NOTES

THE TREATISE ON MUSICAL OBJECTS AND THE GRM

1. Tratado dos objetos musicais, trans. Ivo Martinazzo (Brasília: Edunb Editora Universidade de Brasília, 1993).

2. Tratado de los objetos musicales, trans. Araceli Cabezón de Diego (Madrid: Alianza Música, 1998).

3. Traktaat van de muzikale objecten, trans. by Konrad Boehmer (Beek Ubbergen: Tandem Felix, 2006).

4. See Denis Smalley, “Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes,” Organised Sound 2, no. 2 (1997): 107–26.

5. Readers interested in the history of the GRM should see Évelyne Gayou, Le groupe de recherches musicales: Cinquante ans d’histoire (Paris: Fayard, 2007).

6. Pierre Schaeffer, A la recherche d’une musique concrète (Paris: Seuil, 1952); Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. Christine North and John Dack (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

7. The English translation can be downloaded at www.iremus.cnrs.fr/fr/projets-de-recherche/electroacoustic-resource-site-ears.

TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

1. Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux: Essai interdisciplines (1966; repr., with an additional chapter, Paris: Seuil, 1977).

2. Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux, 457. All pagination refers to the 1977 edition; subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.

3. For a discussion of this work see Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. Christine North and John Dack (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), chaps. 9 and 10.

PIERRE SCHAEFFER’S TREATISE ON MUSICAL OBJECTS AND MUSIC THEORY

1. Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux: Essai interdisciplines (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 663. Subsequent citations of this edition are given parenthetically in the text.

2. “Across disciplines”: here Schaeffer uses the word interdiscipline, which he apparently coined, rather than interdisciplinaire, the more usual term.

PREFACE

1. E.T.A. Hoffmann, E.T. A Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: “Kreisleriana,” “The Poet and the Composer,” Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 74, 163–64.

2. The word used in French is lutherie, which means the craftsmanship of instrument making but which Schaeffer used in a broader connotation to refer to virtual instruments as well. Instrumentarium, we hope, captures this double meaning, although where the context is appropriate, lutherie is translated simply as “instrument making.”—Trans.

3. The word used in French is solfège, a word occurring in romance languages but that does not have an English equivalent. Sol-fa is sometimes used in the United Kingdom or Ear-training in the United States. Music theory is mainly used when referring to solfège, although occasionally, where the context demands this, it is translated as “musicianship.”—Trans.

4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958), 254. Published in English as Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963).—Trans.

5. According to the Roman historian Livy (50 BCE–CE 17). The Curiatii and the Horatii were male triplets from Alba Longa and Rome, who fought to settle the war between the two cities during the reign of Tullus Hostilius (672–642 BCE). The Horatii finally overcame the Curiatii.—Trans.

6. Jacques Poullin and Francis Coupigny were Schaeffer’s chief engineers from 1950 to 1975. They contributed significantly to the invention and development of new tools for sound processing.—Trans.

7. Pierre Henry was Schaeffer’s first collaborator in his “musique concrète” compositions and later became one of the great figures of electroacoustic music; Luc Ferrari and François Bayle are two major composers who worked at the Groupe de recherches musicales founded by Schaeffer in 1958. Bayle became director of the group in 1966.—Trans.

8. Guy Reibel and Enrico Chiarucci, both composers working at the GRM in the 1960s, wrote and developed a book of sound examples, the Solfège de l’objet sonore, in 1967, which is a guide for the understanding of the Treatise on Musical Objects. In 1998 the Solfège de l’objet sonore was reissued by the Ina/GRM as a booklet with 3 CDs.—Trans.

9. Two close collaborators of Pierre Schaeffer.—Trans.

10. Wladimir Porché was the head of the RTF (Radiodiffusion-télévision française) in 1951 when Pierre Schaeffer, after starting his experiments on “musique concrète,” created the Groupe de recherche de musique concrète (GRMC); Porché supported this experimental approach and provided the infrastructure for Schaeffer’s work. Jacques-Bernard Dupont was the head of the ORTF (Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française) when Schaeffer published the Treatise on Musical Objects in 1966.—Trans.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS: THE HISTORICAL SITUATION OF MUSIC

1. Renée Descartes, “Remarques sur septièmes objections, Méditations métaphysiques” (1641).—Trans.

2. Literally “timbre melody,” consisting of a succession of sounds of the same pitch but different timbres. [The word-for-word translation is, in fact, “Sound-Color-Melody” it implies splitting a melody among different instruments. Sounds may or may not have the same pitch but are often within a narrow pitch range.—Trans.]

3. Frequency, measured in hertz (Hz); intensity, measured in decibels (dB); and time, measured in seconds (s) or milliseconds (ms).

4. The French term is instruments gigognes, a reference to the figure from children’s stories, Mère Gigogne, who produced hordes of children from beneath her voluminous skirts. Here the expression implies “the instrument that contains all instruments.”—Trans.

5. This is a groove closed in on itself, thereby isolating a fragment of recording, which can be listened to indefinitely.

6. In contrast with the natural external world, values are norms established within a determined cultural group.

7. By “sound object” we mean sound itself, considered as sound, and not the material object (instrument or some sort of device) that produces it.

8. A very powerful calculating machine. [In the early 1960s, when the Treatise was written, computers were quite unknown devices.—Trans.]

9. The same remark can be found in Saussure with reference to language; see Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1916). [Translated by Roy Harris into English as Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1983).—Trans.]

10. These terms will be clarified later in the work, in particular in chapter 4.

11. The problem of the relationship between objects and structures will be discussed at a deeper level in the philosophical book (book 4).

12. Robert Francès, La perception de la musique (Paris: Vrin, 1958). [Published in English as The Perception of Music (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988).—Trans.]

13. Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique générale, vol. 1, Les fondations du langage (Paris: Minuit, 1963). [The Essais are a collection of lectures by Jakobson; a second volume appeared in 1973.—Trans.]

1. THE INSTRUMENTAL PREREQUISITE

1. One of the two instruments of the Indian tabla is played according to the technique described here.

2. A primitive instrument composed of resonant stones of different sizes, giving a number of sounds of different pitches.

3. Schaeffer explains here that music leads to abstraction while remaining grounded in physical experience. He uses the expression “adhérence au concret” to explain the tendency of all perceived sounds to refer to their physical cause.—Trans.

4. This statement is eloquently corroborated by acoustic enhancements, where huge differences in pitch can be seen between various transmissions of the same note, all of which, however, are heard as in tune by a Western ear.

5. This paragraph is a criticism of the preconceived methods of electronic and serial music, where pitch, intensity, or duration are more important than the sound itself and are often precalculated.—Trans.

2. PLAYING AN INSTRUMENT

1. The Baschet brothers quite rightly use the term adaptors rather than resonators: this is the device that couples the vibrating element to the air, taking into account any acoustic impedance. [Bernard and François Baschet were two well-known instrument makers and artists who created totally original instruments, among them the Baschet Crystal, which was used for music and sculptures or in education. The Baschet brothers worked closely with Schaeffer from the end of the 1950s and during the 1960s.—Trans.]

2. The dynamic of a sound is the variation in intensity of this sound in the course of its duration. (The expressiveness, the life of vocal sounds, for example, is closely linked to their dynamic.)

3. Schaeffer refers here to Molière’s 1666 play Le médecin malgré lui (act 2, scene 6). In English the title is The Doctor in Spite of Himself. The answer to the question, after lengthy disquisitions, is that she is dumb because she’s lost the power of speech.—Trans.

4. We would ask the reader not to be offended here by the apparent lightheartedness of the analysis and to keep in mind, on the one hand, that in this treatise we deliberately start from hackneyed definitions in order to distance ourselves from the technical meanings that these key terms often take on in specific disciplines and, on the other hand, that in this particular case the origin of the word timbre justifies our attitude: in effect, it initially designated a sort of drum made with a series of strings under tension that gave the sound a characteristic color; in practice, therefore, the word timbre and the thing itself as musical instrument were one and the same; again, when we consider the ancient meaning of timbre as a “stamp of origin” attached to a particular object to indicate where it came from, it is clear that we could hardly, initially, think of timbre as anything else but a reference to the instrument, a trademark.

5. In another meaning of the word, clearly different from the one above, and which is defined below.

6. Here, of course, we are referring to the “coloration” particular to each sound and not to the instrumental timbre defined in section 2.4.

7. By complex sound we mean all sounds of undefined pitch, and therefore containing a fairly large number of components with nonharmonic frequencies.

8. Profile is a technical term referring to what in sound synthesis is called the envelope found in early analog synthesizers. The envelope, or overall dynamic shape of the sound, is often structured in four sections: Attack, Decay, Sustain, and Release (called ADSR).—Trans.

9. See Pierre Schaeffer, A la recherche d’une musique concrète (Paris: Seuil, 1952), translated into English by Christine North and John Dack as In Search of a Concrete Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).—Trans.

10. And which our friend Abraham Moles then very unwisely helped to circulate, in the same way as the theory of the “slab of sensation,” in his various works. [Abraham Moles was a French engineer and philosopher working on aesthetics and information theory. He collaborated with Schaeffer at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s.—Trans.]

11. The reader will find a fuller account in chapter 23 of what is only briefly summarized here.

12. Criticized, not without reason, by John Cage, who did not understand our viewpoint.

13. Cf. book 3.

14. Electronic organ, based on electrostatic generators technology, developed by Jean-Adolphe Dereux between 1950 and 1955.—Trans.

3. CAPTURING SOUNDS

1. In the first chapter we used, and we will use again, the word signal, which refers back to the event, in contrast to the sound or musical object perceived for itself. We will use signal here (in contrast to the sign, a component of musical language) in the sense used by physicists: they use the term to designate the physical components they manage to extract from a complex phenomenon, which they have grasped.

2. See, e.g., Robert Kolben, “The Stereophoner,” Gravesaner Blätter, no. 13 (1959). Kolben reports on the disquieting experiments in pseudo-stereophony carried out by Hermann Scherchen based on monophonic recordings.

3. Here, in the psychological sense.

4. Three spatial dimensions plus intensity.

5. Revue du son et de la radiodiffusion-télévision, no. 90 (Oct. 1960).

6. Conversely, it may be that a reproduction is “better” than direct listening because of the highlighting of the properties described in sections 3.7 and 3.8.

7. Schaeffer refers here to the École polytechnique, a French public institution of higher education and research, renowned for its ingénieur polytechnicien degree in science and engineering. This is one of the institutions where Schaeffer studied.—Trans.

8. This French scholarship for arts students, dating back to 1662, includes a two-year stay in Rome.—Trans.

9. The notion of “thème et version,” the French terms used here, is central to Schaeffer’s concept of “la musique concrète.” These are the academic exercises of translation into and translation from the target language. We decided to adopt the university terms “prose composition” and “translation” as being less cumbersome than “translation into” and “translation from.”—Trans.

10. Jacques Copeau (1879–1949) was an influential theater director who left his mark on twentieth-century French theater. Schaeffer contacted him in 1942 to organize a radiophonic art workshop.—Trans.

11. Jacques Copeau, in Dix ans d’essais radiophoniques, an album of recordings edited by the research services of the ORTF. [A CD edition was produced in 1989 by Phonurgia Nova and Ina. Reference PN 0461/5.—Trans.]

4. ACOUSMATICS

1. As Jérôme Peignot also remarked. [A French writer and poet who collaborated with Schaeffer in the 1950s, Peignot suggested the word acousmatic to Schaeffer to describe the listening situation of musique concrète.—Trans.]

5. “WHAT CAN BE HEARD”

1. Schaeffer uses four different words in French to describe the listening modes: écouter, ouïr, entendre, and comprendre. Since there are no perfect equivalents in English, the decision has been made to include the French original word in brackets throughout this chapter.—Trans.

2. Cf. cosmonauts’ stories about “space silence.”

3. Max Frisch, Homo Faber (Paris: Gallimard, 1961). [Frisch’s novel was first published in German in 1957 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), then, in English as Homo Faber in 1959 (London: Abelard-Schuman).—Trans.]

6. THE FOUR LISTENING MODES

1. The pictures on the cover of this work have been chosen to illustrate this diagram. Here is how the visual metaphor they contain should be interpreted: the two ways of playing an instrument such as the violin suggest two “events” in sector 1; the half-profile of a listening woman highlights the ear but also all the surrounding activity that goes with it; in sector 3 there are various qualified sound objects (both the musicianly perception of “pizzicato” and “swelled sound” and the acoustician’s depiction of different dynamic profiles); finally, these two sounds emerge as “signs” and acquire their “meaning” in sector 4. Although there are five pictures for reasons of format, it can be seen that the two “violins” could just as well be in sector 1 as sector 3, if the metaphor is interpreted in different ways: the first interpretation suggests the “prior” event; the second, musicianly perception, a quality of the listening individual.

2. An American device that gives a sound diagram, which for the sake of convenience is called a “sonogram.”

7. SCIENTIFIC PREJUDICE

1. Professor Henri Louis Charles Piéron (1881–1964) was a French psychologist and one of the founders of scientific psychology.—Trans.

2. Adolphe Danhauser, Théorie de la musique, reviewed and corrected by Henri Rabaud (Paris: Lemoine, 1929).

3. Edmund Husserl, Logique formelle et logique transcendantale, translated from the German by Suzanne Bachelard (Paris: PUF, 1957). [Translated into English by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969).—Trans.]

4. Fritz Winckel, Vues nouvelles sur le monde des sons, trans. Abraham Moles (Paris: Dunod, 1960). [Published in English as Music, Sound and Sensation, trans. Thomas Binkley (New York: Dover, 1967).—Trans.]

8. THE HEARING INTENTION

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) was a French phenomenological philosopher.—Trans.

2. The word facture refers to how something is made; it is used in this sense when speaking of literary productions, music, or painting.—Trans.

9. AMBIGUITIES IN MUSICAL ACOUSTICS

1. This is the title of the elementary manual familiar to beginners. [The title that Schaeffer references in this section’s heading is Danhauser’s Solfège des solfèges.—Trans.]

2. Adolphe-Leopold Danhauser, Théorie de la musique, reviewed and corrected by Henri Rabaud (Paris: Lemoine, 1929), 119, note a.

3. Jean-Jacques Matras (1909–92) was an acoustician and engineer who wrote several books and essays on acoustics; on Moles see chap. 2n10.—Trans.

10. CORRELATION BETWEEN SPECTRA AND PITCHES

1. Herman von Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1877). [Translated into English by A.J. Ellis as On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (London: Longmans, 1895).—Trans.]

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Fourier’s theorem: every periodic and continuous function f(t), of period T, can be represented by a series in the following form:

where

We could also write:

Moreover, this series is unique (i.e., the a_n and b_n, or the c_n are determined unequivocally).

In “musical” terms, we could say this: every regular periodic vibration can be obtained by a sum of simple vibrations, each with a frequency that is a whole multiple of the fundamental frequency UC Logo and a determined amplitude.

5. Ibid.

6. See chap. 30.

7. The term tonic sound is used to describe a continuous pitched sound with a clearly recognizable main frequency.—Trans.

8. Robert Francès, La perception de la musique (Paris: Vrin, 1958). [Published in English as The Perception of Music, trans. W. Jay Dowling (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988).—Trans.]

9. See Colloque d’acoustique de Marseille (Paris: Éditions C.N.R.S., 1959), 169–84.

10. In Helmholtz’s terminology. A musician is, conversely, justified in saying: from the most “natural” to the most “artificial,” moving in the same way from music to physics.

11. See “Rapport entre la hauteur et le fondamental d’un son musical,” a paper by the GRM delivered at the Cinquième congrès international d’acoustique, Liège, Sept. 1965.

11. THRESHOLDS AND TRANSIENTS

1. Léonid Pimonow, Vibrations en régime transitoire (Paris: Dunod, 1962).

2. Fritz Winckel, Vues nouvelles sur le monde des sons, trans. Abraham Moles (Paris: Dunod, 1960). [Published in English as Music, Sound and Sensation, trans. Thomas Binkley (New York: Dover, 1967).—Trans.]

3. Ibid.

12. TEMPORAL ANAMORPHOSES I: TIMBRES AND DYNAMICS

1. The first account of these, by Hermann Scherchen, appeared in Gravesaner Blätter, no. 17 (1960).

2. Properly speaking, the term anamorphosis refers to the distortion of the image of an object in a curved mirror compared with the object itself. We are using it here in a figurative sense, to designate certain noticeable “irregularities” when the physical vibration becomes perceived sound, suggesting a sort of psychological distortion of physical “reality,” and which, as we will see, simply shows that perception cannot be reduced to physical measurements. Temporal anamorphosis is by and large the anamorphosis that appears in the perception of time.

3. See p. 152n2.

4. Ibid.

13. TEMPORAL ANAMORPHOSES II: TIMBRE AND INSTRUMENT

1. In the French text Schaeffer refers to a high-pass filter; however, it is obvious from his explanation and figure 14 that as the high frequencies are suppressed, he is in fact referring to a low-pass filter.—Trans.

14. TIME AND DURATION

1. We should also mention the support and advice unstintingly given by this expert and incomparable presenter of contemporary music.

15. REDUCTION TO THE OBJECT

1. Edmund Husserl, Logique formelle et logique transcendantale, translated from the German by Suzanne Bachelard (Paris: PUF, 1957). [Translated into English as Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969).—Trans.]

2. Edmund Husserl, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1950). [Translated into English as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy—First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982).—Trans.]

3. Husserl, Logique formelle et logique transcendantale.

4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). [Published in English as Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).—Trans.]

5. The horse is no less present in the recording (without sight) than in the photo (without hearing). Acousmatics does not ipso facto create the sound object.

6. We have abandoned the terms signal and even more sign to refer to this.

7. This intention to listen only to the sound object we call reduced listening. It was introduced at the end of chapter 8, and it will be described in more detail in the next section.

8. Adherents of Gestalttheorie, also called gestaltists.

9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Published in English as The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).—Trans.

10. Paul Fraisse, Manuel pratique de psychologie expérimentale (Paris: PUF, 1956).—Trans.

11. Variant, with exactly the same meaning: “A part of a whole is entirely different from the same part in isolation or as part of another whole.” [Schaeffer refers here to André Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (Paris: Alcan, 1926).—Trans.]

12. By scalar we mean using the different degrees of a discontinuous calibration.

16. PERCEPTUAL STRUCTURES

1. This expression suggests that at this level, and in a different way from language, music has a meaning rather than a signification.

2. Just as the mystery of life is found at the cellular level.

3. As we cannot deal with all the levels at once, we will limit ourselves to mentioning the meaning of music for each, certainly infinitely less clear than the meaning of the language of words.

4. In his comparison between music and language Schaeffer uses the two words langue and langage in their Saussurian sense. As English does not make this distinction, we have translated langue as “language system” and langage as “language” throughout the book. Similarly where the linguistics distinction is made between sens and signification, we have used “meaning” for the first term and “signification” for the second.—Trans.

5. Bertil Malmberg, La phonétique (Paris: PUF, 1954). [Translated into English as Phonetics (New York: Dover, 1963).—Trans.]

6. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1916). [Published in English as Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (Chicago: Open Court, 1983).—Trans.]

7. Malmberg, La phonétique.

8. Ibid.

9. André Martinet, Éléments de linguistique générale (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960). [Published in English as Elements of General Linguistics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).—Trans.]

10. Malmberg, La phonétique.

11. Robert Francès, in his book La perception de la musique (Paris: Vrin, 1958), demonstrated the importance of this learning process in a great number of experiments, which lead him to say that “musical perception has little in common with hearing.” Those who wish to have proof of this should refer to his work. [Published in English as The Perception of Music (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988).—Trans.]

12. Malmberg, La phonétique.

13. Reminder: Speech as opposed to language systems. It is “language” that subsumes both language systems and speech.

17. COMPARATIVE STRUCTURES: MUSIC AND LANGUAGE

1. Furthermore, we must point out that these levels are much more essential for music than language systems.

2. Here we return to the vexed question of the relationship between acoustics and an acoulogy at the same distinctive level. [Acoulogy is a term introduced by Schaeffer to designate the act of isolating and defining the musical characteristics of recorded sounds.—Trans.]

3. Jean Perrot, La linguistique (Paris: PUF, 1953). It would perhaps be better to say the totality of signs perceptible to any one of our senses and serving, more or less conventionally, to communicate meanings.

4. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1916).

5. Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique générale (Paris: Minuit, 1963).

6. Ibid.

7. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He made significant contributions to semiotics, which he regarded as a branch of logic. Peirce is regarded as the founder of “pragmatism.”—Trans.

8. These behaviors are highlighted a contrario in certain pathological states (auditory asymbolisms).

9. This rule, stated at the beginning of this work, is doubtless the musical equivalent of those stated by Jakobson for language.

10. See chap. 21.

11. This is not the case, for example, in the Chinese language.

18. THE CONVENTIONAL MUSICAL SYSTEM: MUSICALITY AND SONORITY

1. See chap. 31.

2. All this is still schematic. The system of written signs can also develop more autonomously, float free from the word: ideograms, orthography in language systems and in music, theoretical scores playing the written sign rather than its sound equivalent.

3. This is proved by the fact that reading a score never entirely elucidates a work, even if the score informs the listener. The composer himself only really wants it to be performed in order to hear what it’s like.

4. We use this term (the symbols of music theory) rather than sign because of the disparity between musical writing and the musical sign carried by the real-world sound object. The musical sign becomes synonymous with the musical object once this distinction has been made.

5. Feature in the phonological sense is rather unfortunate in music, where the word generally denotes a particularly difficult phrase involving, precisely, virtuosity.

6. Olivier Messiaen, Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum . . . [Orchestral piece composed in 1964.—Trans.]

7. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mikrophonie 1. [Piece for live electronics, with tam-tam, amplification, microphones, and filters, composed in 1964.—Trans.]

19. NATURAL SOUND STRUCTURES: MUSICIANLY LISTENING

1. This is a reference to Molière’s comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670). M. Jourdain is the middle-class master of the house, and Nicole is his maidservant.

2. As in so-called symphonic listening.

3. As in chapter 7.

20. THE REDUCED LISTENING SYSTEM: MUSICAL DUALISM

1. Clearly, this historical approach might have taken priority if the circumstances had been right. Unfortunately, there is now a conflict between conditioned Western musicologists and musicians of non-Western music, now rare, and who have also taken on Western conditioning. So the other approach must be adopted as more effective and perhaps as a prerequisite.

2. We should add to these the whistling languages (there are still some traces left in the Canaries and the Pyrenees) studied by René Guy Busnel. [Busnel was a French anthropologist who collaborated with Schaeffer.—Trans.]

3. See the work by Pierre Henry, Variations pour une porte et un soupir (Variations on a door and a sigh).

4. Baschet instruments, which deserve better than this, are nevertheless registered in scales. [This is a reference to the brothers Bernard and François Baschet, who invented several new instruments and sound sculptures in the 1950s.—Trans.]

21. MUSICAL RESEARCH

1. An expression used in telecommunications and exactly comparable to the phonic object, the spoken equivalent to the syllable, the “atom of speech.”

2. See section 16.6 or, for Raymond Queneau, “If you think, little girl, s’OK, s’OK, s’OK . . .” [This is a quotation from the poem by Raymond Queneau in L’instant fatal (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). The words “que ça va” (that it’s OK) are spelled as they are heard, “xa va.”—Trans.]

3. See section 19.10(d).

4. The difficulty is approaching it from the concrete angle. In the abstract field of ideas (and not perceptions), modern algebra and geometry constantly give examples of this (group theories, etc.).

5. This statement of the obvious in reality masks the indeterminateness of the relationship between the observer and the observed expressed in the standard vocabulary by this confusion about the same term.

6. This is why the word sign is instinctively used in the sense of what refers to something else. Sign of rain, sign of flight, says the Native American. The acoustician talks about the electric signal not only because this informs him about the phenomenon but because he translates acoustic events (movements, mechanical energy) into electrical events (currents, electrical energy).

22. MORPHOLOGY OF SOUND OBJECTS

1. Julius Robert Oppenheimer, L’esprit libéral (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). [Original English title: The Open Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).—Trans.]

2. Here we are using the adjective deponent figuratively, to denote (phonetic or sound) objects with one of their morphological components missing.

3. The term allure given by Schaeffer to the way sounds behave through time is, indeed, one of the most controversial terms when translating his works. Its basic meaning is “way of going,” and it is variously translated as way of walking, pace, gait, speed, rate, appearance, look. No English word truly represents the sense of the word; this is why it has been kept in its original French form. See section 32.8 for a fuller account of Schaeffer’s use of allure.—Trans.

4. Here Schaeffer refers to Plato’s Theory of Forms, which asserts that forms, and not sensations, possess the highest kind of reality.—Trans.

23. THE LABORATORY

1. Hermann Scherchen (1891–1996) was a German conductor who strongly promoted twentieth-century music. He was very interested in Schaeffer’s experiments and work, and he followed the activities of the GRMC very closely. In 1954, with the help of UNESCO, he created the Gravesano Studio in Switzerland, which became an important center for new music.—Trans.

2. See Pierre Schaeffer, A la recherche d’une musique concrète (Paris: Seuil, 1952). [Translated into English by Christine North and John Dack as In Search of a Concrete Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).—Trans.]

3. Phonogènes are variable-speed tape recorders.

4. On the Zeitregler see Appendix A.

5. The standard tape speed of a professional tape recorder is 38 cm/second. [15 ips.—Trans.]

6. On the form modulator see Appendix B. [Francis Coupigny was a French engineer who was a close collaborator of Schaeffer’s in the Service de la Recherche of the ORTF; in charge of technical developments, he built the Phonogène Universel and the synthesizer that is named in his honor.—Trans.]

7. See, e.g., Werner Meyer-Eppler, Elektronische Musik, in Klangstruktur der Musik (Berlin: TU Berlin, 1955).

8. See Répertoire international des musiques electroacoustiques. [The book was compiled by Hugh Davies and published by the Service de la recherche of the ORTF in 1962. A free English copy is available at https://archive.org/stream/InternationalElectronicMusicCatalog/EMR2_3_djvu.txt.—Trans.]

24. TYPOLOGY OF MUSICAL OBJECTS (I): CLASSIFICATION CRITERIA

1. Pascal’s two infinities are the infinitely great and the infinitely small. See Pascal, Pensées, 1670.

2. In section 24.9, figure 30.

3. In section 24.9, figure 30.

26. TYPOLOGY OF MUSICAL OBJECTS (III): ECCENTRIC SOUNDS

1. In French the term is grosse note, literally “fat note,” used to define a note where the attack, the continuation, or the decay have significant durations.—Trans.

2. In French the term is trame, used to define a slowly developing sound with some variation, much as the weft of a material pursues a continuous line across the warp but may have some slight irregularities.—Trans.

28. MUSICAL EXPERIENCE

1. Olivier Alain, Nouveau Larousse musical (Paris: Larousse, 1957), 2:380.

2. George Armitage Miller, Langage et communication (Paris: PUF, 1956). [Original title in English: Language and Communication (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963).—Trans.]

3. To go back to the stages in chapter 21, this experiment targets level 6, and the other, level 5.

4. Once perceived, a microstructure has all the meaning of the level above on its own scale.

29. GENERALIZING MUSIC THEORY

1. We must caution the reader against this pretension: “every definable temporal stage (in the development of sound matter) representing a ‘symbol’ analogous to a phoneme in language.” Abraham Moles, Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), 116. [Translated into English as Information Theory and Esthetic Perception (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), 110.—Trans.]

2. Adolphe Danhauser, Théorie de la musique, reviewed and corrected by Henri Rabaud (Paris: Lemoine, 1929).

3. Acousticians themselves agree on this. We could point out that the two additional qualities (apart from level and pitch) attributed to simple sounds by Stevens (volume and density) essentially depend on the sound structure in use; indeed, it is in their work that we find the beginnings of what they call the psychological dimensions of sound in the same way as with sight, where experimenters were deeply disturbed by the fact that a piece of coal under a very bright light still appeared darker than a sheet of white paper under a weak light, which caused Woodworth to say, “It is almost impossible for a normal man in possession of all his faculties to see the image his eyes present to him. . . . On removing from the perception of colors the illusory appearances of the objects that carry them, we still find three dimensions of sensation (shade, brightness, and saturation), whereas a homogeneous light is perfectly well defined by the two physical dimensions of intensity and frequency.” Robert S. Woodworth, Psychologie expérimentale (Paris: PUF, 1949). [Original title in English is Experimental Psychology (Oxford: Holt, 1939).—Trans.]

Finally, we should note how much more advanced the psychology of light perception is than sound perception and to what extent “intriguing problems” have been acknowledged in this field. The confusions between music and acoustics are very unlikely to pose a threat to the visual domain, which is infinitely better perceived, if not understood.

4. This diagram (fig. 41), in section 34.3, which is called the “Summary Diagram of the Theory of Musical Objects,” will be quoted frequently in the following chapters, under the shortened name of “general diagram” or “section 34.3.” The boxes in this diagram have two numbers: the first indicates the row (criterion), the second the column (type, class, genre, species).

30. THEORY OF HOMOGENEOUS SOUNDS: CRITERION OF MASS

1. Stanley Smith Stevens, “The Attributes of Tones,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20, no. 7 (1934): 459.

2. Throughout this chapter the word timbre will always be used in the sense of “harmonic timbre.”

3. “Box 12” refers to Schaeffer’s “Summary Diagram of the Theory of Musical Objects” in chapter 34.3. The first numeral in “box 12” refers to row 1 (Mass), and the second refers to column 2 (Classes). The box formed at the intersection of this row and column is “box 12” (i.e., box one-two). Schaeffer uses this system in his explanation of how figure 41 should be interpreted.—Trans.

4. We would remind anyone who is doubtful about this explanation that it rests on that structural truism: there are no (harmonic) intervals except in a relationship of tonics (themselves harmonic). This little formula seems to us to give incontrovertible proof of the natural validity of simple relationships, by virtue of a reciprocal similarity between human psychophysiology and the acoustics of sound bodies.

31. THEORY OF FIXED MASSES: DYNAMIC CRITERION

1. Here we should note the purely mental dichotomous workings between two modes of perception: we are, indeed, dealing with a new type of training in perceiving distinctive features that are usually conflated.

2. More precisely, a criterion of steepness of attack since, as we will see, it does not involve the harmonic content—that is, the color of the attack—at all. Nevertheless, for the sake of simplicity we will use the term criterion of attack in the rest of the text.

3. R.L. Wegel and C.E. Lane, “The Auditory Masking of One Pure Tone by Another and Its Probable Relation to the Dynamics of the Inner Ear,” Phys. Rev. 23 (Feb. 1924): 266.—Trans.

32. THEORY OF SUSTAINMENT

1. Here Schaeffer refers to the “Bruitiste” movement initiated by Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) based on his manifesto L’arte dei rumori (The art of noises). The movement developed noise-generating devices brought together into a noise orchestra. His manifesto was very influential among artists and musicians.—Trans.

2. This considerably reduces the interest of a stochastic view of music, which deprives us of one of the most essential motives for aesthetic curiosity.

33. THEORY OF VARIATIONS

1. See figure 3 (section 10.7) and chapter 35.

2. Armand Machabey, La notation musicale (Paris: PUF, 1958).

34. ANALYSIS OF THE MUSICAL OBJECT AS IT GENERALLY APPEARS

1. Sectors 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the experimental system are set out in chapter 21.

2. George Armitage Miller, “The Magical Number Seven,” Psychological Review 63, no. 2 (1956): 81–97.

35. IMPLEMENTATION

1. In the title for this section Schaeffer is referring to the aspect of music that, together with entendre (listening), he considered most important. “Le faire” (making or doing; see our translators’ introduction) involves not only the whole process of music-making—for example, music itself, instruments, pseudo-instruments—but also all the activity, the “doing,” that goes into the production of music. We have therefore used make intransitively here, first, to emphasize this aspect of music and, second, because its connotations are so broad.—Trans.

2. See, perhaps most notably, Jacques Chailley, Formation et transformation du langage musical (Paris: PUF, 1961).

3. Only a few researchers are endeavoring to bridge this abyss; see, e.g., Edmond Costère, Mort et transfiguration de l’harmonie (Paris: PUF, 1962). While not sharing the ideas or the conclusions of this author, we must acknowledge that the general direction of his research is very much needed.

4. From earliest antiquity: Egypt, etc. See Chailley, Formation et transformation.

5. See Proceedings of the Colloque international d’acoustique musicale de Marseille (Paris: CNRS, 1958).

6. Fritz Winckel, Vues nouvelles sur le monde des sons, trans. Abraham Moles (Paris: Dunod, 1960). [Published in English as Music, Sound and Sensation, trans. Thomas Binkley (New York: Dover, 1967).—Trans.]

7. See Proceedings of the Colloque international (cited above).

8. Helmholtz classified intervals in this way, according to their degree of consonance, basing his findings on the number and proximity of their shared harmonics: octave (2/1), twelfth (3/1), perfect fifth (3/2), perfect fourth (4/3), major sixth (5/3), major third (5/4), minor third (6/5), minor sixth (8/5).

9. This whole discussion about “consonance,” to our mind, concerns only intervallic functions and not the justification of the rules of harmony, which raise a completely different problem.

10. A new proof of musical theorizing, taking into account only the value or the (physical) magnitude, and ignoring the object: priority should be given to perception.

11. “Does the disappearance of diatonicism mark the end of that imbuing of minds by the natural affinities of the octave, the fifth, the fourth? Not at all, and it is easy to demonstrate this: the most revolutionary of musicians are so inculcated by them that they conduct their musics as if they had imposed its law upon themselves.” Costère, Mort et transfiguration de l’harmonie, 68; see also examples from Stockhausen, Boulez, et al.

12. Paul Pedersen, “The Mel Scale,” Journal of Music Theory 9, no. 2 (1965): 295–308.

13. Michel Fano, “Pouvoirs transmis,” in “La musique et ses problèmes contemporains, 1953–1963,” Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, no. 41 (1963): 50–51. [Michel Fano (b. 1929) is a composer, musicologist, and teacher who collaborated with the GRM in the 1960s.—Trans.]

14. Our reader may refer to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s whole article, “Une expérience électronique,” in “La musique et ses problèmes contemporains, 1953–1963,” Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, no. 41 (1963): 91–105.

15. To give a clear idea of these proportions, they can be written down like this (fig. 47).

16. This is the tempered approximation, which gives an idea of the sonority of these complexes (fig. 48).

17. The word series in this section’s title is a reference to serial music, a concept against which Schaeffer fought, as being predetermined composing not based on listening. Here “hors série” is also a play on words, as the expression (referring to music other than serial, and most probably to “musique concrète”) also means “out of the ordinary,” “special,” “exceptional.”—Trans.

18. Review of Preuves, no. 180 (Feb. 1966): 31, Luciano Berio’s contribution, “Façon de parler,” to André Boucourechliev’s survey La musique sérielle aujourd’hui (Paris: Preuves, 1965–66).

19. Pierre Boulez, “Auprès et au loin,” Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, no. 3 (1954). [The article can be found in English as “Near and Far,” in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).—Trans.]

20. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (Chicago: Open Court, 1983).—Trans.

21. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie de la nouvelle musique (1948), trans. Hans Hildenbrand and Alex Lindenberg (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). Published in English as Philosophy of New Music, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (1949; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).—Trans.

22. Michel Butor, in an enthusiastic article, tells us about this truly exceptional feat: he hums Stockhausen. [See Michel Butor, La musique, art réaliste (Paris: Minuit, 1964).—Trans.]

23. Armand Machabey, La notation musicale (Paris: PUF, 1958).

24. We may also ask why go to so much trouble, if musical craftsmanship is still not only more subtle but above all more economical?

25. The etymological identity of this term is amusing: there are two types of “chromaticism”—one has several hundreds of degrees; the other can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Therefore, we prefer to avoid the term chromaticism, which is too ambiguous to make a clear contrast between harmonic and colored.

26. This analysis can be generalized beyond the tonal system: it does not involve a particular choice of scale but only the provision of a context allowing harmonic intervals to be perceived.

27. We are suggesting the schematic sense, of course: the juxtaposition of horizontal lines with a contrasting series of vertical slices.

36. THE MEANING OF MUSIC

1. Francis Ponge (1899–1988), French poet.—Trans.

2. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tubingen: Mohr, 1949). [Published in English as Philosophy of New Music, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (1949; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).—Trans.]

3. I do not, of course, exempt those involved in concrete music from this sociological analysis, but it is difficult to be both judge and judged.

4. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 22.

5. The French term consommation used here also means “consummation” in the sexual sense. The pun could not be retained in English.—Trans.

6. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 33.

7. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Esthétique, trans. Serge Jankélévitch (Paris: Aubier, 1944). [Published in English as G.W.F. Hegel, Æsthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).—Trans.]

8. As recommended by the Concilium.

9. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 27.

10. Sigmund Freud, Moise et le monothéisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). [Published in English as Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (London: Hogarth, 1939).—Trans.]

11. Pierre Boulez, “Auprès et au loin,” Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, no. 3 (1954).

PENULTIMATE CHAPTER: IN SEARCH OF MUSIC ITSELF

This chapter was written by Pierre Schaeffer ten years after the publication of the Traité des objets musicaux. It was included in the 1977 edition published by Seuil.—Trans.

1. We would also recommend reading issue no. 2 of Cahiers recherches/musique on the Traité des objets musicaux dix ans après (Paris: INA-GRM, 1976). The article by the author in this issue published under the title “Music par exemple” has also been published in Musique en jeu (Paris: Seuil, 1976). The reader wanting an overview of Les musiques électroacoustiques may refer to the work of this name, by Michel Chion and Guy Reibel (Paris: INA-GRM/EDISUD, 1976). Finally, a Lexique du traité des objets musicaux by Michel Chion, assisted by Jack Vidal, will be published some time in 1977, in the Cahiers recherche/musique. [The book by Michel Chion was finally called Guide des objets sonores: Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche musicale (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1983). It has been translated into English by John Dack and Christine North as Guide to Sound Objects: Pierre Schaeffer and Musical Research, (Monoskop, 2009), https://monoskop.org/images/0/01/Chion_Michel_Guide_To_Sound_Objects_Pierre_Schaeffer_and_Musical_Research.pdf.

2. A reference to the poem of the same title by the romantic poet, novelist, and dramatist Alfred de Musset (1810–57).—Trans.

3. In so doing, we will have to leave the reader considerable latitude to judge which cases this type of analysis may apply to, or not. Otherwise, he would be perfectly justified in criticizing us for wanting to apply the traditional model at all costs by too rapidly postulating intervallic relationships or values between notes. In many contemporary musics the sounds are, in fact, dissociated in macroscopic developments that do not really lend themselves to such a subtle analysis. Works such as these should be approached through more general features: if not their phrasing or punctuation, then at least the rough outline of the interaction of fluxes of sound that become perceptual units. They do not give the density of information or the almost immediate intelligibility that ensure the effectiveness of traditional music. This, incidentally, is what explains the length of some of these works: the length is necessary for them to be understood. Hence also their insistent imposition of effects that are perceptible rather than intelligible. Whether he congratulates himself on this, or regrets it, the experimenter is obliged to take the works as they are. It is consequently up to him to choose the appropriate type of analysis in each case.

4. A double edition of the Revue musicale on the Stockholm meeting on music and technology specifically echoes these difficulties. See Revue musicale, no. 268–69 (1970).

5. As does Molino and, later, Jean-Jacques Nattiez in his Fondements d’une sémiologie de la musique (Paris: UGE, “10/18,” 1975). [Translated into English as Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). (Jean Molino is a semiologist; he was Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s professor, teaching today in the University of Lausanne.)—Trans.]

6. Josef Matthias Hauer, the author of a Traité de musique atonale, published in Vienna in 1920, who called himself “the spiritual father of twelve-tone music, and, in spite of mediocre plagiarists, the only person who knows what to do with it.” Cf. Arnold Schoenberg, Le style et l’idée, writings collected by Léonard Stein, translated from English by Christiane de Lisle (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1977); and Style and Idea (London: Faber and Faber, 1975).

POSTSCRIPT

1. Martin Heidegger, Le principe de raison (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). Translated into English as The Principle of Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).—Trans.

2. René Descartes, Discours de la méthode (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 29. Translated into English as Discourse on Method and Meditations (New York: Liberal Art Press, 1960).—Trans.