wall of sound, I may isolate several structural sound objects and attempt to describe their

individual features. Another is that I may variously describe the whole excerpt as a

multiplicity of sound objects dispersed through a complex structure, or as a single sound

object of mottled texture. Mem1 brings out the fluidity of the border between object and

structure, as between categories of object.342

In my analysis, Mem1 foregrounds what Schaeffer believed to be an integral

aspect of sound-object perception, and indeed of all perceptive acts: the object-structure

relationship. Each sound object is at once an element of a structure and is itself a

structure composed of elements. As Chion puts it:

Every object of perception is at the same time an object in so far as it is

perceived as a unit locatable in a context, and a structure in so far as it is

itself composed of several objects...an object-structure chain, going down

                                                            342 See Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 636-38.

   

143

to the infinitely small when the object is analyzed as a structure of

constituent objects which can themselves be analyzed and so on, and

ascending to the infinitely great when we place the object in the structure

which contains it, and which can in turn be considered as an object in a

context, etc.343

This interpenetration of object and structure means that sound object analysis and

formal or structural analysis do not oppose one another, but constitute different

perspectives between which an analyst may divide her attention at will. Even as I hear

this half-minute of Barents as an individual entity, having heard the piece in its entirety, I

can also situate 8:00-8:30 as the “climax” of the work. Barents begins softly with a

single, thin cello sound that gradually grows louder as repetitions of itself are

superimposed upon it alongside electronic sounds.

In fact, the only other certainty afforded by sound object analysis of this passage

is that, in its complexity rife with repetition and stasis, the sonic experience encourages

me to adopt different listening modes in succession, and gives me time to switch between

them. It is as though this sonic excerpt is a sculpture that I circumnavigate at my own

pace, in order to experience its facets from various perspectives. (This is a loaded

metaphor, as my analysis of Bill Fontana’s work in Chapter 2 evidences, and I invoke it

here with all its materialistic implications.) In that sense, the word object is wholly

appropriate: sound object imparts a thing-like presence to sound, an intransigence that

invites us to contemplate sounds at length, as we may plastic artworks or ideas. Since

                                                            343 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 58.

   

144

these objects are also evolving structures, temporality is basic to their mode of being.

Nevertheless, evolution manifests here as an evolving entity (object) that maintains a

stable identity.

What it is that I hear in 8:00-8:30 of Barents is best described as contingent: it can

always be otherwise than what it’s been supposed to be. It would therefore be entirely

accurate to say that the so-called “certainties” to which sound object analysis brings us

amount to no certainty at all. In one sense, this is not a problem. All interpretations of any

aesthetic phenomena are contingent; that is part of what makes aesthetic practices

interesting, and capable of critical potential. However, as I’ll discuss in the next chapter,

the fluidity of categories in sound object analysis can undermine the discursive potential

of analysis.

   

145

Chapter 5.

Subjectivity, Discourse, and Truth in Sound Object Analysis

Sound object analyses are entirely contingent on what individual listeners choose

to hear or cannot help hearing under our particular circumstances. Individual listening

subjectivities are thus the defining factors in sound object analysis. So what kind of

activity is sound object analysis? This chapter critiques the reliance on subjectivity that

drives sound object analysis, assessing its advantages and disadvantages for music-

analytical discourse.

Flexibility

As the identification and description of functional elements within a sonic

structure, traditional score- or program-based analysis proposes a narrative of a musical

work: a tracing of its semantic structure relative to a pre-established musical system plus,

in some cases, a translation of the “musical semantics” into linguistic communiqués on

emotional, cultural, or socio-historical circumstances. Semanticized or not, the formal

narrative constructed by musical analysis forms a coherent, autonomous whole. The

narrative is an objective presence that brooks no interruption, because interruptions in the

guise of contradictions compromise the narrative’s objectivity by undermining its claim

to truth. This implicit claim is strengthened by basing such narratives on an established

system that fixes the terms in which all narratives proceed. In equal-tempered systems,

for example, G# is always G#, even when its setting varies. Western analysis, which in

   

146

many cases relies on the fixed pitch classes of equal temperament, depends on

categorizing pitches, volumes, attacks, rates and sequences of change, using inflexible

terms determined prior to any hearing. Although no musicologist would claim that his or

hers is the only possible way in which to hear a piece, the predetermination of such

categories as pitch classes, dynamic and tempo markings, prior to any analysis, limits the

extent to which analyses can vary.

Martin Scherzinger critiques this kind of analysis as a form of “immanentism,”

where “everything that is analytically relevant persists within [is immanent to] the system

under investigation.”344 The system, for example the western tonal system, names the

parameters of analysis: pitch, duration, structure, etc.. And the system cannot change

without becoming another system with its own set of fixed parameters (e.g. the tonal

system cedes to the atonal and dodecaphonic systems). To Scherzinger, immanentist

analysis “entails a notion of arrest, of limiting an interpretation.”345

But as I understand it, sound object analysis is not a form of immanentism

because, in sound object analysis, the parameters of the “system” within which analysis

occurs are subjective, fluid, and, in principle, infinite. Hence they do not really comprise

a system (in Scherzinger’s sense) at all. Schaeffer’s typomorphology of sound objects

could be said to constitute a system, as it enumerates the types of sound that one could

hear (iterative, sustained, etc.), prior to any actual listening. But as I mentioned above,

                                                            344 Martin Scherzinger, "The Return of the Aesthetic: Musical Formalism and Its Place in Political Critique," in Beyond Structural Listening: Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew dell'Antonio (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 272.

345 Ibid.

   

147

my version of sound object analysis moves beyond Schaefferian categories and,

following Demers’ notion of aesthetic listening, relies on the fluidity of attention which,

not incidentally, Schaeffer himself also advocated. In sound object analysis, the listening

act can explore all possible descriptive categories, allowing for contradictory

categorizations. For instance, although reduced and transcontextual listening require

opposing standpoints, description of the final seconds of Lucier’s ISR as at once a

transcontextual and/or a reducible sound object is perfectly valid. Sound object analysis

is contingent on the subjective, creative, listening agent, requiring her to interrupt and

contradict every attempt at coherent narration, even her own, by moving at will or

unconsciously between contrasting listening modes. Where traditional analysis closes

itself off from variations of its categories, sound object analysis calls on an Other – any

other category, alternate experience, or another listening subject – to interrupt every

application of every category. Thus sound object analysis functions less like a declaration

and more like an interaction.346 It illuminates the inhumanity of traditional methods,

which undermine the very existence of listening subjects by categorizing sounds before

anyone hears them.

Sound object analysis therefore resembles the kind of analysis Scherzinger calls

for: an orientation that insists on “opening-possibility.”347 Though he does not

specifically describe sound object analysis, it offers the “imaginative and open-ended”

                                                            346 For Adriana Cavarero, speech is an interaction, reason a gaze. See Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), x, xix.

347 Scherzinger, "The Return of the Aesthetic: Musical Formalism and Its Place in Political Critique," 273.

   

148

analytical activity for which he believes music analysis should strive.348 Listening for

sound objects, the analyst “widens the horizon of musical meaning by marking various

moments of musical undecidability...[and] resist[s] meanings whose unity is determined

by the totalizing tendency” of traditional systems.349 Here Scherzinger follows David

Lewin, who rejects the idea that art consists of things “given” and “there,” on which

interpreters mechanically act.350 For Lewin, analysis should resist “constraining our

perceptions by saying of this object that it 'is,' putting it as one location in one present-

tense system,” and he recognizes this limited attitude as a consequence of a traditional

obsession with notes as “given,” “there” in the printed score.351

As I mentioned in Chapter 4, sound object analysis also finds a precedent in

Demers’ notion of aesthetic listening. “Aesthetic listening heeds intermittent moments of

a work without [necessarily] searching for a trajectory that unites those moments.”352 A

listener may attend to “transient delights” or “larger-scale patterns” according to her

whims and choices.353 Like sound object analysis, aesthetic listening consists of

fragmentary, subjective hearings and descriptions. No sound need be qualified as any one

thing. Thus, as Scherzinger points out, no analytical method or listening approach is more

                                                            348 Ibid.

349 Ibid.

350 Ibid., 259.

351 Ibid.

352 Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, 151.

353 Ibid., 151-52.

   

149

beneficial than any other.354 Sound object analyses and score-based analyses deal with

different aspects of music that are not mutually exclusive. All ways of listening are

equally instructive. As Fink puts it, “the key word is undoubtedly flexible. Perhaps our

common strategy should begin not with...embracing a new-old ideal of interpretive

spontaneity...[but should rather a]void totalizing (framing) critical gestures altogether,

whether in the service of autonomous form or cultural code[s]...” 355

In Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself, listening and analysis are kinds

of speech; “speaking is also a kind of doing.”356 The traditional assumption that everyone

hears in the same way, an assumption meant to justify determinate categorizations of

sound, could constitute what Butler calls “ethical violence”: the demand “that we

manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same,”

dismissing the singularity of others.357 When established norms enforce this demand – as

the norms of traditional musical analysis forbid inconsistent application of their

categories, thus refusing to account for other listeners – those norms need to change: “the

very unrecognizability of the other brings about a crisis in the norms that govern

recognition.”358 For example, the category “G#” has no experiential correlate for listeners

without perfect pitch (although, in my experience, such listeners can be taught to hear                                                             354 Scherzinger, "The Return of the Aesthetic: Musical Formalism and Its Place in Political Critique," 273.

355 See also Robert Fink, "Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon," American Music 16, no. 2 (1998): 167. Emphasis original.

356 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 125.

357 Ibid., 42.

358 Ibid., 24.

   

150

intervals). Thus traditional analysis fails to recognize such listening subjects, as it

neglects sounds of indeterminate pitch. Sound object analysis evades this kind of

“violence” in principle, making individual experience indispensable to its approach and

thereby putting traditional norms into crisis. Sound object analysis empowers the

listening subject as a critical and creative agent, by allowing her full control over what

constitutes each and every sound object. As an alternative to traditional analysis, sound

object analysis reveals the foundation of traditional methods in assumptions of listeners’

homogeneity, hence their passive relationship to a priori categories.

However, the claim of sound object analysis to dependence on subjectivity raises

questions about sound’s relation to meaning and truth. Ultimately Schaeffer viewed his

theory of sound objects as a “defeat,” because it afforded no infallible prescription for

how to generate meaning in sonic compositions.359 Moreover, sound objects cannot, as

Schaeffer hoped, serve as the “essence” of music or provide the answer to the question of

music’s ontology. Sound object analysis discourages us from saying “sound is,” “music

is,” or making a decision as to what it means to speak about music and sound. Sound

object analysis discredits any fixed musical ontology. But it does corroborate one theory

about what music is, namely Adorno’s theory of “informal music.”

                                                            359 Pierre Schaeffer, "Preface," in Guide Des Objets Sonores, by Michel Chion (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1983), 9-11.

   

151

“Informal Music”

As Adorno put it: “it is by no means the case that the expression of the subject,

which alternates with constructivity, has made way for a musical order of existence, an

ontology.”360 Sound object analysis corroborates this statement: a sound object analysis is

an expression constructed by an individual listening subject, assembled from choices

grounded in the subject’s predilections. Granted, for Adorno “the subject” in music is

generally a composing subject. But where sound objects are concerned, listening subjects

are just as instrumental as composers in determining the sounds of musical pieces. (And,

Schaeffer might say, composition begins with listening: with the selection of sounds in a

form of active listening.) A transcontextual sound is not transcontextual to a listener who

does not recognize it from a different context, for example.

Adorno finds that experimental music tries to get free of creative human subjects.

He cites aleatoric music, the famous Cagean experiment in relinquishing authorial control

and “letting sounds be themselves.” Posing as the stable essence of music, its elementary

particle, self-sufficient and given like other tangible things, the sound object might well

represent another attempt to liberate music from capricious human subjects.361 However,

writes Adorno, all such attempts will ultimately be in vain. “[T]he objectified elements of

art, those which have, as it were, congealed into things, point back to the subject as to

                                                            360 Theodor W. Adorno, "Vers Une Musique Informelle," in Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (London: Verso, 1994), 279.

361 Ibid., 279-80.

   

152

their objective correlative: subjective mediation appears to be an inextinguishable

component of aesthetic objectification.”362

Adorno therefore calls for an “informal music,” a kind of music “liberated from

the fear” of the creative subject, that both relies upon and “radiates” individual creative

subjects.363 Construed by sound object analysis, all music is informal music: in every

sound object analysis, the listener must determine what she hears, hence what she hears

“radiates” her predispositions.

Discourse

But if music and statements made about music are wholly contingent upon

individual analysts’ predispositions, decisions, and whims, then agreements concerning

the characteristics of music may only be hit upon by chance. And if the only justifiable

agreement we can come to regarding music is that there can be no deliberate agreement,

how can musicologists and theorists converse about music? How can we express our

differences of opinion and have them taken seriously?

This is an especially dire question in the face of sound object analysis, which

cannot even objectively distinguish sounds that belong to the piece in question from

sounds that do not. Thus in sound object analysis, not only are there no grounds for

differences of opinion, but also there are no terms in which we can make such differences

known – because there is no justifiable agreement on what exactly is under discussion.

                                                            362 Ibid., 317.

363 Ibid., 293.

   

153

As I see it, the real problem with sound object analysis is therefore not that it will never

yield the true interpretation of a piece (which is probably how it should be), but that it

cannot even pinpoint a true locus for interpretation, from which further interpretations

and discussions can be extrapolated. In other words, it seems that sound object analysis

can tell us neither what music is nor when it is that we are in its presence. Sound object

analysis reveals nothing of certainty about music.

Truth

But the absence of certainty in statements about music does not entail music’s

inability to possess and communicate truth, even via sound object analysis. Of course,

this assertion depends on what truth is and what it means. Philosophers from Plato and

Protagoras to Wittgenstein and Cavell, and countless others, have speculated on the

definition of truth, if indeed such a thing as truth exists.364 The lengthy and complicated

history of truth is far beyond the scope of this project. The remainder of this chapter will

focus on recent conceptions of truth that music can convey via sound object analysis.

In recent theories by Gianni Vattimo and Roger Savage (both of whom draw on

the work of Heidegger and Gadamer) truth is and brings about some kind of change in

perspectives. Given this definition, theorists find that music and other forms of art do

have and communicate truth.365

                                                            364 For an overview of the history of the concept of truth in Western philosophy, see Simon Blackburn, Truth: A Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

365 Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), Savage, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism, Gianni Vattimo, Art's Claim to Truth, ed. Santiago Zabala, trans. Luca D'Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

   

154

In my reading of these thinkers, truth is not some kind of structure that is always

already given. Rather, truth is an event of articulation, the occurrence of an

announcement or a call that requires a response. As such, truth implores us to open a

dialogue with it. Truth is the requirement and the happening of that dialogue. Every

dialogue is an encounter with otherness (myself with truth, truth with myself), therefore a

“point of discontinuity,” as Vattimo puts it, and an opportunity for transformation.366

Thus, art (including music) is a happening of truth because art “request[s] an ontological

interpretation to lay bare the openings of ulteriority [otherness or difference] against

every illusory attempt at systematically closing off the systems.”367

Through the “opening” or “breach,” this encounter with otherness arranged by

dialogue, something new emerges that is different from anything that already exists

before us – a new perspective, perhaps, a new possibility or alternate way of being: a new

world, according to the aforementioned theorists. In short, a work of art is the birth of a

new world. Truth is the fact that new worlds are possible; it is the occurrence of new

worlds and a call for us to recognize them. New worlds pose alternatives to the world we

currently inhabit. Thus, new worlds – the truths revealed in art – comment upon the

world we live in by serving as points of comparison, and thereby reveal additional truths

about the world as it currently stands.

Savage and Vattimo so eloquently elucidate the “worlding” that occurs in music

and art that it is worth quoting them at length. Savage writes: “a work does more than

                                                            366 Vattimo, Art's Claim to Truth, 28.

367 Ibid.

   

155

reflect the conditions and circumstances of its production...it shatters reality through

redescribing the world anew...[B]reaking through congealed representations, the worlding

power of works prefigure[s] imaginative alternatives by exploring different dimensions of

the affective field of our experience.”368

As Vattimo puts it, because a work of art creates a world, the work is an origin or

ontological event, “a fundamental event of being.”369 Yet:

By virtue of its refusal to be peacefully installed into an already open

horizon, the artwork is nevertheless not outside the [present] world. The

work opens and founds around itself its own world and imposes a general

rearrangement of things. In this sense, its novelty and gratuitousness

coincide with the very fact of founding and opening a world...[In other

words, art] does not install itself peacefully into the [current] world but

rather reorganizes it and puts it in question. [Thus] in our concrete

experience the encounter with an artwork is always the beginning of a

general revision of our relationship to the world: the work puts in question

our way of seeing and standing in the world...[Generally] we are interested

in what stands inside the [current] world, but we miss it because we take

for granted that there be [a] world. Instead, the work brings into the

foreground ‘that’ there be [a] world inasmuch as, by refusing to situate

itself in the world as it is, it opens a new world and shows it to us in the

                                                            368 Savage, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism, 14-17.

369 Vattimo, Art's Claim to Truth, 73.

   

156

moment of its disclosure...By placing me in front of a nascent world the

artwork makes strange and unfamiliar the world that up to then had

seemed obvious.370

For Vattimo, this is the point of aesthetic experience: experiences are only called

“aesthetic” if they call our current situation into question.371 To “encounter the work is

[therefore] like encountering a person...a new proposal to arrange the world in a different

manner...[D]iscourse becomes the fundamental way in which the work of art can be

encountered and enjoyed...[Hence] the work can be introduced into our consciousness

only if it becomes...a partner in dialogue.”372 And as we have seen, dialogue is a

happening of truth: an encounter with some form of otherness, with some alternative.

How may sound objects and sound object analysis enact the dialogue that reveals

the truth promised by the “worlding power” of music? In my analysis of Mem1’s Barents

(Chapter 4), I tried to convey that the analytical act is one of speculation and interaction.

My reflections on Yasushi Miura’s music (Chapter 6) further suggest that this interaction

is embodied. As interactions with sound in specific ways, sound objects are invitations to

listen, question, and respond. Existing simply as a theoretical possibility, a sound object

manifests an appeal addressed to potential listeners, petitioning us to consider how we

listen and what it means to listen, and to try listening in various different ways. Thus we

only hear sound objects when we, as listeners, enter into dialogue with sounds. Sounds

                                                            370 Ibid., 67-69.

371 Ibid., 102.

372 Ibid., 53-54.

   

157

suggest ways of being heard (e.g. as we saw with Lucier in Chapter 4), to which we

respond by following or rejecting their suggestions, or speculating on alternatives. The

result of our interaction with sound is a sound object, such that a sound object is an

occurrence of a singular act of listening upon a given sound (as implied in the

Introduction and Chapter 4). A sound object is an event, an act, an agent. (I build on this

suggestion in Chapter 6.)

As such, as a sound heard in a particular way (if you like, an “objective” sound to

which a “subjective” perspective is applied), a sound object is not merely equivalent to

the sound emitted by whatever source, but is a new, hybrid entity – an alternative to every

other sound, to everything that already exists. In other words, the sound object exists in a

new, alternate world. Artworks made of sounds are thus ontological events that originate

new worlds that sound objects both represent and show us how to inhabit. To inhabit such

alternate worlds means to listen in ways to which we are unaccustomed.

Listening in new and multiple ways provides points of comparison for our usual

ways of listening and what we are used to hearing, inviting us to think deeply about how

and why we developed our listening habits, and about familiar sounds that we have come

to take for granted. Thus, by providing alternative ways of hearing and new things to hear

– or, in Savage’s words, by “refiguring” sounds and what it means to hear them – sounds-

as-objects elicit truths about the world we live in and how we relate to it.373 A work of

art, or a sound heard as an instance of aesthetic beauty, “testifies to a possible manner of

                                                            373 “[The] world unfolded by a work or text refigures the horizons of its listener or readers.” Savage, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism, 88.

   

158

inhabiting the world by aesthetically prefiguring it. Opening us to the world, and the

world to us, anew, gives the work’s claim to truth its prospective dimension.”374

Sound objects indicate that there are always alternative ways of listening and

being that we have yet to consider. In other words, we cannot know or be aware of all

possible ways in which we and our world might exist. For Kane, this precisely is the

message that contemporary music should promise: we should “maintain a caustic

skepticism towards the eternal verities of both irreducible fictions and pre-predicative

intuitions.”375 Yet, by drawing us into a dialogue that produces sound objects, thus

alternate worlds or ways of being, music summons truths about our world and ourselves.

In particular, we learn that neither our conceptual categories, nor any discursive

statement, nor “the truth” as such, are absolute. Hence, Savage aptly concludes that

“music’s redescriptions of our elective affinities with the world touch the fundamental

element of human finitude.”376 Furthermore, in the felicitous words of Paul Crowther, art

including music “opens up new ways of presenting the world,” causing human

relationships with the world to “renew and develop.”377 Such “aesthetic renewal and

development is almost a model of what life (in its positive modes) symbolically aspires

to...It is, accordingly, transcultural and transhistorical in terms of its significance.”378 By

                                                            374 Ibid., 147.

375 Kane, "The Music of Skepticism: Intentionality, Materiality, Forms of Life," 264.

376 Savage, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism, 111.

377 Paul Crowther, "Defining Art, Defending the Canon, Contesting Culture," British Journal of Aesthetics 44, no. 4 (2004): 372.

378 Ibid.

   

159

way of sound objects, music reveals trans-subjective, change-producing truths – a

revelation that nonetheless depends on divergent ways of listening by multiple subjects.

The Real

In light of the preceding section, sound objects are indeed among the truths of

music: they are events and results of change-producing, alternative-producing, ergo truth-

producing, dialogue. As Schaeffer intended, sound objects are the hidden essences of

music in that they are the dialogue which music sets in motion and exists only to

propagate. Sound objects also reveal underlying truths about listening subjects. Listening

for sound objects is the kind of activity that can bring us to awareness of sensations,

perspectives, and levels of astuteness of which we may not even have known ourselves

capable. If I may be permitted to shift to another theoretical gear momentarily, I will

close this chapter with a few speculations on how sound objects may be a latent kind of

truth which, for our own comfort, is usually kept hidden. Jacques Lacan named this kind

of truth the Real.

The Lacanian Real is a tangle of various modes of inconceivability whose full

exploration is beyond the scope of this discussion.379 Briefly, the Real is a missed

encounter that becomes the foundation of the way we think.380 In psychoanalytic terms,

the Real is the trauma that instigates psychological symptoms which alter our thinking                                                             379 For my complete reading of the Lacanian Real, as it relates to “essences” in the forms of atomic particles, see Mandy-Suzanne Wong, "Lacan's Encounter with Democritus," (Unpublished paper 2010).

380 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 11 - the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964-1965), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: W. W. Norton, 1981), 55.

   

160

processes. Because it is traumatic, we protect ourselves by throwing up “screens” before

the Real: symptoms, interpretations, false memories, willful denials, even social

conventions keep the truth from us.381 We dream that a life-changing trauma happened in

a different, less painful way, for example.382 Thus, although the Real constitutes the

events that mold our thought processes by causing traumatic psychological changes, we

cannot pinpoint or conceptualize the Real because we have missed it. Therefore, the roots

or causes of our modes of thought are gaps in our apprehension.383 We cannot analyze or

understand these causes, cannot even really think them, since they are always already

missed. Yet we can confront and try to understand the effects of these missed causes. As

Slavoj Žižek puts it, the “impossible Real” is a “Thing-Body which can be apprehended

only in a negative way.”384 Says Alain Badiou: “That which grounds the possibility of

thinking suffers a shipwreck in the unthinkable.”385

                                                            381 Ibid.

382 This is in fact Lacan’s example, which he borrows from Freud: a father dreams of his son, who has died of a fever. In the dream, the son is alive, accusing, “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?” In reality, the child is dead in his crib, and a burning candle falls onto his body. In Freud’s and Lacan’s arguments, the father dreams the son alive, therefore remains asleep almost electively, so that he does not have to face the Reality – the encounter with the child’s burning corpse, which the father has already missed. At the same time as it screens the Reality, the dream points to the Reality: fever burned the child to death. See Sigmund Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud - Vols 4-5 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 256-57. And Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 11 - the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964-1965), 53-55.

383 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 11 - the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964-1965), 21.

384 Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real (London: Continuum, 2005), 152.

385 Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), 63.

   

161

We may already hear echoes of Schaefferian sound-object theory. A reducible

sound object is that which we always miss hearing, until we undertake reduced listening.

We could say that a reducible sound object is thus indeed the essence of what we hear,

the hidden ground that we screen with signs and sign-interpretations, piled on top of

memories and subconscious adherences to conventions. But the reducible sound object

itself is what is left when we rip these screens away. As such, reducible sound objects can

only be described in negative terms as absences of connotation. As instigators of the

interpretive processes that lead us to characterize sounds in various ways, but that cannot

themselves be characterized, reducible sound objects are gaps in our understanding of

what we hear. In themselves, the first sound objects are unthinkable, conceptualized only

as the results of phenomenological reductions.

This calls to mind Kane’s incisive observation. The Schaefferian sound object

possesses a “strange trajectory: methodologically, one discloses the sound object only at

the end of the investigation, after a series of reductions; but ontologically, the sound

object is absolutely first, a priori.”386 In other words, we could say that the reduction we

perform in listening for reducible sound objects is akin to the psychoanalytic session that,

peeling away the screens little by little, finally uncovers the truth: the Real, inexplicable

gap at the foundation of what we hear.

Friedrich Kittler draws a connection between the practices of sound recording and

listening to recorded sound, and the psychoanalytic unearthing of the nothingness that is

                                                            386 Kane, "L'objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction," 6.

   

162

the Real. Unlike efforts at understanding what someone has said, which strive after the

meaning of what was said, “the phonograph can record all the noise produced by the

larynx prior to any semiotic order and linguistic meaning...Thus, the real...has the status

of phonography.”387 Consequently, encounters with the Real, via sound-recordings,

produced fearful impressions of the fantastic, the ethereal and ghostly. In the sounds of

the gramophone, “bodies appear by virtue of their voices in a real that once again [being

empty] can only be measured in euphemisms: by carrion or skeletons.”388 Sound

recordings thus inspired tales like Maurice Renard’s work of fantastic fiction, “Death and

the Shell” (1907). To the distraught narrator of this tale, his first impression of recorded

sound is of “the insidious songs Circe warned us not to listen to...[a] maddening scene

[that] repeated...incessantly and never diminished.”389 What makes this audible (but

unseen) “scene” close to unbearable is its emptiness: a gap, a dissociation from

everything that is nonetheless fundamental.

Because sound objects have no irrefutable ontologies, as we have seen, sound

objects of every sort instantiate this fundamental gap. Although we cannot conceptualize

this gap, even with the notion of reducible sound objects, we do sense its presence when

we attempt sound object analysis. We sense the gap when we encounter the myriad of

                                                            387 For Kittler, All the “methodological distinctions of modern [Lacanian] psychoanalysis clearly coincide with the distinctions of media technology.” What Lacan calls the “symbolic,” the realm of predetermined order, is represented by the typewriter, the imaginary by cinema. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 15-16. The quotation in the body of my text is from p.16.

388 Ibid., 55.

389 Maurice Renard, “Death and the Shell,” quoted in Ibid., 54.

   

163

interpretations that even a single listener may apply to a single sound. Infinite

characterizations of a sound exist because its Reality is indescribable: a gap in our

knowledge, a missed phenomenon. No interpretive attempt, on its own or combined with

a world’s worth of other efforts, can describe or even conceptualize what a sound Really

is. One can only attempt to describe it, in one’s own multiplicity of ways. The Real

supports all and no such readings, being indescribable and wholly missed. The resultant

infinitude of listening perspectives – which at first led us to conclude that there is no such

thing as truth for sound objects, sounds, or music – are thus the only compelling evidence

we have of the Real of a sound. The multitude of interpretive attempts undertaken in

sound object analysis demonstrates not only the ultimate ineffability of the Real of sound,

but also serves as the only proof that the Real exists. Our myriad ways of hearing and

their analytical results (structural, reducible, transcontextual, gestural sound objects)

screen the Reality of sound by mediating it to our conceptual capacities and, at the same

time, concealing it from us.

In every case, even in music, the Real must remain behind a screen. Here I am

referring not only to Savage’s (Adornian) notion that, in order to reflect truths about this

world, a work of art must be removed from it, set at “a creative distance that would be the

condition for refiguring reality from within.”390 “Ultimately,” Savage writes, “the truth of

a work will prove to be inseparable from its power to refigure dimensions of our

experiences that have no prior referent in reality.”391 This is an accurate and vital

                                                            390 Savage, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism, 17.

391 Ibid., 33.

   

164

observation. However, in drawing attention to the necessary screening of the Real, I mean

to emphasize the following. Even where we are concerned with nothing more than a

single sound, if we were to come directly face to face with the infinite possibilities of the

causal nothingness that is its underlying Real, its rich emptiness would overwhelm us

psychologically, threatening our sanity.

It is tempting, then, to settle for indefiniteness itself as the truth of music. In that

case we could say that sound objects manifest music’s fundamental elusiveness. Despite

the Romantic/Symbolist overtones of this conclusion, it does evidence a certain, now

familiar truth about listeners, that is, the skeptical truth that we know nothing irrefutably.

In spite of the self-defeating, relativist extrapolations of skepticism described above, the

finitude of our comprehension is a transcultural, transhistorical, trans-subjective truth that

inspires us to continually alter our ways of thinking.

This is the kind of truth that to me is more plausible as the truth of music. I would

say that the trans-subjective truth or essence of music and sound is the dialogue to which

they summon us as listeners, in which they challenge our current ways of thinking by

posing alternate ways of being – among them the inscrutable Real. By seducing us to lift

the screens which we ourselves erected, music exposes us to our own, true finitude,

which itself is motivation to try to think beyond our comfortable zones. Sound object

analysis provides an avenue of approach to such revealing alterations of perspective –

which means that sound objects themselves may yet be Real, actual truths.

   

165

Chapter 6.

Listening, Dialogue, and Embodiment in EDM:

A Case Study in Sound Object Analysis

Chapters 4 and 5 argue that although listening through sound objects, which I call

sound object analysis, is grounded in subjectivity, it can reveal subtle and important

truths about music and listening. Among the most important of those truths is that

listening is an interaction with sound, a kind of dialogue. The current chapter offers a

case study in sound object analysis through which I undertake further exploration of that

dialogue. Revealing the interaction between sounds and listeners to be embodied, rather

than merely contemplative, consideration of sound object analysis provides a provocative

response to a pressing question in electronic-music studies: can electronic dance music

(EDM) be listened to, i.e. appreciated without dancing and outside dance-based contexts

such as nightclubs?

In the manner of Chapter 2, where thinking in terms of sound objects enabled us

to critique the ideologies underlying Bill Fontana’s Sound Island, the current chapter uses

sound object analysis to respond to the prevalent, ideological claim that EDM is only

“for” dancing. To this end, I attempt to show that EDM can be analyzed and discussed –

responded to with words and concepts, not only with dance movements. I investigate the

descriptive potential of the categories involved in sound object analysis with regard to

EDM, in the hope of suggesting a specific and telling vocabulary for this music and the

experiences it affords. I then propose that listening/analysis and dancing are not mutually

   

166

exclusive or, by definition, opposed. Identifying points of agreement between sound

object analysis and Jane Bennett’s theory of vital materialism, I suggest that both

listening and club-dancing to EDM are encounters between material bodies. Hence, as an

embodied form of dialogue, listening does not compromise, but rather complements, the

co-inhabitance and co-creation of EDM that happens on the dance floor.

The Problem: EDM is Not “For” Listening

Many authors, such as Pedro Ferreira, Michel Gaillot, and Timothy Taylor

suggest that, outside clubs and raves, EDM is an aesthetic failure.392 Most analyses of

EDM therefore confront aspects of the genre other than its relationship to listening. Like

Gaillot and Taylor, Simon Reynolds, Brian Wilson, and Robert Strachan discuss the

critical social perspectives or quasi-religious escapism conveyed by EDM in various

sociocultural contexts.393 With several of the aforementioned authors, Matthew Collin

links the characteristics of EDM to the effects of hallucinogens.394

Other authors do address how EDM might be heard, by analyzing its musical

qualities. Mark Butler identifies the formal, rhythmic, and textural structures typical of                                                             392 Pedro Peixoto Ferreira, "When Sound Meets Movement: Performance in Electronic Dance Music," Leonardo Music Journal 18 (2008), Michel Gaillot, Multiple Meaning: Techno - a Political and Artistic Laboratory of the Present, trans. Warren Niesluchowski (Paris: Dis Voir, 1998), Timothy D. Taylor, Strange Sounds (New York: Routledge, 2001).

393 Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the Worlds of Techno and Rave Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), Robert Strachan, "Uncanny Space: Theory, Experience and Affect in Contemporary Electronic Music," Transcultural Music Review 14 (2010), Brian Wilson, Fight, Flight, or Chill: Subcultures, Youth, and Rave into the Twenty-First Century (Toronto: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006).

394 Matthew Collin, Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House (London: Serpent's Tail, 2010).

   

167

EDM.395 Demers interrogates all experimental electronic music from aesthetic,

ontological, and epistemological perspectives. Ramzy Alwakeel describes the struggle for

generic identity rampant in IDM (“intelligent” dance music), as evidenced in album art

and track titles. He thus devotes his analysis to what some artists consider a subgenre of

EDM that is meant only for listening and contemplation, not for dancing.396

As Alwakeel points out, though, the label “intelligent” is contrived and

nonsensical, and undermines the considerable aesthetic potential of the actual music.397

Daniel and Schmidt of Matmos share this opinion;398 the electronica band Future Sound

of London finds “IDM” redundant and “restrictive,” since it yet includes the term

“dance” while claiming to eschew dance;399 and Demers rightly concludes that IDM is a

marketing ploy used by “record labels [who] have found it a useful tool for appealing to

consumers’ elitism.”400 Nevertheless, although I would be hesitant to declare IDM an

actual subgenre, the term’s existence (whether it signifies a body of work or empty

flattery) testifies to an interest, shared by artists and labels, in EDM as music for close

listening.

                                                            395 Mark J. Butler, Unlocking the Groove (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006).

396 Ramzy Alwakeel, "I.D.M. As a 'Minor' Literature: The Treatment of Cultural and Musical Norms by 'Intelligent Dance Music'," Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 1, no. 1 (2009).

397 Ibid.: 2.

398 Matmos and Carlos M. Pozo, "Matmos Interview," Perfect Sound Forever (1999).

399 Alwakeel, "I.D.M. As a 'Minor' Literature: The Treatment of Cultural and Musical Norms by 'Intelligent Dance Music'," 5.

400 Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, 170.

   

168

Ferreira, however, attests that since dancing “defines” EDM, to listen to EDM

without dancing is to fail to hear the music at all:

EDM is made, above all, for non-stop [sic] dancing. Admittedly, it is

possible to do many other things while listening to EDM, but it is the

immersion in the intense experience of nonstop dancing, more than

anything else, which defines its specificity, its operative nexus. The failure

to grasp this elementary principle has led many to take EDM for what it is

not.401

In particular, to merely listen to electronic dance music is to conflate it with “electronic

art music,” a marriage with which Ferreira cannot hold.402 Like Ferreira, several other

authors would probably find my use of the same approach for both “academic” and

“popular” genres untenable.403 Nevertheless, sound object analysis will hopefully provide

a perspective that may illuminate the superfluity and artificiality of a total, irrevocable

distinction between “academic” and “popular” in electronic music. I endorse Demers’

position: that “metagenres” of electronic music may be loosely distinguished according to

how they interact with their venues and sources of funding (institutional or commercial),

with the understanding that venues and funding are often shared between metagenres; and

that “all [electronic] metagenres here constitute high art.”404 Further, several EDM artists

                                                            401 Ferreira, "When Sound Meets Movement: Performance in Electronic Dance Music," 18.

402 Ibid.

403 Including Karlheinz Stockhausen, quoted in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds., Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (London: Continuum,2004), 382-83.

404 Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, 6.

   

169

also produce “high-art” experimental music: Matmos, Vince Clarke, and Taylor Deupree

are just a few examples.405 From this standpoint, using a single analytical vocabulary to

approach both EDM and “electronic art music” is a valid practice that may yet do justice

to both.

The vocabulary supplied by sound object analysis may account for EDM’s most

provocative aspect: its repeated defiance of norms, thwarting the tendency toward

normativity traditionally displayed in musical analysis. EDM flouts attempts to confine it

to closed spheres circumscribed either by generic terms or labels such as “academic” and

“popular”; as Alwakeel attests, it “rejects the very notion[s] of genre” and canon.406

Hence there is no “authority” or paradigmatic example against which individual tracks

might be measured, and no hope of isolating an “essence” of EDM.407 As I’ll discuss

below, EDM also dissolves the boundaries between artist, artwork, equipment, and

listener. Thus the identities of a track and its creator relentlessly vary.408 Collaboratively,

democratically generated, EDM encourages dialogue rather than definition or

“solution.”409 Likewise, by being flexible enough to accommodate EDM’s

insubordination to categories, sound object analysis may perhaps withstand normative

temptations.

                                                            405 Ibid., 8.

406 Alwakeel, "I.D.M. As a 'Minor' Literature: The Treatment of Cultural and Musical Norms by 'Intelligent Dance Music'," 2-4.

407 Ibid.: 5.

408 Ibid.: 9.

409 Ibid.: 5.

   

170

Sound Object Analysis in EDM

Regarding most musical genres, listeners can describe what they hear by pointing

to melodies, harmonies, basslines, and rhythmic patterns; and by naming timbres

according to their instrumental sources. But in many EDM tracks, harmony is absent,

timbres unnamable – while melodic, bass, and percussive tracks may be impossible to

differentiate. Alwakeel therefore suggests that we try to hear and think EDM “vertically,”

in terms of overlapping “blocks of sound,” rather than adopting the “linear” focus on

development over time, that dominates our engagement with other genres.410 As my

analysis of Mem1’s Barents demonstrates (Chapter 4), sound object analysis is a form of

engagement with just such “blocks of sound.” I am not suggesting that all listeners do or

should hear EDM in terms of sound objects; rather, my goal is to assess the potential of

sound object analysis as one of many possible vocabularies that may serve as tools for

describing and discussing this music, which has been known to elude traditional

classifications.

Sound object analysis is appropriate to EDM in part because, as I mentioned in

Chapter 4, sound object analysis relies on an important aspect of “aesthetic listening”: the

awareness of and allowance for fragmentary attentiveness. Demers notes that “[a]esthetic

listening resembles the way many listeners hear popular...musics.”411 In particular, as a

fragmentary process in its own right, aesthetic listening complements the often

                                                            410 Ibid.: 13-15.

411 Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, 16.

   

171

fragmentary aesthetic of EDM, which is typically spun out of short, repetitive “bits” of

percussive, noisy, or melodic sound.412 Furthermore, neither sound object analysis nor

aesthetic listening relies on prior knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the

creation of a piece of music. In EDM, such details are frequently unavailable to listeners,

as artists go out of their way to maintain their anonymity behind multiple aliases or, as in

the case of Yasushi Miura, by avoiding promotional materials. (I will discuss Miura’s

musical and promotional processes in greater depth below.) Listeners may nonetheless

describe what they hear in terms of reducible, transcontextual, structural, or gestural

sound objects, the discernment of which requires no “background knowledge” of the

music.

The Case: Capricious by Yasushi Miura

The examples discussed in Chapter 4, by Lucier and Mem1, are without

backbeats, spun out of acoustic sounds (those of the voice and cello), and reliant on

electric but not necessarily computerized equipment. In other words, these examples are

utterly unlike EDM. While sound object analysis served these examples reasonably well,

can it do similar justice to digital, beat-based dance music?

In this portion of the discussion, I will apply sound object analysis to Capricious

(2008) by Japanese EDM producer Yasushi Miura. This track is experimental in that it

consistently strains EDM conventions. Miura abstains from structural formulae typical of

EDM tracks, which center around gradual buildups of textual layers, and even from

                                                            412 Ibid., 78. For more on the structure of EDM see Butler, Unlocking the Groove.

   

172

making clear distinctions between melodic, bass, and percussive lines.413 Even more than

other EDM tracks (take any example of trance music, such as Eat Static’s work; or

Matmos’ Supreme Balloon, which begins tunefully and later relies on minimalistic

repetitions of consonant three-note figures), Capricious obscures these distinctions. As

such, Miura’s music questions the identities of EDM and its basic constituents, by means

of those very constituents themselves.

Of the bare handful of online reviewers willing to take on Yasushi Miura, most of

them chalk up their experiences to psychiatric disease. As one author put it, an album of

Miura’s music “becomes pretty demanding and one can only imagine that his music

perhaps reflects...newly discovered psychiatric diagnoses such as Techno Stress and

Techno Phobia.”414 Another concluded that either “[t]he music seems to showcase

Yasushi’s schizophrenic nature...[or] there seems to be some sort of joke going on.”415

Both reviewers warn that “if you ever get ahold [sic] of it [Miura’s music], good luck

understanding it...[as it is] simply just too abstract in nature” – and above all, “don’t try

dancing to it.”416 Miura himself is even more inscrutable. Hidden somewhere behind his

empty website, he sends his music to reviewers on CD-Rs with handwritten titles and

nothing else – no note, sometimes not even a sleeve. Can listening via sound objects

provide productive insight on his work?

                                                            413 Butler, Unlocking the Groove.

414 Anon., "Yasushi Miura - Circus," Electronic Music World (2004).

415 ———, "Yasushi Miura - Kernel: Magnitude No. 8," Heathen Harvest (2009).

416 Quoting the review in Heathen Harvest, then the review in Electronic Music World, both anonymous.

   

173

Capricious is a swarm of corpuscular sounds. Pitched sounds are just as

percussive as the percussive sounds and just as dissonant as the erratic buzzing sounds,

with the result that every sound in the piece – and none of them – could constitute

“melody,” “bassline,” “noise,” or “percussion.” Therefore parsing Capricious into

contrapuntal lines is impossible. Instead of hunting for linear trajectories, perhaps hearing

the piece as a host of structural sound objects may be more telling. Recall that a structural

sound object may be a sound of any kind, even a noise or melodic figure, that is long

enough to be perceptible but extends no longer than a few seconds. We may interpret

Capricious as the interaction of a crowd of such diverse objects. If we listen via

headphones, this characterization is not just metaphorical. Particularly during the first

minute of the track, I hear an assortment of sonic individuals in my right and left ears; on

occasion they even seem to come from the center of my head. Like tangible objects in

visible space, the sounds shape, demarcate, and populate the interior space in which I

experience the music. Similarly, heard over large loudspeakers, these variously colored

and positioned sound objects would define and articulate the shape of the surrounding

room. Instead of a schizophrenic movement between high pitches, low pitches, and

noises over time, listening for sound objects reveals a horde of stable individuals marking

out a space.

The difference lies in listening for individual sounds instead of musical

trajectories. As Alwakeel points out, listening “vertically” for sonic objects may even

   

174

change our view of Miura’s incessant repetition of the aforementioned sounds.417

“Cycling units do not have to be seen as an undeveloping sequence documenting [a]

subject’s movement in time through the music, but might be devoid of a linear subject

altogether, and therefore exist to some degree outside time.”418 Instead of a single,

obsessive-psychotic movement, we may hear in Capricious the persistence of individuals

which, like tangible objects, possess a degree of permanence that enables us to reidentify

them. This interpretation could apply to most EDM tracks that partake of the typical

styles and layered structures. In tracks from Model 500’s Detroit-techno anthems and

Joey Beltram’s Belgian-style Energy Flash (1988) to Eat Static’s psy-trance escapades

and the latest experiments by IDM promoter r_garcia, there are elements that persist

continually, repeat precisely, or return consistently: brief synth melodies or punctuating

figures, samples from film dialogue or other musical genres, and of course the beats, all

of which are identifiable and reidentifiable as circumscribed individuals. Alternately,

regarding Miura’s track, since there is no reason why sound objects cannot be of any

duration, we may reasonably hear the entire track as a single, multicolored object with a

complex, rippling texture: as a gestural-sonorous object comprised of sound and

undulating movement.419 Since there are no melodies, harmonies, or gradual buildups to

imply any kind of trajectory; and since the 4/4 beat, typically responsible for EDM’s

                                                            417 Alwakeel, "I.D.M. As a 'Minor' Literature: The Treatment of Cultural and Musical Norms by 'Intelligent Dance Music'," 14.

418 Ibid.

419 The durational limits imposed by Roads on structural sound objects are arbitrary.

   

175

propulsion, never stabilizes in this track: it is reasonable to encounter the track “face-to-

face” as a quasi-permanent object, instead of “moving through” it.

In Chapter 4, I compared one possible listening experience involved in sound

object analysis to the experience of walking around a sculpture, taking it in from multiple

standpoints. From this kind of perspective, Miura’s track takes on a certain self-

sufficiency, again mirroring tangible objects, which he exacerbates by absenting himself

from the music and its promotion. Moreover, none of the digital blips and buzzes in

Capricious resemble human vocal timbres or the sounds of traditional musical

instruments. It is admittedly difficult for sound object analysis to thoroughly describe the

timbres in this track. We can be certain only that they are electronic. We might therefore

call them transcontextual sound objects, acknowledging their emigration to the world of

music from the insides of computers, which were not designed to be musical instruments.

I find that interpretation tautological in electronic music, but it is valid nonetheless. It is

my instinct to call these beeps and buzzes reducible sound objects, thus underscoring

their meaninglessness except as they refer to the electronic and mechanical in general.

This refusal of communication compounds Miura’s effacement of human presence,

including his own, from his music. It is almost as if the track has no creator except

perhaps itself or an unknown computer. At the potential risk of invoking Romantic,

phantasmagoric notions of erasing the effortful human conduit between supernatural

genius and its artistic products, Alwakeel identifies the conflation of producer,

   

176

equipment, and product/artwork as a distinguishing feature of experimental EDM.420

Sound object analysis calls attention to this provocative confounding of identities.

The concept of the transcontextual sound object may help us to rationalize the

near-absence of a 4/4 bass drum beat in Capricious. At several points during the track,

the beat attempts to take hold, only to cease abruptly after a maximum of ten seconds,

sometimes remaining absent for long stretches. The beat is yet recognizable as an EDM

beat, especially when a syncopated hi-hat-like sound enters during a brief passage. In fact

the beat as a whole is the only sound in the track that I can name definitively (as an EDM

beat). As a whole, we could consider the beat – a bass-percussive timbre played in steady

quarter-note rhythms – a single sound object. It is a gestural sound object certainly, in all

EDM tracks, for those who associate this idiosyncratic rhythmic figure with club dancing,

as for those who cannot help moving to it. But Miura invites an additional interpretation.

In Capricious, it is tempting to call the 4/4 beat a transcontextual sound object, because

its erratic presence and familiarity – both striking amid repetitive textures and unnamable

sounds – make it seem almost foreign to the track, as though it came from elsewhere. The

beat is circumscribed, parenthesized, by its own frequent absences: set off from the rest

of the track almost as a self-sufficient entity. Perhaps, relative to Capricious, the genre of

EDM, represented by its unmistakable beat, is somewhat “elsewhere,” set off yet close

by. The notion of transcontextuality thus enables speculation on Capricious’ relationship

to genre: EDM is part of this track, but there is more to this music than EDM or its

                                                            420 Alwakeel, "I.D.M. As a 'Minor' Literature: The Treatment of Cultural and Musical Norms by 'Intelligent Dance Music'," 18.

   

177

conventions. In general, the categories of sound object analysis achieve reasonable

success in accounting for the idiosyncrasies of Capricious, including its resistance to

categories.

Embodiment

Sound object analysis constitutes a dialogue between a listening subject, sounds,

and analytical categories. As the listener shifts between listening modes, she participates

in creating “what” she hears. At the same time, sounds impose themselves on her and, by

being as they are, invite or even compel her to hear them in certain ways. As such,

analysis is a creative, performative, collaborative act not just of contemplation but also

participation. Ferreira notes that “EDM is not a kind of creative message sent by a

performer to his audience, but the sonorous dimension of a particular collective

movement.”421 He means the movement on the dance floor; but listening and sound

object analysis are also collective, embodied activities that are therefore viable

interactions with EDM – that do as much justice to the genre, on its own terms, as

dancing does.

Nina Eidsheim reveals that listening is always collective and embodied: “aural

experience is predicated on our physical contact with sound waves through shared

media...[such that] sound is a multisensory experience, tactile as well as aural.”422 The

                                                            421 Ferreira, "When Sound Meets Movement: Performance in Electronic Dance Music," 18.

422 Nina Sun Eidsheim, "Sensing Voice: Materiality and the Lived Body in Singing and Listening," Senses and Society 6, no. 2 (2011): 146-47.

   

178

concept “sound object” serves as a reminder that the analytical act is likewise embodied.

As it invites associations of sounds with objects, hence with visible, tangible, material

things (Chapter 2), as well as objects of thought, objectivity, and other phenomena

(Chapter 7), the notion of the sound object makes explicit the fact that analysis is an

encounter between material bodies: sonic/aerial and human bodies.

The theory of sound objects is thus an instance of what Jane Bennett calls “vital

materialism,” which theorizes the existence and importance of nonhuman bodies as

“actants.” An actant is “that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to

make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events”: a “source of action...[that]

can be human or not, or, most likely, a combination of both.”423 As such, an “actant is

neither an object nor a subject but an ‘intervener’...which, by virtue of its particular

location in an assemblage and the fortuity of being in the right place at the right time,

makes the difference, makes things happen, becomes the decisive force catalyzing an

event.”424 For Bennett, metal, garbage, and electricity are actants. By her definition,

sounds and sound objects are also actants. As both objects (approached by a listener) and

subjects (affecting a listener), sounds are partially responsible for catalyzing the event

that is the listening/analytical act. A sound is a nonhuman actant that produces effects on

listeners and their surroundings. A sound object is also such an actant, with the additional

caveat that its mode of being is determined by what human listeners hear, how what they

hear interacts with what they know, and how they choose to describe the total experience.

                                                            423 Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, viii, 9.

424 Ibid., 9.

   

179

We could say, then, that sound objects are nonhuman actants that are nonetheless

dependent on human experiences and choices.

For Bennett, events are “encounters between ontologically diverse actants, some

human, some not, though all thoroughly material.”425 She underscores the power (“thing-

power”) of nonhuman things to instigate and participate in events, and to produce

effects.426 In fact she “equate[s] affect with materiality”: the ability of a thing to affect

others, to produce change, is what makes the thing a material body.427 Hence, as actants,

sounds and sound objects are genuine material bodies. Bennett emphasizes that

“[o]rganic and inorganic bodies, natural and cultural objects (these distinctions are not

particularly salient here) all are affective,” and that human bodies should not be

considered the only active participants in any interaction, hence the only material bodies

in existence.428 Instead, Bennett offers a vibrant monism, in which everything – sounds

and humans alike – constitutes the same affective material in different forms,

unconstrained by any “hierarchy of being.”429 Of course she acknowledges the

“differences between the knife that impales and the man impaled,” between the sound

that is heard and the hearer; but such differences do not imply that humans dominate their

                                                            425 Ibid., xiv.

426 Ibid., 6.

427 Ibid., xiii.

428 Ibid., xii.

429 Ibid., 10.

   

180

every encounter.430 Activities like listening and eating are thus “encounter[s] between

various and variegated bodies, some of them mine, most of them not, and none of which

always gets the upper hand.”431

The same occurs in sound object analysis. Listening bodies meet sound objects in

an encounter, the shape of which is determined by both embodied parties. Sound object

analysis foregrounds the fact that all music is a collective encounter between human and

nonhuman bodies. So does electronic dance music as, even in its moniker, it summons

both the nonhuman and corporeal movement. In fact, once we “flatten out” the

differences between human and nonhuman (electronic and sonic) bodies, the difference

between close listening and collective dancing to EDM is likewise revealed not to be as

vast as we might have believed.432

However, we should not overlook Fink’s observation (noted in Chapter 2) that to

consider sounds or musical gestures as bodies akin to our own is to imply that music and

sounds possess “insides” and “outsides” – specifically, “inner” subjectivities concealed

from all but the most privileged listeners. Fink underscores the problematic implications

of this “surface-depth” conception, not the least of which include the assumption of a

privileged class of listeners (and, subsequently, an unprivileged class)433 and the

Schenkerian notion that “all great music has a hidden, organic [and hierarchical] unity, no

                                                            430 Ibid., 9.

431 Ibid., viii.

432 Ibid., 9.

433 Fink, "Going Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface," 135.

   

181

matter how complex, chaotic, or incomplete the listener’s experience of its ‘surface’ may

be.”434 But the fixity imposed by unified, hierarchical, and predetermined is precisely

what sound object analysis endeavors to avoid. By conceptualizing sounds as embodied

agents, does vital materialism drive sound-object-based thinking back into Schenkerian

rigidity?

I do not believe so. Vital materialism and sound object analysis insist on

flexibility. Hence the relationship of equality between humans and things or sounds is not

in any way simple or fixed. As I began to explore in Chapter 5, sounds change our minds

about them even as we change them by hearing them in certain ways. Sound objects, in

particular, are ontologically determined by listeners’ subjective choices, memories, and

so on. In a sense, then, we are the sounds and the sounds are us, but in a way such that, in

Bennett’s words, “the us and the it,” the human and the nonhuman sound object, “slip-

slide into each other.”435

In my view, it is this “slip-sliding” that enables sound object analysis and vital

materialism to avoid the “unity” that Fink observes in traditional, Schenkerian readings

of musical organicism, along with the hierarchy and rigidity attendant thereon. As I

mentioned in Chapters 4 and 5, because sound object analysis cannot even say for sure

where a sound begins and ends, let alone a musical piece, sounds slip-slide into each

other as music slip-slides into our other experiences. Moreover, because sound object

analysis is contingent on subjectivities and their singular circumstances, any

                                                            434 Ibid., 103.

435 Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 4.

   

182

interpretation of what a sound might be is correct and incorrect: there is no privileged

“insider” position that makes what any listener says definitive or “the truth.” Thus, there

are no unities – neither musical, sonic, experiential, or conceptual.

Furthermore, vital materialism emphasizes the agency of both sounds and

listeners, either of which can change a listener’s mind, anytime, about what she is

hearing. Despite the fact that it is shaped by the activities of listeners and artists, the

sound object possesses being and affectivity of its own, separate from those of the artist,

his equipment, and his listeners. This is evident in Miura’s Capricious: sound objects

constitute both the artist’s creative acts and self-sufficient entities, alternating between

these modes of being in the analyst’s attention. Generally, as Bennett puts it, things such

as sounds and sound objects:

shimmied back and forth...between, on the one hand, stuff to ignore,

except insofar as it betokened human activity...and, on the other hand,

stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of

their association with human meanings, habits, or projects. In the second

moment, stuff exhibited its thing-power: it issued a call, even if I did not

quite understand what it was saying. At the very least, it provoked affects

in me...a nameless awareness of [its] impossible singularity...436

If a thing is to reveal its singular power, it must appear to us in the right place at

the right time – as the idiosyncratic placement of the EDM beat in Capricious, in the

context of Miura’s infamous obscurity, reveals its transcontextuality. At the same time,

                                                            436 Ibid., 14.

   

183

though, we must harbor “a certain anticipatory readiness,” adopting a perspective or

“perceptual style” that is “open” to things’ affective power.437 Sound object analysis

summons just such an “open perceptual style” by inviting us to hear sounds “vertically”

as individuals, rather than as moments in a trajectory; and by following in the footsteps of

Schaeffer, who recognized that we can change how we hear at will, enabling sounds to

shimmy back and forth between various characterizations as our attention continually

mutates, waxes and wanes. All the same, as we’ve seen, perception is not a mere looking-

on but a participation-with and a creation, a rendering-manifest. “To ‘render manifest’ is

both to receive and to participate in the shape given to that which is received,” with the

understanding that, as participants within it, we cannot see or hear absolutely everything

about a thing or sound.438 Bennett counsels us to relish our mystification. “Vital

materialists will thus try to linger in those moments during which they find themselves

fascinated by objects, taking them as clues to the material vitality that they share with

them.”439

Vital materialism can serve as a comprehensive ontology for sound object

analysis, and demonstrate that this analytical mode is literally a collective movement and

interaction of material bodies. This interaction is democratic rather than dogmatic,

permitting sounds and listening subjects to affect and be affected by one another. As

such, sound object analysis engages with EDM on a level that is historically attributed

                                                            437 Ibid., 5.

438 Ibid., 17.

439 Ibid.

   

184

only to club dancing, and offers a vocabulary that accounts for EDM’s defiance of norms

as well as the embodied nature of listening.

   

185

Chapter 7.

Object, Sound, Materialism

Further Convergences

Sound objects have no stable, irrefutable mode of being (see Chapters 4-6). They

are Real-objective, subjective, dissembling. Passive things, standing-reserve, persuasive

agents (Chapters 1-2). Reducible, structural, transcontextual, gestural, or several of these

at once. Sound objects may function as musical terms, metaphorical linguistic structures,

theoretical constructs, subjective perceptions or relationships with sound, embodied

entities...

Instead of attempting to say – presumptuously and inevitably without success –

what a sound object is: as this inquiry meanders towards its conclusion, I would rather

postulate that the term sound object refers to a rhizomatic structure of relations, in which

sounds, listeners, and sound-producers are connected to each other by contingency and

rupture. In other words, having explored the various modes of being, the uses and

consequences of sound object, this project’s only possible conclusion is its beginning: the

only way to attempt to generalize about the multifarious phenomena encapsulated by the

term sound object is via the analogy of the rhizome with which my opening chapter

begins – and which, by definition, stymies generalization. Recall Deleuze and Guattari: in

a rhizome, which “ceaselessly establishes connections,” there are no universals.440 This,

in fact, is what makes the term sound object interesting and powerful: the term is at its

                                                            440 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7.

   

186

most useful when it is employed with all its possibilities, contradictions, and

convergences in mind. But, and hopefully my investigation makes this clear, an

investigation of the sound object as such (that is, the theoretical roots of the term sound

object, what constitutes the experience of a sound object, and its functioning in music and

other phenomena) can only proceed through rupture and questioning – and end with the

very same.

The plethora of possibilities that constitutes sound objects’ modes of being does

not permit firm conclusions about the essence of sound objects or their relationship to

listening and music. In fact, the myriad definitions and implications of the terminological

combination sound + object raises questions regarding basic categories of experience.

My inquiry concludes, open-ended, with some of these questions.

The ontological instability of the sound + object combination gives us to ask:

What is an object? What relationships do objects entail? And what do these questions

indicate about the subset of sound objects? Are sound objects actually objects? And if so,

what kind of an object is sound? These questions are fundamental. In that sense, they are

beginnings. At the same time, they are inevitable consequences of speculating on sound

objects from multiple perspectives. These questions illuminate the latent potency of the

sound + object combination: its ability to call two fundamental existential categories,

sound and object, into question.

   

187

Objects: Cartesian-Newtonian Materialism

What is an object? What relationships do objects bear to tangibility and

materiality? What perspectives does the word object encourage? Do sound objects

engage these relationships and perspectives?

Artists frequently call upon sound to circumscribe the shapes of physical spaces in

sound sculptures and installations, just as we require material objects, like furniture and

plastic artworks, to shape the spaces we inhabit. For example in Relocation.Vacant,

sound artist Yann Novak places a pair of speakers in an empty gallery, enabling field

recordings to determine the character of the space.

To philosophers, from Descartes of the pre-Enlightenment to the twenty-first-

century thinker Casey O’Callaghan, the most obvious kind of object is the visible,

tangible, ubiquitous thing: mug, rock, blade of grass, loudspeaker cone, colored paper in

a frame, and so on. As O’Callaghan points out, in his theory of object perception,

“Humans understand the world in terms of objects. We take the environment to be

populated by things like forks and bottles and steaks. Whether or not the world contains

any such items, medium-sized dry goods are one central component to our conceptual

schemes.”441 Hence, as we saw in Chapter 2 with Lakoff and Johnson, our abundant use

of object-based metaphors to make sense of less conceptually obvious phenomena.

According to Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, the editors of a recent collection on “new

                                                            441 O'Callaghan, "Object Perception: Vision and Audition," 803.

   

188

materialisms,” what most of us think of when we hear the word object are the solid,

bounded, and passive things exemplified by O’Callaghan’s “medium-sized dry goods.”442

Recall, from Chapter 2, that the association of objects with materiality,

corporeality, discreteness, inertia, quantifiability, mass, and tangibility, and the notion

that objects exist outside the human mind, originated with Descartes and Newton. The

most intuitive kind of object, the medium-sized dry good exemplified by the bottle and

steak in O’Callaghan’s analysis, instantiates these qualities. It is reasonable to expect that

on hearing the term sound object, we might draw associations with what we intuitively

understand as an object, hence with the qualities outlined by Descartes and Newton (in

addition to other qualities).

Indeed, Schaefferian sound objects correlate quite well with Cartesian-Newtonian

objects. Just as for Descartes, the defining characteristics of an object are its length,

breadth, and width – its boundaries or extension – for Schaeffer sound objects are

determined by the establishment of boundaries. Reduced listening effectively demarcates

a border between a sound object and its potential associations with sources and meanings.

As in Newtonian thought, the essence of a Schaefferian sound object is called “mass.” In

his Solfège, Schaeffer writes: “that which does not change [when a sound is electronically

manipulated, sped up or slowed down], the harmonic structure of the object, is its

‘mass.’”443 The mass of a sound is essentially what we hear, to which we subsequently

append meaningful associations. In Schaeffer’s words, “the structures to which the ear

                                                            442 Coole and Frost, "Introducing the New Materialisms," 7.

443 Schaeffer, Solfège De L'objet Sonore, 21.

   

189

refers depend on the mass of the object which is presented to it.”444 Overall, Schaefferian

sound objects possess the defining qualities of material objects under the Cartesian-

Newtonian scheme: discreteness and mass. Granted, Schaeffer is using “mass” as a

loaded (and somewhat unclear) metaphor for sonic properties. But my point is that

Schaeffer’s choice of terminology reflects the general alignment of his thinking with

Cartesian-Newtonian propensities.

For Descartes and Newton, the discreteness of an object also includes its

separation from the human mind. Objectivity attends upon objecthood: to be a Cartesian-

Newtonian object means to be objective, i.e. to possess ontological distinctness or

distance from subjective minds.445 However, it is not universally agreed that the apparent

discreteness of objects is an aspect of the world outside the mind. Corroborating

O’Callaghan, Henri Bergson suggests that perception imposes points of discreteness on

the continuum of experience, in order to enable our bodies to “take hold of” or act upon a

particular aspect of experience.446 Moreover, objectivity is not necessarily a property of a

phenomenon distinct from ourselves, but may be (instead or in addition) an intellectual

attitude that we adopt towards phenomena.

                                                            444 Ibid., 23.

445 See Michael Marder, "Sure Thing? On Things and Objects in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida," Postmodern Culture 15, no. 3 (2005): 3.

446 “The body, by the place which at each moment it occupies in the universe, indicates the parts and the aspects of matter on which we can lay hold: our perception, which exactly measures our virtual action on things, thus limits itself to the objects which actually influence our organs and prepare our movements.” Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. W.S. Palmer and N.M. Paul (New York: Zone, 2005), 179.

   

190

According to a recent history of objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison,

objectivity is not a characteristic of objects. Rather:

First and foremost, objectivity is the suppression of some aspect of the

self, the countering of subjectivity. Objectivity and subjectivity define

each other, like left and right or up and down. One cannot be understood,

even conceived, without the other. If objectivity was summoned into

existence to negate subjectivity, then the emergence of objectivity must

tally with the emergence of a certain kind of willful self, one perceived as

endangering scientific knowledge.447

Objectivity is an ideal intellectual attitude defined and first put into practice by European

natural scientists of the mid-nineteenth century, in particular anatomists, biologists, and

physicists. These

men of science began to fret openly about a new kind of obstacle to

knowledge: themselves. Their fear was that the subjective self was prone

to prettify, idealize, and, in the worst case, regularize observations to fit

theoretical expectations: to see what it hoped to see...They insisted,

instead, on the importance of effacing their own personalities and

developed techniques that left as little as possible to the discretion of

either [documenting] artist or scientist, in order to obtain an “objective

view.”448

                                                            447 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007), 37.

448 Ibid., 34-35.

   

191

For many post-nineteenth-century scientists, objectivity remains a moral imperative, or

what Daston and Galison call an “epistemic virtue.”449 Objectivity is thus a characteristic

of a virtuous scientific self, that steps out of the way to “Let nature speak for itself.”450

One could become this virtuous self by implementing mechanical procedures by means

of which one related to phenomena. Such procedures included using machines (e.g.

cameras instead of human draftsmen) to document one’s observations, as well as personal

“diligence and self-restraint, scant on genial interpretation”: a dogged determination not

to associate what one saw with any connotations other than those immediately visible (or

audible) in the object of observation.451 Daston and Galison therefore propose that

scientists who espouse mechanical objectivity as an epistemic virtue not only utilize

machines but also strive to become them, to see without interpreting as machines do.

“Instead of freedom of will, machines offered freedom from will – from the willful

interventions that had come to be seen as the most dangerous aspects of subjectivity.”452

Thus:

Automatism and objectivity converged...the machine embodied a positive

ideal of the observer...the machine stood for authenticity: it was at once

observer and artist, free from the inner temptation to theorize,

anthropomorphize, beautify, or interpret nature...Here the machine’s                                                             449 “Epistemic virtues are virtues properly so-called: they are norms that are internalized and enforced by appeal to ethical values, as well as to pragmatic efficacy in securing knowledge.” Ibid., 40-41.

450 Ibid., 120.

451 Ibid., 121.

452 Ibid., 123.

   

192

constitutive and symbolic functions blur, for the machine seemed at once a

means to and a symbol of mechanical objectivity.453

Note the parallels between the aspirations, techniques, and ontologies of

mechanical objectivity in natural science and those of Schaefferian reduced listening and

sound objects. Like objectivity, reduced listening “suppress[es]...some aspect of the self”

by bracketing out the personal associations that each listener subjectively draws between

sound and meaning, so that the sound object, the “authentic” essence of sound, might

“speak for itself.” Schaeffer also used mechanical equipment to isolate and reiterate

sounds, with the idea that this would help listeners to achieve the “reduced” stance, as

scientists use instruments rather than their eyes to observe phenomena objectively. In the

Traité, he writes that “the tape recorder operates on the level of objects,” and “prepares

the ear” to hear in the same terms.454 Yet even Schaeffer realized that reduced listening is

ultimately performed by the listening subject. The first sound objects thus emerged due to

dualistic practices mirroring those of scientific objectivity.

In both Schaefferian and natural-scientific practices, the objective is a kind of self,

specifically a subjective self that seeks to cancel itself out. “Objectivity was a desire, a

passionate commitment to suppress the will.”455 Yet “objectivity meant cultivating one’s

                                                            453 Ibid., 131-39.

454 “Dans le sens du faire ou même de l’analyse du sonore, le magnétophone [tape recorder] est un outil de laboratoire ou de lutherie. Il travaille au niveau élémentaire, mettons celui des objets. Dans le sens de l’entendre, le magnétophone deviant un outil à preparer l’oreille…” Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 34. Emphasis original.

455 Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 143.

   

193

will to bind and discipline the self by inhibiting desire.”456 Daston and Galison clarify the

self’s “process of algebraic [self-]cancellation”:

scientists strove for a self-denying passivity, which might be described as

the will to willessness. The only way for the active self to attain the

desired receptivity to nature was to turn its domineering will inward – to

practice self-discipline, self-restraint, self-abnegation, self-annihilation,

and a multitude of other techniques of self-imposed selflessness...By a

process of algebraic cancellation, the negating of subjectivity by the

subject became objectivity.457

Daston and Galison find a model for this self-nullified self in Kantian moral theory:

the Kantian moral self was monolithic and tightly organized around the

will, posited as free and autonomous (literally, “giving the law to itself”).

Insofar as the will had to overcome internal obstacles, these were not rival

faculties but the will itself: the “objective” side of the will, determined by

the imperatives of practical reason valid for all wills, had to bridle its

“subjective” side, which was responsive to the psychological motives of a

particular individual.458

Schaeffer likewise attempted to look beyond the particularity of aural experiences

by positing reduced listening as a means of foregrounding the “objective” essence of

                                                            456 Ibid., 185.

457 Ibid., 203-04.

458 Ibid., 210.

   

194

every auditory experience, a phenomenon that he named sound object. However, as we

saw in Chapter 4 – and as Daston and Galison would naturally point out -- the objective

attitude of reduced listening was a subjective achievement, as are all sound objects.

Paradoxically, in the apprehension of Schaefferian sound objects, a subjective act is

employed to attempt to uncover what’s “really [objectively] there,” beyond and

underlying all subjective perceptions.

Sound objects exemplify Bergsonian matter, constructed and rendered discrete by

subjective perception, as much as they do Cartesian-Newtonian objects rendered by the

scientific-objective attitude described by Daston and Galison. Scientific posturing is

common among theorists and artists who use the term sound object. Schaeffer preferred

to think of the recording studio in which he manipulated tapes and records as “le

laboratoire,” posing as an applied scientist rather than an artist.459 He recognized that

one could look at music in the “freer” terms of “personal expression” or from a

“scientific” perspective.460 “The second [scientific] point of view, contra [the first],

presents us a succession of ‘things in themselves,’ susceptible to being studied for

themselves, seeming to enable us to arrive at ‘objective’ knowledge and at truths of the

scientific kind, at universal validity.”461 Schaeffer recognized that “in the best of

worlds...[the] physicist would say to his [musical] colleague: what do you hear? and the

                                                            459 Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 404.

460 Compare “la liberté laissée au talent de chacun dans l’expression personnelle” to “le passage à la science.” Ibid., 131.

461 “Le second point de vue, par contre, qui nous présente une succession de ‘choses en soie’ susceptible d’être étudiées pour elles-mêmes, semble pouvoir nous conduir à des connaissances ‘objectives’ et à des vérités de type scientifique, d’une validité universelle.” Ibid.

   

195

musician would say to the physicist: what do you measure?”462 At times, however,

Schaeffer felt that he should “give preference to the scientific tendency” in the name of

“objective” truth.463 François Delalande reports that as a researcher Schaeffer wanted to

institute multiple, interdisciplinary “music sciences,” that would have as their general

goal a “movement back to the essentials,” ergo to non-subjective truths.464

Defining microsound, Roads also approaches sound objects “scientifically.” In a

line of thought that he traces back to Descartes, Newton, and Albert Einstein, as well as

the philosophical atomists Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, Roads conceives sound

objects as molecular aggregates of “elementary” sound particles (0.1 seconds or less in

duration).465 He emphasizes the scientific heritage of his theory alongside his debt to

Iannis Xenakis, the first composer inspired by his scientific and mathematical training to

think in terms of “sound grains.”466

So far we have reviewed the ontology of objects from the Cartesian-Newtonian

perspective, still the default mode of natural science. We have seen that sound objects can

                                                            462 “Que se passerait-il dans le meilleur des mondes? Avertis de la nécessité de leur collaboration, musicien et physicien se donneraient ainsi rendez-vous autour du ‘point commun,’ la pièce à conviction, désormais tangible sous forme de bande magnétique, réceptrice du ‘signal physique’ aussi bien que mémoire potentielle, après lecture, de ‘l’objet musical.’ Le physicien dirait à son collègue: qu’entendez-vous? et le musicien dirait au physicien: qu mesurez-vous? Ainsi apparaîtraient les corrélations annoncées.” Ibid., 145.

463 “Nous...donnons raison à la tendance scientifique: nous renonçons à comprendre immédiatement les mécanismes de l’écoute, préférant expérimenter, à la façon des physiciens, en mettant en relation des causes et des effets.” Ibid., 143. Emphasis original.

464 François Delalande, "Schaeffer and Research," in Polychrome Portraits: Pierre Schaeffer, ed. Évelyne Gayou and translated by François Couture (Paris: Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, 2009), 104-05.

465 Roads, Microsound, 50-51.

466 Ibid., 64.

   

196

be understood as objects in the Cartesian-Newtonian sense, and that they therefore

embody post-Enlightenment modes of thought and scientific, mechanical-objective

perspectives. In doing so, sound objects bring Cartesian-Newtonian materialism to the

forefront of contemporary inquiry. As we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, several features of

Cartesian-Newtonian objects – in particular tangibility, materiality, discreteness,

objectivity, and the endorsement of Enlightenment anthropocentrism – are not fully

adequate descriptions of sound or music. What else might objects be, considering that

they can be sounds?

Objects, New Materialisms

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a wealth of new theories of matter and

philosophies of the object arose to combat the ideals of domination permitted by

Cartesian-Newtonian materialism. Among many of their advocates, these alternate

theories are known as “new materialisms.” The new materialisms are fascinating in and

of themselves; however to describe them all would be to exceed the scope of the current

project. I will describe only a few that may help us to interrogate the objectness of sound

objects.

Introduced in Chapter 6, Bennett’s “vital materialism” is fast gaining attention

among twenty-first-century philosophers.467 To contest the “haunting association of

matter with passivity” posited by Cartesian-Newtonian materialism, Bennett poses a

                                                            467 Jane Bennett, "A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism," in New Materialisms, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 47. See also Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.

   

197

“thing-power materialism” that posits “technological and natural materialities,” by which

she means artificial and natural objects, as “actors alongside and within us.”468 For

Bennett, objects are “vitalities, trajectories, and powers irreducible to the meanings,

intentions, or symbolic values humans invest in them.”469 In her system, “matter is an

active principle and, though it inhabits us and our inventions, [it] also acts as an outside

or alien power.”470 Thus, pace Descartes, matter is not wholly separate from the mind.

However, Bennett is not an idealist: she does not contend that objects and matter exist

only in the mind. Rather, in vital materialism, objects and humans bodily interpenetrate

one another, since both consist of living, acting matter. For Bennett, all objects are alive,

and possess the ability to act. My analysis of Yasushi Miura’s EDM track Capricious,

which postulates sounds as embodied individuals with the potential to act upon their

listeners, is an example of vital materialism in action.

With Bennett, Diana Coole protests the Cartesian-Newtonian presupposition that

matter is merely an inert form of standing-reserve. She rejects the oppositions between

subject and object, mind and body, entailed by Descartes’ and Newton’s notions of

matter. Instead, she rearticulates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory that all things

collectively constitute a single body of self-generating, self-activating “flesh.”471 Flesh –

                                                            468 Bennett, "A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism," 47-49.

469 Ibid., 47.

470 Ibid.

471 See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 54-57. And, in its entirety: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège De France, ed. Dominique Séglard, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003).

   

198

a new-materialist conception of existence as such – itself consists of bodies “coexist[ing]

within a relational field that loops and effervesces around and through them, where flesh

folds over itself to engender, traverse, and ‘animate’” our own and other bodies.472

Events, the births of new things, even ideas occur when this fleshy relational field “folds

over itself” to meet itself. Unlike Descartes and Newton, who insist on the discreteness of

objects and their inability to move or change except at the prompting of an external agent

(God or a human subject), Coole suggests that all phenomena are “mutually encroaching,

with things touching me as I touch them and myself.”473

In Chapters 5 and 6, my theory of sound object analysis implied that sound

objects are agents that call upon listeners to join them in dialogue; even as listeners bring

sound objects into existence by acting upon sound, that is by choosing to hear it in a

certain way. Sound objects therefore instantiate Bennettian active, vital matter. We could

also say, following Coole, that sound objects interact and meld with listeners so as to

bring themselves into existence, within and comprising a complex of relationships, that

themselves consist of sonic and listening bodies. Sound objects are occurrences of the

folding-over-on-itself of the flesh of existence: they are events, encounters of embodied

listeners with sounds. As Carlos Palombini puts it in an essay on musique concrète, a

                                                            472 Diana Coole, "The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh," in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 106.

473 Ibid., 107.

   

199

sound object is a “practice...a work and a game,” all of which are varieties of

encounter.474

Despite the apparent “givenness” of objects observed above by Coole and Frost,

O’Callaghan, and Schaeffer: as an encounter, the sound object is an utterly contingent

occurrence. It is an encounter that might not have happened, and rarely happens in a

predictable way. Though I hear a sound as a reducible sound object, I might have heard it

as transcontextual instead; I might have declined to adopt any of the listening

perspectives that engender sound objects. According to Coole and Frost, an emphasis on

contingency is characteristic of new materialisms. Following Louis Althusser, new

materialism is typically “aleatory materialism” or “’materialism of the

encounter’...distinguished by its nonteleological principles.”475 Althusser theorized the

object in the matter of the atomist Lucretius: as an “encounter...a chance conjuncture of

atoms, the event, whose consequence may be the provisional configuring of facts or

forms.”476 The atomist tradition to which Althusser refers is the same as that espoused by

Roads; but the emphasis is different. Where Roads posits sound objects as divisible but

static structures with fixed (durational) qualities, new materialism introduces bodies that

occur by meeting by chance. In fact, new materialist ontologies work for Roads as well.

To take an example: if each of the granulated glissandi prevalent in his Sonal Atoms

(1999) constitutes a structural sound object, then each of these objects constitutes an

                                                            474 Carlos Palombini, "Musique Concrète Revisited," Electronic Musicological Review 4 (1999).

475 Coole and Frost, "Introducing the New Materialisms," 35.

476 Ibid.

   

200

aggregate of sound particles which Roads selected not because he was driven to do so by

teleological necessity, but as part of a contingent aesthetic decision that he might have

made differently. The key difference from Cartesian-Newtonian schemes here is the

emphasis on contingency, which Descartes and Newton did not espouse.477

How do we perceive these encounters that are also bodies and events? In Coole’s

scheme, as I read it, we perceive an encounter as a unified experience because we

perceive everything according to the “standard” established by our own bodies.

Fundamentally, each of us is a unified material body, and therefore perceives other events

and objects as such. (Chapter 6 describes the vital materialist philosophy at the heart of

this view, and potential objections to its application to music.) A human body “lend[s] to

objects” – which are also encounters, events, and folds in the existential flesh – “a

sensuous unity that is meaningful for the body because it has existential familiarity as a

style of being – ‘a certain rhythm of existence’ – that is recognized as a variant of the

body’s own and thereby delivered to it ‘in the flesh.’”478 An object is a meeting between

my body and others.

So, too, is sound, especially in music and sound art, where hearing is a locus of

experience. Sound is “lived,” as Eidsheim puts it: “[S]ound is a multisensory experience,

tactile as well as aural,” since “aural experience is predicated on our physical contact

                                                            477 In fact, though I cannot go into this here, Descartes was more concerned with the opposite of contingency, with proving that everything boils down to a deliberate, non-arbitrary decision made by God. See Descartes, Principles of Philosophy.

478 Coole, "The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh," 102. Quoting Merleau-Ponty.

   

201

with sound waves through shared media, in this case water and air, flesh and bone.” 479

Sound is indeed an encounter between material bodies. The sound object is this

encounter, itself a material body. Since we may associate, even equate, objects with

bodies and materiality – and since we intuitively do so – the term sound object brings the

embodied characteristics of sound to the forefront. In contrast, says Eidsheim, musical

notes tend to occlude the fact that sound is an embodied encounter. “[A] musical

experience is not something that can be captured in notation, but an open-ended and

pluralistic negotiation with sound in all its physicality,” she writes.480 New materialists

like Coole might reply that this negotiation is indeed “a something,” and that all

[some]things are negotiations. This notion is foregrounded by the sound object, which as

we have seen constitutes both a material body (in Descartes’ and Newton’s systems as

well as Bennett’s and Coole’s) and also a negotiation between listening subjectivity and

living sound.

Before turning from objects to sounds, I want to re-emphasize that the new

materialisms are fundamentally non-dual: “material” objects and bodies are not distinct

from “ideal” mental subjectivities. This is the case even in materialisms that are not

explicitly “new,” but that evince greater sympathy with Bennett and Coole than with

Descartes and Newton. For example, in Hegel’s metaphysics: objects, sounds, and other

phenomena typically characterized as “external” are not existentially distinct from our

subjectivities. The coincidence of mind and body, subject and object, is the main point of

                                                            479 Eidsheim, "Sensing Voice: Materiality and the Lived Body in Singing and Listening," 146.

480 Ibid.: 136.

   

202

Hegel’s Science of Logic and Phenomenology of Spirit. For Hegel, realizing that we as

knowing subjects are the world and everything in it, is Absolute Knowledge.481 We

should also note Schopenhauer’s intimation that the world constitutes both “Will” and

“Representation,” interior and exterior or spiritual and physical aspects.482 Sound objects

are genuine objects in the sense of Descartes’ and Newton’s inert, heavy objects; and in

the new-materialist sense of the object as a vital, embodied encounter with and of

subjectivities. In Coole’s and Bennett’s writings, the new and traditional approaches to

materialism are opposed. Sound objects, however, provide a point of contact between the

two theories: both Cartesian and new materialism “fit” aspects of the objectness of sound

objects. In fact, it may well be their combination that does the most justice to such a

complex materiality. Sound objects call both standpoints into question, prohibiting either

one from eclipsing the other.

Sounds

What is sound, that it can combine with objects in the manifold configurations I

have described? Given the flexibility of new materialisms, sounds are material bodies

even as they are encounters, relational events. In Eidsheim’s work, we experience sounds

tangibly: our bodies touch them as they touch our bodies. Moreover, in O’Callaghan’s

                                                            481 Hegel, Science of Logic, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, System of Science, First Part: The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

482 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation.

   

203

philosophy, we cannot avoid processing sounds as objects if we are to hear them at all:

hearing is a species of object-perception. To hear a sound is to hear a sound object.

O’Callaghan is fully aware that what our ears undergo during audition,

physiologically speaking, is “stimulation by pressure” generated by moving air.483

However, in order to experience sound, to listen or even to become aware of it, we must

recognize it as an object. All “perception targets objects,” writes O’Callaghan. “Thus,

attention, perceptual belief, and action hint that experience not merely causes cognition

aimed at objects, but that it does so because objects figure among the things we

perceive.”484 Specifically, “[a]udition involves...awareness as of a variety of individuals

that deserve the name ‘auditory object’ in light of their composition and continuity.

Auditory objects, like visual objects, are mereologically complex individuals that persist

through time.”485 Note the similarity here between O’Callaghan’s sound object and

Schaeffer’s: Schaeffer postulated that the sound object “endures through changes,” and

“enables different listeners (or the same listener several times) to bring out as many

aspects of it as there have been ways of focusing the ear.”486

In other words, auditory objects are events perceived as unified and discrete.

Awareness of sound requires “segregating the auditory scene into separate sound objects

or streams characterized by complexes of pitch, timbre, loudness, and location...treating

                                                            483 O'Callaghan, "Object Perception: Vision and Audition," 820.

484 Ibid.: 803.

485 Ibid.: 805.

486 Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 59.

   

204

the auditory objects or streams in question as particular individuals...Awareness of an

auditory object or stream constitutes awareness of a sound, an audible particular.”487

Lived sounds, sounds as they are experienced, are sound objects. Not figuratively,

not metaphorically. We hear sound objects, when we hear anything. For O’Callaghan,

sound objects are objective and, at the same time, they arise within each listening subject

as foundations that enable hearing to function. Thus far, the present inquiry has claimed

that listening grounds and generates sound objects. With O’Callaghan, we learn that the

converse is also true: sound objects ground and enable hearing. We hear sound objects

not by choice or contingently, but of necessity.

What about complex sounds of which we are not entirely aware to the fullest

possible extent? Although a world’s worth of sound is available to us at any one moment,

we do not register all of it. Think also of the noise excerpted from Mem1’s Barents in

Chapter 4: we cannot process every frequency. It is tempting here to summon Coole’s

Merleau-Pontian existential flesh. Indeed, Don Ihde theorizes an “auditory field” in

which material bodies and living interact. “The field of sound is also a penetrating

presence that in certain instances unites and dissolves certain presumed ‘individualities’

by its penetration in and through interiors...This power of sound [which Ihde calls the

‘power of penetration’] is also a dynamic and animated or lively quality of sound.”488

True: I am in the flesh, part of the field. But Coole would most likely argue that I am not

all of the flesh. It is physically impossible for me to join in every fold. Similarly, I am

                                                            487 Casey O'Callaghan, "Constructing a Theory of Sounds," Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 5 (2009): 251.

488 Ihde, Listening and Voice, 83.

   

205

immersed in all the sound there is in a given encounter; when I encounter a sound, the

sound and I blend with one another – but I do not hear every sound. Sound as a whole

thus eludes me, it refuses to be made mine, to let me make sense or even become aware

of all of it.489

It seems, then, that sound objects must be heard in order to actually (not just

potentially) exist. But sound exceeds hearing. Is there any proof, however, that

unperceived sounds do in fact occur? In a well-known thought experiment, Peter

Strawson fashions a universe in which only sounds exist. His goal, in positing such a

universe, is to find out whether or not a conceptual scheme is possible in which (contra

Coole and O’Callaghan) material bodies are not the standards or “ontologically

prior...basic particulars” according to which we perceive everything.490 Regarding sound,

his question is: If the world only consisted of sounds, would it still make sense to talk

about things other than myself (“objective particulars”)?491 He reduces this question to:

Do sounds exist outside the mind? Do unheard sounds occur?

                                                            489 See also Melissa Orlie on “impersonal matter.” Melissa A. Orlie, "Impersonal Matter," in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

490 Strawson writes, “It seems to me also unobjectionable to use the expression, ‘ontologically prior,’ in such a way that the claim that material bodies are basic particulars in our [everyday and typical philosophical] conceptual scheme is equivalent to the claim that material bodies are ontologically prior, in that scheme, to other types of particular...[But what] I want to consider is whether, and if so how, it could be otherwise. Could there exist a conceptual scheme which was like ours in that it provided for a system of objective and identifiable particulars, but was unlike ours in that material bodies were not the basic particulars of the system...I mean ‘Can we make intelligible to ourselves the idea of such a scheme?’” P.F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Routledge, 1959), 59-60.

491 Ibid.

   

206

For to have a conceptual scheme in which a distinction is made between

oneself or one’s states and auditory items which are not states of

oneself...is to have a conceptual scheme in which it is logically possible

that such items should exist whether or not they were being observed, and

hence...that there could be reidentifiable particulars in a purely auditory

world if the conditions of a non-solipsistic consciousness could be fulfilled

for such a world.492

Strawson concludes that a sound-only universe would be possible only if this

universe included listeners with “persistent audible bod[ies].”493 I will return to this point

below, after noting Brian Kane’s observation: the situations generated by acousmatic and

reduced listening parallel Strawson’s sound-only universe.494 Reduced listening seals

sound off from everything other than itself. Kane believes that Schaefferian theory fails

for the same reason as Strawson’s thought experiment: they bracket out the personal,

embodied perspective of the listener.495 To return to Strawson’s conclusions: leaving

aside the possibility, neglected by Strawson, that sounds might themselves be material

bodies, he admits that for reidentifiable particulars to be locatable in a sound-only

universe, that universe would have to admit embodied observers, living in space.496 Thus,

                                                            492 Ibid., 72.

493 Ibid., 84.

494 Kane, "The Music of Skepticism: Intentionality, Materiality, Forms of Life," 239.

495 Ibid., 239-40.

496 Strawson, Individuals, 75, 84-86.

   

207

he is unable to prove that unheard sounds exist, or that sounds in general occur

independently of listening minds.

Hence Kane’s objection to Schaefferian theory: the “object” that is supposedly

uncovered from the “objective” standpoint of reduced listening does not necessarily exist

“objectively.” All I know is what I hear: as we noted above, the sound object is an

encounter that may or may not occur. It may not even exist: I am rightfully certain of

nothing besides myself.497

Jean-Luc Nancy takes a more positive outlook on this potentially empty

solipsism. For Nancy, sound “refers” to the listening self by mirroring, thus illuminating,

the self’s formal structure. Sound may thus bring each of us to greater self-awareness. A

sound for Nancy is a “referral” to itself: it travels from the world into a listener, where it

“re-sounds” even as it continues sounding in the world, beyond the listener.

Sound is also made of referrals: it spreads in space, where it resounds

while still resounding “in me,” as we say...In the external or internal

space, it resounds, that is, it re-emits itself while still actually “sounding,”

which is already “re-sounding” since that’s nothing else but referring back

to itself. To sound is to vibrate in itself or by itself...to stretch out, to carry

itself and be resolved into vibrations that both return it to itself and place it

outside itself...A self is nothing other than a form or function of referral: a

self is made of a relationship to self, or of a presence to self, which is

nothing other than the mutual referral between a perceptible individuation

                                                            497 Kane, "The Music of Skepticism: Intentionality, Materiality, Forms of Life," 131-32, 239-40.

   

208

and an intelligible identity...To be listening will always, then, be to be

straining toward or in an approach to the self...neither to a proper self (I),

nor to the self of an other, but to the form or structure of self as such, that

is to say, to the form, structure, and movement of an infinite referral...498

In an echo of new materialism, Nancy thus removes the ontological divide between

listener and sound, or more generally between self and other, subject and object. Given

his and Strawson’s assessments, must we then conclude that sound cannot exist without a

listening subject?

Conclusion as Introduction

Personally I would prefer to avoid the anthropocentricism entailed by an

affirmative response to this question. With Bennett, Coole, and Frost, I prefer the more

inclusive perspective of new materialism, that enables nonhuman phenomena, including

events and encounters – the meeting of the ear and receptive mind with moving air, for

example – to function and exist as entities and material bodies. However, Nancy’s,

Strawson’s, and O’Callaghan’s theories are just as important because of the vital

questions they provoke.

For instance, according to O’Callaghan, sound objects are real; in fact they make

hearing and listening possible. Is my assertion in Chapter 2 incorrect, therefore, that

sound objects are metaphors which dissemble sound’s true manner of being? Or might

O’Callaghan be incorrect, since he also attests that sounds are only temporal, and have no

                                                            498 Nancy, Listening, 8-9. Emphasis original.

   

209

materiality or spatial existence?499 Can anything exist both figuratively and literally? Can

sound objects’ dialectical ontology extend even to that? Can sound objects exist at once

by choice, contingently, and necessarily?

Here my questions, provoked by O’Callaghan, converge with Strawson’s

questions, which in turn would be subject to rending and rupture by deconstructionist,

feminist, posthuman, and object-oriented philosophies. I will close this inquiry with a few

questions that may also suggest directions for further theoretical examinations of sound

objects based on these cutting-edge philosophies.

If, as Strawson implies, sounds do not occur independently of listening subjects,

then what is sound’s relationship to presence? Is sound ever just there? Presence is no

longer fashionable as a basis of philosophical judgment – thanks to Jacques Derrida,

Adriana Cavarero, Katherine Hayles, and many others – because it implies a limiting

stasis and legibility. With Cavarero, Frances Dyson protests “the abstraction and

desonorization of the voice, the containment of sound and its exclusion from what counts

as knowledge, [which] parallel and penetrate the development of ocularcentrism – of a

metaphysics grounded in the visible and material presence of the static and enduring

object.”500 Dyson’s point, which she shares with Derrida and other theorists, is that sound

defies “presence,” therefore defies objecthood. But she does not take new materialisms

into account: theories in which even objecthood and materiality eschew the fixity

typically implied by metaphysics grounded in “presence.” Future research could attempt

                                                            499 O'Callaghan, "Object Perception: Vision and Audition," 804.

500 Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture, 21.

   

210

to reconcile, via sound, new materialism with deconstruction and “anti-presence”

perspectives.

A contrasting perspective is that of object-oriented ontology, first theorized by

Graham Harman in 2002 and still under development by Harman, Ian Boghost, Timothy

Morton, and others. Object-oriented ontology interrogates existence as such from a

perspective centered on things. Object-oriented ontology starts from the position that all

things exist – even fictional objects and sound objects – and theorizes their existence as at

once objective, atomistic aggregates, and subjective, human and social constructions.501

How might such a theory manage sounds and sound objects? Still other convergences

with these phenomena are possible, some as yet unthought-of.

                                                            501 See Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. And Boghost, Ian. “What is Object-Oriented Ontology?” http://www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog.shtml. Accessed 29 March, 2011.

   

211

Bibliography

Abbate, Carolyn. "Debussy's Phantom Sounds." Cambridge Opera Journal 10, no. 1 (1998): 67-96.

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

———. In Search of Wagner. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 1991.

———. "Vers Une Musique Informelle." In Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, 269-322. London: Verso, 1994.

———., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Alwakeel, Ramzy. "I.D.M. As a 'Minor' Literature: The Treatment of Cultural and Musical Norms by 'Intelligent Dance Music'." Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 1, no. 1 (2009): 1-21.

Anon. "Yasushi Miura - Circus." Electronic Music World (2004): Available at <http://electronicmusicworld.com/2004/11/28/yasushimiuracircus/>

———. "Yasushi Miura - Kernel: Magnitude No. 8." Heathen Harvest (2009): Available at <http://www.heathenharvest.com/article.php?story=20090418175955444>

Badiou, Alain. Theory of the Subject. Translated by Bruno Bosteels. London: Continuum, 2009.

Barbosa, Alvaro. "Public Sound Objects: A Shared Environment for Networked Music Practice on the Web." Organised Sound 10, no. 3 (2005): 233-42.

Barnes, Jonathan. Early Greek Philosophy. London: Penguin, 2001.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

———. "A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism." In New Materialisms, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 47-69. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by W.S. Palmer and N.M. Paul. New York: Zone, 2005.

   

212

Blackburn, Simon. Truth: A Guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Bohlman, Philip. "Epilogue: Music and Canons." In Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, edited by Katherine Bergeron and Philip Bohlman, 197-210. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Bonds, Mark Evan. "Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century." Journal of the American Musicological Society 50, no. 2/3 (1997): 387-420.

Brook, Andrew. "Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/kant-mind/. Accessed October 6, 2010.

Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

Butler, Mark J. . Unlocking the Groove. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Carpenter, Patricia. "The Musical Object." Current Musicology no. 5 (1967): 56-87.

Cavarero, Adriana. For More Than One Voice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Chion, Michel. Guide Des Objets Sonores. Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1983.

———. Guide to Sound Objects. Translated by John Dack http://modisti.com/news/?p=14239, 2009.

Clarke, Eric F. Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Collin, Matthew. Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House London: Serpent's Tail, 2010.

Coole, Diana. "The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh." In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 92-115. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. "Introducing the New Materialisms." In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1-46. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

   

213

———, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Cox, Christoph, and Daniel Warner, eds. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. London: Continuum, 2004.

Crowther, Paul. "Defining Art, Defending the Canon, Contesting Culture." British Journal of Aesthetics 44, no. 4 (2004): 361-77.

Cutler, Chris. "Plunderphonics." In Music, Electronic Media and Culture, edited by Simon Emmerson, 87-114. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone, 2007.

Davies, Stephen. Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Delalande, François. "Schaeffer and Research." In Polychrome Portraits: Pierre Schaeffer, edited by Évelyne Gayou and translated by François Couture, 103-08. Paris: Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, 2009.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Dell'Antonio, Andrew, ed. Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Demers, Joanna. Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

———. Steal This Music. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2006.

Descartes, René. Principles of Philosophy. Translated by John Veitch. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2009.

Dodd, Julian. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Dyson, Frances. Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Eidsheim, Nina Sun. "Sensing Voice: Materiality and the Lived Body in Singing and Listening." Senses and Society 6, no. 2 (2011): 133-55.

eM. "Liner Notes to Greater Than Zero, Less Than One." FOU.05B: Foundry, 1998.

   

214

Emmerson, Simon. Living Electronic Music. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

———. "Living Presence." In Living Electronic Music, 1-34. Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2007.

———, ed. Music, Electronic Media, and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.

Emmerson, Simon, and Denis Smalley. "Electro-Acoustic Music."

Ferreira, Pedro Peixoto. "When Sound Meets Movement: Performance in Electronic Dance Music." Leonardo Music Journal 18, (2008): 17-20.

Field, Ambrose. "Simulation and Reality: The New Sonic Objects." In Music, Electronic Media and Culture, edited by Simon Emmerson, 36-55. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000.

Fink, Robert. "Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon." American Music 16, no. 2 (1998): 135-79.

———. "Going Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface." In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 102-37. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Flueckiger, Barbara. "The Unidentified Sound Object." Paper presented at the ASF Conference, Paris, 2002.

Fontana, Bill. "The Relocation of Ambient Sound: Urban Sound Sculpture." Leonardo 20, no. 2 (1987): 143-47.

———. "Resoundings." http://resoundings.org/Pages/Resoundings.html, ND.

———. "Sound Island." http://www.resoundings.org/Pages/sound%20island.html, 1996.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Interpretation of Dreams." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud - Vols 4-5. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.

Fried, Michael. "Art and Objecthood." In Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 148-72. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Continuum, 1975.

Gaillot, Michel. Multiple Meaning: Techno - a Political and Artistic Laboratory of the Present. Translated by Warren Niesluchowski. Paris: Dis Voir, 1998.

   

215

Godøy, Rolf Inge. "Gestural-Sonorous Objects: Embodied Extensions of Schaeffer's Conceptual Apparatus." Organised Sound 11, no. 2 (2006): 149-57.

———. "Gestural Affordances of Musical Sound." In Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning, edited by Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman, 103-25. New York: Routledge, 2010.

———. "Images of Sonic Objects." Organised Sound 15, no. 1 (2010): 54-62.

———. "Motor-Mimetic Music Cognition." Leonardo 36, no. 4 (2003): 317-19.

———. "Music Theory by Sonic Objects." In Polychrome Portraits: Pierre Schaeffer, edited by Évelyne Gayou and translated by François Couture, 67-76. Paris: Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, 2009.

Godøy, Rolf Inge, and Marc Leman, eds. Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Goehr, Lydia. Elective Affinities. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

———. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Hall, A. Rupert, and Marie Boas Hall. "Newton's Theory of Matter." Isis 51, no. 2 (1960): 131-44.

Hanslick, Eduard. The Beautiful in Music. Translated by Gustav Cohen. Edited by Morris Weitz. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957.

Harman, Graham. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court, 2002.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 1969.

———. System of Science, First Part: The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Terry Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Heidegger, Martin. "The Origin of the Work of Art." In Poetry, Language, Thought, 15-86. New York: HarperCollins, 1971.

———. "The Question Concerning Technology." In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, edited by and translated by William Lovitt, 3-36. New York: Harper, 1977.

   

216

Helmholtz, Hermann L.F. On the Sensation of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. Translated by Alexander J. Ellis. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895.

Hope, Cat. "Infrasonic Music." Leonardo Music Journal 19, (2009): 51-56.

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by F. Kersten. 2 vols. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983.

———. "Transcendental Phenomenology and the Way through the Science of Phenomenological Psychology." In The Essential Husserl, edited by Donn Welton, 332-36. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Ingarden, Roman. The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity. Translated by Adam Czerniawski. Edited by Jean G. Harrell. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986.

Josipovici, Gabriel. "Review: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works by Lydia Goehr." Music & Letters 74, no. 1 (1993): 86-87.

Kane, Brian. "L'objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction." Organised Sound 12, no. 1 (2007): 15-24.

———. "The Music of Skepticism: Intentionality, Materiality, Forms of Life." PhD Diss.: University of California, Berkeley, 2006.

Kankaanpää, Vesa. "Displaced Time: Transcontextual References to Time in Kaija Saariaho's Stilleben." Organised Sound 1, no. 02 (1996): 87-92.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

LaBelle, Brandon. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. London: Continuum, 2006.

   

217

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 11 - the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964-1965). Translated by Alan Sheridan. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. London: W. W. Norton, 1981.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

Lucretius. On the Nature of the Universe. Translated by R. E. Latham. Edited by John Godwin. London: Penguin, 2005.

Lukács, Georg. "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat." In History and Class Consciousness: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm., 1923.

Marder, Michael. "Sure Thing? On Things and Objects in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida." Postmodern Culture 15, no. 3 (2005): 1-35.

Matmos, and Carlos M. Pozo. "Matmos Interview." Perfect Sound Forever (1999): Available at <http://www.furious.com/perfect/matmos.html>.

Maus, Fred Everett. "Concepts of Musical Unity." In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 171-92. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège De France. Translated by Robert Vallier. Edited by Dominique Séglard. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003.

———. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2002.

Morris, Michael. "Doing Justice to Musical Works." In Philosophers on Music, edited by Kathleen Stock, 52-78. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Morton, Timothy. "Materialism Expanded and Remixed." Paper presented at the New Materialisms Conference, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 2010.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

   

218

Newton, Isaac. The Pricipia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Translated by I.B. Cohen and A. Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

O'Callaghan, Casey. "Constructing a Theory of Sounds." Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 5, (2009): 247-70.

———. "Object Perception: Vision and Audition." Philosophy Compass 3, no. 4 (2008): 803-29.

———. Sounds: A Philosophical Theory: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Orlie, Melissa A. "Impersonal Matter." In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 116-38. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Palombini, Carlos. "Machine Songs V: Pierre Schaeffer: From Research into Noises to Experimental Music." Computer Music Journal 17, no. 3 (1993): 14-19.

———. "Musique Concrète Revisited." Electronic Musicological Review 4, (1999): www.rem.ufpr.br/REMv4/vol4/arti-palombini.htm.

Pasnau, Robert. "What Is Sound?" The Philosophical Quarterly 49, no. 196 (1999): 309-24.

Pippin, Robert B. "Technology as Ideology: Prospects." In Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, 185-206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Reynolds, Simon. Generation Ecstasy: Into the Worlds of Techno and Rave Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Roads, Curtis. Microsound. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.

Rodgers, Tara. "Synthesizing Sound: Metaphor in Audio-Technical Discourse and Synthesis History." PhD Diss: McGill University, 2010.

Savage, Roger W. H. Hermeneutics and Music Criticism. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Schaeffer, Pierre. "Preface." In Guide Des Objets Sonores, by Michel Chion. Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1983.

———. Solfège De L'objet Sonore. Translated by Livia Bellagamba. Paris: Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, 1998.

———. Traité Des Objets Musicaux. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966.

   

219

Scherzinger, Martin. "The Return of the Aesthetic: Musical Formalism and Its Place in Political Critique." In Beyond Structural Listening: Postmodern Modes of Hearing, edited by Andrew dell'Antonio, 252-78. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. 2 vols. Vol. 1. London: Dover, 1969.

Scruton, Roger. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Smalley, Denis. "Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes." Organised Sound 2, no. 2 (1997): 107-26.

Solie, Ruth A. "Review: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, by Lydia Goehr." Notes 50, no. 2 (1993): 604-05.

Sontag, Susan. "Against Interpretation." In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 3-14. New York: Picador, 1966.

Spitzer, Michael. Metaphor and Musical Thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004.

Strachan, Robert. "Uncanny Space: Theory, Experience and Affect in Contemporary Electronic Music." Transcultural Music Review 14, (2010).

Strawson, P.F. Individuals. London: Routledge, 1959.

Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Taruskin, Richard. "Foreward to the Imaginary Museum of Musical Works." In The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, by Lydia Goehr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Taylor, Timothy D. Strange Sounds. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Thomasson, Amie. "Roman Ingarden." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta: URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ingarden/>.

Thomson, Phil. "Atoms and Errors: Towards a History and Aesthetics of Microsound." Organised Sound 9, no. 02 (2004): 207-18.

Vattimo, Gianni. Art's Claim to Truth. Translated by Luca D'Isanto. Edited by Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

   

220

Waters, Simon. "Beyond the Acousmatic: Hybrid Tendencies in Electroacoustic Music." In Music, Electronic Media and Culture, edited by Simon Emmerson, 56-86. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000.

White, Harry. "'If It's Baroque, Don't Fix It': Reflections on Lydia Goehr's 'Work-Concept' and the Historical Integrity of Musical Composition." Acta Musicologica 69, no. 1 (1997): 94-104.

Whitelaw, Mitchell. "Sound Particles and Microsonic Materialism." Contemporary Music Review 22, no. 4 (2003): 93-101.

Wilson, Brian. Fight, Flight, or Chill: Subcultures, Youth, and Rave into the Twenty-First Century. Toronto: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006.

Windsor, Luke. "Through and around the Acousmatic: The Interpretation of Electroacoustic Sounds." In Music, Electronic Media and Culture edited by Simon Emmerson, 7-35. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000.

Wishart, Trevor. On Sonic Art. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Wlodarski, Amy Lynn. "The Testimonial Aesthetics of Different Trains." Journal of the Americal Musicological Society 63, no. 1 (2010): 99-142.

Wong, Mandy-Suzanne. "Action, Composition - Morton Feldman and Physicality." Paper presented at the College Music Society, Pacific Chapter Meeting, 2009.

———. "The Glammogr and the Present Inquiry." Newsletter of the UCLA Center for Research on Women: Special Edition - Writing and Music, (2010): http://www.csw.ucla.edu/publications/newsletters/ay-2009-10/writing-music-10/writing-music-10-special-edition. Accessed 10 November, 10.

———. "Hegel's Ontology of Musical Sound." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, Victoria, 2010.

———. "Lacan's Encounter with Democritus." Unpublished paper 2010.

Žižek, Slavoj. Interrogating the Real. London: Continuum, 2005.