1. Ecological psychology: An introduction
Ecological psychology is a term for a school of psychology based on the writings of James J. Gibson, primarily The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Gibson Reference Gibson1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Gibson Reference Gibson1979).Footnote 1 The essence of Gibson's philosophy is that ‘perception is seen as a continuous and mutual relationship between organism and environment’ (Windsor Reference Windsor1995). Organisms did not suddenly come into existence from nothingness, nor did they evolve in a vacuum; they evolved in an environment, and thus the characteristics of that environment heavily determined the evolution of the senses, and of perception. Thus, neither a given sense nor perception itself can usefully be considered in isolation; not only must the organism's various functionings be taken together, but, more importantly, the organism must be considered simultaneously with its environment. In this regard, the organism and the environment are taken together, as a dynamic system, in which the environment affects and influences the organism, and the organism affects and influences the environment.
A key concept of Gibson's theory is the idea of ‘affordance’, which is interpreted in subtly different ways by different theorists. Gibson wrote: ‘I have coined this word as a substitute for values, a term which carries an old burden of philosophical meaning. I mean simply what things furnish, for good or ill’ (Gibson Reference Gibson1966: 185). Windsor explains affordance thus: ‘Objects and events are related to a perceiving organism by structured information, and they “afford” certain possibilities for action relative to an organism. For example, a cup affords drinking, the ground, walking’ (Windsor Reference Windsor1995). And finally, from Sanders: ‘affordances are opportunities for action in the environment of an organism, the opportunities in question include everything the organism can do’ (Sanders Reference Sanders1997: 108).
This, then, is the central vision of Gibson's ecological psychology: an organism exists in a dynamic relationship with its environment, and this dynamic relationship grants a range of possibilities for action, which are termed ‘affordances’. This can be further extended by considering the effective means of communication between organism and environment: stimuli (or information). We can then recast our dynamic system as being between three active agents: organism, environment, and stimulus information.Footnote 2
2. Ecological psychology and electroacoustic music
There is much to recommend ecological psychology as a relevant tool in considering the musical experience, and the electroacoustic experience in particular. As Clarke points out, theoretical approaches have tended to be dominated by linguistic or semiotic perspectives (Clarke Reference Clarke2005: 4); while these can be very valuable, there is much about the listening experience that is ignored or left out in such approaches. Ecological psychology can thus be proposed, not so much as a replacement for these other perspectives, but rather as an important counterbalance.
Critically, where other systems tend to prioritise either the work as a self-contained and self-sufficient unit of study or the compositional act, the listener's perspective is, in contrast, absolutely central in an approach rooted in ecological psychology. One finds, especially with regards to electroacoustic music, that much of the theoretical writing comes from the composers themselves, with a certain poietic bias as a consequence. A certain amount of such composer-driven theory makes the mistake of assuming the listener to be simply the mirror image of the composer, and the listening experience to be simply the composing process reversed: the listener is imagined to be climbing backwards down the scaffolding erected by the composer, focused solely on discerning the movements of the composer's hand and thought, or on those same qualities and parameters with which the composer was preoccupied in creating the work. On the contrary, the listener's is an entirely distinct process, through which it is quite possible to arrive at an entirely different destination from the composer's authorial intent. While it is possible to listen specifically with the goal of unravelling the riddle of intention, this is a very specific mode of analysis, significantly removed from most modes of reception. Thus, there is much to be potentially gained from ecological psychology's primary emphasis on the role and experience of the listener.Footnote 3
A further important feature of the application of ecological psychology to electroacoustic music is the inclusion of the listening context and environment. A listener is not granted direct experience of a work; rather, the work is accessed through listening contexts which potentially have a major impact on how the work is understood and received. Such contexts not only significantly determine the listener's potential attitude to the work, they form a prism through which the work is received and interpreted by the listener. While a composer may be primarily concerned with communicating the structural or material content of the work, the listening context is to an important degree the means through which these are communicated. As a result, although such contexts might be considered somewhat banal, it might be valuable to more carefully consider these aspects and their ramifications. While they do not, of course, represent the full extent of the listener's engagement with the music, it is a critical stage, and one which is too rarely given serious consideration.
Our exploration of ecological psychology and electroacoustic music will, to a significant degree, be focused on these environmental and contextual qualities of the listening experience. More specifically, we will be primarily focusing on the concert context – taken here to mean the ‘traditional’ concert situation for contemporary music, as opposed to more extended or ‘alternative’, often more informal, concert contexts – such as ‘warehouse’ performances, installations, site-specific works or public interventions – or more private listening contexts.
2.1. The ecological triad
The organism/environment/stimulus triad, described above, is easily translated into the electroacoustic context – or a musical context generally – as listener/surroundings/music. A dynamic relationship is established in which all three participants are considered active agents: the listener, the music, and the listening environment – in our case, the concert context. The listener is no longer considered a passive receptor; a mutual relationship is established between the listener and the work, and the listening experience is fully contextualised and situated in the total experience of the listener.
A distinction in the interpretation of the term ‘environment’ in the triad should perhaps be stressed. In our consideration, this is considered primarily to be the listener's immediate, physical surroundings – the concert hall, the performers – as opposed to the ‘virtual’ environment of the work or of the sound image. However, the roles and relationships of many environmental elements and agents – audience members, theatre staff, chairs and other objects and physical presences in the room or hall, sounds coming from outside the hall, and so on – are unlikely to play a significant role for the informed listener, except perhaps under extreme or unusual circumstances, or if the listener becomes particularly bored or weary of the stimuli, structure and relationships offered by a particular piece. This is not due to any inherent qualities or characteristics of these aspects of the environment, but rather the result of cultural understanding and social codes: such aspects are relatively invariant, and are only scanned for meaning at points in the concert experience in which social codes reassert themselves as important for the successful determination of affordances.Footnote 4
It should also be kept in mind that the ‘organism’ we are considering is the listener; we will not here consider the perspectives of other potentially relevant ‘organisms’, such as the performer or composer.
It is interesting to note that soundscape studies – and, by extension, soundscape composition – centre on a very similar triad, drawn from communicational models, between listener, sound and environment (Truax Reference Truax2001: 12). Indeed, the terms and relations of these two triads are exactly the same. Thus, in many ways, the perspective of ecological psychology has long had a firm foothold within electroacoustic practice in the form of soundscape composition.
2.2. The listener
The role of our listener also bears further introduction. We will attempt to determine some of the priorities and processes through which the listener commonly engages with the other terms of the triad. This very quickly leads to questions regarding the identity of our listening subject, and on what authority our assumptions might be based. In this regard we will refer to Clarke's consideration of ‘subject-position’:Footnote 5 while one cannot account for the experience of every listener, and one cannot guarantee that a given generalisation will necessarily hold true for a given listener or instance of listening, it remains possible to draw upon shared experience and upon observable characteristics which are inherent to each of our triad's three terms – listener, work, and concert environment – to determine a generalised set of behaviours and relationships. We will justify the analysis that follows, therefore, as well as the nature of our generalised ‘listener’, with these principles.
2.3. Scanning and hunting
Gibson describes a process by which an organism ‘scans’ the environment for information; if this information is missing or insufficient, the organism ‘hunts’ for the missing information, in order to understand the structure of the environment.Footnote 6 Using this as our starting point, we can begin our attempt to develop a convincing model of the listener's relationship with various forms of electroacoustic music by locating those elements of each system on which the listener is most likely to focus in the quest for understanding.
There are several key components to the listener's scanning process. These include: scanning for the primary agents of the system, identification of the roles of individual agents, and relationships between agents. Each of these can be broken down in various ways, depending on the context in question. For example, the quest for agents will tend to begin with human agents, followed by remaining visible or manifest agents and, finally, any remaining audible but invisible agents; the search for relationships begins with causal relationships between agents, before moving on to structural relationships, and eventually to further, more embedded relationships.
Generally speaking, the quest for structural understanding only extends to the ‘content’ of the work after an initial stage of scanning for agency and relationships.Footnote 7 If this initial process is unsuccessful – if the agents and relationships are unclear or cannot be determined by the listener – there is the risk that the listener will either remain at this stage, continually ‘hunting’ for the missing information, or remain distracted by this process while simultaneously moving on to succeeding stages of structural scanning. It might be suggested that greater consideration and control of this process might be of benefit to both composer and performer. For example, this process is sometimes playfully mined to ‘tease’ the listener, by deliberately changing, exchanging, or obscuring these agents and relationships. On the other hand, if the meaning which the composer or performer hopes to communicate to a listener lies primarily within the structural or material content of the work itself, then this early stage of scanning for agency and relationships might best be made as transparent as possible, lest one risk hindering the listener's progression to further stages of structural scanning, or blocking it altogether.Footnote 8
The listener is then expected to begin scanning the environment for structural information. This scanning is likely to be situated differently in different electroacoustic situations; the ramifications of these differences lead to remarkably different listening experiences for different electroacoustic paradigms. We will consider several of these individually, including mixed works (instrument/s and tape, instrument/s and electronics, instrument/s and live treatments, etc.), live electronic works, and several genres of tape music.
3. Electroacoustic concert paradigms
3.1. Mixed works
The first such paradigm to consider is the ‘mixed work’ scenario – in other words, a performance which combines live acoustic performers with electronic elements, be these live or fixed. In this instance, the scanning of the environment for structural information is likely to begin with an identification of the active agents – in this case, one or several instrumental performers, and one or several electronic elements. Here we are likely to see some differences in the path followed by the scanning listener, dependent upon the number and nature of electronic elements. Firstly, are there visible, live, human agents enacting these electronic elements? If so – in other words, if all active elements of the work are represented by a human agent who is visible to the listener – then the scanning for information is likely to settle on the observation of these agents, in an attempt to use this information to identify the agents responsible for the identifiable structural elements of the aural stimulus – that is, the piece. If the listener is unable to determine this by scanning, they will begin to ‘hunt’.
Once these environmental agents are identified, and each linked with an associated stimulus (to the extent possible), the listener is likely to begin to scan for clues to the relationships between these agents.
3.2. Instrument(s) and electronics
Electroacoustic performance practice now offers a wealth of possible scenarios. In an all-acoustic musical performance, the listener's quest would likely be significantly easier: for many listeners, the majority of instruments are a known quantity, whose behaviour and resulting stimulus can likely be accurately predicted. Furthermore, the visual link between the performer's sound-producing actions and the resulting aural stimulus is usually quite clear. With electronic performers, these are often not the case. There is a far broader range of possible sound production and behaviour than with traditional acoustic instruments; there is often very little in the way of physical performance cues to link a performer's actions with the sonic output (the ultimate example of this being, perhaps, the use of the laptop for sound productionFootnote 9); and what little visual information there might be is often invisible to the listener (again, particularly so in the case of the laptop). All of this makes it very difficult to predict the aural result of a given electronic performer's activity, and potentially equally difficult to identify which of several or many sonic stimuli is being caused by that performer. This becomes exponentially more difficult if there is more than one electronic performer.
One of the possibilities offered in the mixed-work electroacoustic context is the live treatment of one or several of the acoustic performers. This can further complicate attempts to identify the stimulus associated with a given agent – in this case, that not only of the electronic performer, but also of the acoustic performer(s), whose output may now be regularly confused with the treated signals being produced by the electronic performer(s).
It is possible, however, that no present human performers are associated with the electronic aspects of a given performance. The electronic elements may be automated; they may be being triggered by the acoustic performer(s); score-following or similar techniques may be being employed; and so forth. In this case, the absence of a physical, human agent shifts the weight given to other aspects of the scanning process. The listener will first identify any active, manifest agents, and identify their associated stimuli. After this, those stimuli without a visible source or presence are identified, and the quest begins once again for relationships. In this case, of central importance will be the attempt to discern relationships – be they causal or otherwise – between the visible, present agents and the disembodied electronic elements of the structured environment. Those agents who are physically present will take precedence in this process, as the relationships between such agents and the listener will have significantly greater importance for the listener, while consideration of the disembodied elements will tend to focus on the search for relationships between these and the visible, manifest agents. There is thus a general tendency, conscious or not, to attempt to correlate all sound to the manifest agent(s), at any of a number of levels.
3.3. Instrument(s) and tape
A slight extension of this scenario is that of acoustic instrumental performer(s) and tape, though this is heavily dependent on the nature and quality of the tape part. In many instances such a scenario will be indistinguishable from that just described, in which electronic parts were ‘live’ but without active human agents. However, in some instances the listener may quickly establish the ‘fixed’ (i.e. not live) quality of the electronic part. For the informed listener, this will likely cut short the search for causal relationships between active visible agents and electronic elements, in which case the scan for information will likely move onwards, from causal relationships to structural relationships, that much more quickly.
In all of the above instances, the scanning process described may or may not be successful, and such success may come more quickly or more slowly. If such actors and relationships prove sufficiently difficult for the listener to identify and explore, the listener might not move past this stage of information-seeking, and might continue this level of scanning until the end of the piece. On the other hand, if the listener is successful in identifying the relevant agents and elements and in establishing the relationships between them, the scan for information and understanding will likely move on to seek further structure elsewhere. Where exactly this now takes place is heavily dependent on the qualities and characteristics of the work in question. Possibilities include the search for structural relationships between different materials employed in the piece, between different streams or agents of the piece, or between different spaces, both virtual and actual. The possibilities are too vast to discuss exhaustively here,Footnote 10 although some will be further considered below.
3.4. Live electronic music
The next electroacoustic paradigm to consider is live electronic performance; we will limit ourselves to the scenario in which only electronic performers – no acoustic instrumentalists – are involved, as combinations of the two have already been discussed above. Here, there is a range of possible scanning approaches, which depend significantly on the relative ease or difficulty with which individual agency can be determined by the listener. In situations in which one, several or all of the electronic performers are closely and identifiably related to the sounding product of their actions, this scenario will vary only slightly from those already discussed above. Often, however, none will be given precedence in the scanning process, as all are likely to be more or less equally related to their sounding output. In many instances of live electronic performance it becomes very difficult to distinguish the sounding parts of the various performers, or to identify the output of a particular individual agent, for the reasons listed above, and further exacerbated by the fairly common practice of running the output of any and all electronic performers out from the same loudspeakers. In such cases, the listener's scanning is likely to proceed through the stages mentioned above, but to move relatively quickly from one to the next as such scanning attempts prove unfruitful.Footnote 11
3.5. Tape music
The final electroacoustic concert paradigm to consider is tape music. This is clearly a significantly different scenario from those discussed above, all of which included, entirely or in part, human performers. Of course, the concert presentation of tape music may very well involve a diffusion performer; if this is the case, we have a particularly extended instance of the live electronic performance scenario, albeit somewhat simplified, as there will generally be only one performer (and thus no attempt to distinguish the actions and relationships of a number of agents), and also due to the fact that the performer's impact on the sounding result is limited to a restricted number of parameters, primarily spatial. Again, the scanning process is likely to rest heavily on this aspect of the system, as this human presence is the sole present, visible, active agent.
In tape music concert situations without any identifiable human performing agent, however, this part of the scanning process is entirely absent. Where previous examples dealt first and foremost with questions of agency and of relationships between active agents, between active and passive agents, and between such agents and the listener, all of these scanning processes are entirely absent in the tape music scenario. As a result, scanning for structure and information begins directly with a questioning of the sounding environment.
4. The electroacoustic work
4.1. Structural listening
Once the listener has resolved issues of agency and relationships in their immediate environment, the search for understanding turns to a questioning of the sounding structures, and again, a quest for relationships. Here, however, this process will vary wildly depending on the nature, qualities and characteristics of the work in question.
Consider, for example, a work such such as James Dashow's Sequence Symbols (Dashow Reference Dashow1987), which employs an essentially formalist, mathematically determined pitch structure (Dashow Reference Dashow2002). The informed listener might focus their scan for meaning on such elements of pitch structure,Footnote 12 or, should these prove impenetrable, focus instead on surface textures (which might then be scanned for relationships with the supporting pitch structures). While the uninformed listener might also quickly determine the pitch organisation to be central to the unfolding structure, and therefore also attempt to scan this organisation for meaning, they might instead, unaware of such structures, scan elsewhere for supposed or expected meaning. Such meaning might not be found, or may contradict or conflict with the composer's poietic intentions; from an ecological psychology perspective, however, the musical information contained in the work exists only as part of an environment experienced and scanned by the listener, and as such, the composer's intentions are of limited intrinsic value, with vastly greater emphasis placed on the listener's esthesic process.
4.2. Cinéma pour l'oreille
At the other end of the spectrum (and perhaps a likelier candidate for a consideration of the principles of ecological psychology), Cinéma pour l'oreille Footnote 13 presents a substantially different paradigm – as a body of work, as a listening experience, and as an applied example of a Gibsonian environment. The genre deploys many techniques – such as illusion, metaphor, varieties of materials, and shifting relationships between all of these – which are handled well in a framework based on ecological psychology. Many features of Gibson's reasoning are immediately attractive and readily applicable to Cinéma pour l'oreille and the acousmatic genre in general. These include: a firm focus on the perceiver/listener; the emphasis on sound as distinct from source; the emphasis on stimulus as distinct from information; an openness to the multi-modality of our sensual experience; and a grounding of the perceiving subject in an environment, be it immediate or remembered. As ecological psychology focuses on the listener's experience of (and interaction with) their environment, it proves to be a very valuable tool indeed when considering a genre which deliberately and provocatively plays with and distorts the listener's sense of that environment.Footnote 14
4.2.1. Acousmatic illusion
Some of the primary tools of Cinéma pour l'oreille are directly addressed by Gibson. Symbol, sign and metaphor are briefly discussed and grouped together by Gibson as ‘virtual objects’ (Gibson Reference Gibson1966); further, acousmatic music prides itself on locating the listener within the sound-world of the work, much as Gibson describes visual illusion as ‘put(ting) the viewer into the scene’ (Gibson Reference Gibson1966: 282, emphasis mine). Gibson, however, draws a distinction here between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ perception: the perception of a photograph (or loudspeaker) is direct perception, while the perception of the content of the photograph (or of what's played over the loudspeaker) is then indirect perception.
But what of Gibson's ‘indirect perception’ when the perceiving organism is, in fact, unaware of the duplicity?Footnote 15 Cinéma pour l'oreille – both historically and, increasingly, with the improvement of sound technology and sound quality – regularly employs illusion both as an effect and as a compositional technique; in fact, it can be argued that the genre is predicated upon the capacity for illusion. To a significant extent, this is made possible by some of the detailed characteristics of our hearing processes and mechanisms. It could be argued that cinema also deploys the power of illusion, but surely to a significantly lesser extent: it is extremely unlikely that a viewer – even a viewer who does not expect to suddenly be faced with an image on a screen – will be fooled into believing in the corporeal existence of what they see. On the other hand, it is entirely possible to fool the ear into believing in the nearby presence of the source of a sound heard over a loudspeaker; indeed, the intermingling of real, local sounds with the sounds of an acousmatic work being played over loudspeakers, such that the two are sometimes impossible to distinguish, is a regular occurrence.Footnote 16 Gibson, however, largely denies this possibility, although he recognises its potential power: ‘They are virtual instead of real events, to be sure, and no one is ever wholly deceived, as when having a hallucination, but the feeling of being present in the world behind the magic window is very strong’ (Gibson Reference Gibson1979: 301). It could be argued that what Gibson is here assuming to be a basic perceptual/psychological fact is in fact simply a question of technological means. Some forms of effective illusion are currently possible; we can safely assume that more will be soon. As an example, Gibson – focusing primarily on visual perception – describes the ways in which any movement of the viewer relative to an illusion of perspective breaks the illusion (Gibson Reference Gibson1966: 283), in much the same way that movement of the listener within the stereo field tends to break the illusion of the stereo image; the introduction of ambisonic arrays, however, reduces or eliminates such aural shifts in perspective.
4.2.2. Mediated perception
Closely linked to this – as well as to Gibson's concept of direct vs. indirect perception – is another very acousmatic concept, that of ‘mediated perception’.
The process by which an individual becomes aware of what exists and what goes on around him is perception. The process by which a human individual is made aware of things outside his immediate environment is one stage higher. It is mediated perception. It involves the action of another person besides the perceiver’. (Gibson Reference Gibson1966: 234)
For example, someone has taken a photograph, and I have seen the photograph, having never seen the subject of the photo in person; this is mediated perception. It could be argued, however, that this is an oversimplification, especially in aural terms, and in light of above comments on illusion. Let's say I clap my hands. You hear it. I am part of your environment; my handclap was part of your environmental stimuli. Now, let's say I record a handclap and play it back, in as faithful a manner as possible, such that, for all intents and purposes, it arrives to your ears in the same manner as an actual handclap. What is the difference here? In one, I have chosen to clap my hands; in the other, I have chosen to present the illusionFootnote 17 of the clapping of hands. Both sounds reach you as environmental stimuli. Is there a difference? If the illusion is complete: no. What if you are aware of the illusion? How much does my agency, or rather the intervention of the recording, change anything? Gibson suggests that the effect is somehow reduced; it is mediated; it is secondhand. However, none of the original is necessarily lost; and, in fact, added layers of meaning are possible. My clapping my hands is potentially a random act; the playback of a recorded handclap suggests a greater intervention of will, and thereby potentially greater emphasis.
It is also worth considering Gibson's notion of surrogates in this regard: ‘It is a substitute or surrogate, and thus provides for a kind of perception that is mediated instead of direct, a perception at second hand’ (Gibson Reference Gibson1966: 225). Thus, the perception of recorded sound is, for Gibson, automatically a lesser experience. Let us consider the ramifications for a moment. Is the playback of a recording of breaking glass automatically a surrogate? The reflexive response says that it is. But what if it is played back in another room, and the hearer is unaware of the artifice? Or, could it be argued (if we leave any deterioration of sound quality and detail due to the recording and playback processes out of the picture) that the playback of the recorded sound simply constitutes a delay between the event that caused the sound and the sound reaching the hearer's ear? While this might at first seem far-fetched, consider, for example, an echo. A sound is made. It leaves the source, travels across a valley, strikes a mountain opposite, and returns, eventually to reach your ears. Is this the original sound? Or is it the sound via an intermediary – the mountain opposite? The only difference here is that, when recorded, the sound is stored; its voyage through the air is temporarily halted and transferred to another medium. While this at first seems a relevant distinction, this too bears reconsideration; for example, sound heard when underwater from a source in the air or onshore has also been transferred to another medium. Apparently, then, it is the storage that is the issue. Is this really, a priori, a complete shift in experience? Acousmatic sound can indeed be a surrogate, as Gibson suggests; but its capacity to trigger direct experience is a critical distinction, one which forces a reconsideration of some of Gibson's theory in this regard.
4.2.3. The acousmatic concert experience
But let us return to the point at hand. The world of Cinéma pour l'oreille offers a remarkably rich and diverse range of possibility for the perceiving organism of Gibson's triad. Scanning for meaning can operate at a sufficient number of levels that it becomes difficult to predict the manner in which a listener will engage with the environment offered by a given work. Possible factors to consider include the listening/playback situation and apparatus: Is illusion possible? Is immersion possible? Is there a discrepancy between the spaces on the tape and the listener's actual listening space? Is this discrepancy small or great? To what degree are any real-world sounds presented ‘naturally’ in the work, and to what degree are they treated? How do the materials of the work interact? How do they relate to one another? The list is, effectively, endless – or, at least, long enough to prevent us from adequately discussing the possibilities here.Footnote 18
5. Some potential constraints
Thus, we find that the listener's processes and responses when faced with different forms of electroacoustic music – mixed works, live electronic performance, tape pieces, diffusion, acousmatic works, and so forth – are remarkably diverse and varied. While such genres are commonly considered close relatives within the electroacoustic family, an ecological consideration of the listener's relationships with these genres reveals a surprising degree of difference in how these are actually experienced.
The application of ecological psychology to electroacoustic listening is not, however, without its drawbacks. While it is useful in considering many aspects, there are others for which ecological psychology is a less comfortable fit.
First of all, it might be proposed that ecological psychology is more readily applied to immediate, local sound events; larger-scale questions of development and form are less comfortably handled within an ecological psychology framework. It is significant that Clarke, in perhaps the most important existing application of the principles of ecological psychology to music, explicitly focuses solely on the act of perception – ‘the awareness of meaning in music while listening to it’ (emphasis mine), which he contrasts with ‘musical meaning that arises out of thinking about music, or reflecting on music, when not directly engaged with music’ (Clarke Reference Clarke2005: 5). It could be argued that formal questions, to a certain extent, lie outside the temporal framework of a piece; they are considered post facto, from outside the environment, outside the dynamic triad. Ecological psychology focuses primarily on the flow of the ‘now’, on the constantly evolving relationships between the listener, the environment and the flow of stimuli. While ecological psychology does not explicitly demand that experience and understanding be limited to the present, it is difficult to fully address such constantly changing relationships and stimuli while simultaneously projecting backwards (and/or forward) to enact consideration of large-scale formal questions. However, these qualms might perhaps be easily enough put to rest; for example, both Wishart (Reference Wishart1996) and Basanta (Reference Basanta2010) propose effective means by which local, microlevel ecological models can be expanded in order to develop large-scale formal constructs.
Many are also openly sceptical of the application of ecological psychology to the cultural environment.Footnote 19 Clarke points out that ‘[i]n the circumstances of entertainment and aesthetic engagement … overt manifestations of the perception-action cycle are often blocked or transformed’ (Clarke Reference Clarke2005: 20), and that ‘many aesthetic objects and circumstances change this seamless state of affairs by radically limiting the perceiver's capacity to intervene in, or act upon, the immediate environment in a free-flowing manner’ (Clarke Reference Clarke2005: 124). This latter point is important; affordance requires a ‘mutual relationship’ between organism and object or event (Windsor Reference Windsor2004). How is the relationship between listener and electroacoustic work mutual? We can see how the environment impacts upon the listener in this situation; but how can the listener impact the environment? Part of the problem here is a particular characteristic of the Western concert tradition, and of the Western art tradition generally,Footnote 20 which is largely predicated on one-way communication from creator to receiver.Footnote 21 The listener is, in essence, a passive participant, and is limited somewhat in their capacity to explore the environment perceived through the work, as they are unable to effectively impact that environment, and thus unable to adequately interact with it.Footnote 22 This risks negating the capacity for affordance, and the establishment of the dynamic triad.
Windsor, on the other hand, has constructed a very convincing framework for the effective application of ecological psychology in aesthetic and cultural contexts, for example describing a cycle in which creation affords interpretation, which then affords further creation, and so on (Windsor Reference Windsor2004: 195). It might be argued, however, that such a cycle runs up against the temporal issues mentioned above, departing from the territory of the ‘now’ to which the principles of ecological psychology are most comfortably applied.
Many simply choose to make use of ecological psychology for its strengths, and turn to other methods to compensate for any perceived weaknesses. While sometimes conflicting or even in outright contradiction, the theoretical pairing of ecological and cognitive psychology might be expected to provide good results, should each be applied where best suited,Footnote 23 and the combination of ecological psychology with semiotics, in particular, seems a likely candidate and has a respectable representation in the literature.Footnote 24 Such pairings, however, can be somewhat delicate; Windsor warns, for example, that ‘a piece-meal approach that overlays a semiotic, or traditionally cognitive, interpretation of social and cultural significance upon event perception will tell us little about how cultural knowledge is related to ‘direct’ perception’ (Windsor Reference Windsor1995).
6. Conclusion
Whether taken on its own terms or coordinated with other theoretical constructs, ecological psychology represents a powerful tool, offering considerable potential insight when applied to electroacoustic theory, analysis and experience. Its application here to a number of electroacoustic performance practices hopefully acts as a useful illustration of this potential. Whether we take these singly or in combination with semiotics, cognitive psychology or other methodologies, there is much to be gained by allowing ourselves – as composers, performers and listeners – to continue to be guided by its principles.
