Sound Objects: Empowerment and Abuse Via Musical Terminology

Presented at a special session entitled "Writing Sound," at the 2012 meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, this talk, despite its somewhat informal tone, protests the American military and police forces' use of sound cannons - their deployment of sound as a weapon.  What sort of concepts and pre-understandings seem to excuse this horrifying behavior?  I suggest that the popular conception of sound as an object - as blunt, passive thing - which is quite common in creative and musicological discussions, contribute to the epistemic underpinnings of sonic weaponization.  Below is the abstract I submitted with this talk, and a link to a pdf version of the entire talk.

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To a significant extent, what music is depends on what we call it. The terminology employed by listeners, composers, performers, and scholars to describe music affects how we – as listeners, musicians, and as a society – treat music. Terminology alone can transform music and sound from experiences to things, from encounters to commodities, from interactions to forms of domination. This paper describes the history and connotations of one such influential term: “sound object,” a cornerstone of electronic-music discourse. This term was coined in the late 1940s by musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, who conceived “l’objet sonore” as the audible “raw element” of music. Post-Schaeffer, “sound object” acquired several definitions and exists today in a variety of contexts. I will describe the varied applications of the term in the discourse surrounding contemporary electronic music; the scientistic attitude from which the term stemmed; and its latent implications. On the positive side, the use of the term “sound object” may associate music with “new materialist” philosophies, which conceive even non-human entities as empowered, affective beings. And analyzing music in terms of “sound objects” may foreground the importance of subjective listening perspectives. Less desirable, however, are the term’s equally plausible associations with reification-as-domination which, at its most extreme, seems to excuse dangerous misconceptions and uses of music and sound as passive, blunt, even harmful things - for instance in the "long-range acoustical devices" or sound cannons frequently deployed by American military and police forces. Overall, my goal is to assess the sound object’s potential as an increasingly prevalent, materialistic aesthetic category, too often taken at face value.

Download this talk here.

Sound Objects: Speculative Perspectives

My PhD dissertation, successfully defended in February 2012, available to download here. 

Abstract:

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.

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.

Reduced Listening as a Phenomenon of Memory

“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.
Download here.