Acousmatic, says the Larousse dictionary: Name given to the disciples of Pythagoras who, for five years, listened to his lessons hidden behind a curtain, without seeing him, and observing the strictest silence.1 Only the voice of their master, hidden from their eyes, reached the disciples.
From this initiatory experience we will take the concept of acousmatic in the sense we wish to use it. The Larousse continues: Acousmatic, adjective: a noise that is heard without the causes from which it comes being seen. As we briefly mentioned at the end of the last chapter, this term, in fact, emphasizes the perceptual reality of sound, as such, by distinguishing it from its methods of production and transmission: the new phenomenon of telecommunications and mass broadcasting of messages can only take place with reference to and in accordance with a fact that has been rooted in human experience forever: natural sound communication. This is why, without being anachronistic, we can go back to an ancient tradition that, no differently and no less than radio and recording today, gave back to the ear alone the entire responsibility for a mode of perception normally backed up by other sensory evidence. In former times the device was a curtain; today, the radio and sound reproduction systems, using all forms of electroacoustic transformations, place us, modern listeners to an invisible voice, once more under the conditions of a similar experiment.
It would be a wrong use of this experiment if we submitted it to a Cartesian analysis by differentiating the “objective”—what is behind the curtain—from the “subjective”—the listener’s reaction to these stimuli. From this viewpoint it is the so-called objective factors that contain the references for the sought-after elucidation: frequencies, durations, amplitudes . . . ; the curiosity aroused is an acoustic curiosity. Compared to this approach, the acousmatic is a reversal of the pathway. It asks parallel questions: the question now is not how subjective listening interprets or distorts “reality” or of studying reactions to stimuli; listening itself becomes the phenomenon under study. The concealment of causes is not the result of technical imperfection, nor is it an occasional variation: it becomes a prerequisite, a deliberate conditioning of the individual. Now the question: “What can I hear? . . . What exactly can you hear?” is turned back on him in the sense that he is being asked to describe not the external references of the sound he perceives but his perception itself.
But acoustic and acousmatic are not opposites like objective and subjective. While the former approach, starting from physics, may go as far as the “individual’s reactions” and therefore, at a pinch, include psychological factors, the latter should in effect ignore measurements and experiments that apply only to the physical object, the acousticians’ “signal.” But although this type of research concentrates on the individual, it cannot, for all that, abandon its ambition to have an objectivity of its own: if what it studies were to be no more than the changing impressions of each listener, all communication would become impossible; Pythagoras’s disciples would have had to give up a shared way of naming, describing, and understanding what they heard; an individual listener would even have to give up trying to understand himself from one moment to another. The question here is how, through comparing subjective reactions, we might find something on which several experimenters can agree.
In acoustics we started from the physical signal and studied its transformations through electroacoustic processes, with tacit reference to the norms of a supposedly familiar mode of listening—one that could hear frequencies, durations, and so forth. On the contrary, the acousmatic system, generally speaking, symbolically forbids any relationship with the visible, touchable, measurable. In other respects the differences between Pythagoras’s experiment and the experiment that radio and recording make us part of, between live listening (through a curtain) and nonlive listening (through a loudspeaker) become, ultimately, negligible. Under these conditions, what are the characteristics of the present-day acousmatic situation?
(a) Pure listening
For the traditional musician and the acoustician one important aspect of sound recognition is the identification of sound sources. When this takes place without the help of sight, musical conditioning is thrown into disarray. Often taken by surprise, sometimes uncertain, we discover that much of what we thought we could hear was in reality merely seen, and explained, by the context. This is why it is just about possible to confuse some sounds produced by instruments as different as strings and woodwind.
(b) Listening to effects
Through listening to sound objects with their instrumental causes hidden, we come to forget about the latter and attend to the objects in their own right. The dissociation of sight and hearing encourages another way of listening: listening to sound forms, without any other aim than to hear them better, so that we can describe them through analyzing the content of our perceptions.
In reality, Pythagoras’s curtain is not enough to discourage a curiosity about causes to which we are instinctively, almost irresistibly, inclined. But the repetition of the physical symbol made possible by recording helps us in two ways: by exhausting this curiosity, it gradually imposes the sound object as a concept worth studying in its own right; furthermore, with the help of more attentive and accurate acts of listening, it reveals to us little by little all the richness of this mode of perception.
(c) Variations in listening
In addition, as these repetitions take place under physically identical conditions, we become aware of the variations in our listening and can better understand what is generally called its “subjectivity.” This is by no means, as we may perhaps be inclined to think, an imperfection, for example some “blurriness” scrambling the physical signal, but different perspectives or ways of hearing that are accurate every time, and every time reveal a new aspect of the object, which engages our deliberate or unconscious attention.
(d) Variations in the signal
Finally, we should mention the special ways open to us to operate on sound, which when implemented intensify the characteristics of the acousmatic situation described above. In effect, we are in control of the physical signal fixed on the record or the tape; we can also make different recordings of one sound event or approach it from different angles when capturing sound, as we would, say, when capturing images. Assuming that we keep to one recording, we can play it back more or less fast or more or less loud or even cut it into pieces, thus giving the listener several versions of what, in the beginning, was a single event. What, from the point of view of the acousmatic experiment, are the implications of drawing these divergent sound effects from one material cause? Can we still talk of one single sound object? What correlation can we expect between the modifications made to what is recorded on the tape and the variations in what we hear?
We have spoken several times about the sound object, using a concept that has already been introduced but not explained. The reader will see, in the light of this chapter, that we could only put forward this concept because implicitly we were referring to the acousmatic situation we have just described; the sound object exists only insofar as there is blind listening to the effects and content of sound: the sound object is nowhere so much in evidence as in the acousmatic experience.
Once this has been made clear, it is easy for us to avoid wrong answers to the question raised at the end of the section above.
(a) The sound object is not the instrument that played
It is obvious that in saying “that’s a violin” or “that’s a creaking door” we are alluding to the sound produced by the violin, the creak of the door. But the distinction we wish to make between instrument and sound object is even more radical: if we are given a tape with a recording of a sound whose origin we are incapable of identifying, what do we hear? Precisely what we call a sound object, independent of any causal reference covered by the terms sound body, sound source, or instrument.
(b) The sound object is not the tape
Although materialized by the tape, the object, in our definition, is not on the tape either. There is only the magnetic trace of a signal on the tape: a sound medium or an acoustic signal. Listened to by a dog, a child, a Martian, or a citizen of another musical civilization, this signal takes on different meanings. The object is the object of our listening alone, and it is relative to it. We can physically act on the tape, cut into it, change its speed. Only a given listener’s act of listening can give us an account of the perceptible result of these manipulations. Coming from a world in which we can intervene, the sound object is nonetheless entirely contained within our perceptual consciousness.
(c) The same few centimeters of tape can contain a number of different sound objects
This remark flows from the previous one. The manipulations we have just mentioned did not change a sound object with its own intrinsic existence. They created others. There is, of course, a correlation between the manipulations applied to a tape or the various ways of playing it back, the listening conditions, and the object perceived.
A simple correlation? Not at all. We have to look for it. Suppose, for example, that we were listening to a sound recorded at normal speed, then slowed down, then played again at its normal speed. The slowing down, acting on the temporal structure of the sound like a magnifying glass, will have allowed us to distinguish certain details, of grain, for example, which our ear, alerted, informed, will also find in the second playing at normal speed. Here we must let ourselves be guided by the evidence, and the very manner in which we had to formulate our assumption provides the answer: it is indeed the same sound object observed in different ways that we are comparing with itself, the original and the transposed version. But what makes it the same object is, precisely, our will to compare (and also the fact that the way we have manipulated it, with this same intention to compare it to itself, has changed it without making it unrecognizable).
Now give this slowed-down sound to a nonspecialist listener. Two things can happen. Either the listener still recognizes its instrumental origin and, with it, the manipulation. For him there is an original sound source that he cannot hear properly but to which, nevertheless, he refers his act of listening: what he hears is, in fact, a transposed version. Or else he will not identify the real origin, will not suspect the transposition, and he will hear an original sound object, which is so in its own right. (It cannot be a case of illusion or lack of information, since in the acousmatic state our perceptions cannot rely on anything external.) Conversely, for us who have just carried out one or more transpositions of the sound object, it is likely that there will be a single object and its various transposed versions. It is also possible, however, that, abandoning any intention to make comparisons, we attach ourselves to one or other of these versions in order to use them, for example, in a composition; they will then become for us so many original sound objects, entirely independent of their common origin.
We could make similar analyses using different sorts of manipulations (or variations in sound capture) that, depending on our intention, our knowledge, and our previous training, will result in either variations of one sound object or the creation of several sound objects. In the slowed-down example we deliberately chose a modification that lends itself to ambiguity. Other manipulations can transform an object in such a way that it becomes impossible to discern any perceptible relationship between the two versions. In this case we cannot talk about the permanence of a single sound object, if identifying it depends only on remembering the various operations performed on “something that was on the tape.” If, even when guided by memories and a desire to find comparisons, it is impossible to detect any similarity between the various results by listening, we can say that, whatever our intentions, the manipulations of one signal have given rise to several sound objects.
(d) But the sound object is not a state of mind
To avoid its being confused with its physical cause or a “stimulus,” we seem to have based the sound object on our own subjectivity. But—our preceding remarks already indicate this—it does not, for all that, change either with the variations in individual listening or the incessant fluctuations of our attention and our sensibility. Far from being subjective, in the sense of individual, incommunicable, and practically ungraspable, sound objects, as we will see, can be described and analyzed quite easily. We can gain knowledge of them. We can, we hope, transmit this knowledge.
The ambiguity revealed by our brief consideration of the sound object—objectivity bound to subjectivity—will surprise us only if we persist in seeing “the workings of the mind” and “external realities” as opposites. Theories of knowledge have not needed the sound object to perceive the contradiction to which we refer, and which does not derive from the acousmatic situation as such. This debate will be the subject of the whole of book 4.
Our approach is therefore different from spontaneous instrumental practice, where, as we saw in the first chapter, everything is given at once: the instrument, the first principle and vehicle of a musical civilization, and the virtuosity that goes with it, and therefore a certain structuring of the music played on it. Nor have we in mind “the most general instrument possible”; what we are aiming for, in fact, and what follows from the above remarks, is the most general musical situation possible. We can now describe this explicitly. We possess nearly all sounds—at least in theory—without having to produce them; we only have to press the tape recorder button. Deliberately ignoring any reference to instrumental causes or preexisting musical meanings, we seek to give ourselves over entirely and exclusively to listening, and so to come upon those instinctive pathways that lead from pure “sound” to pure “music.” That is what acousmatics proposes: turning our backs on the instrument and musical conditioning, and placing sound and its musical “potential” squarely before us.
One more remark before ending this first book which still only deals with “making.” In the course of this chapter we have already begun to listen with a new ear. It may perhaps have seemed more logical to start the next book precisely with this chapter. That is of little consequence. The interest of this remark is not purely formal: it lies in the observation that technology has itself created the conditions for a new mode of listening. Let us render unto audiovisual techniques that which is their due: we expect previously unheard sounds, new timbres, dizzying modes of playing, in a word, instrumental progress from them. They do indeed contribute all of this, but very soon we do not know what to do with them; these new instruments cannot so easily be integrated with the existing ones, and the questions they raise fundamentally challenge received ideas. First of all, the tape recorder has the virtues of Pythagoras’s curtain: it may create new phenomena to be observed, but above all it creates new conditions for observation.
And so we move on from “making” to “hearing” through a redefinition of “hearing” through “making.” It is in this sense that the next book will deal with both the most ancient definitions of hearing and the newest ways of making us hear.