8

The Hearing Intention

8.1. PLEONASM

That the title of this chapter should be possible without shocking people as an obvious pleonasm is already an indication of the fact that the word to hear (entendre) has lost its meaning. Etymologically, it expresses tending toward, therefore intention. The fact that we have to reinforce it with a synonym to give it back its strength of meaning shows how listening has become automatic. It is the same with every human achievement. Only the incompetent or beginners are aware of how they go about it: later, they will have “reflexes.”

The accomplished musician or the skilled physicist will perhaps accept the diagrams in chapter 6 as, in effect, an account of the activities or education that led to their specialty. But it is unlikely that they will go further and admit so easily what we have finally implied: that every specialized act of listening comes not only from a system of training but from a property of perception itself. In short, we are saying that we only hear what we intend to hear, with each practitioner focusing on something different. It must be understood, moreover, that we are not thereby laying the emphasis on the subjectivity of the individual (which is apparent at the time of the training needed for effective practice) but on the objectivity of the objects scrutinized by particular experts.

At this point we must take the probable diversity of our readers into account, their education and habits of thought. If they are unwilling to accept that the objects of listening are different for each category of ear (musicians, acousticians, linguists, etc.), there is no point in repeating this statement. They will all want to be convinced through their own particular access route. Hence the need to create a sort of crossroads at this stage of the book, where there will be a parting of the ways.

8.2. THE TWO PATHWAYS

“The middle way,” Schoenberg writes somewhere, “is the only one that does not lead to Rome.” We must accept that this is the one we have taken until now, as long as it suited everyone, and that, under the guidance of the Littré dictionary and in the name of common sense and the sense of words, we led down it every specialist, who must have an “ordinary ear” to start with and with which initially he hears like everybody else.

For some people, despite our warnings, the scientific approach wins out and will always do so. The universe, including the mental universe of music, does not elude the chain of causalities. Human effectiveness demonstrates this. We make rockets; we split the atom; and so forth. Thus our mind proves its objectivity. In the same way, we make violins and tape recorders, and our signs, even if they do not exhaust musical reality, give an often unhoped-for account of it. For those readers with a “scientific turn of mind,” what we demonstrated in the last chapter is not convincing. Clever, perhaps, but it must be hiding a sophism somewhere.

For philosophical minds it is, on the contrary, likely that our warnings are unnecessary. For professional psychologists these are no more than rehashed college questions: after the gestaltists’ rather perfunctory clearing of the decks, fifty years ago, everyone knows that “sensation” does not come first, is not prior to perception, that perceptual structures inform our entire sensory stock. Merleau-Ponty considers that the classical antinomies—soul-body, external-internal, mentalism-materialism—are out of date in modern philosophy.1

And our musicians are suspicious. They, like everyone else, are convinced that complete scientific explanation is possible, and in comparison philosophy seems superfluous to them. If by chance they have to choose, they will instinctively incline toward mathematics. They have done this since Pythagoras and do it all the more readily since electronics took over the baton from instrument makers, worthy craftsmen but overtaken by technology; association in the studio and then of minds brings them much closer to the engineer than to the philosopher.

The contemporary musician who wishes to be progressive has therefore little hesitation in joining the friendly camp. He definitely has something in common with the scientist, handling instruments like him, learning how to use them, and perhaps how to construct new ones; what does he do but relate causes and effects? As for his scores, are they not also blueprints? Do not the structures they contain come, in their own way, from quantifiable formulae?

It is, in the first instance, with the aim of taking into account this instinctive tendency to go back to the schema of experimental “causality,” that we are writing book 3, showing the potential and the limitations of the scientific approach in music. Only then, once we have explored this, do we hope to engage our reader in a phenomenological approach in book 4.

First, in this final chapter on “hearing” (entendre) we must attempt to sketch out these two pathways and to see how they begin, though in divergent ways, from the diagram analyzing the “four listening modes.”

One of the pathways consists in taking “experimental” routes, linking cause and effect, but based on two separate copies of the diagram, with two parallel, nonoverlapping routes. We will give an outline of this first approach, the subject of book 3, in the sections below. The other pathway consists in drawing out the philosophy of this diagram and seeing that it conceals two sets of quadrants: one for verbs and one for nouns, in other words activities and objects of perception. We will give a short account of this at the end of this chapter as an introduction to book 4.

We will thus have attempted to address what we suppose to be the wishes of the reader: to be able to use the commonsense data of both approaches seamlessly and in the order that he finds the most natural or the most up-to-date.

8.3. THE HEARING INTENTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC POINT OF VIEW

For now we will leave aside our synthetic approach to the diagram in four quadrants and argue for the scientific side: we will give up trying to understand the mechanisms of listening immediately and instead experiment in the same way as physicists, linking causes and effects.

And so we are modifying the original meaning of a diagram that is too literary, too “psychological,” by explicitly making it into a circuit of causality. But we should not lose sight of the fact that there are two circuits, two ways round, and that what unites or links them is precisely not a relationship of cause and effect but a correlation. We will give illustrations of this.

First we will let the physicist take the initiative, then the musician.

First example. The acoustician has a stimulus generator—that is, an instrument known in physics that can deliver simple, measurable signals that are linked to a system of “understanding” based in scientific thought. The circuit is described as follows: the cause of the event (the device) (sector 1) delivers a signal that is its effect (2) qualified by measurements (3) based in scientific concepts (4).

At the same time that it is being measured by instruments (imperceptible to human beings but scientifically very clever), this signal falls on the musician’s ear. The stimulus generator is still the cause (1) of the sound object perceived by the musician (2′) musically described by him (3′) and referred to a system of traditional musical values (4′) (see fig. 1).

FIGURE 1. Correlation among physical object, sound object, and musical object.

Second example. The initiative is given to the musician, as we intend to do in experimental music. The musician’s preferred choice will be an ordinary musical instrument, delivering not stimuli but normal (musical) sounds. The two circuits are clearly of the same type, although “what can be heard,” like “what can be measured,” are different in nature. The musician will listen to a musical object produced by the instrument (a relationship of cause and effect), will describe it, and relate it to his traditional value system. The acoustician will consider this effect as a signal; that is, he will try to measure it and relate it to a system of physical values.

What would happen in the best of worlds? Made aware of the necessity of working together, musician and physicist would meet on “common ground,” around exhibit A, now tangible in the shape of the tape recorder, receptor of the “physical signal,” as well as potential memory, after playback, for the “musical object.” The physicist will say to his colleague: what can you hear? And the musician would say to the physicist: what are you measuring? In this way the correlations we have mentioned would appear.

In fact, it does not really happen like this. Usually the physicist has the advantage over the musician as far as the initiative is concerned, since he chooses the stimuli to be listened to. Then, the physicist naively plays the musician, whereas the musician has only been thinking of playing the physicist for a few years. What is more, each risks behaving like an amateur in the other’s field. Our physicist, who suspects and dreads this, surrounds himself with safeguards: he chooses simple phenomena (the simplest, he thinks) and summons listeners, to create more ears, so that their statistics make an “average ear.”

8.4. THE STUMBLING BLOCK

So he seems to have taken all necessary precautions. In actual fact, the stumbling block in his thinking about these questions, and the way of representing them that seems to go right to the heart of the matter, is the logical linking: instrumental cause (1) → hearing (2) → perceptions (3) → musical values (4): if we accept this schema, how can we doubt that the acoustician is really dealing with the musical?

Although they have magnetic tape in common, we can easily understand how fundamentally different the two pathways described in the last section are.

That tape, in fact, is a matter for study for physicists independently of any listening. Although “sound,” it is identical to numerous other magnetic tapes, with other signals on them too slow to be audible (seismograms, encephalograms, etc.) or too fast to be heard (e.g., ultrasound). All these tapes are studied in the same way, by measuring devices. What do they measure? Frequencies, intensities, different systems of combined waves—that is, spectra. Surely these are the dimensions of sound? Absolutely not. They are the dimensions of vibrating phenomena, material particles moving in an elastic medium independently of any ear.

The circuit of these phenomena only involves the ear as an add-on and for a tiny fraction of their field. Measuring devices, in any case, do without the ear and function on their own account. A tuning fork vibrates; its vibrations are transmitted through the air; and the to-and-fro motion of its prongs creates pressures from a distance on the membrane of the microphone, which act on the needle of a voltmeter. To explain sound (i.e., what we hear) by readings on a voltmeter is a fatal mistake. We can see this clearly since, at any one time when the frequency increases, the ear can no longer hear; there is no audible sound any more, yet the apparatus continues to indicate something. That something, obviously independent of what we can hear, since we can’t hear anything, is still what it has never ceased to be: the phenomenon of the elastic vibrations of the tuning fork, studied for itself, in an electroacoustic measuring system.

Now the tape is played. It creates a signal that, as we have just seen, goes toward the measuring devices. But through the loudspeaker it also provides a sound object for the ear. Consequently, what is on tape (A) produces a physical effect (B), as well as a sound or musical effect (C): at best we could say that the musical effect C correlates with the physical effect B, since they both have the same origin A. Perception and measurement are on the same level; one is not subordinate to the other: we cannot say that B explains C; at the very most it accompanies it. In terms of sound or musicality, the values in B have no significance: the musical pathway completes the circuit without them. We have to accept that, even if the two approaches do indeed have magnetic tape in common, they are completely different in principle.

8.5. CORRELATIONS

Even if we overcome this difficulty, by the same token we move on to the concept of correlation between the two experimental circuits that have magnetic tape in common. A series of experiments has led to the establishment of two types of correlations depending on whether the physicist or the musician was in charge. In the first case the physicist used stimuli, expressed in physical magnitudes, and he asked the musicians or his guinea pigs in (musical) listening to formulate responses. So we obtain a sort of physics-music dictionary. In the other case the musician used sounds, and the physicist measured what he could: so we get the other half of the dictionary, music-physics.

But surely this is what happened in the past?

Yes, to the extent that physicists have worked very hard at the first part of the dictionary.

No, to the extent that the others have not.

Hence, we have an imbalance that tends to see music only from the angle of “prose composition,” not as “translation.” But much more serious is the misunderstanding arising from this unilateral language system: an attempt at synthesis has implicitly taken the place of experimenting on correlations. By combining stimuli, and thus starting from physically defined sound “models,” people thought they could infer combinations of musical impressions, thus inappropriately using for perception a law of accumulation that is only valid for physical measurements, and thereby reintroducing a cause-effect relationship by the back door, in the shape of a parallelism between combinations. It should be noted that the solution to the “stumbling block” does not safeguard us against this latter snare in particular.

8.6. THE HEARING INTENTION FROM A PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF VIEW

Just as rational as the physicist’s attitude, or more precisely the only scientific one from a musical research point of view, is the attitude that consists in exploring the listening consciousness.

We have already seen, with the help of the Littré dictionary, that we listen to many different things as soon as we listen to something. And we have learned to appreciate the shades of meaning in a sentence such as this: “I unintentionally perceived (j’ai ouï) what you were saying, without listening (écouter) at the door, but I didn’t understand (je n’ai pas compris) what I heard (j’ai entendu).”

The four listening functions appeared to summarize the complex situation defined by the four verbs: to listen (écouter), to perceive aurally (ouïr), to hear (entendre), and to understand (comprendre). But there are no verbs without an object. We thought it appropriate to give each one a complement, as in this list: I listen to (j’écoute) an engine; I perceive (j’ouïs) a noise; I hear (j’entends) a bassoon; I “understand” (je comprends) a common chord. Thus, these four activities seemed to have four counterparts: the cause, the thing, the description, the meaning. But if I were to say, I listen to (j’écoute) a chord, I hear (j’entends) an engine, I perceive (j’ouïs) a bassoon aurally, I understand (je comprends) that noise, would I be using French incorrectly? Would I be going against the rules of meaning? Surely not. On the contrary, I can see variations of meaning, but these are, in fact, quite vague and imply much more than they express.

So this leads us to divide the summary of the listening modes into two—not, as in the context of physics, in order to describe two parallel experiences in independent fields of causality but, by separating auditory intentions from objects of audition, to show the complexity of perceptual phenomena. In a sound that is presented to me, I notice that passive listening makes me hear what “dominates” at that moment; but active, willed listening allows me to hear what I want to hear, what I am “targeting.” In an orchestral fragment my aim can be to recognize a certain instrument or, again, to pick out the theme, name the notes, or finally enjoy the solo violinist’s vibrato. With each act of listening, my perceptions are different, and in the first place the result of the choice of my object of listening. It goes without saying that my other activities contribute to this. Once I have chosen the preferred object, I listen (j’écoute), I perceive with my ear (j’ouïs), I assess what I hear, and I refer back to what I already know I understand (je comprends). But all this applies just as much to the bassoon as to the chord, to the engine as to the noise. Will we ultimately discover the sixteen combinations of the four verbs and four objects?

To pursue this analysis within the framework of our research, we must ask ourselves what the intentions of hearing musically are. Here we will see that music, far from appearing as the result of a simple activity, gives an endless number, an infinite variety of objects of listening.

8.7. ON SOME MUSICAL HEARING INTENTIONS

We cannot deny that a concertgoer, a virtuoso, a theory or violin teacher, their respective pupils, a music critic, an orchestral conductor, a piano tuner, and finally, the latest arrival, the sound engineer, intend to listen musically. We will see that they do not hear the same objects and that they are in very different musical situations:

The musicianship situation:

The teacher makes the pupil turn his back and plays various notes on the piano. Or else he plays notes on different instruments. The pupil has to identify a “value” or recognize a “timbre.”

The instrumentalist’s situation:

The young violinist is asked to make sure he plays in tune and to avoid making too much of a scraping sound. The situation is much more complicated.

The listener’s situation:

The listener can simply say, That’s a violin, or, That’s a high note. If the listener is a musician or, again, if he is the violin teacher, he compares the result with others. He says: It’s better, or, It’s not as good. He can be indulgent or severe, proving that he is judging not only the result but also the intention. He will say, That’s fine, to a (wrong or bad) note from a beginner and, That’s no good, to the same note played by an advanced pupil. A critic would say the same about a virtuoso: He’s on form, or, He’s got the jitters.

All this implies that the hearing intention has many different objects and many listening mechanisms for the most traditional, simple violin note. What will we say about listening to an incongruous sound, where a large number of different elements can be discerned: that it is unlike anything else, that it reveals an unknown value, that it reveals an intention or not?

What is the difference between a pianist and a violinist? Surely the pianist has more or less prefabricated sound objects, which the violinist must create? And the singer, who is both ear and instrument? Surely the instrumentalist is in a very different situation depending on the instrument he plays? And surely these instrumentalists are in a different situation again from the listener, generally speaking? In addition, one listener is surely fundamentally different from another, depending on his culture and education? As for the piano tuner, whose ear is considered to be so musical, does he behave like a musician or a physicist? Surely the violinist tuning his instrument is different from the violinist playing? Finally, if we forget all these musical craftsmen or artists, and keep in mind only the circuit of communication from the composer to the listener, surely this also has a specific object, the aim of one or other of the protagonists? Take the conductor in particular, the one (together, these days, with the sound engineer) mainly responsible for this communication; how does he hear, and what does he attempt to put across?

8.8. MUSICAL LISTENING MODES

We can see that a detailed analysis of each of these examples would need pages and pages of descriptions. Furthermore, the aim of this work is not to complete a particular piece of research but to give an overall response to the question, What is the musical? We will nevertheless try to shed some light on this question, which is never altogether pointless in a discussion with so many repercussions. We will identify:

(a) Three musical situations

The first is purely passive. We are placed in front of given sound objects, simple ones, such as violin notes, or complex ones, such as new or previously unheard sounds. We make the pupil turn his back, just as when a tape is played to us: an acousmatic situation that in the first place means disconnection from the audiovisual context, but above all makes it possible—but not compulsory—to explore the sound itself, its properties that refer only to sound, unconnected to its mechanical origin or the intentions of others. We must emphasize the fact that this type of interest does not follow automatically from simply being disconnected from the audiovisual complex but from a specific intention on the part of the listener, as we have already suggested in chapter 4 and as we will see later.

The second is the instrumentalist’s situation, which is essentially active: he makes what he hears. In a way it is still an acousmatic situation: this sound tells us nothing about the external world, or at least there is no other person, unless the instrumentalist splits himself in two: one doing, the other hearing and judging the first on the success of his intentions.

The third is the normal listening situation, by far the most complicated. We can see that it combines something of the first two. It is passive but not acousmatic, because of the associated perceptions motivated by a curiosity that turns spontaneously toward what is emitting the sound, and that, this time, is a true other. But then, it cannot understand this other except by implicitly “simulating” his activity, as far as possible taking his place.

(b) Three more or less musical groups of objects of auditory attention

• I may essentially be drawn toward what is going on with the emitter of the sound: pupil, virtuoso, non-Western instrument, amplifier, conductor, and so forth, or a quality of the piano. We will not go on enumerating so many points of interest and different levels of complexity but will keep in mind what they have in common: we are looking for indicators in the sound, to tell us about the people or things from which they originate.

• I may be drawn exclusively to the effects: accuracy of the note or the instrument, too rapid a tempo, precise nuance; or again, over and above these details, to the music itself, as I speak its language: theme, reprise of the theme, counterpoint, and so on. I may also stop listening to the musical language and wonder what, objectively speaking, is characteristic of the conductor’s style.

• Finally, but in rather exceptional circumstances that are scarcely those of the concert hall, I may ponder the sound itself, suddenly detached from the two poles of musicianly production and musical value: an unknown sound strikes my ear, and its strangeness makes me hear it apart from any indicator as to what is producing it, or any referential value. We should nevertheless point out that, as an instrumentalist, this is very often how I hear my own sound or work at my voice, for example. After many years of practice, what do I hear that I do not already know, coming from my instrument or my score, except the way I am shaping a particular swelled note at this moment, or a particular timbre of my voice?

On the one hand, only the natural ease with which I can move among these various perceptions and the virtuosity of my musical listening conceal from me the complexity of my “pathways” from one to another and the diversity of my aims. But, on the other hand, it would be wrong to describe these different types of listening as subjective: there is nothing subjective in all these “aims” that can be shared, defined, and studied in agreement with other people.

We have already mentioned them: they are the two pairs of listening modes ordinary-specialized and natural-cultural. We might expect to see these four approaches reduced to two where music is concerned: specialized and cultural then. Not so.

Listen to an out-of-tune piano or, more precisely, a note on this piano, where the strings are not at the same pitch. Here already we can see the distance between “ordinary musical” listening (the piano is out of tune) and specialized listening: the tuner’s diagnosis (the three strings are not at the same pitch). We can see that these two listening modes have in common that they link the left and right of the diagram, the abstract and the concrete. Ordinary listening is not totally unaware of either the piano or its accuracy, elements of a situation in civilization that is both natural and cultural, but it does not pay particular attention to the sound object; it gives an “automatic response” and cannot really target the object itself. Specialized listening is more skilled and better informed.

Now let us take the pair natural-cultural. The tuner’s listening seems eminently “natural”: the tuner acts like a physicist responsible for tuning the note to a tuning fork, acting purely on physical causes to obtain a result that can be measured on an interferometer. We cannot hold him responsible for either the tuning fork or the structure of the scale. The violinist tuning his instrument is in the same situation, totally concentrated on causalities. But neither of them stops there: they will not be playing their instrument later to try out causalities but for cultural purposes: making or striking out sounds for their sonority, nuance, and so forth. So here again, we have to identify a dualism in musical activity. We are indeed in the presence of four typical auditory approaches.

8.9. FINAL SUMMARY OF INTENTIONS

The polyvalence of musical listening invites the following summary:

(a) We have had to abandon grouping verbs and substantives, activities and objects of listening too closely together, as we did in chapter 4.

(b) We have identified three typical situations: (1) the ordinary listener, in general drawn toward musical meaning and at the same time responsive to the conditions in which the sound is made; this first situation, in fact, relates to the other two: (2) the acousmatic listener, and (3) the instrumentalist who makes the sound.

(c) We have seen, in relation to the acousmatic situation, that it did not predetermine the listening intention of the listener in that situation. The acousmatic listener is, in fact, free to focus through the sound on anything he was entitled to see, infer, understand about the origin of the sound, as well as the sound itself in the normal situation. More precisely, the acousmatic situation can intensify two complementary types of interest: (1) the ordinary intention to trace causes or decode meanings in which we are deprived of the sight of the instrument or the operator, are given no explanation from outside, are cut off from the context: we are all the more curious to know who is playing and what is being played, where this odd sound is coming from, what causes it, or what it means. If Pythagoras has his disciples listen to him through a curtain in this way, it is because he hopes they will hear and understand better both what he is and what he is saying. (2) The other type of interest, the converse of the previous one, is rarer. It is the tuner’s interest, “tasting” the sound as one tastes a wine, not to tell the vintage but to identify its virtues. It is also the instrumentalist’s way of listening, confident in his accuracy and his violin but endlessly shaping the same sound until he is satisfied with it. He does find indicators and values in this type of listening, but that is not enough for him: he nourishes the sound with them himself.

(d) Finally, in all the above examples, we can see the variety of contexts arising from the two pairs of listening modes described above: ordinary-specialized and natural-cultural.

To sum up these ideas, we have produced a figure (see fig. 2) showing the new point of view at which we have arrived and which replaces the diagram in section 6.3: on the line down the middle, we have put the, as it were, “average” activity of a normal listener’s listening, where sound is described in all sorts of ways, polarized both in the concrete sense (indicators concerning the origin of the sound) and in the abstract sense (sound value on the horizon of a particular group of musical significations). It should be noted that a mixture of perceptions such as this, called the “raw object” on our illustration, is not a well-defined whole but only an unstable collection thrown together, of hardly any use except to demonstrate our conclusions, in much the same way as those bodies that cannot really be isolated but that chemists sometimes postulate in their chemical reactions in order to describe them better.

FIGURE 2. Final summary of listening intentions.

So we must reorganize the pictures on the cover in another, seemingly less clear but more authentic, way. First of all, we should abandon the “picture of the two violins,” an audiovisual complex from which we must now extract an acousmatic type of perception, without a visual backup. These two images of the instrumental gesture will therefore be removed, and the memory of them in watermark representing the “raw object” suggests, in fact, a “deletion,” a theoretical concept that ultimately corresponds to nothing real. We must seek reality in two ways: either in the emergence of signifieds (the bathygrams then moving up to sector 1, as indicators of the physical phenomenon, of interest to the physicist; the score remaining in sector 4), or in a different kind of attention, a new type of interest directed toward perception itself, represented by the listening woman. This questioning ear will of course be “polarized” by two sorts of information: from the event itself (factures)2 and from information that already indicates a meaning (values).

From this central point, listening will turn toward a particular external perception: the perception of the origin of the sound, the indicators revealing the circumstances of the event, or the perception of its meaning—its values in relation to an established sound language. Finally, in a third scenario, if the listening intention is directed toward the sound itself, as with the instrumentalist—or the acousmatic listener, indifferent to conventional language and the anecdotal origin—indicators and values are surpassed, forgotten, redefined, for a unique, unusual, but nevertheless irrefutable, perception: having ignored the source and the meaning, we perceive the sound object.

How did we manage to get there? By making an unexpected diversion in listening or, more prosaically, by reversing the pathways, reorganizing what at the outset seemed to lead inevitably both to the concrete origins of sounds and to their abstract meaning; by refusing to put listening on the rack between this event and that meaning, we apply ourselves more and more to perceiving what their original unit is—that is, the sound object. The sound object is therefore the synthesis of perceptions that are usually dissociated. We cannot, in fact, deny, or break, their connections with signification and anecdote, but we can reverse their aims in order to grasp their shared origin. We will return to this sound object, the aim of the activity we will call reduced listening, with philosophers in book 4, and musicians in books 5 and 6.