Partly truth, partly fiction. A walking contradiction.
—Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), in Taxi Driver (Scorsese Reference Scorsese1976)
1. INTRODUCTION
Narrative is a thread, a guide that connects a series of actions. It proposes a specific understanding of what is happening (Bal Reference Bal1997). Through mediation, these actions become an event.Footnote 1 While actions can be understood as descriptions (in a verbal sense), an event carries disclosure beyond what is immediate, and proposes an overall perspective. An action is a single occurrence, while an event offers a perspective over these occurrences put together, which would not be possible when isolated. Yet narrative is a transversal concept: it can be deployed in many different media, and at the same time it does not depend on the medium in use (Ryan Reference Ryan2004). However, the chosen medium provides the specific understanding of what is happening; it provides the premises based on which the perspective will be established.
This article proposes a theory that considers the use of sound recordings as means of composing a narrative. In this case, the narrative’s premises should be adjusted to the fact that the tool of guidance (turning actions into events) operates in the abstract sphere of the auditory sense. Sound as a medium fails to be effectively concrete because listening is an abstract way of perceiving given information (non-spoken sound). When one listens only – without images or words to outline the information – sounds turn out to be a fragile strategy for conveying narrative structures because they operate in an abstract sphere of suggestions, guesses and assumptions. In other words, listening does not relate to concrete references because these references cannot be easily pinned down. By skipping the ground reference of their causal actions, it is as if sounds were immediately events, instead of becoming events (Deleuze Reference Deleuze2004). In contrast, narrative presupposes a certain referential value, that is, the unfolding of understanding (in a Kantian sense – Kant Reference Kant1991). It requires a common ground through a system, a language, a specific code that will be shared. In literary terms, a story needs to be told/translated into an idiom the perceiver should be able to decode; otherwise there is no information being shared and therefore no narrative to follow. If this is the case, on what basis can sounds actually narrate an event?
2. SOUND NARRATION
Narrative relates to many other concepts, beyond the medium in use. Outside of classical literary theory, narrative is detached from specific agency. It then correlates with other theories, such as that of representation (Frege Reference Frege1892). In this case, representation would imply the author’s intentions and presuppose the audience’s interpretation (Sontag Reference Sontag1964; Ricoeur Reference Ricoeur1976).
Concerning representation, narrative entails a polarity between reality and the object to replace it. It presupposes that one thing is the truth and the other is the imitation, representing it. Yet, ‘imitation implies a sense of intention […] and requires the listener’s knowledge of the reference’ (Augoyard and Torgue Reference Augoyard and Torgue2006: 59). However, sounds (especially acousmatic sounds) do not replace an object; they are the object. As pointed out by Cage, a sound cannot symbolise, in a one-to-one relationship, another thing (Dyson Reference Dyson1994: 373–407). Then sounds do not represent listening to a thing; rather, they are the thing’s sound, and one possible way of perceiving it. They do not stand for something else that they re-present; they are presenting themselves – a form of presentation.Footnote 2 They are not a duplicated experience, just as listening to a CD at home does not represent, repeat or replace the experience of listening to the music in a concert. A recorded sound is only one possible way of experiencing the object. More importantly, playing sound does not represent the recorded actions, nor the thoughts about or the meaning of the objects. As LaBelle asserts, ‘representation could thus only be trusted if it demonstrated some element of contingency’ (LaBelle Reference LaBelle2006: 96).
As for intentionality, although the process of composing may be handled through a series of narrative strategies, such approaches will not survive in the outcome. For this to happen, it would be required that each member of the audience would understand exactly what each sound is, what it does, how, where and when – as the Intention/Reception project investigated (Landy 1990; Weale Reference Weale2006). Intentions, like representation, are also contingent. The fallacy of intentionality is discussed at length in Jauss’s ‘Theory of Reception’ (Jauss Reference Jauss2003), which regards the process of perception as a goal in itself (50). The work should consider the perceiver as it considers the emitter, by questioning the former’s position in light of the work (55) – it is the relation between both that determines the work’s development (57). In other words, a sound is not an absolute value, and will depend on a series of factors to be experienced. The form of presentation is responsible for the relationship that will develop between the listener and the sounds. Listening is an experience per se, and the conditions in which it takes place have a major role in what one understands of that/those sound(s). In fact, these conditions, otherwise called context, are what the listener ‘can hold onto’ (Weale Reference Weale2006); they establish the listening relationship.
Yet, subjectivity is twofold, and the work should not be reduced to it; in just the same way that the work should not be reduced to the individuality of the listener, it should also not be delimited by the author’s intentions. In spite of the abstract character of sound, the reliability of the work should not be fully delegated to the listener. For instance, Norman (Reference Norman2000) takes narrative as a dimension of the work, a dimension that ultimately requires an involvement from the audience, to balance the boundaries between the fictionality of the sounds and the ‘real listening’ outside that. This is the case with Norman’s interpretation of two compositions: Paul Lansky’s Things She Carried and Luc Ferrari’s Presque rien avec filles (Norman Reference Norman2000). Things She Carried (Lansky 1997) relies on words and orality, while Presque rien avec filles (Ferrari 1989) is subject to interpretation. In accordance with a theory of sound narration that is specific to sonic terms, sounds have to be given credit as autonomous entities. Approaching narrative through sounds is not the same if those sounds are (accompanied by) words; words will always stand in the foreground, and their meaning will influence the understanding of the abstract sound and be pre-eminent over anything else, overdetermining the path of guidance, as Norman’s interpretation reveals.Footnote 3 With Presque rien avec filles, the tendency is still to interpret these actions, and Norman’s interpretation emerges from her curiosity to understand the piece as a listener. In other words, the validation of Presque rien avec filles (Ferrari 1989) as a sound-narration comes from Norman’s own interpretation of the piece as a listener. However, instead of alluding to other/distant locations, sound-fiction should be itself the imaginary location in which the event is happening. If the premises are properly defined, the content will fall into them without depending on interpretation. Nonetheless, Norman highlights that a sound narrative relates to the ability of imagining a location, and that such imagination emerges through movement and the need to understand a sequence of actions (turning it into an event).
But even though narrative is a becoming event and this becoming requires a willingness to understand what is happening, there is a certain effectiveness that should remain the responsibility of the work, that is, the work should be as self-sufficient as possible. The Intention/Reception project has shown that providing information about the work might be deceptive, or at least that it may be at odds with what the listener thinks about it (Weale Reference Weale2006). ‘Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there’ (Sontag 1966: 13); interpretation – like representation and intentionality – operates in the realm of replacement, surpassing a hypothetical original thing, which did not prevail. Interpretation is to the listener as intentionality is to the composer. For that reason, a sense of fiction is more effective than a sense of narrative. The difference is that fiction frames a context in which narrative might happen (or not), while narrative presupposes that there is something else to understand rather than the event of listening.
3. SOUND FICTION
In spite of their contingency, representation and interpretation entail a sense of imagination. A sound composition is undeniably an artifice, and therefore a product of invention. This article proposes a theory of sound narration based on an understanding of fiction. While sound narrative entails certain expectations towards the understandability of the sound events, sound fiction implies, etymologically, the making or manufacturing of something. Additionally, fiction requires ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’ (Coleridge 1817), which implies that it is not completely detached from reality, despite being a construction. And so the premises of sound-fiction do not carry certain misconceptions of sound narrative because the former unfolds the components which constitute the events per se, in the moment of listening, while the latter presupposes an understanding of actions – which in this way become events – before the listener becomes part of the equation. In this sense, sound-fiction must develop its own methodology, instead of dissipating into the multiple ramifications of narration (representation, intentionality and interpretation).
Fiction begins with content. The assimilation of its structure establishes an internal logic, which in turn brings forth the outer form – in the case of sound fiction, the arrangement of loudspeakers. Both content and form are interrelated, corroborating the idea that fiction is finally achieved through the way the sounds will be presented to the listener, or the ‘presentation form’.
3.1. Sound-motifs
By definition, a motif is a theme that creates a pattern, defining a specific setting. This setting can be understood as the thread of events. In music, it is a phrase that presents a recurring idea, insinuating an internal logic by anticipating or delaying expectations. Stemming from the concept of leitmotif, a sound-motif operates slightly differently. Its outline is shared by music composition and film narrative, because its content is in the realm of musical understanding and its technique is part of film language, mostly connected to editing strategies (Beck and Grajeda Reference Beck and Grajeda2008; Bordwell and Thompson Reference Bordwell and Thompson2010; Dancyger Reference Dancyger2011). In film, a sound-motif is never detachable from the image. It is only by association with an action, a condition or a specific moment in the timeline that the motif’s meaning is established. From that point on, it becomes unquestionably recognisable. It can be a guiding motto, a structural tool that marks the intentionality of certain moments. Along the way, it consolidates the understanding of the actions, especially in relation to one another. Due to its plausibility and consistency, the motif establishes an internal logic in which the listener (willingly) believes.
Brown’s film adaptation of Anna Karenina, starring Greta Garbo (Brown Reference Brown1935), contains a valuable example. The motif is composed of two sounds which carry no particular meaning or understanding per se. As objects, there is a train and a hammer. As actions, there is a train about to depart, and a hammer being used to break the ice stuck on a train rail. At an early point in the Hero’s Journey (Vogler Reference Vogler2007), Anna Karenina goes to the train station. When she is about to leave, the departing train is marked by a combination of sounds including the hammering. Suddenly, unexpected shouts are heard, the crowd (and the audience) understands that someone committed suicide on the tracks. Anna Karenina expresses her sensitivity to the incident, slightly horrified but emotionally distant. Much later, when her journey is reaching an end, she returns to the train station. This new sequence seems almost a déjà vu; it immediately recalls the previous episode. The scene is built sound by sound, growing in tension, which is confirmed when the hammering is heard once again. This sound is grounded in a well-known and previously justified meaning, so that it can proceed on its own, announcing what is about to come; its existence is so well justified that it can afford desynchronisation, claiming autonomy from the image. It extends the waiting, giving it a tempo, increasing the suspense and the expectation. As ‘in a narrative there exist simultaneously a linear dimension – events happen at different moments in time – and relations of cause and effect between these different events’ (Nattiez Reference Nattiez1990: 242), the hammering corresponds directly to the idea of suicide.Footnote 4
Conversely, if one would isolate this sound from the image, this motif would be merely a suggestion; there would be no evident relationship between the hammer and the meaning it affords (i.e. suicide), as there was no precedent giving a sense of causality. In this case, without the image, the listener would have nothing to ‘hold on to’ in order to understand the meaning of this sound (Weale Reference Weale2006). So, in acousmatic listening, this sound-motif would only suggest an idea of causality. The logical effect of actions may be there – it could be the composer’s intention to use such a sound to represent the idea of ‘suicide’ – but it is not a statement: it depends on the listener’s interpretation for this sound to mean ‘suicide’. It is a suggestion because, in its abstraction, its immediacy relies only on listening, instead of on the event that that action initiates. In other words, listening surpasses the sound. Listening fabricates a new moment, which is fictional because it has been manufactured. If, on one hand, sound initiates an event (Altman Reference Altman1992: 23), skipping the ground reference of an action, listening on the other hand is, initially, eventlessness. The ‘eventness’ has to be fabricated through understanding the actions: an event occurs as a consequence of the act of listening, rather than being embedded in the sound itself. It is through listening that this action becomes an event. Whether in the original recording (the content) or in the context where it has been placed (the form of its presentation), a sound is never completely isolated from its context: ‘Every sound I hear is thus double, marked both by specific circumstances of recording and by the particularities of the reproduction situation’ (Altman Reference Altman1992: 27). When listening to a sound, the listener makes empirical associations from it, arising from one’s own memories, references and understandings of this sound (see Weale Reference Weale2006).
Yet, not every sound is a reference to something else. Such an assumption would disregard the main principle of musique concrète – the reduced listening mode (Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer1966) – and, more importantly, diminish the possibilities of fiction. Still, ‘reduced listening prevents sound from serving as a signifier of anything other than itself’ (Wong Reference Wong2012: 29), disregarding that every sound carries a certain ‘cultural baggage’ (Bal Reference Bal2002). And yet a hammer, by itself, does not relate directly to the same associations as it does once a motif is established. Acousmatically, it would not carry any specific meaning besides an embedded musicality and/or the cultural bonds of the context; it is the listening that turns it into an event. Before listening, sound is only a performance of movement, because ‘to listen is to always be on the edge of meaning’ (Nancy Reference Nancy2007: 7). The objects activate their own noises through certain operations; in this sense, sounds are like actors. Through their acting, they reveal different traits and a particular dramaturgy. Hence, in the sound-motif described above, the hammer is an actor.
3.2. Sound-actors
Inherited from musique concrète’s concept of sound-objects, a ‘sound actor uses many components of the same sound […], practicing multiple niches’ (Augoyard and Togue Reference Augoyard and Torgue2006: 79). Among the various definitions and considerations from academics and practitioners, and in all the classifications concerning materiality and instrumentality, a sound-object has a performative value (Kane Reference Kane2007; Wong Reference Wong2012; Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer2013). In Foley an object is a prop – an adornment (or another means of characterisation) – that contributes to the comprehension of the action or the characters; a diegetic function, not merely decorative.Footnote 5
Moreover, Foley is intrinsically associated with the idea of sound manufacturing – the ‘make-believe’ that ensures fictional achievement (Currie Reference Currie2008: 18; Stecker Reference Stecker2009: 276). Stemming from both fields – sound objects in musique concrète and props in Foley Art – sound-actors convey ideas not only of performance, but also of mise en scène and staging. Performance suggests the existence of a specific enactment, like a set-up or a blocking to be followed by the actor. Blocking is the English term for the French didascalie, which comes from the Greek didascalia (meaning instructions). It is used in theatre to refer to the instructions given to actors and technical crew to guide the movements on the stage. By ascribing gestures, movements, textures, durations and other features, blocking guides the sound-actor to make actions in a particular way; in Foley, this often means using an object to sound like another object. This translates into two forms of building the mise en scène: the performance of the sounds that constitute the dramaturgic meaning, and the performativity of listening to it (Bal Reference Bal2002).
The mise en scène is both the place where the actor performs (e.g. the studio where the sound is recorded) and the place where the sound is performed (e.g. the stage where the listener experiences it). This distinction is comparable to the differentiation between performance and performativity (Bal Reference Bal2002: 175–212), the first being the ‘execution of the work’ (175) while the latter is ‘the occurrence’ of it (176). At the same time, the stage is the space where the sounds are heard; it is where the motif reveals its patterns, gestures, movements, textures and other features that shape the content. This corroborates the idea of enactment: actors performing their actions and their actions being heard. The actors execute the performance and the performativity depends on the agents that mediate it, that is, the loudspeakers.
Hence, to set into practice a theory of sound-fiction based specifically in terms of sound is to make both theory and practice depend on the conditions in which the sound is heard. The form of fiction is the presentation form. Be it the loudspeaker arrangement, the social environment created for the listening, or other conditions: the stage is where it all happens.
4. ACOUSMATIC FOLEY
Although Acousmatic Foley appears to be an oxymoron, the terminology brings together shared concepts and practices from both fields. As we have seen, it allows for the concept of sound-motif, which structures sound-fiction, and it allows for the idea of sound-actor, based on the concepts of sound-objects and sound-prop. More importantly, it allows the joining of a practice that is, in its condition, sound dependent, with a practice that is fictional in its core. In these terms, Acousmatic Foley bears no contingency.
The argument starts from the premise that a Foley Artist is an acousmatic listener. The Foley Artist looks for objects not according to the object’s real function, but for what it should sound ‘as-if’.Footnote 6 Many times, the matching sound is achieved through objects other than the one in the scene. The idea of sound-acting starts right here: with a given object trying to perform a sound to match another object/action.Footnote 7 Further, the Foley Artist thinks in terms of composition: layers, patterns, timbres, rhythms and other ‘musical’ properties that characterise the moment in question, codifying it in an internal logic and implying certain associations (like the hammer in Anna Karenina). At the same time, the acousmatic composer is focused on the use of sound as an artefact, to present ideas and concepts, creating a fictional universe often transcending the functionality of the objects in use. Yet, musique concrète objectifies sound under the idea of ‘a thing in itself’ in order not to consider any semantics other than musical, ‘as-if’ a hammer would not be a hammer and, at the same time, nothing but a hammer. Joining these two fields in the same theoretical and practical pool enlightens a layer of this objecthood that has very little to do with materiality. Material is to performance as materiality is to performativity; in other words, the ‘sound-object’ is in fact not a thing per se, but what it is made of, what it suggests. For both fields, the sound object is what is heard of it. It is not a material, tangible; it is the sound it makes. While in Foley it is made to match a visible action, in musique concrète it is made by withholding its source material; in both cases the prop is acting out only its sound: ‘by offering itself […] to be heard, every sound […] loses its autonomy, surrendering the power and meaning of its own structure to the various contexts in which it might be heard’ (Altman Reference Altman1992:19). The composer is the first mediator by providing the circumstances in which the sound is heard; however, the loudspeaker is the real mediator of the experience, by providing the sounds to the listener.
4.1. Mediation
In this account, the loudspeaker is an agent of mediation, not because it is the (technical) emitter of the sound, nor due to possible traces it prints onto a sound (Paiuk Reference Paiuk2013), but because its function is analogous to that of a literary mediator: it positions the perspective, shaping the context in which the fiction takes place.
Earlier in this theory of sound-fiction, it was claimed that sound initiates an event, skipping the ground reference of an action. Setting up a context to mediate this event (becoming event) is the moment in which fiction emerges. It is the form of presentation, that is, the staging of these sounds, that provides the experience of listening to fiction. The form of presentation is the chosen constellation of loudspeakers. It delineates the way sounds are communicated, first by establishing the relation between one sound and another, or one sound’s source and another, and consequently by establishing the ground reference based on which the listener will relate to what’s being listened to. Thus, the form of presentation is an enactment achieved by the number of loudspeakers, their position in relation to one another, and the character each loudspeaker will acquire by taking the role of a given sound source. The loudspeaker presents the sound, allowing for the experience to happen. The more that experience is manufactured, the more fictional the experience that might occur.
For example, let’s imagine the sound of a cat. The cat is purring. There is a picture of a cat, a video or a scene in a film. If listening to the cat while having that image as a reference, one assumes or accepts that the cat in question sounds that way – the image mediates it. However, if listening to the sound of a cat purring with no image, one can imagine the cat as one pleases. Yet, what else will be understood out of this sound, listening without a nominative value?Footnote 8 In both cases, the experience relates to the listener’s own cultural baggage. One possibility is that one’s knowledge of a cat’s sound is rather different and therefore the sound will be challenged. Will it be recognisable? Most importantly: what if the listener never heard a cat before? The reference is lost. But let us assume that a common ground of references establishes that this sound was caused by a cat. Even then, what happens to the notion of ‘event’ here? Is the event ‘there is a cat purring’? Or is the event ‘the way the cat purrs’? The cat purring is only an action. But its communication, that is, the mediation of this action, gives it a sense of eventness, ultimately developed by the act of listening.
4.2. Staging sound-fiction
A theory of staging sound-fiction is based on the content (the sounds) and the form (the presentation), advocating the loudspeaker as the mediator of this experience. To stage sound is to bring the fictitious location to the listener’s position. In this sense, the stage is also a happening.
The idea of the stage, as much as of narrative, has always been a case study in the context of acousmatic music. For instance, Lopez (Reference Lopez2004) contributed to identifying the necessity of formulating a practice of ‘stage’ that meets the specificities of acousmatic work. The idea is to challenge the usual relation between the work and the audience; but whereas Lopez addresses this necessity as an issue of the performer, sound-fiction addresses it as a relation between the listener and the sounds heard. Thus, to fictionalise is to set a structure that creates an artefact of locations and movements. Yet, it is distinct from, for instance, the acousmonium practice in which the feeling of immersion is a goal in itself (Stefani and Lauke Reference Stefani and Lauke2010). What staging sound-fiction aims at is to prevent acquiescence. Each loudspeaker is the sound’s source, it contains the sound: it evokes the manufacturing of the work, and thereby fictionality.
Unlike filmmaking, which mastered the invisibility of its fabrication (with exceptions, of course), sound-fiction needs to expose its construction precisely because of fiction’s need for ‘making-believe’. While in film, the audience needs to take no notice of the technical apparatus, in acousmatic sound the audience needs to be aware of the source (the loudspeaker) and, so to say, to believe it – to believe in the sound that comes from it. One hears the sound coming from a specific point; this will establish connections among the other sounds and with the listener. Listening establishes the guide that turns an action into an event; in other words, if sound immediately initiates an event, it skips the ground reference of an action. A loudspeaker then re-establishes the sense of description initially belonging to actions by creating a dynamic and a pattern based on which the experience is established, re-composing a mise en scène. Placed on the stage, the loudspeakers constitute the point of perception (or point of audition, as studied in film). That point-source mediates perception, replacing the camera’s mediation in film; it constitutes an action similar to an offscreen/onscreen movement in film. It creates a fictional location and a sense of direction, as in the making of a happening. But this idea of stage is not contemplative; that the stage is where the sounds are heard means that the stage is where the audience hears the sounds. The signification of those actions, then, is created not through the suppression of its signifier as in representation vs interpretation, but by an actualisation of the senses – by, in fact, experiencing the sounds and relating to them, neither instead of the ‘real’ object nor instead of the concept it stands for, but as an experience per se. Therefore, like the theory of reception, the theory of stage in sound-fiction is addressed to the listener. Instead of formulating the idea of stage as a contemplative concept, the audience should be placed within it, in order to be the ultimate mediator of the experience.
5. CONCLUSION
As an attempt to overcome the weaknesses of the concept of sound narrative, this article conceptualises a practice of Acousmatic Foley. Its formulation allows for a strategy that depends on both sound and fiction, first because Foley Art carries a sense of fiction embedded in sound-making, and second, because acousmatic listening asserts a specific way of listening/relating to sounds. Through Acousmatic Foley, the theory of sound narrative can be based on the concepts of sound-motif and sound-actors. These are agents of a mise en scène which will have to be re-composed through mediation. Due to its function, the loudspeaker emerges as model of mediation, allowing for a conception of stage that is dependent on its relation to the listener. Such a theory calls for a practice that is not exclusively dependent on, but benefits from, multichannel arrangements, adjusted to the specific needs of each mise en scène. This implies the composition of a piece considering the presentation form from the beginning – not only the number of loudspeakers, but the constellation created and, more importantly, the relation it establishes with the listener. Based on this, the listener will relate to the sounds and experience them in one’s own way. The experience is then not a representation of something else, neither expecting nor depending on its own interpretation; it is an event per se – it emerges from narrative, but on its own (sound) terms.
Sound fiction is made possible through the ‘manufactured’ quality of the work, and is intrinsic to the listening experience itself, through the awareness of the work as artefact. In this sense, listening to sound fiction is of the same nature – requiring the same willing suspension of disbelief – as watching a film. Accepting the proffered reality as plausible within the apparatus allows us to experience something that is only made possible through its quality of having been manufactured – an experience that is autonomous from reality and that therefore does not require ‘referentiality’. After listening to a piece, it is not necessary to re-describe what one has heard for it to become a narrative, just like after a movie there is no need to write a synopsis or otherwise re-describe the actions; instead, fiction is afforded by the acceptance of the work as artefact. Unlike narrative, fiction is not contingent because it does not depend on extrinsic factors. It only relies on the making of the work. In specific terms, Acousmatic Foley proposes to structure fiction from sound-actors to presentation forms, carrying the fictional luggage of Foley with the listening tradition of an acousmatic practice.
