Sound Unseen

Sound Unseen Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice Brian Kane   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kane, Brian, 1973Sound unseen : acousmatic sound in theory and practice / Brian Kane. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–934784–1 (hardback) — ISBN 978–0–19–934787–2 (online content) 1. Music— Acoustics and physics. 2. Musique concrete—History and criticism. 3. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. I. Title. ML3805.K15 2014 781.2'3—dc23 2013037100 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper CONTENTS Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 PART ONE The Acousmatic Situation 1. Pierre Schaeffer, the Sound Object, and the Acousmatic Reduction 15 PART TWO Interruptions 2. Myth and the Origin of the Pythagorean Veil 45 3. The Baptism of the Acousmate 73 PART THREE Conditions 4. Acousmatic Phantasmagoria and the Problem of Technê 97 INTERLUDE. Must Musique Concrète Be Phantasmagoric? 119 5. Kafka and the Ontology of Acousmatic Sound 134 PART FOUR Cases 6. Acousmatic Fabrications: Les Paul and the “Les Paulverizer” 165 7. The Acousmatic Voice 180 Conclusion 223 Notes 227 Bibliography 277 Index 293 Introduction About an hour’s drive from New Haven lies a small village near East Haddam with an unusual name, Moodus. Derived from the Wangunk term “Machemoodus,” meaning “Place of Noises,” Moodus possesses a peculiar soundmark.1 Since the time of the Native Americans, residents of the area have keenly attended to the distinctive sound of tremors and underground rumblings that emanate from a cave located near Mt. Tom. These sounds have come to be collectively known as the “Moodus noises,” and it is probably safe to say that no Connecticut phenomenon has inspired more curiosity, speculation, and marvel. New Englanders have written many accounts of the Moodus noises. The earliest, from settlement days, reported that the Wangunks heard the voices of their gods in the rumblings and tremors. Mt. Tom was a site of divination and, according to folklorist Odell Shepard, those who lived in its proximity had “special access to the Divine.” In the noises, the Wangunks “heard the immediate voice of the good spirit Kiehtan and also the rage of Hobbamock.”2 Rev. Stephen Hosmore, the first minister of East Haddam, confirms this view in a letter from 1728. “I was informed,” Hosmore wrote, “that, many years past, an old Indian was asked, What was the reason of the noises in this place? To which he replied, that the Indian’s God was very angry because Englishman’s God was come here.”3 Hosmore’s letter also describes the nature and duration of the noises. Not only had he heard them, their presence had been “observed for more than thirty years” by settlers in the region. His vivid description is worth repeating: Whether it be fire or air distressed in the subterraneous caverns of the earth, cannot be known; for there is no eruption, no explosion perceptible, but by sounds and tremors, which sometimes are very fearful and dreadful. I have myself heard eight or ten sounds successively, and imitating small arms, in the space of five minutes. I have, I suppose, heard several hundreds of them within twenty years; some more, some less terrible. Sometimes we have heard them almost every day, and great numbers of them in the space of a year. Often times I have observed them to be coming down from the north, imitating slow thunder, until the sound came near or right under, and then there seemed to be a breaking like the noise of a cannon shot, or severe thunder, which shakes the houses, and all that is in them. . . . Now whether there be anything diabolical in these things, I know not; 2 INTRODUCTION but this I know, that God Almighty is to be seen and trembled at, in what has been often heard among us.”4 According to historian Richard Cullen Rath, both Native American and European settlers in early America understood natural sounds as corresponding to animate sources, “as bridges between visible and equally real invisible worlds.”5 The thundering sounds emanating from Moodus could be heard by both groups as “made by some great spiritual being.” Although the religious beliefs of the Native Americans and European settlers led to divergent attributions concerning the divinities heard in the noises, Rath notes that this entire complex of animate natural sound was challenged by a shift in European-American soundways in the 18th century. Due, in part, to the rise of natural scientific inquiry, modern listeners, unlike their 17th-century counterparts, attributed many supernatural features of the natural soundscape to more worldly causes.6 Yet, superstition persisted alongside scientific inquiry well into the 18th century. Theories concerning the noises often embellished natural events with ominous forces and supernatural causes. One of the stranger accounts appears in the Connecticut Gazette from August 20, 1790. It describes the legend of Dr. Steel, a mysterious visitor drawn to Moodus by the dark enigma of the noises: Various have been the conjectures concerning the cause of these earthquakes or Moodus noises, as they are called. The following account has gained credit with many persons—It is reported that between 20 and 30 years ago, a transient person came to this town, who called himself Dr. Steel, from Great Britain, who having had information respecting these noises, made critical observations at different times and in different places, till at length he dug up two pearls of great value, which he called Carbuncles . . . and that he told people the noise would be discontinued for many years, as he had taken away their cause; but as he had discovered others in miniature, they would be again heard in process of time. The best evidence of the authenticity of this story is that it has happened agreeably to his prophecy. The noises did cease for many years, and have again been heard for two to three years past, and they increase—three shocks have been felt in a short space, one of which, according to a late paper, was felt at New London, though it was by the account much more considerable in this and the adjacent activity.7 Like the removal of a growth or tumor that would improve the health of a patient, removal of the carbuncles would make the noises cease, but only temporarily. As fate would have it, a large tremor shook the region the following May. Its effects were felt as far as New York and Boston.8 While the tremor helped to legitimate Dr. Steel’s prophecy in the minds of credulous residents, the validity of his reasoning became far less important than the entertaining story itself. The alchemical Dr. Steel and his discovery of mysterious carbuncles became a standard part of local folklore, inspiring numerous legends, stories, poems, and ballads.9 In contrast to Dr. Steel’s carbuncular theory, less eccentric explanations of the Moodus noises vied for legitimacy during the 19th century. In 1836, John Warner Barber, the Connecticut historian, offered a theory: “the cause of these noises is explained by some to be mineral or chemical combinations, at a depth of many Introduction 3 thousand feet beneath the surface of the earth.”10 Barber’s explanation was likely influenced by chemical experiments with reactive sulfur and iron mixtures that were common at the time.11 In addition, Barber included a description of the sound, reported to him by a local resident: “It appeared to this person as though a stone of a large body fell, underneath the ground, directly under his feet, and grated down to a considerable distance in the depths below.”12 Soon after, in 1841, Barber’s theory was challenged by a group of Wesleyan professors. Arguing that an explosion of mineral compounds could not produce an agitation large enough to generate tremors of the size associated with the Moodus noises, they proposed a different hypothesis: electricity. Interruptions in the natural flow of electricity in the Earth’s crust would be adequate to produce the devastations and tremors associated with the noises. If electrical forces could rattle the skies in the form of thunder and lightning, the same phenomenon could perhaps explain the noises’ powerful underground rumblings and quakings.13 By the turn of the 20th century, William North Rice, a professor of geology at Wesleyan, attributed the noises to minor seismic activity: “The noises are simply small earthquakes, such as are frequent in many regions of greatly disturbed metamorphic strata. . . . The rocks are apt to be in a state of strain or tension, which will from time to time produce such slight vibratory movements as are heard and felt in the Moodus noises.”14 Professor Rice’s successor at Wesleyan, Wilbur Garland Foye, developed Rice’s theory, attributing the cause of the small quakes to ongoing readjustments of Connecticut’s rocky crust after the glacial period.15 The slow process of glacial retreat released the pressure and strain on the crust underneath, leading to occasional shifts of rock masses near the surface. Foye’s hypothesis received some confirmation during the construction of Route 11, about 20 miles east of Moodus. Holes drilled into the bedrock revealed shifting and thrusting consistent with Foye’s explanations, although here the release of stress was due to manmade disturbances of the bedrock, not natural forces.16 A far cry from the dreadful rage of Hobbamock, “The Moodusites of today listen to the noises with greater equanimity,” writes C. F. Price, “because science has solved the mystery.”17 And yet, when they rumble, they still have the power to shake such confidence. While I was writing this book, the noises sounded again. On the evening of March 23, 2011, a loud boom rattled East Haddam and shook houses in the vicinity of Moodus. The sound was thought by many to be an explosion. More than 30 firefighters searched the village and its surroundings for the source of the blast, but found nothing. Craig Mansfield, East Haddam’s emergency management director, began to suspect that it was simply the Moodus noises. “You hear old-timers talk about feeling their house shake and hearing loud groans,” said Mansfield, “but in all my 23 years with the town, I’ve never experienced anything like this.” The next morning, the U.S. Geological Survey confirmed that a 1.3 magnitude earthquake had struck the region. No damage was reported.18 The Moodus noises are acousmatic sounds. Strictly speaking, they fit the standard definition of the term, cited by Pierre Schaeffer and others: “Acousmatic, adjective: a sound that one hears without seeing what causes it.”19 The cause of the noises— whether seismic, chemical, carbuncular, or divine—remains unseen; its sound is an audible trace of a source that is invisible to the listener. Yet, aside from a few 4 INTRODUCTION vivid descriptions of the sounds themselves, discussions of the Moodus noises (mine included) tend to emphasize two notable features. First, most accounts focus on speculation concerning the source of the sound through the causal ascriptions that historical listeners have made. Because the source of the noises remains obscure, the desire to uncover it generates much of the interest in the sounds themselves. Second, many accounts focus on the various effects the noises have wrought on auditors. Terror, curiosity, bemusement, awe, theophany, wonder—listeners have experienced these feelings, and more, before the noises. Yet, these two aspects of the Moodus noises—concern with the source of the sound and its effects on the listener—do not squarely align with the use to which Pierre Schaeffer, and the tradition of those directly influenced by him, deployed acousmatic sound. While the canonical account of acousmatic sound is presented in Schaeffer’s massive Traité des objets musicaux, Michel Chion summarized many of Schaeffer’s findings in his authorized Guide des objets sonores. The Guide provides a synoptic and perspicuous account of Schaeffer’s thought by reorganizing his ideas into topical headings. Here is Chion’s very first entry: 1) Acousmatic: a rare word, derived from the Greek, and defined in the dictionary as: adjective, indicating a sound that one hears without seeing what causes it. The word was taken up again by Pierre Schaeffer and Jérôme Peignot to describe an experience which is very common today but whose consequences are more or less unrecognized, consisting of hearing sounds with no visible cause on the radio, records, telephone, tape recorder etc. Acousmatic listening is the opposite of direct listening, which is the “natural” situation where sound sources are present and visible. The acousmatic situation changes the way we hear. By isolating the sound from the “audiovisual complex” to which it initially belonged, it creates favorable conditions for reduced listening which concentrates on the sound for its own sake, as sound object, independently of its causes or its meaning (although reduced listening can also take place, but with greater difficulty, in a direct listening situation).20 There are three important aspects to consider. First, Chion notes a relationship between the acousmatic experience of sound, which is “very common today,” and the ubiquitous presence of modern forms of audio technology, in particular those designed for sound transmission, inscription, storage, and reproduction. Unlike the rare Moodus noises, acousmatic sound is here described as an everyday phenomenon, a result of our immersion in sound flooding from elevators, radios, cars, computers, and stereos. However, it would be incorrect to claim that the acousmatic experience of sound originates in modern audio technology. Schaeffer argued that the originary experience of acousmatic sound could be traced back to the school of Pythagoras. Etymologically, the term “acousmatic” refers to a group of Pythagorean disciples known as the akousmatikoi—literally the “listeners” or “auditors”—who, as legend has it, heard the philosopher lecture from behind a curtain or veil. According to Chion, Pythagoras used the veil to draw attention away from his physical appearance and toward the meaning of his discourse.21 The central role of the Pythagorean veil in Schaefferian tradition blocks the causal identification of acousmatic experience with modern audio technology in order to make a more striking claim. Modern Introduction 5 audio technology does not create acousmatic experience; rather, acousmatic experience, first discovered in the Pythagorean context, creates the conditions for modern audio technology. Radio, records, the telephone, and the tape recorder exist within the horizon first opened by the Pythagorean veil. Second, Chion emphasizes the relationship between acousmatic experience and the partition of the sensorium. Acousmatic experience entails the “isolation of sound from the ‘audiovisual’ complex.” Hearing is separated from seeing (and the rest of the sensory modalities) and studied for its own sake. This separation is, as Schaeffer calls it, “anti-natural.” It requires effort to divide the sensorium given its “natural” intersensorial condition, where multiple senses simultaneously and cooperatively provide information about the environment. According to Chion, one “effect of the acousmatic situation” is that “sight and hearing are dissociated, encouraging listening to sound forms for themselves (and hence, to the sound object).”22 The acousmatic experience of sound allows a listener to attend to the sound itself, apart from its causes, sources, and connections to the environment. Just as the Pythagorean veil directed the attention of the disciples onto the meaning of the master’s discourse, the isolation of hearing from seeing in the acousmatic experience directs the listener’s attention toward the sound as such. It allows a listener to grasp the sound itself as a “sound object,” a term about which I have much to say in the following chapters. It also affords a special mode of listening that is focused entirely on the sound object, known as “reduced listening.” Third, Chion claims that reduced listening is facilitated when the source of the sound is unseen or hidden, what he calls “indirect listening.” However, reduced listening can also take place, albeit with more difficulty, in a “situation where sound sources are present and visible,” called “direct listening.” What is the relationship between reduced listening and the acousmatic experience (or “indirect listening”)? Although there has been much confusion about the precise relationship of these two terms in the discourse on acousmatic sound, the two should be distinguished. By separating a sound from its (visible) source or cause, the acousmatic experience of sound facilitates reduced listening; however, reduced listening can occur in situations where sources are visible and present—situations that are not, strictly speaking, acousmatic. This distinction is not always preserved, and many writers on acousmatic experience treat the terms synonymously. For instance, the philosopher Roger Scruton, in his Aesthetics of Music, claims that when listening to music, “we spontaneously detach the sound from the circumstances of its production, and attend to it as it is in itself: this, the ‘acousmatic’ experience of sound, is fortified by recording and broadcasting, which completes the severance of sound from its cause that has already begun in the concert hall. . . . The acousmatic experience of sound is precisely what is exploited by the art of music.”23 Even in the direct listening situation of the concert hall, Scruton claims that we are not attending to the source of the sound (this clarinet, that trumpet). Rather, the musical listener listens to an order that is distinct from the material world of causes, a reduced listening to musical tones irreducible to their sources. Chion’s Schaefferian account of acousmatic sound can be summarized under three headings: technology, the division of the sensorium, and reduced listening. The acousmatic experience is encountered in certain forms of ancient and modern 6 INTRODUCTION technology (Pythagorean veil, architectural screen, tape recorder, loudspeaker, etc.) that divide hearing from the rest of the sensorium. This division encourages reduced listening—a way of attending aesthetically to sounds as such, apart from their worldly causes. The purpose of the acousmatic experience in the Schaefferian tradition is, as Chion says, to “change the way we hear,” to draw attention away from the source of the sound (whether visually present or not) and onto its intrinsic audible properties. The source of the sound is severed from its audible effects, so that the latter can be studied separately, placed into morphological categories or systematically integrated into musical compositions. The separation of the senses is purposive, a way of discarding the sonic source in order to orient attention toward aesthetically appreciated sonic effects alone. While the Moodus noises are acousmatic sounds, according to the standard definition of the term, they are not typically listened to for their aesthetic properties. If anything, their sonic properties, like those described in Hosmore’s letter, are ultimately used to provide clues about the potential source of the sound. The natural conditions at Moodus make the source of the noises invisible to a listener and thus aid in splitting the sensorium, creating an experience of hearing without seeing. Yet, the aesthetic orientation toward the sound of the noises does not follow. In a case like the Moodus noises, an aesthetic orientation toward their sound is not the relevant mode of audition. Yet, I would argue that the acousmatic character of the sounds matters, in that the enigma of their source—its invisibility and uncertainty—is a central feature of the experience. There are many cases, like the Moodus noises, where such sounds are neither heard primarily as aesthetic objects, nor capable of being made intelligible in aesthetic terms. For instance, the aesthetic orientation cannot address the central role that acousmatic sounds have played in Judeo-Christian religion, from the invisible voice of the Jewish God to the Catholic confessional. Nor can this aesthetic orientation account for the role played by acousmatic sounds in psychoanalysis; the psychic effect of the disembodied, acousmatic voice has not only contributed to the spatial arrangement of the analytic session (where, in the famous photos of Freud’s office, the analyst is tucked away from the analysand’s view), the position of the superego in Freud’s late topographical models, and the development of psychoanalytic technique, but, in the form of the “sonorous envelope” (the prenatal experience of sound in the mother’s womb), is claimed to play a central role in the formation of the subject.24 Nor can the aesthetic orientation deal with the full employment of acousmatic sounds in the production and performance of music. This would include not only the positioning of singing nuns behind grilles and grates during the era of clausura, the setting of offstage voices and instruments in opera to produce divine effects, or the use of darkened auditoriums to produce quasi-religious effects in German Dunkelkonzerte or Georg Friedrich Haas’s contemporary compositions, but also the application of architectural techniques to hide the orchestra at Bayreuth and elsewhere.25 Nor can the aesthetic orientation make sense of the way that acousmatic sounds have come to be a topic of concern in the humanities: from Chion’s invention of the cinematic acousmêtre; to Carolyn Abbate’s analysis of acousmatic sounds that conjure unheard, ineffable, metaphysical events; to Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek’s investigation of the acousmatic voice as a form of social interpellation; to recent work in literary studies—topics like “acousmatic blackness” or the use of acousmatic Introduction 7 sound in Ralph Ellison’s work—which sit at the nexus of critical race theory and sound studies.26 To understand the significance of acousmatic sound in these various domains, we must listen to them anew. While, undoubtedly, the aesthetic orientation toward acousmatic sound has contributed to historical and current practices of musical listening, exclusive focus on it limits our ability to consider acousmatic listening—that is, the experience of acousmatic sound—as a cultural practice. In this book, I attempt to theorize acousmatic sound differently. As an alternative to the aesthetic approach to acousmatic sound, I take the position that acousmatic listening is a shared, intersubjective practice of attending to musical and nonmusical sounds, a way of listening to the soundscape that is cultivated when the source of sounds is beyond the horizon of visibility, uncertain, underdetermined, bracketed, or willfully and imaginatively suspended. The term “acousmatic listening” should be understood as a rubric intended to capture a set of historically situated strategies and techniques for listening to sounds unseen. Thus, there is a double entendre in the subtitle of this book. Instead of a book that describes the use of acousmatic sound in compositional and aesthetic terms (i.e., a book on the theory and practice of “acousmatic music”), this book is written to develop a theory of acousmatic listening as a historical and cultural practice, one with clearly defined characteristics.27 To begin moving in this direction, I present a few central propositions that I develop in the chapters that follow. While I am aware that I must forgo offering the kind of substantial evidence and argumentation for these propositions provided later in the text, I hope that they will serve as points of orientation for the reader and offer clear contrasts with the Schaefferian tradition of acousmatic sound. 1. I work with a model of sound that has three necessary components: source, cause, and effect. Sounds, as we know, only occur when one object activates or excites another. For instance, a rosined bow is rubbed against a string or cymbal; air is forced across a cane reed or a vocal tract (then shaped by a mouth, tongue, and teeth); or a raindrop collides with a windowpane. The interaction of a source (cymbal, string, reed, vocal tract, or windowpane) with a cause (rosined bow, moving air, raindrop) produces an audible effect. We can formulate this as a proposition: Every sonic effect is the result of the interaction of a source and a cause. Without this interaction, there is no emission of sound.28 2. Just because a sonic effect is the result of an interaction of a source and a cause does not entail that a listener is certain about the source and cause based on hearing the sonic effect alone. Typically, the environmental situation will aid in determining the source and cause of the sound.29 But, there might be cases where I cannot determine the source from the effect, or the effect is ambiguous. For instance, as I walk across a college campus, I might hear various chirps from above, which I know come from birds in the trees, although I may not be able to see them through the foliage. Normally, I have no worries about making such inferences. But, perhaps, as I walk past the art school, I hear a chirp that sounds slightly amiss. It is possible that the chirp I hear is not from a bird, but from a little electronic circuit hidden in a tree—a clever piece of sound art—designed to imitate the sound of a bird.30 If I spot a loudspeaker tucked away in the tree, near the location from which the sound emanates, 8 INTRODUCTION I will likely be satisfied that I have discovered the source of the sound. The same thing happens if I see a bird suddenly fly away from the location of the sound. Although one might be tempted to treat this example hyperbolically, as a case of global skepticism—and thereby immediately assert that I cannot know anything about the world because it may always turn out to be otherwise than what I expected—I draw a much more humble conclusion. An auditory effect, apart from the environmental situation in which it is located and our ability to explore that situation with all our senses, is often insufficient for determining its cause. To formulate a second proposition: The sonic effect, by itself, underdetermines its source and cause. 3. The underdetermination of source and cause motivates a reification of the sonic effect. By bracketing an effect from its source and cause, I transform a sound from an event into an object. The autonomy of a sonic effect is constituted only when the gap between the effect and its source or cause is disregarded. In the aesthetic orientation of acousmatic sound, that is precisely the point. The autonomous sound, bereft of its source, is then integrated into the virtual world of musical composition; shedding its source, it can fully participate in the virtual connection of tone to tone, in the metaphorical gravity of tonal-harmonic organization, or in the expressive analogies of musical sound with emotional states. The autonomous sonic effect becomes a sound object. At the same time, there is a countervailing tendency, perhaps ineluctable, to find a source for autonomous sonic effects.31 Steven Connor argues that “human beings in many different cultural settings find the experience of a sourceless sound uncomfortable, and the experience of a sourceless voice intolerable . . . the disembodied voice must be habited in a plausible body.” The autonomous sound or voice is supplemented with an imaginary body. Connor refers to this phenomenon as the vocalic body, the idea of “a surrogate or secondary body, a projection of a new way of having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the autonomous operations of the voice.”32 For example, we could say that the Wangunks gave a vocalic body to the Moodus noises by imagining them to be the voices of Kiehtan or Hobbamock. Furthermore, we can move away from the voice and generalize Connor’s term by referring to the production of a sonic body elicited by acousmatic sound. A third proposition: Acousmatic sounds encourage the imaginative projection of a sonic body. 4. If acousmatic listening is a practice, then it should be possible to trace its history. In the Schaefferian tradition, there have been attempts to talk about the history of acousmatic sound before, yet they have all foundered on the same methodological problem: The history of acousmatic sound has been mistaken for a history of the word “acousmatic.” Given the rarity of this word, one ends up with only a piecemeal and diffuse historical account. One reason against privileging the presence of the word “acousmatic” as a central criterion for a historical account is that, I would argue, historical agents have not often recognized the extent to which they employed the practice of acousmatic listening. Acousmatic listening, while audible, has not, in all cases, reached a level of explicit audibility, in the sense that it is not always recognized as part of a culture or style of listening.33 Yet, if one considers acousmatic listening as a practice—that is, a way of listening to the soundscape that is cultivated when the Introduction 9 source of the sounds is beyond the horizon of visibility, uncertain, underdetermined, bracketed, or willfully and imaginatively suspended—it is surely the case that acousmatic listening was alive and well, even in eras when the term “acousmatic” did not exist.34 To write a history of acousmatic listening would then mean to gather significant instances of privileging hearing over seeing, of cultivating situations where sounds are detached from their causal sources, and of techniques for listening to sounds unseen in order to tell a story about how such practices have affected views about music, the senses, philosophy, and ourselves. Making acousmatic listening explicit should be a priority of any history or theory of the topic. A fourth proposition: The history of acousmatic sound is not a history of the word “acousmatic.” It is a history of the practice of acousmatic listening. 5. If acousmatic listening is a practice, one should be able to talk about its meaning or the way that it conceptually articulates the audible world of those who employ it. While one can indeed talk about the meaning of the practice, one should be careful not to treat its meaning like an essence. The meaning of the practice cannot be specified apart from the actual context and use to which it is employed. However, this is where its history becomes pertinent—for it allows us to track the replications and propagations of the practice from agent to agent, and thus, to find central cases, norms, deviations, and patterns. One central, replicated feature of acousmatic listening appears to be that underdetermination of the sonic source encourages imaginative supplementation. In many cases, the sonic body projected onto acousmatic sound is taken to be transcendent. Acousmatic listening is often deployed in order to grant auditory access to transcendental spheres, different in kind from the purely sonic effect—a way of listening to essence, truth, profundity, ineffability, or interiority. However, we cannot specify precisely the kind of transcendence heard in the sound or the exact meaning of the practice without appealing to the specific context, culture, and experience of the agents involved. In fact, there is no guarantee that any numbers of agents in the same contexts employ the practice in identical ways. Thus, although we can articulate some basic conditions for hearing a sound acousmatically, at a certain point, a theory of acousmatic sound must give way to the social and historical agents who employ it as a practice. This leads to my fifth proposition: The meaning of the practice of acousmatic listening cannot be defined in abstraction from those who employ it. Finally, a few words about the organization of this book. As the subtitle indicates, it is conceived as a theory and practice of acousmatic sound. While various chapters may emphasize the history of the practice more than the theory, or vice versa, the book was written in the form of a continuous argument, and I think it is best understood in that manner. In part 1, “The Acousmatic Situation,” I offer a philosophical reading of Schaeffer’s concept of l’acousmatique and its special relationship with l’objet sonore, the sound object. I outline the development of Schaeffer’s thinking, from the initial moments of musique concrète to the mature project of the Traité. My focus is on Schaeffer’s employment of Husserlian phenomenology—in particular his use of 10 INTRODUCTION the transcendental reduction, or epoché—to define the acousmatic reduction and its privileged object, the sound object. After presenting Schaeffer’s theory, I raise a set of objections to be explored in the subsequent chapters: (1) I argue that Schaeffer’s method does not allow him to adequately characterize the history of acousmatic listening; driven by a phenomenological account of history as “originary experience,” Schaeffer’s thinking about music, sound, and technology is ahistorical and mythic; (2) I argue that Schaeffer’s theory does not give adequate consideration to the cause, the source, or even the production of sound; thus, Schaeffer offers a “phantasmagoric” view of musical material, one that occludes its manner of production; (3) I argue that there is an ontological problem in Schaeffer’s characterization of the sonic effect as a sound object. I revisit the history of acousmatic sound in part II, “Interruptions,” by way of a critique of its standard historiography. As noted above, the history of acousmatic sound in the Schaefferian tradition is often confounded with a history of the word “acousmatic.” This places undue weight on two contexts: the Pythagorean school, with its veil and akousmatikoi (or silent disciples), and the rare French term acousmate. In chapter 2, I investigate the first context by posing a simple question: When and where did the Pythagorean veil first emerge? A patient investigation into the ancient sources reveals a history of the veil (and the acousmatic disciples who sat opposite it) that cannot be reconciled with the Schaefferian account. This exposes the mythic use to which the veil has been employed in the Schaefferian tradition and disallows any phenomenological claims about the veil as initiating the originary experience of acousmatic sound. In chapter 3, I investigate the second context, the word acousmate. Again, I pose a simple question: Where did this word come from and how does it relate to the Pythagorean tradition? After describing the context in which the word was coined and first used, I demonstrate that the word originally had nothing to do with the Pythagorean school. Then, by tracing its dissemination into various contexts—medical, psychological, and literary—I pinpoint the moment when Pythagorean and French contexts were first associated. In part III, “Conditions,” I move beyond the Schaefferian tradition and start to sketch an alternative historical account of acousmatic listening as a practice (chapter 4). In particular, I argue that the history of modern acousmatic listening is sutured to a lineage of musical phantasmagoria that reaches fruition with the birth of Romanticism, the aesthetics of absolute music, and Wagnerian architectural reforms of the concert hall. I consider a wide variety of evidence: from Schopenhauer’s use of bodily techniques designed to ready the listener for the experience of music’s disclosure of profound metaphysical truths; to architectural projects (realized and unrealized, from the grilled galleries of Italian churches to the hidden orchestra at Bayreuth) for performance spaces where the musician’s body would be partially or entirely obscured in order to preserve music’s transcendental nature from contamination by empirical sources; to literary and philosophical fantasies where absorbed listeners shut their eyes in order to disclose and experience music’s transcendental power. In all cases, the auditory effect is separated from its source; the latter is phantasmagorically occluded so that the former can be taken as transcendent, as manifesting a virtual or spiritual world separate from the mundane. These claims form the basis of a set of theoretical conditions about the production of acousmatic phantasmagoria. Introduction 11 I also argue that these conditions are prolonged in Schaeffer’s phenomenology of the sound object and in his works of musique concrète. But must all musique concrète be phantasmagoric? In the interlude between chapters 4 and 5, I consider an internal critique of Schaeffer’s work by his pupil, the composer Luc Ferrari. Through a discussion of his piece Presque rien, I trace how Ferrari breaks the grip of Schaefferian phantasmagoria by self-consciously emphasizing the materiality of recorded sound and producing an aesthetic situation that encourages reflection upon the affordances of recording devices used in the production of musique concrète. In chapter 5, I develop an alternative theory of acousmatic sound, by way of a close reading of Kafka’s tale “The Burrow.” Extrapolating from Kafka, I advance arguments for some of the central propositions mentioned above. This chapter is the theoretical core of the book. It attempts to rethink the terms of acousmatic sound apart from the ontology of the sound object. In the final sections of chapter 5, I test these arguments and develop their implications against a variety of examples from music, literature, film, sound studies, and philosophy. In part IV, “Cases,” I continue to test the theory developed in part III. Chapter 6 is a case study of guitarist Les Paul. The personal motivations behind Paul’s overdubbed recordings, his unusual production and studio techniques, his relentless invention of electronic gadgets, and his challenges with live performance provide a matrix wherein many of the book’s central themes intersect: technology, recording, subjectivity, identity, underdetermination, the uncanny, the Pythagorean veil, and the separation of the senses. I argue that Paul’s career was shaped by his encounters with acousmatic sound and hone in on a central problem: How can one perform acousmatic music live while maintaining the underdetermination of the source by the effect that is the hallmark of acousmatic sound? In chapter 7, I focus on the acousmatic voice. Taking my cue from Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, who explicitly describe the Lacanian “object voice” as acousmatic, I argue that the acousmatic voice has played an unacknowledged but crucial role in Husserl and Heidegger’s philosophical theories of the voice. Lacanian theorists like Žižek and Dolar prolong this tradition. By closely reading Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More in terms of the theory put forth in part III, I expose a set of critical problems and inconsistencies in the Lacanian treatment of the voice. In particular, I argue that Dolar reifies the acousmaticity of the voice, making it into a permanent condition, and that his treatment of the acousmatic voice is phantasmagoric, masking the technique at play in the psychoanalytic session. Notes Introduction 1. Modeled on the parallel term “landmark,” a soundmark, according to R. Murray Schafer, “refers to a community sound which is unique or possess qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by the people in that community.” Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, NY: Destiny Books, 1994), 10. 2. Odell Shepard, Connecticut Past and Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), 104. 3. Stephen Hosmore to Thomas Prince, August 13, 1729, in Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, Vol. 3 (1890), 280–281. 4. Ibid., 281. 5. Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 29. 6. Ibid., 41. 7. Anonymous, Connecticut Gazette (August 20, 1790), 3. 8. John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections Containing a General Collection of Interesting Facts, Traditions, Biographical Sketches, Anecdotes, &c., Relating to the History and Antiquities of Every Town in Connecticut, with Geographical Descriptions (New Haven, CT: J. W. Barber, 1836), 526. 9. For a sampling of legends concerning Dr. Steel, see Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (Rutland, VT: C. E. Tuttle, 1971), 427–431; Federal Writer’s Project for the State of Connecticut, Connecticut; A Guide to Its Roads, Lore, and People (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1938), 404–405; Hosford B. Niles, The Old Chimney Stacks of East Haddam (New York: Lowe & Co., 1887), 28–31; David E. Philips, Legendary Connecticut (Hartford, CT: Spoonwood Press, 1984), 199–203; Carl F. Price, Yankee Township (East Hampton, NY: Citizens’ Welfare Club, 1941), 167–181; Charles Burr Todd, In Olde Connecticut; Being a Record of Quaint, Curious and Romantic Happenings There in Colonial Times and Later (New York: Grafton Press, 1906), 142–152; Clarence M. Webster, Town Meeting Country (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1945), 94; and Glenn White, Folk Tales of Connecticut (Meriden, CT: The Journal Press, 1977), 23–25. 10. Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections, 527. 11. Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, Stories in Stone (Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 143. 12. Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections, 527. 13. de Boer, Stories in Stone, 144. 14. Todd, In Olde Connecticut, 151–152. 15. de Boer, Stories in Stone, 148. 16. Ibid., 149. 228 Notes 17. Price, Yankee Township, 181. 18. Erik Hesselberg, “ ‘Moodus Noises’ Strike Again,” Hartford Courant, March 24, 2011 [accessed 12/27/2012: http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/ hc-moodus-quake-0325-20110324,0,6968586.story]. 19. Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 91. All translations from the Traité are mine, except for passages from chapter 4, “L’acousmatique.” An abridged translation of that chapter is available as “Acousmatics,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum Books, 2004), 76–81. 20. See Michel Chion, “Acousmatique,” in Guide des objets sonores (Paris: Buchet/ Chastel, 1983), §1, 18. John Dack’s translation (which I use here, slightly modified) is published online by EARS (the ElectroAcoustic Resourse Site) as Guide to the Sound Object, trans. John Dack [accessed 1/9/2013: http://www.ears.dmu.ac.uk/ spip.php?page=articleEars&id_article=3597]. 21. Ibid., “Acousmatique,” §2c, 19. 22. Ibid., “Acousmatique,” §2b, 19. 23. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 2–3. 24. On Freud’s office, see Edmund Engelman, Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna, 1938 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), especially plates 12 and 13; on the late topography, see Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989); on technique and role of modern audio technologies, see Sigmund Freud, “Recommendations for Physicians on the Psycho-Analytic Method of Treatment,” in Collected Papers, Vol. 2, trans. under the supervision of Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959); on the sonorous envelope, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” in Typography, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); and Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). 25. On clausura, see Craig Monson, “Putting Bolognese Nun Musicians in their Place,” in Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds, ed. Jane Bernstein (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004); on Dunkelkonzerte, see Bryan Gilliam, “The Annexation of Anton Bruckner: Nazi Revisionism and the Politics of Appropriation,” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Autumn 1994), 584–604; and Friedrich C. Heller, “Von der Arbeiterkultur zur Theatersperre,” in Das Wiener Konzerthaus, eds. Friedrich C. Heller and Peter Revers (Vienna: Wiener Konzerthausgesellscaft, 1983), 101; on Bayreuth’s architecture, see Bayreuth, the Early Years, ed. Robert Hartford (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980); on other hidden orchestras after Bayreuth, see Heinrich W. Schwab, Konzert: öffentliche Musikdarbietung vom 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, DE: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1971), 186–189. 26. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 124–130; Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); on Ellison and acousmatic technology, see Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); on “acousmatic Notes 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 229 blackness,” see Mendi Obadike, “Low Fidelity: Stereotyped Blackness in the Field of Sound” (doctoral dissertation, Duke University, 2005); and Nina Sun Eidsheim, “Voice as a Technology of Selfhood: Towards an Analysis of Racialized Timbre and Vocal Performance” (doctoral disseration, University of California, San Diego, 2008). While mentioning work on acousmatic sound, I should give special note to Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s “Sound Objects: Speculative Perspectives” (doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2012), which treats the various ways that the term “sound object” has been used in musical discourse in the wake of Schaeffer’s coinage, with different degrees of fidelity to his intentions. I am aware of conflating acousmatic sound and acousmatic listening in this introduction. However, the conflation is not pernicious. Later, I argue that there is no acousmatic sound as such; its acousmaticity depends on the conditions under which a sound is heard. Appealing to Occam’s razor, I would argue that despite the simplicity of this model, it is sufficiently robust for analyzing the cases of acousmatic sound discussed in this book. For instance, auditory scene analysis and other ecological approaches to listening would support this claim, committed as they are to the primacy of the environmental situation of a listener in all discussions of auditory perception. See Albert S. Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); and Eric F. Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005). I had a similar experience while attending the SuperCollider Symposium, a computer music conference, at Wesleyan. As I walked under a tree, I heard an odd-sounding bird chirping a strange but familiar tune. I spotted an enclosed loudspeaker and circuit hanging from the tree. The sound was nearly indistinguishable from a real bird, except that the bird was chirping select strains of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” The artist is Dan St. Clair, and the work is entitled Call Notes. For documentation, see http://www.hearingthings.net/projects/callnotes/. To his credit, Chion is well aware of this fact. He writes, “Schaeffer thought the acousmatic situation could encourage reduced listening, in that it provokes one to separate oneself from causes . . . in favor of consciously attending to the sonic textures, masses, and velocities. But, on the contrary, the opposite often occurs, at least at first, since the acousmatic situation intensifies causal listening [i.e., listening for the source] in taking away the aid of sight. Confronted with a sound from a loudspeaker without a visual calling card, the listener is led all the more to ask, ‘What’s that?’ (i.e., ‘What is causing the sound?’) and to be attuned to the minutest clues (often interpreted wrong anyway) that might help to identify the cause.” Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 32. Yet, in the following paragraph, Chion wipes all of this away as merely preparatory for the discipline of reduced listening, aided by the repeated playback of sounds. “When we listen acousmatically to recorded sound it takes repeated hearings of a single sound to allow us gradually to stop attending to its cause and to more accurately perceive its own inherent traits.” The premium remains on reduced listening (see chapter 1). Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35. 230 Notes 33. For a suggestive analogy, see Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011) and his use of the term “visuality.” 34. In chapter 3, I discuss a moment in 18th-century France when a historical agent explicitly attempted to coin a word to describe an extraordinary audible phenomenon that was heard but not seen, what I would call an acousmatic sound. Chapter 1 1. Journal entry of March 1948. Pierre Schaeffer, A la recherche d’une musique concrète (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952). All further citations are from In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. Christine North and John Dack (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012). I have occasionally modified North and Dack’s rendering when necessary. 2. March. Ibid., 4. 3. April 18. Ibid., 6. 4. May 5. Ibid., 12. 5. May 10. Ibid., 13. 6. April 19. Ibid., 7. 7. April 21. Ibid. 8. May 15. Ibid., 14. 9. Ibid. 10. April 21. Ibid., 7. 11. Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux, 20. 12. However, Schaeffer’s method for theorizing the sound object would change dramatically. Throughout In Search of a Concrete Music, Schaeffer relies on information theory to indentify the sound object. This is in contrast to the phenomenological method of the Traité. 13. Traité, 95. 14. My emphasis on Schaeffer’s Husserlianism contrasts with scholars who claim Merleau-Ponty as the central phenomenological influence on Schaeffer. See Michel Chion, Guide des objets sonores, 32; and Makis Solomos, “Schaeffer phénoménologue,” in Ouïr, entendre, écouter, comprendre après Schaeffer (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1999), 53–67. 15. Marc Pierret, Entretiens avec Pierre Schaeffer (Paris: P. Belfond, 1969), 97. 16. Traité, 262. 17. Solomos, “Schaeffer phénoménologue,” 57–58. 18. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), ix. 19. Merleau-Ponty, ibid., viii; Traité, 662. 20. Merleau-Ponty, ibid. 21. By the time Traité was published, Schaeffer would have had access to French translations of many of Husserl’s central texts. The Cartesian Meditations were published in France in a translation by Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmauel Levinas in 1931. See Méditations cartésiennes: introduction à la phénoménologie (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2001). Paul Ricoeur published a translation of Ideas in 1950 with an extensive commentary. See Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie, trans. Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1950); an English translation of Ricoeur’s commentary is available as Paul Ricoeur, A Key to Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I, trans. Bond Harris