1. Introduction
Denis Smalley has done much to define and expand contemporary acousmatic music. His writings on spectromorphology have codified a formal taxonomy of the genre (Smalley Reference Smalley1986), and his compositions provide exemplary and virtuosic applications of this language. In spite of this, there is one way in which his music stands out as somewhat separate from acousmatic traditions. Much of the traditional attitude of the acousmatic genre has focused exclusively on the formal or ‘intra-musical’ aspects of sound, eschewing sound-identities as ‘extra-musical’ elements which hinder the somehow more refined process of reduced listening. In contrast to this attitude, a significant portion of Smalley's body of work focuses clearly on sound-sources and their referential capacities – and even aspects of environment. These elements do not contradict the essentially acousmatic nature of Smalley's work, but work in collaboration toward an expanded palette of meaning. Thus, it is fruitful to consider Smalley's work from a soundscape perspective and negotiate how it interacts with the more abstract qualities also present. I am less interested in considering Smalley's development within the historical–aesthetic background of soundscape music (though this could be an interesting point of research) but rather with how his music, taken in isolation, benefits from a soundscape-style analysis.
2. Acousmatic aesthetics
In order to best describe how these elements negotiate within the acousmatic framework of Smalley's music, it is important to describe first what is meant by ‘acousmatic’. Each of the possible meanings of the word stem from the historical akousmatikoi, Greek followers of Pythagoras, who reportedly listened to lectures where the speaker was occluded behind a veil, so that the visualisation of the speaker did not alter their perception of the content of the lecture. The contemporary acoustic parallel, then, is when sound is divorced from its source by electroacoustic means. The broadest and least aesthetically charged notion of ‘acousmatic’ is simply anything transmitted through loudspeakers where the source is not visually present. In soundscape theory, this is also termed ‘schizophonia’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1977: 90). This definition, which refers to acousmatic media, is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and essentially encompasses any and all electroacoustic music where the source sounds are visually or temporally removed. From this is derived acousmatic listening, also known as reduced listening, wherein an attempt is made by the listener to consider sounds as divorced from their causal origins. This is in spite of whether the causal origin is visually or aurally discernible. Again, this is a descriptive process. It does, however, form the basis of the aesthetic for acousmatic composition which encourages acousmatic listening. Whether the sound identities in an acousmatic composition are aurally discernible, there is an aesthetic impetus to focus on the formal properties of the sound as divorced from its image. In other words, acousmatic composition ‘denies a visual source for its constituent sounds’ (Windsor Reference Windsor2000: 7). Much of the confusion surrounding the term emerges in ambiguities between which is meant, and so it is important to be clear. I will predominantly be referring to the genre of acousmatic composition in this paper.
While acousmatic composition does encourage an intended listening position, it does not necessarily prescribe content, in terms of recognisability of sound identities. An entire continuum does exist and is available to acousmatic composers. Identity of a sound can range from abstract to mimetic, and its syntax from abstract to abstracted (Emmerson Reference Emmerson1986). Mimetic identities retain their original referential qualities, whereas abstract do not, and abstracted syntaxes are organised in reference to ecological or other referential models related to the sound source, while abstract syntaxes are organised in accordance with some other formal principle. The entire range of the spectrum is available to the acousmatic genre; much of the early musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer, whose philosophy promoted reduced listening, was mimetic in character.
2.1. Acousmatic listening as ideology
Regardless of the content of a piece of acousmatic music, the genre suggests an abstract construction and listening position. Many composers will not find acousmatic music and referential listening in conflict, which is quite correct when referring to acousmatic media, but the genre of acousmatic composition seems to call for a reduced listening position, at least by definition. Perhaps the same composers, even those who emerged from the acousmatic tradition, have looser attitudes toward the essentiality of reduced listening, but there remains a strong foothold of the aesthetic which banishes real-world sound-identities as ‘non-musical’. According to composer Francisco López,
There can only be a documentary or communicative reason to keep the cause-object relationship in the work with soundscapes, never an artistic / musical one. Actually, I am convinced that the more this relationship is kept, the less musical the work will be. (López Reference López2000)
Michel Chion has expressed another example of this attitude.
The composers of the GRM tended to Fetishisms which have to do principally with focussing attention on the sources of the sounds and the means whereby they are produced, whereas the sounds themselves are what really count, and they can be made in any and every way. (Chion Reference Chion1993: 53)
It seems that this classification of works interested in sound-identities as ‘non-musical’ or even ‘fetishistic’ remains a common conceit among some acousmatic composers, and can even invoke a kind of animosity. I am forced to wonder what their reply would be to a traditionalist's conceit that a sound becomes ‘less musical’ the further it deviates from traditional melody and harmony played on instruments. The twentieth century was enormously successful in breaking down the boundaries of what music is, but one bastion left to many seems to be the referential and semantic qualities of sound.
The difficulty in question seems to be rooted in the assumption that the formal aspects of sound are ‘what count’, and that therefore focusing on referential qualities can only distract from, or hamper, the depth of focus on formal qualities. I am sceptical that this is the case. It shouldn't be any surprise that the Greek akousmatikoi practice of listening to veiled lecturers is no longer common practice, and yet today's students don't appear to be compromised in their ability to ingest knowledge in spite of being ‘influenced’ by the physical appearance of their lecturers. Similarly, we should not be persuaded to think that somehow being made aware of a sound's source prevents intense concentration toward its spectromorphological properties. The referential capacities of a sound accounts for a significant portion of its complexity (Truax Reference Truax1994) but it does not need to be ‘ignored’ in order to consider other aspects. A piece of music focused on rhythm, such as Smalley's own The Pulses of Time, needn't be listened to in ignorance of other parameters, such as timbre, in order to appreciate its focus. Similarly, the parameter of ‘outer complexity’ or sound-identity is not necessary to ignore in order to listen deeply to a sound's aural characteristics. A question of whether this forced ignorance is even plausible for listeners is important to consider, as studies (McCartney Reference McCartney2002; Landy Reference Landy2006) have indicated a tendency for listeners to invent their own imagery in response to abstract sounds, often contradictory to the intentions of the ‘narrative’ of the piece. And so, even ‘abstract’ acousmatic music tends to have the capacity to have imagistic characteristics, even if the sounds are not direct referents to real-world images. Smalley acknowledges this very clearly: ‘the invisible world of acousmatic imagery also conjures up scenes in the imagination’ (Smalley Reference Smalley2000). Because of this, close attention to the referential capacities of sounds can often enhance their formal trajectories and work in concert in such a way that meaning is expanded in both realms. Much of Denis Smalley's music explores such a negotiation.
3. The negotiation of abstract and mimetic elements in Smalley
The materials in many of Smalley's pieces include both mimetic and abstract sound-identities. Pentes (1974) includes processed and unprocessed recordings of Northumbrian pipes (whose sudden exposure in their naked state forms the climax of the piece), Wind Chimes (1987) makes clear its eponymous sound-source, and Empty Vessels (1997) contains a number of environmental sounds and is the most extreme of Smalley's works in its inhabiting a mimetic discourse. Beyond these pieces, there are a number of pieces for instruments and tape which necessarily involve mimetic discourse due to the instruments’ visible sound-identities. Additionally, Smalley has a great number of works with predominantly abstract sound identities which are nonetheless arranged into an ecological or referential syntax. Pentes (again), Vortex (1982), Tides (1984) and Valley Flow (1992) represent this category well. A discussion of how these elements manifest themselves will be presented later in the paper.
The question is whether the mimetic elements in these works contribute to their discourse, or whether they are to be ignored in acousmatic listening. The latter option might be intuitively appealing. Smalley comes from a tradition of acousmatic style which endeavours toward abstraction of sound material. His formative years and writings emerged from the Paris acousmatic school, through his education at the Group de Recherches Musicales (GRM) and introduction to the writings of Pierre Schaeffer (Smalley Reference Smalley2009). By that time certain composers at the GRM, such as Luc Ferrari, became interested in preserving sound-identities as part of the discourse of their music, but the central force behind the GRM school remained Schaeffer's theories. Smalley writes that he initially ‘followed the basic French, musique concrète method’. (Smalley Reference Smalley2009: 15) His early writings on spectromorphology stem from, or are inspired by Schaefer's theories of abstract typologies (Smalley Reference Smalley2009: 14), In ‘Spectro-morphology and Structuring Processes’ he asserts that ‘today we continually need to reassert the primacy of the aural experience in music’ (Smalley Reference Smalley1986: 62), which sounds very much like the Schaefferian call for ‘primacy to the ear’. In discussing spectromorphology, he lays out the need for reduced listening in order to ‘find out what happens in the life of a sound or sound structure’ (Smalley Reference Smalley1986: 63). It is clear, then, that when Smalley speaks of spectromorphology he is referring to an acousmatic method for examining the formal properties of sound. All this should be indicative that Smalley's roots lie in an acousmatic tradition of composition which is highly abstract.
However, this is only part of the story. Smalley concedes that spectromorphology is a way of looking at sound based on its abstract characteristics, but he is clear that there are other important aspects of sound not covered by spectromorphology. He writes at the conclusion: ‘There are two facets of electroacoustic music which would have to be examined for a more complete perspective of the medium. These are language and mimesis’ (Smalley Reference Smalley1986: 92) He has also written that ‘a spectromorphological approach cannot deal adequately with electroacoustic music which is strongly anecdotal or programmatic, that is, music where a very wide palette of sonic references may be employed – recordings of cultural events and behaviour, musical quotation and pastiche, and so on’ (Smalley Reference Smalley1997: 109). And so it appears that Smalley acknowledges some aspects of sound which are worthwhile and yet outside the scope of an abstract view. If this is true, then, given that some of Smalley's music contains these elements, spectromorphology alone may be insufficient to describe these works.
Evidence in Smalley's other writing can be ambiguous. For instance, he has declared it ‘important’ in his music ‘that there needs to be a certain ambiguity of identity in the majority of sounds as they finally appear in a piece, maybe with some links with possible, imagined sources, but also a certain level of abstraction’. However, he does afford that ‘there are exceptions, like Empty Vessels, which is strongly source-bonded, but even there I draw attention to the spectromorphological qualities of the sound world’ (Smalley Reference Smalley2009: 15). The call for ambiguity of identity could be interpreted to suggest that he is among other acousmatic composers who encourage that identity be ignored. However, this would ignore the fact that Smalley has also spent much of his scholarly writing addressing the idea of sound identity (Smalley Reference Smalley1996, Reference Smalley2007). Smalley's own acknowledgement that ‘an important goal of analytical exploration is … to attempt to reconcile and relate the internal world of the work within the outside world of sonic and non-sonic experience’ (Camilleri and Smalley Reference Camilleri and Smalley1998: 7) should be a good indicator that this forms an important aspect of his work. The conceit that the mimetic sound identities in his works are to be understood through a veil of self-imposed ignorance also betrays the richly woven semantic webs between abstract and mimetic sounds in his pieces, which suggest deep consideration for the impact of sound-identities in the construction of the discourse of his pieces. Some of the pieces where this occurs most acutely are collected on the album Sources/Scènes. That a collection of this type exists, specifically centred around the importance of sound-source and scenic elements in Smalley's work, is a testament to his skilled treatment of these aspects of sound.
One of Smalley's most recent articles, ‘Space-Form and the Acousmatic Image’, makes his interest in these aspects even clearer. The article begins with what is essentially a sound journal entry describing a particular soundscape (Smalley Reference Smalley2007: 35). It becomes evident that his discussion about space isn't just as an abstract property of sound, but is rooted in environment and stems from source-bonded sound. He is sensitive in his writing to the continuum of mimetic and abstract sound-archetypes, as they inhabit more ‘soundscape-like’ or abstract acousmatic spaces. This reflects his sensitivity to the continuum of these sound-types in his music – he is not content to remain within purely abstract discourses (or the other way around). This illustrates that Smalley's own attitude toward his work is very broad, and that perhaps that there may have been a sort of historical progression from a more abstract acousmatic aesthetic toward a broader inclusion of source-bonded sounds and soundscape aesthetics. The reasons for this could be manifold and are beyond the scope of this article. Whatever the historical basis for the content of his work, it is clear that Smalley is a composer who, despite emerging from an acousmatic tradition with an abstract aesthetic, produces a great deal of work which contains overtly mimetic, environmental, cultural or otherwise ‘extra-musical’ elements, and that this affords his music an interpretation sensitive to these aspects of sound.
From this perspective, a close examination of some of his most ‘scenic’ pieces will reveal the importance of sound identities to these works, as well as important ecological aspects in the way in which they are structured. Smalley singles out Empty Vessels as ‘the closest my music gets to composition based on the soundscape’ (Smalley Reference Smalley2000), though this proximity may be closer than he lets on. It is not my intention to brand Smalley as a ‘soundscape composer’, but rather to suggest that his inclusion of mimetic materials and syntaxes requires an analytical method sensitive to these concerns to be best appreciated. Soundscape theory is arguably the most developed and broadest tool for these purposes, and, as such, a soundscape-type analysis of Smalley's works will yield some fruitful result.Footnote 1
4. Soundscape analysis
A brief outline of soundscape theory and its later application to composition and musical analysis will be required in order to continue. Soundscape theory began as an ecological approach to researching sound environments, established by R. Murray Schafer in the late 1960s as part of the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University. Some key concepts include lo-fi and hi-fi soundscapes (Schafer Reference Schafer1977: 43), referring to the noise content of soundscapes. Lo-fi, or ‘unbalanced’, soundscapes feature dense populations of sound and noisy spectra, whereas hi-fi (balanced) soundscapes are able to maintain the information content of all discrete sounds because of low ambient noise levels. Individual elements of soundscapes include keynote sounds (Schafer Reference Schafer1977: 48) which are sounds continuously endemic to their environment, signals (Schafer Reference Schafer1977: 169) which are discrete sounds intended to carry specific information, and soundmarks (Schafer Reference Schafer1977: 26), which are discrete sounds unique to a particular area and serve to identify it. They are also characterised as being cultural elements necessary to preserve, much like visual landmarks.
These descriptive ecological models eventually fostered the development of an electroacoustic music genre, ‘soundscape composition’, broadly described here by Barry Truax:
One of the most obvious traits [of soundscape compositions] is not that the pieces use environmental sound materials, but rather that most pieces can be placed on a continuum between what might be called ‘found sound’ and ‘abstracted’ approaches. In other words, the soundscape composition cannot be defined as any piece using soundscape recordings as its source materials, mainly because contemporary signal processing techniques can easily render such sounds unrecognisable and completely abstract, i.e. with few if any real-world referents.
The soundscape composition always keeps a clear degree of recognizability in its sounds, even if some of them are in fact heavily processed, in order that the listener's recognition of and associations with these sounds may be invoked …
Of course, many composers like to create an imaginary world with processed sounds of various origins, and if the result is heard as a coherent soundscape, even if unrealistic in its details, one can make a connection to the soundscape composition approach. (Truax Reference Truax2002: 6)
While the majority of Smalley's pieces should perhaps not be considered ‘soundscape compositions’ as such, they appear to exhibit properties characteristic of soundscape compositions, and these properties are interwoven into a framework sensitive to spectromorphology. Smalley is clear that spectromorphology is not a ‘compositional theory or framework’ but has also acknowledged that as a ‘descriptive tool’ it may also turn and influence compositional process (Smalley Reference Smalley1997: 108). And so, when I refer to it here, I am describing it in the broad sense that it is a ‘way of looking at sound’ and as such it has potential applications in both analysis and composition.Footnote 2 It may seem, though, that as a way of looking at sound which is highly abstract, and perhaps even requires acousmatic listening, it is incompatible with a soundscape perspective. I would consider this to be a false dichotomy, however, as one piece does not demand a single listening mode from start to finish, nor does it demand a single discourse of mimetic or abstract information. Smalley discusses this himself in The Listening Imagination (Smalley Reference Smalley1996) and has even referred to ‘extra-musical’ elements as being ‘carried and articulated by spectro-morphology’ (Smalley Reference Smalley1986: 92). Additionally, I hope to have already illustrated that the notion that the concerns of acousmatic compositionFootnote 3 and soundscape concerns are somehow incompatible is patently false. Indeed, many of the techniques and qualities of soundscape composition have grown out of the acousmatic tradition and they share many of the same concerns (Drever Reference Drever2002). This considered, there are many common concerns between a soundscape perspective and other perspectives focused on more spectromorphological aspects of sound which allow them to communicate quite well.
4.1. Tone and noise in soundscapes – Empty Vessels
Both soundscape theory and spectromorphology are intensely concerned with spectra. Movement between spectral properties forms the basis of spectromorphologically focused formal languages. One of the clearest manifestations of this is the continuum from tone to noise. Used as a formal tool, movement between tone and noise is a primary method of creating development and formal movement in many acousmatic works, and can even be seen as an expanded replacement for the functional movement between consonance and dissonance in tonal music (Saariaho Reference Saariaho1987).
This function of noise as ‘tension’ draws a close parallel to its function within soundscape theory as the characteristic element in lo-fi soundscapes. Conversely, hi-fi soundscapes are those with thinner and more discrete spectral bands. And so the movement from tone to noise in soundscape composition has a narrative ecological function. The connotations of noise are those of aural pollution and the masking of information – as fine a parallel to noise as functional tension as any! With these shared vocabularies, it is easy to see how a composition could, using the same parameters, convey two potential layers of information at once: one an abstract aural discourse of movement between spectral densities, and another an ecological semantic framework relating to movement between qualities of soundscapes.
Denis Smalley's Empty Vessels does just that. Smalley describes his compositional process:
The empty vessels of the title are some large garden pots from Crete and an olive jar from Turkey. Recordings of the air resonating in these vessels provided the starting-point for the piece. Since the recordings were done in my garden in north London, sounds from the environment (rain, birds, planes flying overhead) were also captured by the microphones inside the pots, and changes in the timbre of these sounds resulted from interaction with the filtering effect of the resonant vessels. (Smalley Reference Smalley2000)
What seems to have emerged from a somewhat experimental process is a stage set for natural imagery describing a specific soundscape. Formally, the piece is divided into quiet, fairly naturalistic sections featuring sounds of birds and rain, and denser, louder sections predominantly driven by resonated recordings of airplanes. The differences in the spectra of these sound sources provide a good formal structure for the piece, but also lend themselves to an ecological interpretation. They serve as an excellent example of hi-fi and lo-fi soundscapes. Or, more properly, the piece maintains an image of being situated within one continuous soundscape, but the introduction of the plane sounds present a narrative element of ecological risk. They mask the information of the natural sounds and lead to an ‘unbalanced’ soundscape, and so create a sense of tension which stimulates the narrative movement of the piece.
The use of processing in the piece is very limited, but when it does occur it is done with a great sensitivity to the source material. The ‘natural’ processing of the resonant vessels in which the microphones were placed sets the stage for the digital processing, which extends and expands the inherent capacities of the sounds, rather than transforming them completely into new identities. This is a technique Truax describes as fundamental to soundscape composition (Truax Reference Truax2002). Processing is used as a means of extending and exploring the sounds used, or processing ‘through’ the sound, as opposed to reconfiguring the sound entirely by applying processing ‘onto’ the sound.
The use of resonators has a profound effect in relationship between the continuum of tone to noise of the piece, and it could be interpreted in terms of an ecological programme. For the most part, when they are applied to ‘natural’ sounds, such as rain, they serve to heighten the sonic image. The natural syntactic patterns of rain make source-bonding of the sound very clear, and so even some forms of more extreme processing would preserve the image to some extent. The resonating of the raindrops, however, does allow a sort of hyper-real exploration of their natural morphology. The pitched sensation of their contact with a surface becomes expanded upon and aestheticised. Because our everyday experience with the sound of rain is with its interaction and subsequent modulation upon impact with various surfaces, we are used to its character being ‘naturally’ processed and its transformation into more pitched sounds is a common experience heard when it interacts with metallic or other resonant objects. And so the transformation never breaks the natural image, but heightens it.
When this is applied to a noisier sound, like the airplanes, the processing scarcely breaks the image, but, because it has a denser continuous spectrum, the processing becomes apparently more extreme. Some of the processing, like flanging, mirrors natural phenomena associated with planes, and so the natural image is kept; however, the types of processing chosen interact with noisy spectra in such a way to heighten the presence of their noise content. Noisier sounds are easier to background and cancel out when listening, but when their spectrum is constantly shifting as it is resonated, the breadth of spectrum is brought to attention. And so, the type of processing and the way it is applied serves to heighten the noise-tone continuum, and therefore could be seen as heightening the potential ecological programme of the piece.
5. Spectromorphology and soundscape theory as paradigms
Smalley's comment mentioned earlier that ‘Empty Vessels… is strongly source-bonded, but even there I draw attention to the spectromorphological qualities of the sound world’ (Smalley Reference Smalley2009: 15) becomes relevant for consideration now that we have discovered a close relationship between the spectromorphology of the piece and the sound world's ecological properties. While Smalley's view of the piece is clearly that a soundscape was adapted to fit into a spectromorphological context, the reverse view could be taken – that the spectromorphology of the piece is itself a kind of soundscape, which is a poeticised extrapolation from the original, naturally occurring soundscape. This sort of chicken–egg problem occurs because the two ideas (spectromorphology and soundscape theory) are in a sense paradigms which serve to envelope the same material (the entire sound world) through different lenses.
In one sense, soundscape music is contained ‘within’ spectromorphology, which, contrasting itself against traditional instrumental music, ‘[embraces] the total framework of pitch and time’ (Smalley Reference Smalley1986: 61). That sounds rather absolute, insinuating that all sonic properties are accounted for by spectromorphology. So, if that is the case, soundscape music (like all sound) can be described by (and contained within) spectromorphology. On the other hand, a case could be made which suggests that a soundscape paradigm is broader than, and therefore encompasses, spectromorphological aspects of sound – instead of the other way around. As Smalley concedes, while spectromorphology does encompass the total framework of spectrum and time, it does little to explain the referential aspects of sound (Smalley Reference Smalley1997: 109). Truax refers to these two aspects of sound, formal and referential, as ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ complexity, respectively (Truax Reference Truax1994). This is not to suggest that spectromorphology is ‘missing’ this element; it simply focuses on different parameters. Much of Smalley's other writing does account for the referential capacities of sound (Camilleri and Smalley Reference Camilleri and Smalley1998; Smalley Reference Smalley2007) and, as we have already seen in Empty Vessels, his music is quite sensitive to it. However, because spectromorphology seems to be focused more clearly on the formal properties of sound, it may not be sufficient to discuss the more imagistic qualities of Smalley's work. Or, put in other terms:
In spectromorphological theory we still seem to have far more sophisticated theoretical and analytical concepts for dealing with what Smalley calls the interactive… than we do for the indicative. (Atkinson Reference Atkinson2007: 120)
In order to expand on this concern, it can be useful to consider his music within the context of a soundscape.
A piece of acousmatic music is a soundscape unto itself and can be analysed in terms of soundscape theory (Truax Reference Truax2008). It can be looked at it terms of its spectra: low-fi or hi-fi; movement between ‘balanced’ and ‘unbalanced’ soundscapes. The idea of the sound-object which has carried through into spectromorphology can function as a keynote sound in the soundscape of a piece of acousmatic music (the eponymous chimes in Wind Chimes, for instance). Individual sound-events may operate functionally to indicate new sections and draw relationships between other sounds, acting as signals carrying information. Individual pieces may contain discrete sounds similar to soundmarks which identify them as unique and become indexical of that piece. Of course, this type of analysis becomes much more interesting and nuanced when there is some mimetic capacity to the sounds being analysed. We can speak more meaningfully of signals if they contain some mimetic properties to information-bearing sounds to which the listener may have a referent, rather than one which exists only in the vacuum of the sound-world of a given piece.
In this manner, much of Smalley's music benefits from both ‘paradigms’ of analysis. As we have already seen in the case of tone and noise, in some pieces in particular a spectromorphological interpretation and a soundscape interpretation can benefit one another, and their characteristics can work rather symbiotically toward the same or similar goals.
5.1. Acousmatic music as soundscape – Valley Flow
The notion of reading an acousmatic work as a soundscape is particularly fruitful in some of Smalley's work. Valley Flow exemplifies this category. Acousmatic music's concern for precision in spectrum mirrors the soundscape notion of acoustic design (Truax Reference Truax2001: 245). Indeed, what is composition if not acoustic design? The careful movement between different spectral bands could be illustrated as concern for creating a ‘balanced’ soundscape, where information is not masked by bands overlapping, as in a lo-fi or unbalanced soundscape. Looking at a well-composed acousmatic piece is like looking at a well-preserved soundscape, where its constituent sounds occupy distinct spectral ‘niches’ (Truax Reference Truax2001: 81). These niches, which are found in all naturally occurring soundscapes, allow for the lucid presentation of information, and preserve the information content of keynote sounds and signals.
Valley Flow is a good example of this, particularly because its programme suggests an imagined landscape. The airy resonant drone sounds which open the piece establish the sound environment, creating the image of the ‘valley’ – its vast hollow expanses of landscape; the flow of air as directed by mountains. As they develop, an almost melodic aspect to their frequencies occur. Most significantly, its centring around one pitch establishes a structural formal element, to which the piece returns continuously after departures into expanded spectral territory. This pitch first appears at 2′36″; and again more clearly at 2′52″. A significant exposition of detailed textures makes the return at 6′31″ satisfying, and already it seems in many ways to mirror the function of a tonic pitch in functional harmony. However, because of the programme of the piece, I am tempted to think of it less as a ‘tonic’ for the harmony of the piece and interpret it functionally, but rather as a keynote sound of the soundscape in the piece – the resonant frequency of the imagined valley itself.
Keeping with the notion of the sound as keynote is its continued presence in the piece. It provides a distinct sound environment or ‘bed’ of sound on top of which more detailed activity can occur. The precise pitch does change and return, but it occupies a specific spectral region and doesn't vary significantly from that band. The band is well separated from most of the other sounds in the piece, which skirt around it, preserving each sound's character with clarity.
The discrete, more active sounds which occur on top of the keynote are interesting in their sound identities. The sounds themselves are heavily processed with granular activity, and so their original sound-sources are unclear. However, through the processing they acquire characteristics of natural sounds that are familiar. Smalley describes in his programme note:
The listener, gazing through the stereo window, can adopt changing vantage points; at one moment looking out to the distant horizon, at another looking down from a height, at another dwarfed by the bulk of land masses, and at yet another swamped by the magnified details of organic activity. Landscape qualities are pervasive: water, fire and wood; the gritty, granular fracturing of stoney noise-textures; and the wintery, glacial thinness of sustained lines. The force and volatility of nature are reflected in abrupt changes and turbulent textures. (Smalley Reference Smalley1992)
Smalley's own imagistic interpretations of the somewhat abstract sounds in the piece suggest importance in their potential imagined sound-identities. Whether these specific identities are transferable to listener interpretation may be something which requires research. However, I would be inclined to assume that they are in some way due to the care in which they are constructed, and in the types of processing used, which are closely related to existing ecological models to which the ear is accustomed.
6. Ecological modelling as soundscape design in Smalley
The use of the textures in Valley Flow to simulate water, wood and fire images is reflexive of their granular processing. While this doesn't represent classical physical modelling, the nature of the processing relates closely to the physical mechanisms of these natural processes. For instance, granulation can ‘[operate] like the model of running water; various granular streams (note the terminology in relation to ecological modelling) consist of variable amounts of grains, or in this case drops’ (Basanta Reference Basanta2010: 128). Because our ear is accustomed to the patterns of these familiar sounds, when abstract sounds adopt their patterns, an association is made even if their precise character is not the same, a process which Basanta refers to as ‘syntax as sign’ (2010). With a name and programme note along to help, the imagistic potential becomes great.
This basing of abstract sounds into ecological patterns and shapes is a key feature of much of Smalley's output. Beyond Valley Flow, this is a feature of Vortex, which exhibits spatial motion in patterns similar to the natural phenomenon of its title. More significantly, this forms the basis for much of the form of Tides, which, according to Smalley, features sonic images ‘based on analogies between water and sound – motion, textures, images of turbulence, strength and tranquility, the play of colors and light, and the intimacy and immensity of space’ (Smalley Reference Smalley2000). The notion of ecological model as formal shape becomes clear as he describes the piece further. ‘The pool idea suggests textural play, while the idea of ‘currents’ stresses the more linear motion that propels the movement forward’ (2000). And so it is quite clear that Smalley is thinking directly about how ecological processes can be applied to spectromorphological shapes. Though much of the actual sound material in Tides is quite abstract, I imagine any listener would be hard pressed not to be confronted with the clarity of image and sound-identity presented in the work.
Another instance of ecological models providing formal inspiration is more metaphorical, and this is found in Pentes.
The title Pentes (both French and Latin, meaning slopes, inclines, ascents) was suggested by the outlines of the broad stretches of the piece, which evoke the spaciousness of landscape. (Smalley Reference Smalley2000)
The imagined landscape of Pentes is, in Smalley's own words, ‘only scenic by analogy and metaphor – its spectral energies and motions’ (2000) While it is clear that Smalley is thinking again here of ecological models as the basis for his spectromorphological shapes, it is not clear that this connection is preserved upon listening as it is more clearly in Valley Flow and Tides. However, the one preserved sound identity in Pentes, the Northumbrian pipes, opens the door to a whole world of semantic interpretation.
7. Sound-identity transformation in Smalley – Pentes
Truax outlines a compositional tool in soundscape music wherein sounds abstracted from their source through processing return to their original unprocessed state as a means for constructing formal narrative in soundscape music (Truax Reference Truax2002). The example he gives, coincidentally, is Smalley's Pentes, whose abstracted textures and gestures give way to the emergence of their unprocessed source material – the Northumbrian pipes. This, serving as the climactic point in the piece, forms a sort of narrative discourse between abstracted and mimetic sound, establishing a formal trajectory for the piece. As the abstracted sounds from the beginning decrease in energy, they settle into a rich drone which follows a very elongated, almost unnoticeable harmonic progression. This gradual movement from abstracted formal structures into elements which are themselves endemic of the source material of the Northumbrian pipes (drones, harmonic progressions) establishes a teleological framework for the piece – from abstracted to concrete, and then a return to the abstracted in the ‘coda’ section. The movement between discourses has a profound effect once the piece returns to the abstract material. The pipes’ arrival is shocking and unexpected, but carefully prepared so that it fits within the logic of the piece. When the original material returns it is coloured by the recent image of the pipes, and so the gestures become instilled with new meaning and the abstract re-appropriation of sound identity is able to engage in a kind of playful dialogue with the mimetic sound identity. Elaborate transformations of image become possible, and the old sounds are instilled with new meaning potentials.
There is still more at work in the pipes’ inclusion, beyond simple discourse between abstract and mimetic sound. That the pipes were chosen instead of some other instrument seems to be a bearer of meaning in the work. Few other instruments can speak so lucidly of geo-cultural space than do pipes. Even if divorced from their original context, they will always draw imagery of their cultural origins. And so, if we are to use the ecological model for the form of Pentes – metaphorical as it may be – for the basis of its consideration as a type of soundscape into itself, then the pipes function clearly as a soundmark within this soundscape. Not just as a soundmark within the logic of the piece, though that function is clear enough. Anyone familiar with the piece need only hear a snippet from that section to be instantly reminded of the piece, often with a certain nostalgia given its warm status as a classic within the genre. Its function as a soundmark, however, extends beyond that into the world outside of the music, as it draws clear reference to its cultural home. And so the slopes of Pentes are perhaps not just spectral shapes, nor are they archetypical slopes as divorced from space and time, but are the slopes and hills of north England and Scotland, to which the pipes are home. This is perhaps a more concrete way in which the abstract sounds can be seen as becoming coloured as they are repeated after the climactic pipes section. A cultural narrative can be seen as being formed through the relationship between mimetic and abstract sounds. The narrative aspect of this relationship, however, only goes so far – one would not imagine that the explosive gestures in the abstract sections of Pentes, for instance, are meant to conjure bomb raids over the Scottish heaths!
Pentes gives us an example of mimetic-to-abstract transformation in sound identity, but a smaller portion of Smalley's works have a focus on transformation between different mutually referential sound identities, or sound-image transformation (Wishart Reference Wishart1996). In these cases, mimetic images do not merely inhabit the sound world of the pieces, but begin to perform more complex poetic semantic discourses. In these cases a kind of semantic narrative does begin to take place. In Empty Vessels, for example, there is a clear sound-image transformation between rain-image and swarm-image at 5′20″. Processing is gradually applied to sounds of rain until it becomes noisier and less distinct, and then, as the processing decays, the image has changed to one of a swarm of insects. This is not a literal semantic narrative, but a poetic analogy between the syntactic patterns of two natural phenomena. Similar transformations are common in Valley Flow, as abstracted water sounds transform into abstracted wood sounds or fire sounds. For instance, a water-image transformation into wood-image can be heard at 14′07″. Once again, these transformations don't appear to have any literal narrative, but form the basis of Smalley's poetic semantic language, which in these pieces is as rich as his spectromorphological language.
8. Conclusion
An examination of some of Smalley's works has shown trends toward an integration of real-world elements into abstract sound worlds and syntaxes. Additionally, he has a strong body of work wherein abstract sounds are shaped according to real-world ecological syntaxes. Empty Vessels perhaps remains unique in that it consists of mimetic sounds arranged in a mimetic syntax; each of Smalley's other works discussed either remain largely abstract in syntax when appropriating mimetic sounds, or else appropriate abstract sounds into an ecological syntax. There exist still many others without strong connections to real-world sound identities, but, given the breadth and depth of his work which does deal with mimetic structures, the richness of Smalley's understanding of the indicative and ecological qualities of sound is clear. Smalley represents a mature acousmatic aesthetic which does not turn a blind eye to this important aspect of sound.
As paradigms of sound, spectromorphology and soundscape theory are now each several decades old. Many emerging composers trained in the acousmatic tradition have begun to seek ecological and real-world sounds to expand the palette of their aesthetic. Many established composers in this genre have also increasingly discovered the semantic and poetic potentials of mimetic sound. Likewise, composers emerging from the ecological traditions of soundscape theory are looking toward spectromorphological concerns to enhance and expand the formal depth and breadth of their sound-world, engaging with acousmatic methods in a meaningful exchange with real-world imagery. As time progresses, any bifurcation in these aesthetics becomes increasingly blurred, and Smalley is an exemplary figure who has paved the way for much of that artful blurring.
