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.

Noise as Cultural Commentary

"The Glitch, the Mower, and the Squeaky Door: How Noise becomes Cultural Commentary in Electroacoustic Music."  Prepared and rejected for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, 2009. Download the paper on noise.

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.

Action, Composition - Morton Feldman and Physicality

Morton Feldman’s writings reveal his ambivalent conception of musical sound, which led him to mixed opinions of the meaning of composition. To Feldman, sounds are at once human bodily actions, the objects of those actions, and the ultimate results of action upon material. He therefore insists that the efforts of composers, performers, instruments, and listeners should not be discounted from any consideration of music. However, he frequently refers to musical components as though they were autonomous, tangible objects. Feldman believed that a sound should be appreciated for its own sake as an individual – like a completed painting from which the painter’s hand has retreated, having done all that it can. His conflicting notions of musical sound and time reflect the double-sided definition of “physicality,” which refers at once to human bodily action and to tangible material in general. Through almost literal representation of slips of ancient paper in his chamber work The Turfan Fragments, Feldman attempts to create music that exemplifies tangibility, while simultaneously illustrating that in music “tangibility” cannot be more than illusion. The Turfan Fragments also represents a somewhat extreme underscoring of the physical effort required in musical performance. The piece thereby brings to the forefront both aspects of physicality – materiality and action – which inform Feldman’s understanding of composition and sound.

A version of this paper was presented at the 2009 meeting of the College Music Society's Pacific Chapter.

Link to the paper here.
And to the musical examples and figures here.

Hegel's Ontology of Musical Sound

In this paper, I examine Hegel's thoughts on sound, which are scattered none too systematically throughout his Aesthetics and Philosophy of Nature. Unsurprisingly, sound turns out to have a dialectical mode of being: it is both material and ideal, both an entity and a concept. I postulate that Hegel's ontology of sound grounds his philosophy of music. Even though musicologists tend to assume that Hegel's aesthetic of music is pure idealism, since it is based in his partly materialistic ontology of sound, it is as much materialistic as idealistic. I then identify other dialectical conceptions of sound, and thus unwitting echoes of Hegelianism, in Eliane Radigue's notion of sound as simultaneously material and ideal, and in Pierre Schaeffer's sound object, likewise an ideal and material entity.

A version of this paper was presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics.
Read it here.