19

Natural Sound Structures

Musicianly Listening

19.1. THE UNIVERSAL SYMPHONY

It is there for everyone; it is within his reach, unless he turns a deaf ear.

We, in fact, find it quite natural, in an immense hubbub, to hear one thing rather than another. But this implies two preconditions: that we can identify a particular sound source, by attributing various sound effects to it, and that we can isolate it, by putting other sounds aside. This natural listening is the least passive possible; it is one of the most highly evolved activities of the human ear and the main activity onto which the various expert, specialized listening modes are grafted.

We will endeavor to understand the way this admirable calculating machine works: instead of obeying our reflexes, we will adopt a contemplative stance; instead of selecting one of the sources from a multitude of disparate perceptions, we will endeavor—and this is already a step toward reduced listening—to hear everything at the same time, if possible. A step backward toward passivity? Not at all. It will be an active musicianly mode of listening, as if we were listening to an orchestra and trying to focus on all the sources at once. Weary of hearing music passively, or the tune asininely played by the first violins, we will decide to open our ears, to grasp the whole of the orchestra’s activity, which is what the conductor does supremely. There is already reduction: the focus on external objects, causes and sources, is no longer in order to follow the events they suggest, each one for itself, but rather to appreciate their working together—how, in their coming together, they are still distinct. This is the dialectic of the orchestra itself, the etymology of symphony, a unity that is constantly plural. Even if the listening mode we are describing is not reduced at the level of the sound object, we could say that it tends in that direction at the orchestral level or the din we have taken as our experimental field. It constantly mobilizes and also constantly eludes our attention through its richness and diversity. Even good professionals similarly lose their way in the orchestral mass.

We already know the results of such a simple experiment, and we know that, except for music, our parallel is valid. The same type of activity, the same perceptual structures (this time to do with sound, outside any musical system) prevail both in this sort of symphonic attention and in extraordinary opportunities to grasp the way various languages are articulated and to identify speakers. We also know that this is nothing to do with referring disorganized noise perceived in this way to scores notated in pitch, duration, and intensity; the mechanisms of listening to the orchestra cannot be explained any better by the existence of a score and a notation.

What happens spontaneously and often with extreme accuracy is that we decode with consummate skill. Now, far from congratulating ourselves on this and admiring our abilities, we are ashamed, and readily despise our marvelous autonomic systems, doubtless out of irritation because we cannot understand them.

So, to verify this, we will again imagine ourselves in the tumult of an amusement park, in a fairground or a packed meeting, chattering near a flight of birds beside the sea, amid the rustling of the trees in the wind. Our ear, much more musicianly than we would dare to think, does much more than identify these sound objects, which it names “twittering of birds,” “my neighbor speaking,” “sound of waves,” or “barrel-organ music” as separate units. It does not mix them up with each other, as even the latest IBM machine would. In its own way, and in the etymological and not the symbolic sense, it makes a true score: creating each instrument’s part and giving it its continuum.

Now we will suppose that the conversation is taking place in a language system unknown to the listener. To isolate each speaker and give him the right sound continuum, the listener must make an effort. But he will cope nevertheless, although the meaning (which of course would help him) is lacking in this conversation. In spy novels the hero similarly listens to two or three secret agents speaking in languages he does not know, and concern for his safety makes him adopt an acousmatic mode of listening: he cannot see them from his hiding place. He can clearly distinguish what he hears, however, and, boldly summoning sonorities or musicalities, true or false, to his aid, he identifies and describes: one has a deep voice, a throaty r; the other speaks jerkily, and so forth.

Now look more closely at these last few lines: we have given ourselves a spontaneous description of how our listening works. Each time we have used two terms: “twittering of birds,” “sounds of waves or trees,” “my neighbor speaking,” “barrel-organ music.” This analysis gives us not the key to this amazing, although spontaneous, decoding but its two poles: one of these words refers back to the source, the other to the content. However approximate the words in our description, it has covered the essentials. Though not understanding everything, we identified everything: on each occasion an essential permanence enabled us to analyze the identity of the cause; and notwithstanding the countless variety of those words, that barrel-organ music, those noises, we find it quite natural to take possession of those variations through which we can establish something permanent. For it is time, we believe, to realize that blind, or hidden behind Pythagoras’s screen or the tape recorder, it is through the diversity of the sounds that we inferred distinct causes that we might readily give, logically, as an explanation. Now, it is through their effects, of course, that we can go back to them!

These universal sound structures, which we postulated tentatively and considered crude, are not hypothetical. They dictate everyday practice in the most incontrovertible way possible. Talking about indicators or significations, we too often forget the sound perception from which they came and which reduced listening, finally focusing on the sound object itself, will allow us to become aware of. And this sealed-off, subtle, unstable perception of the sound object, the vehicle, but brought to a halt, of all the other perceptions, is dominated by structures that, before being linguistic or acoustic, dramatic or prosaic, detective or medical, or, finally, strictly musical, are the structures of sonority.

19.2. THE REPERTOIRE OF CAUSALITIES

Already fruitless is the acoustician’s attempt to get to grips with timbre. We ourselves have managed only with great difficulty to establish correlations between our manner of perceiving and the physical makeup of a few elementary sounds. This scarcely puts us on the road to an overall process.

Watch the acoustician at work. Just like his colleague teaching Monsieur Jourdain,1 he carefully studies each causality, one by one: the phonatory instrument, the position of the tongue against the teeth, the resonators. “What a wonderful thing an A is,” remarks Monsieur Jourdain, with good reason. But Nicole hears As just as well as her master, without knowing anything about them. Perceptual structures do very well without technical expertise, as much at the instrumental level as with the signal.

Now, we have emphasized the natural-cultural pair of opposites, postulating a human ear, universal, full of potential, precultural. Is this the ear that has that astonishing power of identification since it can identify speakers through speech it does not understand?

So what is the natural? When we think about it, it is not the opposite of the cultural but, more accurately, of the conventional: instead of focusing on concepts, joined to sounds by arbitrary links, and which only a prior knowledge of the code enables it to identify, “natural” listening gives a meaning to what it takes in, without going through any conventions but relying on already very highly evolved previous experience, which could be called the acquisition of a personal repertoire, shared nevertheless with contemporaries. Just like learning a language system, this is the result of an individual learning process in a group environment: we mean the repertoire of noises.

Would these noises, which we readily consider natural (because we identify them with events: engine noises for contemporary civilizations, animal noises for pastoral civilizations) be understood without the help of a type of experience in which civilization adds to nature? When I hear an unfamiliar noise, with no prior reference point, it is then that I hear it as a sound object, since I immediately have to look for its cause; there are noises like this whose sonority I could best evaluate if they were not so surprising, and if I did not immediately attempt to compare them with other, known, noises with a view to explaining them—that is, identifying and describing them.

So the fact that noises seem natural is all very well: from our earliest childhood we spell out, we learn this language of things with the same diligence as a human language system. We are scarcely capable of imagining a world where noises were different or belonged to a repertoire different from the repertoire of this planet. Pathology provides proofs for our debate. In tactile or visual asymbolia, people are neither blind nor paralyzed, but the patient no longer recognizes what he sees or what he touches. What is this pencil? The patient replies: it’s long, thin, pointed (as can be seen, he expresses himself in values): he has forgotten the repertoire. Thus, he might not recognize an object he feels with his right hand but recognize it with his left if his deficiency is unilateral.

19.3. THE LANGUAGE OF THINGS

So what seemed to be a metaphor becomes, ultimately, a statement of reality. Earlier attempts to find an explanation for our sound object identification structures still came from a sort of lack of realism, implicitly positing that the physical cause comes before the perceived effect. If we use language in its broadest sense, as we have learned to do in music, it seems reasonable to allow that the language of things can also be learned. We refer it back to its source using the register of its interactions because this is our experience and our training. If there are birds on Mars, or highly developed machines on a planet somewhere near Sirius, there is nothing to tell us about their general shapes and the variations of the sounds they make. Our familiarity with identifying so easily both their sources and the various sounds they make hides this learning process from us.

A horse has a timbre that is very easy to locate. We should note that it consists of various neighing sounds, as well as the noise of hoofs. A car enthusiast recognizes simultaneously the way the engine runs and the make of car: this is precisely the timbre-value, permanence-variation pair mentioned above. It is the result of a whole listening experience. We have slandered natural listening by calling it nonspecialized. But it is specialized, at a basic level, in many domains.

So what is the difference between learning the repertoire of noises and the codes of language systems? We could say that it develops in the opposite direction (fig. 22). Linguistics does more than ignore the “speakers”; it only studies sound objects insofar as they are the bearers of abstract concepts. It uses the permanence-variation pair a contrario. Variations of intonation do not matter; the structure that commands perception is meaning. In the language of things (and for us things include the noise of conversations, the commotion of animals, etc.), some of the meanings do not matter or are impenetrable to us; but some indicators are clear and inform us, not about what the individual wishes to say to us but what we want to know about him. These modulations, which have no linguistic significance but are obvious noises, lead us to an identification of their common source, how they are produced and a description of his activity: as indicators, they have pertinent characteristics, just as in a language system the features that lead to the identification of a signified are pertinent.

FIGURE 22. Language system code and noise repertoire: comparison of systems of conventional (and musical) language codes and the noise repertoire (sound events).

It is often in the same way as that type of language that we understand—or fail to understand—music. Why, then, should we not add the decoding of what naturally emits sound to any approach to cultural music?

Besides, we cannot continue this decoding of sound objects if we limit ourselves to natural listening, at least if we want to use it to discover a musicality. It is precisely by putting aside spontaneous reference to sound sources, demonstrating the processes behind identifying and describing objects perceived across a whole variety of sound samples, that we might have some chance of progress. We are therefore moving in the opposite direction from making lists of instruments or from describing the particular properties of the samples they produce.

In book 5 we will endeavor to find such a method, one that can take into account articulation and intonation, the common bases for identifying any type of sound object.

But as we have said, we will not pursue such a general study for too long. Aware now of the disparity among sound objects, in relation to both their innumerable sources and their capricious modulations, we feel that it would be good to limit ourselves to the simplest, least indicative, least anecdotal objects, which carry a more spontaneous, although sparser, musicality. We will, however, take care to identify those suitable sound objects that lend themselves to musicianly invention just as do the most universal sound objects. We cannot apply any musical perceptual structure to them a priori. We will find out through practical work if this is possible.

19.4. THE CHILD WITH THE GRASS

Homo faber, grown old, no longer plays on anything but Stradivarius. So we must use a younger setting. We are going to listen to a child who has picked a suitable blade of grass, held it stretched between his thumbs, and is now blowing on the grass while the hollow of his hands serves as a resonator.

First we note that this child is giving us the right exercise in musicianship for our situation: we no longer want to hear the Stradivarius’s sound quality, which is too musical, but listen in a musicianly way to the crudest of sound objects, and we will discover this mode of listening by doing it.

What is more, from the sound sources, he has chosen for himself one of those that seemed most suitable for what he is doing. In fact, this child is trying out his sounds one after the other, and the problem he presents is more his manner of making them than identifying them. Moreover, his intention is visibly musicianly. Even if the result does not seem musical to his exasperated audience, we cannot deny an aesthetic intention, or at least an artistic activity, on the part of the composer. He does not demand or use an implement. His aim is disinterested, if not disarming; it is even, we must admit, musical. Indeed, not content with fabricating sounds, he plays them, compares them, judges them, and finds them more or less successful, their sequence more or less satisfactory. As we said about Neanderthal man, if this child is not making music, what is he doing?

Our example is already outstripping our purpose. In the sounds of the grass there is more than sonorities. We will nevertheless continue. Suppose he is making “experimental music.” What is heard by the listener, even casual, reticent, or hostile? For once, and this is not the norm, sound objects. In fact, scarcely has he identified the causality, grass, before the series of efforts by the virtuoso teach him nothing more, either about a grass anecdote or an unlikely piece of grass music: there will be no further “message,” any more than event. Our listener will have to suffer a collection of objects devoid of musical meaning, and he will hear them all the better for this: one hoarser, another more strident; some short, others interminable; some trumpet-like, others rasping. The best of it is that, in fact, this (nonmusician) listener will be doing the best musicianly listening possible. Constrained to listen, as the objects are so hostile, he will implicitly make value judgments. He would go so far as to mutter (provided he did not—wrongly—despise his unconscious activity): “That one’s a bit better than the others.”

In fact, he is practicing the two modes of listening: musical, which makes him locate a higher, a deeper, a short or a long sound, and so forth, albeit crudely; and another type of listening, musicianly, much more refined. He cannot stop himself identifying with the child, blowing along with him, succeeding or failing: the grass cracks, balloons out, straightens, bursts; it is as if he were playing it himself. The breaths are short, long, good, rushed; again it is the listener in agony, out of breath. What better confirmation of what we said in chapter 15: we are not listening to the sound for the event any more but to the sound event itself?

19.5. THE MUSICAL IN EMBRYO

And so we discover what might structure the perception of sound objects. We can see that these structures, the foundation of all sonorities, would also provide an initial approach to the musical, tending to describe (prematurely) certain formal aspects of the sound object. But we know that this was quite different from describing the object by means of a crude musicality (sector 4: bass, forte, piano . . .); we are dealing with a refined sonority, as much for sound effects (sector 3) as for details of performance (sector 2).

Where will we turn to make progress? Certainly not toward musical listening, which is conventional by definition, and certainly not toward an extension of existing musical conventions, to accommodate this new domain of sound. The man listening to the grass is only such a good musician because he has not won the Prix de Rome.

What are we asking of the experimental listener (at the tape recorder, for example) in musicianly listening to any type of sound over which he has no control? We are putting him into the acousmatic situation, forbidding him to ask questions about the origin of the sound, and also into a deconditioning situation, refusing him reference to any traditional music theory so that he listens with a fresh ear, which is curious to discern ways of describing sounds that are at present not in his “system” but that can be clearly heard and demand to be included in some other system, through lateral generalization.

Would we ask this listener to be as passive as his music theory is supposedly active? No. He listens to sound as if he were making it; he tries various experiments, approaches the object by listening to it several times over, just as the child with the grass made several attempts to perfect his motif, his theme. Though less apparent, his activity is just as real as the instrumentalist’s.

Here there is symmetry in terms of translation. Since the recorded tape indisputably gives the same physical signal each time it is played, the listener can perceive the same sound object. Then his repeated listening acts as a series of rough sketches. He is working on his ear as the instrumentalist worked at his instrument.

Moreover, musicians, even without tape recorders, corroborate what we are saying: for an instrumentalist it is indeed the ear that counts. However difficult the technique, the positioning of a bow or the placing of a voice, the teacher advises the pupil to learn to hear himself. With a gifted pupil, they say he has an ear, before saying he has fingers or a voice.

19.6. THE CHILD WITH THE VIOLIN

Here, if I may, I should like to mention some personal memories. Throughout my childhood, listening to my father’s violin lessons from the next room, I would hear his perpetual refrain: “One to get ready,” he would say, “two to play.” The poor children who, tearful or resigned, had to undergo this regime put up with this asceticism as best they could. A long moment of hesitation prolonged the silence: “Your bow like this; your fingers like that! Press with your fingertips, raise your wrist,” and so on. I could sense a laborious positioning process. Then, at the number two the liberated bow ran across the string. The rosined pressure gave the sound a sometimes painful mordent; then the whole forearm at full stretch swept the air, usually vouchsafing a hoarse scraping noise, the brief and pitiful result of so much effort. When, fascinated by this nevertheless familiar listening process, I was drawn into following the twists and turns of the drama, I would, to my great surprise, hear my father reprimanding or praising the child, often, it seemed, the wrong way round. When for once he had played in tune and not made too many squeaking noises, he told him off. For other dreadful sounds, clearly out of tune, the gruff voice would encourage him. Perhaps, I thought later, it was because his stance was good, with his bow held well and a bold extension for an augmented second, which it was better to have wanted too accurate and risk being wrong than to get right sloppily or by chance. In this way my father seemed to inculcate in the young musician a separation into two stages of making and hearing, knowing that once he was a virtuoso, it would not be at the moment when the note was released that he could put it right.

When I started listening to sound objects, I remembered those lessons. With sounds in which I had nothing musical to hear (no traditional values), I could first of all endeavor to sense a facture, to listen a second, a third time, as if I were responsible for describing something behind the unknown or overlooked phenomenon. And so, I worked on my ear, and I learned to imagine the potential values concealed in badly articulated sounds, just as eventual qualities were developing in the scraping sounds of the beginner.

We will take this moral as far as it will go. My father could have been methodical, rewarding effort or intention more than success or result. This would be to underestimate the lesson. In the two stages, preparation and execution, he was making an instinctive dichotomy that went beyond the scope of teaching. The first stage was facture, entirely focused on results; the second stage was meaning, permeated with the facture.

The schema of musical communication itself was clearly visible in this, and, of course, it applied both ways, to the violinist as much as the listener, in the sense of prose composition as well as translation.

However reduced our listening to the sound object or to the sound event for itself may be, the two sides of this listening, and the links it still has with the two aims that usually go beyond the object cannot be separated: “What’s happening?” and “What does it mean?” In chapter 8 we did try to “pry away” the sound object from its two neighbors, the event and the meaning, the cause and the aim: but our listening is structured by this same looped circuit, which harks back to the object: musicianly listening to factures by the instrumentalist, musical listening to values in the traditional system, and invention by the researcher trying to discover unknown—that is, previously unheard—structures, outside the musical code and musical manners.

19.7. OVERVIEW OF “SONORITY”

Through the example of the grass sounds, and also the violin lesson, we have gained important insights. We will continue with the same line of inquiry:

(a) Every object perceived through sound is only so because of our listening intention. Nothing can prevent a listener from destabilizing this, going unconsciously from one system to another or else from reduced listening to one that is not. We should perhaps even congratulate ourselves on this. It is through such swirling intentions that links are established, information exchanged. The essential is to be aware of some final goal, toward which the other perceptual activities are working, and to define the project that formally sanctions the sound object: reduced listening.

Thus, when we listen to a grass sound, we may unthinkingly focus on a traditional value (pitch), which masks listening to the structures of the grass (as sound or as music), which are rich in other ways.

But the troublesome question remains: which of these sound (grass) structures are common to all sound objects? Which, on the contrary, describe the sound object coming from the grass as if it virtually belonged to some particular domain? This question is far from idle. Above and beyond its theoretical importance, here is the experimental proof: sometimes the grass sounds like a trumpet; sometimes it moans like a child; sometimes it might, almost, give out a vowel, so . . .

(b) By comparing the (musicianly) activities of these two children—one using grass, the other the bow—we can prove that sound can indeed be more general than the musical.2 It is by getting rid of the pertinent features in the various languages that we can discover, by subtraction, the essential sound structures that we have said are linked to “factures”; this is the shared comparative domain of all sound objects.

Later, we will retain only very few criteria for sonority, just enough to provide a basis for identifying and classifying musical objects (as sound objects). We should not conclude from this that this idea is simple, very much to the contrary. It is the extreme difficulty of making any general statements about the “common stock” of sound objects (which are described later on) that makes us so cautious.

(c) So we move inevitably from sound to the musical. We have generalized the specific study of the “sound structures of musical objects,” in the traditional sense of the professional language, in the formula “musicianly listening to sound objects,” and we have limited it initially to a selection of suitable objects.

It remains for us to clarify what “musicianly invention” is, that gives itself sound objects not yet described as musical but that lend themselves to this.

(d) We always dread begging the question, which we know is a danger for us. Although this is a very real danger at the beginning of a piece of research, which is always permeated with our conditionings or notions, it recedes as everything becomes clearer, and, better still, it becomes less daunting. The choice of the child with the grass shows, moreover, what meaning (inspired by him) we give to musicianly invention. It should reassure some and frighten others.

(e) As for “musicianly listening,” we have just seen it at work. It is first of all listening to factures, in the manner of homo faber, whom we imagine ourselves to be. But it is also listening to effects, all the contents of sonority. In fact, it is the first step toward reduced listening, listening to sound at this point, but already striving to find identification criteria. We must make ourselves a little clearer.

19.8. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MUSICIANLY AND NATURAL LISTENING

1. Musicianly listening is renewed by natural listening.3

Musicianly listening takes musical intention beyond the conditioning of custom; it must therefore move away from traditional listening and refuse to limit itself to the objects of a culture.

But since it has a tendency to “go back to sources,” to more inquisitive listening, it is in danger of turning back into natural listening, focusing not on the sound object but on the event. It must resist this just as much.

This detachment of cause from effect, this reversal of curiosity, may seem delicate and fragile. In fact it is an exercise in power; the distinction it creates, infinitely productive, is the secret of reduced listening. It amounts to transferring traditional responsibilities from the composer to the object.

2. Musicians often practice natural listening.

There are not two categories of listener, those who are entirely musicians and those who are not musicians at all. In a musical civilization a whole series of conditionings and skills creates different levels of listening and ways of accounting for them socially. Between the statement “I can hear a violin playing a tune” and this one: “When I switched on the radio, I happened to recognize Untel playing such and such a piece; he seemed in very good form,” there is all the difference that separates a philistine from a skilled amateur or an experienced professional. But we observe that, even if the former has practiced ordinary, and the latter expert, listening, in each case they have drawn conclusions and paid little attention to musicality.

3. The natural ear sometimes does musical listening.

As musical language belongs to a civilization, musical characteristics and values are used independently of those who practice music to describe sound objects or objects that are targeted through sound. The doctor will speak of an arrhythmic heart, whistling breath, a fine death rattle. The mechanic will talk about his engine in musical terms. . . . It may be that he is focusing on the sound itself at the time, but only temporarily, to get some clues. To describe these clues, there is no reason why he should not use traditional vocabulary or refer to conventional musical values.

19.9. TOWARD A MUSICIANLY CLASSIFICATION OF SOUND OBJECTS

To what sort of classification of sound objects can musicianly listening lead us?

As long as the simple examples of traditional music are in our minds, we expect to obtain a classification of sound objects that is rather like instrumental classification. Since energetic events are the common basis of sound objects, surely instruments will enlighten us? In fact, we will see that musical instruments have very wisely minimized these events. In their development they have all followed the same rule: discretion. They are all busy trying to be forgotten and to load the sound object only very sparingly with musicality. A classification of sound objects would actually be ill-served by such highly developed examples: for example, piano notes, which have a particular predetermined calibration of values and a particular specialized facture.

But a general classification of sound objects still seems to be out of our reach and, in addition, to lack the effectiveness necessary for our purposes. We, who are still musicians, do not have the motivation, purely for the sake of knowledge, that would bring about such a classification. So in book 5 we will reach a compromise, a classification of sound objects that does not exclude musical choices in the sound criteria. We hope, however, once we have an adequate range of objects, to open the way for other researchers, who might follow the same pathway for other systems. One interesting direction would be research into the language of animals.

19.10. FROM SOUND TO THE MUSICAL

It was essential to go back to the sources of sound before moving on to the distinctions below, which will mark a new approach to objects and define the activities that target them, in a different way from the “conventional system.”

(a) General nature of sound objects.

A moment’s thought shows that the distinction sound object—musical object, as far as a difference of nature goes—collapses as soon as the sound object is defined theoretically: everything that can be heard in reduced listening. The former contains the latter. Musical objects, phonetic objects, industrial sounds, birdsong, and so on are sound objects. The common stock of these objects has as many branches as the categories these terms cover. How can we separate what belongs to the common stock and what comes from the descriptions of them?

(b) In listening to sound objects, therefore, we have to distinguish between two aspects: one to do with identifying, the other with describing, these objects. Where identification is concerned, very general rules have been suggested, which would enable objects to be articulated in the sound universe independently of the pertinent characteristics of each source. If such a general, even if not precise, approach to sound objects is successful, it will be applicable to the musical object in particular.

(c) We will abandon, however, our thoughts of an overall study of the ways sound objects can be described. Not that this is not interesting in theory. But it would be truly presumptuous to attempt such a study, mixing up so many objects whose qualities are, precisely, developed and differentiated by their use.

This is what made us say, conversely, supposing the question to be resolved, that a fully elucidated musicality could in its turn be applied to the problem of sonorities (at least if the axioms of musicality, both at the level of description and at the level before, have not already marked out an exclusively musical domain). The complementariness of what we are saying can be explained as follows: the laws for identifying sound objects give new material to musical research, free of the most narrow-minded musical prejudice; at the same time, a musicality explored for fairly universal musical objects could lead to methods that, if not parallel, at least come from lateral generalization, for a particular field of sonorities, arising from the various domains of facture or use.

(d) It is true, in fact, that we have introduced a further restriction, which is not of the same nature as the earlier ones, by speaking of musicianly invention: this should create sound objects varied enough to extend the study of sonorities while limiting their varieties so that, later, they can be found suitable for a musicality yet to be defined. It remains to be shown that this bias does not vitiate all our research and that it does not, right from the start, posit an implicit musical convention without defining it.

(e) All of this finally pins down the term musicianly listening, which has been becoming gradually clearer: it is doubly restricted, then, on the one hand, because it is not asked to explain all the sound structures of the object, but only the structures that identify it (point b); on the other hand, because, informed by it, we choose suitable objects (point d) for it. It is through these two restrictions that it makes “reduced” listening into a “specialty.”

Points a and c may well come from logic, and point e from a particular terminology, but we still had to prove the validity of points b and c; this is the purpose of the examples given in this chapter and the argument in the next chapters.