1. Dynamic Processing Of Acousmatic Morphology And Its Cosmic Dimension
After a detailed study of the compositions of French composer François Bayle (Tamatave, Madagascar 1932–), follower and reformer of Pierre Schaeffer’s teachings, we can conclude that sound events not only refer to real images but also go beyond a figural representation and tend to an abstraction of the main features. François Bayle considers acousmatic sounds to have special characteristics because one does not see the source production; a sound coming from a loudspeaker is an image-of-sound or i-sound (Bayle Reference Bayle1993) and it is characterised by its faculty of movement and its power to deform original sound traces. We can establish a correspondence between the image-of-sound and some of the ideas of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) (to whom Bayle often refers). First, in Bachelard’s writings, imagination, as well as an image-of-sound concept, is the faculty to deform images, not to create them. The imagination is considered as an organising dynamism related to that which is imaginary and not to the images themselves. Due to this, imagination is open, is evasive, goes beyond images and is an ‘imagination without images’ (Bachelard Reference Bachelard1943), which is what defines its mobility. The image-of-sound also reflects this imagination without images since there is one continuous itinerary from the real to that which is imaginary through movement and without specific images. This movement of the images-of-sound, from both a spatial and an acoustic level to a mental level, contributes to the creation of their own specifications; it also constitutes the typical register of poetic forms because, in our opinion, both in acousmatic music and in Bachelard’s theory, it is a matter of replacing a cinematic description philosophy with a dynamic production philosophy: ‘to constitute the self as both moved and moving, as mobile and engine, thrust and aspiration’ (Bachelard Reference Bachelard1943).Footnote 1 The dynamic value of duration can bring together the past and the future. Acousmatic music is defined by its mobility, its continuous flux generation; the being is pure movement. The importance of the dynamic production of the i-sounds contributes, as will be discussed below, to the creation of a living space.
However, this dynamism is reflected in the transformation processes of i-sounds. Sound images do not remain unaltered but rather undergo transformations as they appear. At the end of his Tremblement de terre très doux, in Climat 4, Bayle creates some sound distortions, changing the points of view of the sound object; the electronic sounds are repeated and altered in different ways by means of acceleration, transposition, superposition and accumulation. These operations also have an impact over the projected significance and the sense of the image; there is a semantic modification.Footnote 2 When François Bayle transforms certain human sounds (such as a voice, a cry, or a murmur), he usually hides a number of features or characteristics, leaving little clues behind so that they can be recognised. We can identify a sound but we remain uncertain. A dialectic game is established between knowledge-recognition and pure discovery: this state between the two movements leads to a certain tension. As we listen, we can also create an ‘axis of source recognition’ (Smalley Reference Smalley1986). The origin of this axis can be found in the sounds the listener may unambiguously identify as coming from a real source in the world. The further away we get from the origin, the less recognisable the source of the sounds will be. For example, in Voyage au centre de la tête (1980–3) we can feel the presence of someone using a coffee machine but the sounds around the person (a monastery chant, someone opening a door) make the listener doubt when identifying the object. In fact, what counts is the ‘effect’: the character leaves a trace that evokes undefined situations. However, what matters is not what these situations are but the evocation (the logic of evocation shall be discussed in the last section of this article) that has occurred, the imaginary worlds they create.
Researcher Jean-Christophe Thomas (Bayle Reference Bayle1993) points out that in Bayle’s music there is always one itinerary between two ‘opposite ends’ of transformations: between diffuse and clear, continuous and discontinuous, informal and formal, banal (noise) and unusual (form), stability and movement. By exploring these opposite ends, a range is generated whose scales are conceived as attempts to give new values. However, from our point of view, the most important thing is not the opposite ends in the scales, but the passage from one value to another, the minimal variations or gradations that occur between the different states of perception.
The dynamism of images is also reflected in Espaces inhabitables, a piece in which the static position of the sound objects disappears and electronic sounds seem to overlap organic lines. There is a process of energetic transformation, a metamorphosis from one energy to another. Reality is no longer a fixed entity but becomes mobile; it is conceived in a dynamic way. The first movement, Jardins de rien, is organised by an energetic criterion that goes from fluid to solid taking into account the different dynamic processes. These processes are based on the creation of figures resulting from the metaphorical elaboration of the images-of-sound: ‘By process or dynamic species I designate the various “figures” that appear in the temporal development of sound phenomena’ (Bayle Reference Bayle1967).
Finally, I would like to point out that the image-of-sound theory is part of a philosophical and cosmological approach through which Bayle wants to understand and to experience the world:
Music (to me) in its current state rejoins from within the romantic project of describing the world. Not to portray it from the outside but to penetrate the mechanisms, internal constitutions, shapes of emergence, of disappearance, of resurgence.
(Bayle Reference Bayle1993: 77)
This can lead us to François Bayle’s evolution towards the idea of a spiritual union of humanity and cosmos in which the image-of-sound carries out the fusion between the former and nature, and through which mankind gets in touch with the universe. The image-of-sound holds in itself the union of the spiritual and the material and helps humanity get closer to the most basic primary forces. This theory of i-sounds is also inspired by Bachelard’s thoughts on how poetic images draw mankind closer to the basic and deepest forces of the universe:
every image is an operation of the human spirit. It has an internal spiritual principle, even when we think of it as a simple reflection of the outside world … The task of the poet is to gently push images to be sure that the human mind operates on them with humanity, to be sure that they are human images, pictures humanizing the forces of the Cosmos. So we are led to the cosmology of the human. Instead of living in a naïve anthropomorphism, we return man to basic and profound forces.
(Bachelard Reference Bachelard1943: 6; Bayle Reference Bayle1993: 242)
The cosmic dimension of Bayle’s works appears in his work Jeîta represented by the cave sounds, which, recorded and transformed, are the intermediaries between nature and humanity. Outside and inside are united; the man and the cave become one. While we are listening to Jeîta, the cave does not reveal itself in an abrupt way; it is rather the different sonorities that evoke its presence and let it speak. The cave’s absence is present and shows its reality: there is a presence of an absence, in which the object – the cave – is transformed into a subject. Additionally, Bayle’s interest in the cosmic dimension of music is evident if we carry out a thematic analysis of his works’ titles. They are essentially based on nature, humanity and movement, all of which together give us a vision of the Cosmos. Examples of the first topic – nature – would be: Trois rêves d’oiseau, La forme de l’esprit est un papillon, Jardins de rien (Three Bird Dreams, The Form of the Spirit is a Butterfly, Gardens of Nothing). Titles related to the second topic – humanity – speak of body movements, such as Respiration (Vibrations Composées) (Breathing – Vibrations Composed), human activities or emotional situations such as Faim, peur, amour (Hunger, Fear, Love) from Aeroformes (Aeroformes), Le sommeil d’Euclide (The Sleep of Euclid). The third topic – movement – is expressed by the following words extracted from some of Bayle’s titles: spinning top, trembling, vibration, velocity, etc. The meeting of man and nature in a joint movement is revealed in one of his last works: Univers nerveux (2004–5) (Nervous Universe).
In this way, the images-of-sound generated by acousmatic music recover a romantic vision of music, considering it something inextricably linked with Nature and Humanity. In acousmatic music there would be a union of body and world and these, in turn, would enter into resonance with other unknown universes: ‘An acousmonium … would be an agreed process of listening to worlds that are unknown to us and from which we are separated only by the virtual thickness of a vibrating membrane’ (Bayle Reference Bayle1993).
2. Time Conceptions
A gradual change in Bayle’s way of understanding the temporality of music can be observed when analysing his career. His first works are characterised by a linear time conception with ruptures that break the continuity (influenced by René Thom’s catastrophe theory). With Son Vitesse-Lumière (1980–3) (Sound Speed-Light), however, Bayle introduces a time conception based on the circle and in a continuous flux that will reach its full realisation in La forme du temps est un cercle (1999–2000) (The Form of Time is a Circle). Although in his first works the successions of sound events were characterised by the presence of ‘catastrophes’ that fractured the musical discourse – as happens in Tremblement de terre très doux (1978) (Very Soft Earthquake) where a horizontal time is vertically cut by catastrophes – there are also signs of a circular treatment when, for example, in Substance du signe (1972) (Substance of Sign), he tries to create perceptual states that refer to a suspended and hypnotic sense of time. In these states, past and present are mixed and listeners do not know if what they are listening to has already appeared or not, because they are in a fixed and eternal moment in time. The fact that the change in the conception of time is more obvious in Son Vitesse-Lumière raises the question on the influence of technological tools in the process of composition, since it is precisely in this work that François Bayle began to use digital tools, giving up analogue ones. Between these two time conceptions, that is, the discontinuous and the circular one, the ‘moment form’ of Stockhausen will also play an important role.
We will now analyse the evolution in Bayle’s time conception by looking at some of his works: discontinuous time in Tremblement de terre très doux (1978), the moment form in Espaces inhabitables (1967), and, finally, circular time in La forme du temps est un cercle (1999–2000).
2.1. Discontinuous time
In Tremblement de terre très doux, there is, in my opinion, a conception of time constructed by means of breakpoints in the continuity. This work, composed in 1978, was later included as a second movement in the cycle entitled Érosphère (1978–80), a work influenced by the surrealist movement (as was the case with Camera oscura). Just as Surrealism explored the free associations carried out by the subconscious, in Tremblement unexpected relationships are emphasised (between sounds with a realistic nature and sounds without a direct causal reference), making us think of an imaginary universe in which reality and dream are intermingled. In Paysage 3, the sounds of a person’s footsteps moving from one place to another bring us closer to a real universe but, being as they are mixed with electronic sounds, it is difficult to know where the person is going; an imaginary space is created in which transformed voices betray the presence of someone. However, Bayle’s affinity with Surrealism is also obvious in the work’s title, taken from Max Ernst’s 1925 picture, L’An 55, tremblement de terre fort doux. The image of an earthquake is taken as a model for the work’s structure: as is the case in an earthquake, there are jolts produced by crashes which bring about an energy release. The unstable sound material shifts searching for stability and creating displacement.
The most remarkable feature in Tremblement de terre très doux is its continuous to-and-fro between stability and instability, regularity and irregularity, continuity and rupture. In spite of its fragmentary nature – given that it has 11 movements (divided in Climats, Transits and Paysages) – it is, in fact, a piece with a unitary nature surprised by ‘critical points’ of rupture. The dramatic quality of this piece is brought about by ruptures and tilting states, or catastrophes. These ruptures occur amongst movements or within the movements themselves. In the first case, the change from movement Climat 1 to the next one, Transit 1, is revealed by the sudden rupture of a door noise leading, in turn, to the sound of a lift which opens Transit 1; in the second case, when the ruptures are within the movements, as happens in Transit 1, the spring noise and the voices are abruptly cut off by silence and the sound of footsteps. In Climat 4 there is a stream of sounds – produced sometimes by an accumulative process achieved by means of a feedback loop – that keeps on moving closer to us. However, despite this continuous flow (which brings to mind repetitive American music), there are some blows that mark the discourse and little crashes which resemble catastrophe points. In some other occasions, these ruptures are clearly exposed by the use of gestures: sonorities that redirect us to the action of the person producing them – for example, in Climat 2, we can hear somebody making a hitting noise. Another example of a strong gesture is the beginning of Transit 2 where we can hear a noise made by glass that reminds us of the beginning of Grande Polyphonie (appel). However, besides the ruptures, there is also a continuity between movements created by gliding sounds: the change from Paysage 3 to Climat 3, for example, is carried out by the ascending and descending glissando of a ball moving.
Through these dialectics between continuity and rupture, stability and instability, a longer listening time is created without returning to the procedures used in L’expérience acoustique (1972) (The Acoustic Experience). Whereas in L’expérience acoustique there is a horizontal time, in Tremblement de terre très doux the continuous, horizontal time is cut by vertical moments. All the hypnotic shaking of L’éxpérience acoustique is sweetened by the sound of steps or female voices. A sweetness, however, which does not prevent the existence of moments of strength, the flickering movements are disturbing because they seem small but they are actually strong.
2.2. The moment form
Besides the ideas of a discontinuous time and a circular time, we must consider the concept of moment form (as proposed by Karlheinz Stockhausen) which influenced Bayle’s way of composing. Stockhausen developed his idea of moment form in works such as Kontakte (1960) or Momente (1969). In these works the form does not aim for a climax or a group of climaxes already prepared and therefore expected, and nor does it provide the usual phases of introduction, intensification, transition and resolution:
I wonder if an auditor feels compelled to listening beyond his or her limits; especially when a composition … does not have a continuous story, is not composed following a ‘red wire’ that must be followed from the beginning to the end in order to understand the whole – that is, when there is not a dramatic form with an exposition, intensification, development, peak effect and end effect (not a closed form), but each moment is linked to all others and can survive by itself. .
(Stockhausen Reference Stockhausen1988)
Therefore, every ‘now’ is not the result of what precedes it and the exit of what goes after it, but something individual, autonomous, that can exist by itself. Stockhausen called it ‘eternity’, an eternity that can be expected within every movement. We are talking about musical forms in which he searches for the explosion of the concept of time, or its overflowing, in order to achieve a certain timelessness.
François Bayle does not explicitly develop the concept of moment form but we suppose that he rather takes it as inspiration in order to reflect the autonomy of the different movements that compose many of his works. For example, in Espaces inhabitables (1967) (Uninhabitable Spaces), every movement is considered as an independent moment with its own personality (Desantos Reference Desantos1997). Each one of them is independent, contains the past, the present and the future in itself, and is different to the others because of the context in which it appears; duration is only one of its attributes. Also, in works such as Toupie dans le ciel (1979) (Spinning Top in the Sky) the directional and linear temporality is cancelled since it is impossible to predict when the work will finish. This allows us to interpret Toupie dans le ciel as a moment stopped in time where there is no past and no future, only a perpetual present.
2.3. Circular time
When analysing the temporal structures in François Bayle’s works, we find that the conception of circular time appears in those pieces composed from the 1980s onwards (Son Vitesse-Lumière, Motion-emotion) and is also developed in his later works (La forme du temps est un cercle and La forme de l’esprit est un papillon). In addition, Bayle used to group his works in what he called ‘cycles’: a cycle gathers several movements, the last of which takes up again elements from the beginning of the piece. Thus, the formal structure can be represented with the figure of a circle since there is a continuity with no beginning and no end but only a sound trace that returns over and over again. The feeling of an endless work is generated, a work that could begin again an infinite number of times. Furthermore, the structure of circular time not only appears in each individual piece but also could be used to explain all Bayle’s production as a large circle in which the same questions are considered by means of different approaches. Also, over the last few years, Bayle has created new versions of earlier pieces: in Petite Polyphonie au jardin (2008) he took the sound material of Grande Polyphonie and created an octophonic version and in Espace, etc … (2007) he created an octophonic remix of several works.
Circular time can be found in nature, in the seasons and in the movement between night and day. Bayle wants to reproduce a time closer to that of nature and rejects the chronological or historical time based on a succession of events following a certain order in the past, present and future. The time of life is a cyclic time in which everything is renewed; in La forme de l’esprit est un papillon, the butterfly is used as a metaphor of change, life regeneration and music. We would like to point out that this concept of time, closer to that of nature, is linked on another level to what we discussed earlier as Bayle’s intention of bringing humanity and nature together in a unified movement.
Musicologist Gianfranco Vinay (Reference Vinay2001) considers that the history of Western music can be explained as a fight between two temporal principles: a Chronos time, linear and dialectical, and an Aîon time, circular, pagan and repressed but always present in the collective subconscious. Chronos time is at the origin of the rhythmic regularity coded by music and the harmonic tension/release dialectics. However, Aîon time opposes this rhythmic regularity with all kinds of flights. For Gianfranco Vinay, time fluidity, the circular characteristic of images and the linking of sonorous metamorphoses of Bayle’s last pieces show the latter’s vocation (as well as that of acousmatic music) to bring Aîon time back in an age where Chronos time prevails. These thoughts on the two conceptions of time also appear in the writings of philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) who, in his book Logique du sens (1989), points out that in Chronos time there is only a present in time, past and future being two dimensions relating to this present; in Aîon time, however, there would be only one past and one future continuously dividing the present. Aîon is the instant without thickness that subdivides every present into past and future, unlike the vast and thick present of Chronos: ‘In short, two times, one of which consists only of embedded presents, the other merely decomposed into elongated past and future. One is always defined, active or passive, the other, eternally infinitive, eternally neutral’ (Deleuze Reference Deleuze1989).
When examining Bayle’s works, especially those created after 1980, we realise that time is not thick but rather disappears in a million particles; it is an Aîon time that moves continuously from one instant to another. There is a pure, non-identifiable and immeasurable development in which time never stops dividing itself into a before and an after. Every sound event is mobile, restless and, unable to stay in the same place, always replaced by another: ‘The entire line of the Aîon is run through by the instant which is endlessly displaced on this line and is always missing from its own place’ (Deleuze Reference Deleuze1989). Chronos time is the time of material succession, the time of the action of bodies, while Aîon time is the extra-temporality that acts on the surface of bodies. Bayle’s music also acts in this temporality that reflects the lightness of sound events which are continuously escaping.
Aîon is populated by effects that haunt it without ever filling it and is unlimited like the future and the past, but finite like an instant. That is what happens in a way with Bayle’s works: they are full of impacts and sensations which, instead of occupying all the time, allow it to breathe. At the same time, each one of his works is finite but also unlimited because the sound material appears to be never-ending, as if there was a perpetual natural reserve ready to offer us its sounds. In the instant of Aîon, singularities and points projected to the past and future are extracted. Likewise, in Bayle’s music there are some figures that stand out from an infinite circular line. Aîon time is close to the time of pleasure and desire, the time of ecstasy and of the listening-experience (as happens in L’expérience acoustique); it is a time in which the listener gets closer to the sound events, as a resonant subject (as will be discussed below). Bayle himself insists on the relevance of the flow of desire: ‘It is about the precise organisation for a different and specific system of listening, thought of like the flow of a movie. Or, of desire’ (Bayle Reference Bayle1993: 193).
The idea of time as a circle leads to the idea of a non-finished time. Time evolves through the evocation of one image-of-sound to another image-of-sound in an unfinished process which is different every time. There is a development marked by non-linear parameters and, even though there is an ending, the listener’s feeling is that everything could begin again an infinite number of times. In this infinite time there is a space proliferation caused by an absent space positioning itself in a present space; different temporalities are blended accounting for this ambiguity. These compositions could be considered as open works in the sense that we cannot foresee the sound events that will appear.
La forme du temps est un cercle (1999–2000) shows an interesting interpretation of this circular time. This work was inspired by La cifra, Jorge Luis Borges’ collection (1899–1986) of 45 poems written between 1978 and 1981. In one of these poems, Borges shows how Pythagoras taught his disciples that time is shaped as a circle and that everything happens for the first time but in a way that is eternal (Borges Reference Borges1996). In fact, the idea of a circular time is common to all of Borges’s production and can be found in other poems such as La Noche Cíclica (The Cyclic Night) with the poem ending in exactly the same way it had begun, and where the suspension points imply an indefinite repetition. Another early work in which Borges wrote about circular time is the essay included in his Historia de la Eternidad (La doctrina de los ciclos). This first idea of a circular time, based on infinite cyclic repetition, is related to the image of the eternal return; an image not taken as a set-back but as an infinite progress towards the departure point, moving along the finite circumference in order to return to the same point. The concept of a finite matter implies that time is not an absolute concatenation in which a before and an after can be recognised, but rather a cyclic concept. In the same way, sound material in Bayle’s work returns indefinitely but always in a different way. In La forme du temps est un cercle, he studies possible time states corresponding to a sensation of flux. The last of the five movements of this work, Cercles, is made up of sonorities close to those in the first movement so that the piece’s form is that of a circle in which everything could begin again several times. Here, Aeolian sounds, electronic cracklings, infinite glissandi and circular images that never stop in their trajectory also express fluidity.
2.4. The influence of technological tools
Technological tools have evolved as much as ideas in the history of electro-acoustic music (Racot et al. Reference Racot, Teruggi and Favreau1999). As these authors suggest, in a first phase, the change from analogue to digital techniques influenced all the composers who arrived in the electro-acoustic music scene in 1970. A knowledge of digital techniques led to the discovery of the power of precision and the accumulation of treatments, keeping the sound quality. The first digital studio of GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales, founded in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer and directed by François Bayle from 1966 onwards) was 123 studio. Here there were some programs in non-real time which, despite a monotonous and slow ergonomics, obtained very original results. Later, with the Syter system it was possible to make music in real time, and the simultaneous manipulation of several parameters was made possible by their interpolation in value sets within a bi-dimensional space. After that, with GRM tools, all algorithms were clarified in their presentation and a graphic explanation allowed the beginner a quick understanding of what was going on. From then on, the path was opened for the search of new ergonomics. Bayle was aware of the influence these tools had had on his music’s aesthetics and he classified his compositions in three historical periods (Bayle Reference Bayle2003: 50):
1. The use of editing techniques and stereophonic mixing with a magnetic tape from 1963 to 1994 (some works from this period are: L’oiseau chanteur, L’expérience acoustique, Grande Polyphonie, Camera oscura, Érosphère).
2. From 1980 onwards: computerised processing and the first digital audio tools in non-real time. Later, in 1988 the launch of Syter and in 1994 of MIDI Formers (works such as: Eros, Son Vitesse-Lumière, Théâtre d’ombres, Fabulae).
3. Around 1995, he adopted the dynamic medium and the digital multiprocessor editor with GRM tools plug-ins (in, e.g., La main vide, Morceaux de ciel, Si loin si proche).
Taking Bayle’s technological auto-analysis as a starting point, we can take a step forward and associate these periods with important changes in his compositional ideas. At the beginning of the second period (since the 1980s), Bayle modifies his way of conceiving time (from a linear development with ruptures to a continuous and circular time); the third period (around 1995) corresponds to his growing interest in adapting old stereo works into multichannel ones. Thus, consciously or not, Bayle brought onto his career the circular time he applied to his very work. We can say that in François Bayle’s works there is a mutual bidirectional influence between the technological tools used and the temporal structure emphasised within each work. At the same time, as will be discussed below, this evolution in the conception of time leads Bayle to consider space as an expressive place in which the subject lives the sound experience.
3. A Resonant Subject In A Living Space
The study of the use of space in François Bayle’s works takes as its starting point the definition of acousmatics as ‘the art of projected sounds’ (Bayle Reference Bayle2003). From Bayle’s first works the sound position in space is a fundamental parameter in the composition process. Each sound’s itinerary is registered in the medium; space is defined in the work and is, at the same time, a consubstantial part of it. This allows us to speak of a composition of space.
French musicologist and composer Michel Chion distinguishes between an outer space and an inner space in acousmatic music (Chion Reference Chion2001). The outer space is related to the listening conditions of the work (acoustic profile of the concert hall, the number, type and position of the loudspeakers) as well as to the social space of the work. However, the inner space is fixed on the recording medium and is characterised by the different layouts of presence of the sounds, the fixed or variable distribution of the elements in the different tracks, the nuances of their reverberation or absence, or other characteristics typical of the composition. Bayle defines the inner space as a ‘psychological volume’ (Bayle Reference Bayle2003) which is developed in the composition time expressing the velocity and all the ‘differences’ that structure the space. The problem with the interaction of these two kinds of space is clearly presented by Bayle (Reference Bayle1998) and raises not only an acoustic problem but also a philosophical one: we have hic et nunc sound productions which do not belong to the same reality. At the concert two spaces are present: the real space, in the sense of an actual space (outer space), and at the same time, the recorded space from the medium itself (the inner space). Our mental space is disrupted because there is an uncertainty related to space–time parameters: inside the real world (the concert hall) another world is built (the one created in the medium). Also, the real world recorded from the outside is inscribed on a technological device; it is a matter of bringing the outside into the inside. Therefore, we listen to sonorities that do not actually exist but existed previously: there is the ‘presence of an absence’. However, we cannot clearly distinguish the difference between a real sound and its projected simulation, that is, we cannot distinguish whether what we are listening to is really happening or is recorded. This clearly shows the big gap separating the presence from the absence by emphasising the perception of a difference of spaces which is difficult to retain. As a consequence, we are aware of the presence of a space that comes from another place. Thus, according to Bayle, what we are listening to is a space hole, a void; we are listening to a space that is not there.
From our point of view, in François Bayle’s music there is not an opposition of an inner space to an outer space: against the pure interiority of music itself or of a music that refers only to the outside, acousmatic music appears as a ‘wild being’ (as French philosopher Merleau-Ponty would say) between the two states. Acousmatic music unfolds itself onto outside and inside, it is visible and invisible. In no case is there a fusion of these two aspects but a continuous reversibility of both, a reversibility that is, at the same time, not complete. The auditory perception is possible in the continuous metamorphosis that goes from one to the other. As French philosopher Merleau-Ponty shows about the other’s presence:
It is necessary and sufficient that the body of the other that I see and whose word I hear, which is given to me as immediately present in my field, shows me in its own way that which I shall never be present for, which will always be unseen to me and which I shall never be a witness of, an absence.
(Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1964)
In the same way, we would like to point out that François Bayle’s music always shows us what remains absent for us: it makes us aware that music is not limited to what we are listening to in a specific instant; there is something that is hidden but present. The invisibility of acousmatic music, far from being an obstacle to the feeling of the music, becomes the appropriate way to establish and to create its own specificity. Acousmatic music makes us keep in mind the places where the music is composed. Merleau-Ponty declared that the invisible is not opposed to the visible: the visible has an invisible context and the invisible acts as compensation for the visible. Equally, the absence of the spaces where sounds were created is not the opposite of the presence of these spaces. At an acousmatic concert we feel the presence of the spaces where sounds were recorded and, at the same time, we perceive that in the actual space of the sound movements the physical space where they were created is missing: the absent space has a real presence and the present space reflects an absence.
Following Francis Bayer’s thoughts on space (Reference Bayer1981), we can say that the space created in François Bayle’s works is fundamentally a living space and not a constructed one. In fact, the auditor (and the composer) feels the place of the projected sound like a reality that lives concretely and not as an abstract category. One can feel the material and carnal presence of the concrete audible. This sound space corresponds to an aesthetics of an intuitionist type in which there is a supremacy of the plastic over the tectonic, of the expressive value over the structural one. Intuitionism leads us to a more specific representation of spatiality, one answering the requests made by our sensitivity and our intuition. It focuses on sensitive qualities as they can be expressed in the living aspects of the listening experience.
This said, we cannot deny that there are no characteristics of a constructed space in Bayle’s work. This space, corresponding to a formalist aesthetics, shows a supremacy of the tectonic over the plastic. It guides us towards an abstract conception of spatiality that satisfies above all the logical request of our formal intelligence; it emphasises the objective and intelligible values of the spatial construction. Bayle occasionally uses space with a structural value that organises the work: in his octophonic compositions, for example, the distribution of the sounds implies a willingness of organisation that makes the listener give a different signification to the front-to-back and left-to-right displacements. Several of his writings show drafts of the spatial layouts that he considered appropriate for his works, and sketches of the movements for the projected sound. In Théâtre d’Ombres, for example, he introduces a program of automatic projection (Bayle Reference Bayle1993) with an implementation diagram of the position of the loudspeakers. It includes instructions on the intensity level of each one of the 11 loudspeakers and on the sound displacements. At the beginning of the piece, the sound of loudspeakers one and four is distributed in a medium spatial plane, located between the left and the right; however, as the work draws on there is a movement to the right or to the left (generally if loudspeaker one moves left, loudspeaker two moves right). However, in a live performance, the possibility of moving the sound gives some reference points to the structure of the piece: starting the sound projection from afar and bringing it gradually closer to the audience helps in the understanding of the piece’s introduction.
Yet in most of Bayle’s works, spatiality refers to plastic properties that define an expressive value and allude to aesthetic significances. Unlike formalism, this is not about imposing a form to the sound material from the outside but rather about discovering a form inside the material itself. The sound space promoted by intuitionism makes a continuous demand on our physical sense of space, joining in with our deep feeling of a spatial experience. The intuitionist, taking a phrase from Bachelard, uses a ‘material imagination’ that leans towards the discovery and promotion of new sonorities. In this way, the space experience produces new sensations in the listener. For example, distance can provoke feelings of calm or loneliness, the proximity of sounds can reflect the now as well as something private, whereas vast or huge sounds might imply immensity or eternity. A semantics of music linked to spatial feeling is created making the listener give a bodily answer to the connections between musical contents and space (Smalley Reference Smalley1988). The spatial experience depends on the contents and the context; it is the product of a collaboration of factors that cannot be considered as isolated parameters. At the same time, the composer cannot systematically control this experience; it has to be felt.
From this point of view, the feeling of space will be different depending on the type of person taking part in the listening, but in all cases, it can be suggested that the subject stops being an intentional subject to become a resonant subject. Pierre Schaeffer introduces the importance of intentionality in the construction of a sound object: there is no object without a subject who listens to it and has the intention of listening to it. The intentionality discovered by Husserl through Brentano’s analysis is considered as a fundamental aspect in the perception of concrete music. The sound object appears as an object of our perception and is ‘entirely contained in our perceptive conscience’ (Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer1966). The sound object is linked to a subject, a continuous gliding between them. Listening is not a passive act, it implies a ‘tending towards’, an intention. However, even if we accept the importance that Schaeffer bestows on intentionality as essential, in our opinion, what we find in Bayle’s acousmatic music is an openness to the subject’s resonance, to the joint re-sounding of the listener and the sound. The conscience is intimately bound to what it constitutes and the other way round. We can distinguish what is constituted from what constitutes it but they are still closely related: there are features or characteristics of the subject in what is constituted; also, the one who perceives is joined to what is perceived because they are in the same world. Both belong to each other and resonate one another. So, the phenomenological subject is transformed into a resonant subject. There would not be any intentionality in the listening, the sound is not what we are pointing at, but what invades us and what we communicate with. These ideas bring to mind the words of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy who expresses this transformation thus:
It is a question of going back from the phenomenological subject, an intentional line of sight, to a resonant subject, intensive spacing of a rebound that does not end in any return to self without immediately relaunching as an echo, a call to that same self.
(Nancy Reference Nancy2002)
In our opinion, there would no longer be a logic of manifestation but a logic of evocation. Since there is an invisibility of their sources, sounds are neither presented nor revealed; their presence is recalled. The listening opens to the resonance and the resonance opens to the resonant body and to the resonance itself. Acousmatic listening is an active process in which the music comes to us at the same time as we go to the music. Music enters our body and we both feel inside the same world. There is no ideality in acousmatic music because it becomes flesh, it possesses us: ‘precisely because musical or sensitive ideas are negativity or absence circumscribed, we do not possess them, they possess us’ (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1964).
4. Conclusion
The most radical contribution in the aesthetics of Bayle’s works is the listener’s transformation from an intentional subject into a resonant subject who experiences the sound space. This idea has been explored through an analysis of François Bayle’s works from the point of view of morphology, temporal structure and spatial conception. We can state that in his music, the imagination of the sound forms works without images, that is to say, even if the original model might be a visual image, there is a process of abstraction in which what matters are the qualities of dynamic production. The continuous movement of the sound forms consists of a permanent modification where it is the tiny variations or gradations that are produced which are important. We are talking of a universe based on a continuous transformation of energy and not on discontinuous extremes.
We can also appreciate a change in how Bayle built the temporal structure: from a discontinuous time marked by events that break the musical discourse, to pieces based on temporal moments in which every instant of time is suspended and fixed, to, finally and since the 1980s, a temporal sense based on continuity and associated to Aîon time. This conception of time, related to the extra-temporality of the instant, is connected with a time which is closer to the pleasure and the willingness of listening distinctive of a resonant subject.
François Bayle has always been interested in conceiving new tools of sound projection, like the acousmonium, which has led listeners to increase their spatial sensitivity. It is, above all, a living space, in which the most important thing is the experience of such space, its expressive value, and the feelings it provokes, the content. In this space, the subject is not an intentional subject that controls every sound movement but a resonant subject that establishes links with the space around him.
