“Reduced listening” is Pierre Schaeffer’s term for the appreciation of sounds’ intrinsic aesthetic properties: sound for its own sake, not as a means of gleaning extra-sonic information. Recent scholars doubt the validity of reduced listening, arguing that for sounds not to point beyond themselves is impossible, and criticizing Schaeffer for negating music’s ability to comment on “real life.” However, I propose that whether a listener can identify the referent of a sound depends on whether or not the sound triggers memories that align the sound with an apparent origin. Thus, “reduced listening” may be possible as the perception of a sound that fails to evoke memories in its listener. In the adaptation of sounds towards or away from recognizability as musical tones or everyday “noises,” electroacoustic composers may direct listeners to draw associations based on remembered experience, or to eschew associations. Drawing on the phenomenology of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur, I attempt to show how musical works that wield and ply everyday “noises” may manipulate our memories and imaginings, both conscious and unconscious. I examine two electroacoustic compositions that exploit “noises” to this end: “Textuell” by Oval, and “Suburbia” by Christian Marclay and Otomo Yoshihide. I argue that, through the instigation of recollections, juxtaposition of remembered with imagined events, and induction of forgetting, an electroacoustic work may yet address social and cultural situations – even when the origin of the work’s constituent sounds is indiscernible to listeners, as in “reduced listening.”
Presented at the 2009 Musicology Graduate Students' Conference at Harvard University.
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