1. Introduction
Those of us who gather sonic material from the quotidian find ourselves operating in the liminal zone between two historically embedded modes of engagement with sound. The first of these is Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète, based on an acousmatic relationship, defined by Chion as ‘sounds one hears without seeing their originating cause’ (1994: 71). The second is R. Murray Schafer's soundscape, predicated on a schizophonic relationship that resulted from the self-same historical moment when the sound source and its product were split asunder (by the telephone, radio and phonograph, for example). Each approach to composition is built on particular conceptions of listening, technology and nature. These ideologies have dominated the development of environmental electroacoustic music. This paper will investigate these approaches in an ecological context, using concepts from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1987) and Timothy Morton's Ecology without Nature (2007), in order to develop the possibilities of a non-hierarchical, fluid engagement with our sonic milieu.
The term environmental music will be used here to describe electroacoustic music predominantly based on recorded sounds from the pre-existing acoustical/physical context, as opposed to sounds that are purposefully computer-generated, electrically generated or based on traditional instruments. This term might require one to displace previous referents, for example those that denote music's use as a meditation aid, a safe cocoon for a chill-out session, or a way of communing with cetaceans. The ‘environment’ in question will perforce be an admixture of the natural and artificial, even if it is only a matter of proportion and perspective that distinguishes the two terms. Environmental music may incorporate the techniques of the soundscape composition or musique concrète to different degrees, but it is not congruent in philosophy with either.
Following a discussion of antecedents, Artaud's Body without Organs and Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome will be considered as useful metaphors that can generate new approaches to such composition. Katharine Norman's differentiation between self-intended and composer-intended listening will be investigated, along with considerations of accidents of listening and the machinic phylum. Particulars from The Garden of Adumbrations (Parmar Reference Parmar2009a; Sound example 1), a multi-channel electroacoustic composition, will be used to ground the discussion in compositional praxis. The scope of this paper will be broad rather than deep, in order to form a multiplicity of connections between ideas not commonly linked.
In collecting sounds for my composition I often found myself in a forest navigating the detritus under foot, or in a back alley of the city doing likewise. An appropriate place for this discussion to begin is in shadow.
2. Phenomenology and Schaeffer's acousmatic
An adumbration is ‘a faint sketch; an outline; an imperfect portrayal or representation of a thing’ and also ‘the act of adumbrating, or shadowing forth’ (Porter Reference Porter1913). This is a fitting description of the delicate act of composing with quotidian sounds. The term is doubly appropriate in that Husserl uses it to refer to the ‘stream of perspectival views’ that is required to perform the phenomenological reduction, the very process of abstraction that corresponds to Schaeffer's reduced listening (Kane Reference Kane2007: 16–18). Consider Husserl's example of a table, an object which appears differently from different sides. The viewer's perception changes with each new perspective on the table. What holds ‘the table’ together in our minds qua table is ‘an act of consciousness, a synthesising together of the stream of adumbrations … to posit the identity of the object, as transcendent to perception’ (Kane Reference Kane2007: 16).
The word ‘adumbration’ in the title of my composition acknowledges the phenomenological roots of acousmatic music while at the same time emphasising a movement that takes us from sound to sound in the shadow of incomplete, imperfect interpretation. This is best explained by way of a critique of the acousmatic ideology.
In Traité des objets musicaux (1966) Schaeffer dissects the process of listening into four modes, each of which serves a different function (Schaeffer in Smalley Reference Smalley1996: 78–80). These can be considered alongside the three modes in Michel Chion's influential model of film sound (1994: 25–9). The first two Schaefferian modes are objective, made possible by the ‘acousmatic reduction’ that separates a sound object from its origin. Simple listening for information purposes, to gather signs of the world, is expressed in écouter, corresponding to Chion's ‘causal listening’. Comprehending sounds for their meaning or signification, expressed in language, is the function of comprendre, congruent with Chion's ‘semantic listening’.Footnote 2
Following on these, Schaeffer posits a second reduction, that of l’écoute réduite or ‘reduced listening’ (a term Chion directly adopts), which allows the listener to discover ‘the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning’ (Chion Reference Chion1994: 29). Schaeffer further divides this into two modes. Passive reception of sound as pure perception is the function of ouïr, or plain hearing. Attending to a sound to actively select attributes for study, appreciation and response is the domain of entendre (Kane Reference Kane2007: 18).
Kane makes two objections to Schaeffer's formulation on philosophical and political grounds. First, reduced listening would have the sound object standing outside history as an idealised form, instead of deeply embedded in particulars of time and place, custom and culture. Second, this process detaches the sound object from its originating technologies, making these invisible to critique. This is particularly paradoxical considering the specificity of the technical methods (namely transposition, segmentation, reversal, repetition, superimposition and envelope shaping) that made possible the practice of musique concrète in the first place. Schaeffer's insistence that the cause of a particular sound (a physical energy transfer from one object to another) be divorced from its effect (the sound energy itself as it impacts the ear and is interpreted by our cognitive system), asserts a doctrine of ‘intrinsic finality’ (Kane Reference Kane2007: 21–2). The sound object ‘always already’ exists somewhere in its perfect nature; our work as listeners is to discover what that is, to reveal the inevitable.
‘It is the sound itself that I aim at’ wrote Schaeffer in Traité des objets musicaux (quoted in Kane Reference Kane2007: 20). Reference Kim-CohenKim-Cohen responds to this with the warning that the ‘construction “in-itself” should always trigger an alarm’, arguing through Jacques Derrida that ‘meaning of any kind is always a product of differentiation, of a process that distinguishes the thing-in-question (never simply itself) from all that it is not’ (2009: 13, 14). It is this sticky process of teasing out difference which paradoxically re-asserts connectedness and provides for a network model of semantics in general and listening in particular. This is in direct contrast to the acousmatic ideology that attempts to jettison societal context and technological referents in favour of phenomenological purity.
Dugal Reference McKinnonMcKinnon has made a parallel critique by exposing the acousmatic doctrine as ‘paradigmatic of the technological sublime’ (2007: 5). His conclusion is that this doctrine does not necessarily invalidate acousmatics but rather ‘is at its best when its language, knowingly or otherwise, admits the inherence of unmappability and depthlessness, as well as the productive indeterminacies of this form of the sublime’ (2007: 8). I do not believe the acousmatic ideology can be recuperated in this way, but instead must be abandoned in place.Footnote 3 In making this pronouncement I wish to clarify that this is not in any way a denial of the acousmatic phenomenon itself – quite the opposite; now that the separation of origin from resulting sound is a commonplace in our listening world, it is ever more important to develop an integrated and sustainable model of sonic critique, one that does not forsake origin, context and intentionality.
3. From soundscape to the Body Without Organs
Educator and composer R. Murray Schafer established The World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia in the late 1960s. This research group documented sounds gathered from rural and urban environments, accumulating three hundred audio tapes by 1975 (Westerkamp Reference Westerkamp1991). In The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and The Tuning of the World, Schafer defined the title term as follows:
Soundscape: The sonic environment. Technically, any portion of the sonic environment regarded as a field for study. The term may refer to actual environments, or to abstract constructions such as musical compositions and tape montages, particularly when considered as an environment. (Schafer Reference Schafer1994: 274)
Significantly, the sounds Schafer considers are situated through an act of attention or capture. ‘To record sounds is to put a frame around them. Just as a photograph frames a visual environment, which may be inspected at leisure and in detail, so a recording isolates an acoustic environment and makes it a repeatable event for study purposes’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1973: n.p.). It is clear from this that a listening culture provides a necessary context for any soundscape. But it is equally clear that ‘place’ has been aestheticised in this process. The soundscape creates distance between us and our environment; an interface has been constructed where before there was none. Much of Schafer's book is made up of aesthetic appreciations of the sonic environment at various stages of human history. This leads to the formulation of the following dichotomy: ‘A hi-fi environment is one in which sounds may be heard clearly without crowding or masking’ whereas ‘a lo-fi environment is one in which signals are overcrowded, resulting in masking or lack or clarity’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1994: 272). His central thesis is that industrialisation has increased the volume levels of our soundscape, reducing a once hi-fi environment to lo-fi. This term ‘fidelity’ implies a certain pure unadulterated original from which lesser versions may be derived. It might also suppose a communications theory approach to information, in which entropy in the signal is inevitable but undesirable.
The third important concept in Schafer's work is that of ‘schizophonia’, a term which ‘refers to the split between an original sound and its electroacoustical transmission or reproduction’ (1994: 90). Before electroacoustics, ‘the basic modules for measuring the acoustic environment [were] the human ear and the human voice’ (1994: 206–7). Technologies such as the telephone separated the sound of the voice from its actual production in the chest, larynx and mouth. The origin was made physically and temporally disjunct from the sound as apprehended by the listener.
While Schafer performs a valuable service by estranging us from what contemporary society takes for granted, he is unable to greet the schizophonic with joy, as his use of a term evoking schizophrenia makes obvious. Rather, he wishes to rebuild a (perceived) lost connection, by way of the ‘preservation of soundmarks’, ‘repairs to the soundscape’, ‘imaginative excursions into utopia’, encouraging nature to ‘speak for itself’, and ‘the recovery of silence as a positive state’ (1994: 239, 240, 244, 247, 259). His goal is to knit together the physical and acoustical once again into a whole of sign and referent, by way of careful ear training and attention to sound. This nostalgic enterprise in no way prepares us for the contemporary milieu in which the schizophonic is the norm.
How do we perceive and formulate the natural world? This is the complex question that Morton investigates in detail in Ecology Without Nature (2007). The concept of Nature (here capitalised to emphasise its special significance) is a social construct variously representing growth, change, process, continuity, purity, freedom, mystery, transcendence and even fantasy. Urban residents seek Nature as a restorative, to bring back balance, to refresh themselves after the stresses of city life, or to reduce anxiety. ‘Urban places subject you to many stimuli, often of great intensity, that change quickly and continuously, while in the country most change is gradual and periodic’ (Gallagher Reference Gallagher1993: 209–10).
Schafer posits Nature as the hi-fi soundscape original, which our species has degraded, primarily through industrialisation. The first chapter of his book is full of stirring references to classical literature in sections titled ‘voices of the sea’, ‘the transformations of water’, ‘voices in the wind’, ‘the miraculous land’, ‘unique tones’ and ‘apocalyptic sounds’ (1994: 15–27). These echo many of the conceptions of Nature listed in the previous paragraph and paint a decidedly Romantic world view (Morton Reference Morton2007: 42–3). Given that Schafer's conception of the soundscape cannot escape the complex of societal biases inherent in Nature, it is perhaps prudent to forgo use of this word entirely and instead look to a different formulation. This, in essence, is Morton's thesis: ‘Ecology, if it means anything at all, means being without nature.’ Unlike Nature, ‘ecology’ has the advantage of being defined in a manner not overly constrained by centuries of aesthetics and politics (2007: 204).
The ecosystem may be defined as ‘living and non-living parts, together with (their) total environment, interacting to form a stable system’ (Yeang Reference Yeang2006: 30). Since we are one of these living parts, this definition clarifies the scope of the problem: we cannot stand outside the ecosystem in order to view it, tame it, measure it, bend it to our will. The further we step back, the more we include in our view, but there is always something hidden behind our skulls. That tingle in the nape of the neck relates the unseen back again to what is in plain sight, in a constant dynamic of difference; peripheral vision defines the limits of a world view that is fixated on the ocular.Footnote 4 This explains the appeal of sound for writers such as Walter Murch, who notes our genesis in the uterine environment, where we are blind but can already hear (Murch Reference Murch1994: vii) and Salomé Voegelin, who develops a theory of perception from sound's immersive qualities (Voegelin Reference Voegelin2010: 183). The danger here is that emphasis on immersion might describe us as overly passive, mere subjects of environmental pressures, as opposed to participants always active in interpretation and the creation of meaning (not to mention bound up in a system of energy and matter flows). But Voegelin does not allow this reductionist interpretation; her main thesis is that listening is ‘an act of engaging with the world’ (2010: 3).
We are participants in a system of ‘patterns, networks, balances and cycles’ (Yeang Reference Yeang2006: 30). We process water by drinking and excreting, two visible processes, but also by perspiring. We process gas molecules in our lungs and can readily see the effects of this action through breathing and the rise and fall of our chest, but additionally the entire surface of our body is engaged in respiration. We take on matter to form new cells, just as we cannot fail to notice the passing of solid waste. What is less obvious is the sloughing of skin as it is abraded into dust. These examples demonstrate that we have been taught to interpret the body visually, and to conceptualise it as a system in hierarchy. Cells compose tissue which compose organs, with each stage of increased scale and greater organisation considered to be more important. But, contrary to this normative view, hidden and unconscious processes are also vital; our relationship in a network of flows is not at all dominated by sight or organs. This is the point of destabilisation that Antonin Artaud declaimed in his banned radio programme To Have Done with the Judgement of God (1947):
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic
reactions and restored him to his true freedom.
Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.
(Sontag Reference Sontag1988: 570–1)
Artaud wanted nothing less than to do the twist with his own body. Not content with simply inverting an existing hierarchy, he demonstrated more radically that no one linear arrangement from top to bottom was sufficient. William S. Burroughs played incessantly with this same concept, like a dealer trying every permutation of a pack of cards. Naked Lunch announced the game:
The physical changes were slow at first, then jumped forward in black klunks, falling through his slack tissue, washing away the human lines … . In his place of total darkness mouth and eyes are one organ that leaps forward to snap with transparent teeth … But no organ is constant as regards either function or position … sex organs sprout everywhere … rectums open, defecate and close … the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments … . (Burroughs Reference Burroughs1966: 9)
Such impossible permutations were a deadly serious attempt to break outside the logos, to reconstruct language along with the body in a strategy designed to cut lines of control. Deleuze and Guattari adopted the phrase Body without Organs for the same purpose in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia series, cautioning those who would be too literal in their reading: ‘It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit’ (1987: 150). Furthermore, they made a direct connection between this internal reorganisation and the physical world around us, declaring that:
(T)he Earth – the Deterritorialized, the Glacial, the giant Molecule – is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles. (1987: 40)
Rather than fixating on the ocular, the embodied nature of our existence is best appreciated through the haptic senses, of which hearing (with the entire Body without Organs, not just the ear) is perhaps the most potent. By interpreting our world through the auditory, we emphasise our presence in an immersive sphere of biotic and abiotic influences.
4. The rhizome as generative metaphor
Deleuze and Guattari describe the concept of nomadic or smooth space in similar terms:
It is a tactile space, or rather ‘haptic’, a sonorous much more than a visual space. The variability, the polyvocality of directions, is an essential feature of smooth spaces of the rhizome type, and it alters their cartography. The nomad, nomad space, is localized and not delimited. (1987: 382)
The rhizome is that twisting vessel that makes unexpected connections, indeed connections between everything that can possibly be connected. It is non-oriented, non-ordered and amorphous, in principle (though not in practice) infinite, generated from inside (as opposed to top-down), intensive and directional. For their part, the nomads inhabit the nomos, the ‘nondelimited, unpartitioned; the pre-urban countryside; mountainside, plateau, steppe’ (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 481). They are always on the move (in potential if not in fact), tracing a trajectory, ready to rise up at any point. They are placed (in the first approximation) in opposition to the State apparatus, which works by mapping point to point, circumscribing space, building towns (polis) and decreeing laws (logos).
This short explication only scratches the surface of the myriad inter-related concepts that form A Thousand Plateaus, a book that is contradictory, repetitive and perhaps not even designed as a book at all, but rather a phonographic recording one can sample at will (Massumi Reference Massumi1987: xiii–iv). The rhizome will be adopted from this work and used as a generative metaphor, a relational device that allows us to bridge contexts.
Before proceeding, it is important to respond to a possible objection. Morton rejected the writers of A Thousand Plateaus by declaring ‘These forms, such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's idea of the “rhizome”, are also post-structuralist fantasies that seek to do away with the strange, bumpy divisions between things’ (2007: 52). Given this rejection, how can these authors be used in alliance? A reconciliation is in order.
I begin by noting that Morton's statement seems to run counter to the fact that the rhizome is in the first instance that very manifestation of the ‘strange, bumpy divisions’ Morton seeks. Throughout Ecology without Nature he takes care to be not too closely associated with post-structuralist thought, in case he is caught up in an apparently anticipated backlash against same. This leads him to create distance where none is necessary, or even tenable. He continues:
If the function of rhizome is to join and therefore to differentiate, then how can it do it in a ‘better way’ than a binary play of difference, without collapsing difference into identity? If sound b grows ‘rhizomically’ out of sound a, then is it the same sound, or a different sound? If I am retrofitting my car, tacking on found pieces here and there and ignoring the factory specifications, does it stop being the same car at some point? If it is now a ‘different’ car, then in what consists the rhizomic thread connecting the ‘two’ cars? If it is the ‘same’ car, then surely there is no point in talking about a connection, rhizomic or not, between two things, since only one thing exists. (2007: 53)
This seems to be asking a completely different question from those the rhizome is ready to answer. For, in the second instance, the rhizome is not a thing at all, but a ‘thisness’ that Deleuze and Guattari term a ‘haecceity’:
There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected. (1987: 261)
The rhizome is hence not (just) some thing that joins sound a to sound b. It is not (only) a process for getting from one to another, rather it is (also) a quality of the journey itself. More could be said about the particular identity paradox Morton presents if he were to answer the questions first on his own terms. But he doesn't, perhaps because such a paradox is unresolvable no matter what the framework. (Perhaps this unanswerability is the very evidence of the rhizome he denies?)
Morton wishes to place the ‘binary play of difference’ in dialectical opposition to the rhizome, a formulation both counter-productive and, again, simply unnecessary. The rhizome, as a quality of becoming, is an attempt at a constantly renewing affirmation of multiplicity and exists ‘precisely in order to escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one, to escape dialectics’ (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 32). This seems perfectly consonant with Morton's own ‘attempt to forge art and concepts that lie “in between” traditional ideas of inside and outside’, a pursuit he declares ‘noble, exciting, and the only reason why I can write this book at all’ (2007: 78). Further investigation might well find additional accord between Deleuze's stratification (1987: 502), with all its dynamics and articulations, and Morton's programme of ambient poetics (2007: 34).
The final justification for my use of Deleuze and Guattari in the context of environmental music comes from the primary importance of music to the development of their work. Music is at the very heart of A Thousand Plateaus, starting with the concepts of partitioning and striation as defined by composer Pierre Reference BoulezBoulez, who wrote:
The continuum is manifested by the possibility of partitioning space according to certain laws; the dialectic between continuity and discontinuity thus involves the concept of partition; I will go so far as to say that continuum is this possibility, for it contains both the continuous and the discontinuous; partition, in fact, simply changes the aspect of the continuum … . Temperament – the choice of a standard measure – will be an invaluable aid in estimating an interval; in short, it will ‘striate’ the surface, the musical space, and will provide our perception … with useful points of reference. (1971: 85)
This sets up the dynamic between striated/smooth, structured/amorphous and partitioned/continuous that Deleuze and Guattari develop throughout their work (and subsequently entangle to the point that only in the first approximation can this even be read as dialectic). Music for them has a special role as ‘the absolute state of movement as well as of rest, from which all relative speeds and slownesses spring’ (1987: 267). They repeatedly arrive back at music for examples of how to escape from structured extensive processes, defining it using two of their fundamental terms, the refrain and deterritorialisation. ‘The refrain itself is the content of music’ but also
a means of preventing music, warding it off, or forgoing it. But music exists because the refrain exists also, because music takes up the refrain, lays hold of it as a content in a form of expression, because it forms a block with it in order to take it somewhere else … . Music is a creative, active operation that consists in deterritorializing the refrain. (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 300)
Ronald Reference BogueBogue explains that a refrain is ‘any kind of rhythmic pattern that stakes out a territory’ (2003: 17), and most especially ‘territorializes chaos in forming a milieu’. Further consideration of this topic is well beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to conclude that, for Deleuze and Guattari, music is an intimate part of the environment of flows and networks in which we are embedded, arising from the underlying chaos that pre-exists other patterns. The fundamental importance of music to their formulations justifies, even demands, the use of their concepts in an explication of environmental music.
5. The Garden of Adumbrations
The Garden has long been used to imbue the urban with some of the restorative powers of the rural. The word is derived from the Latin hortus gardinus meaning a cultivated, enclosed area. In fact, ‘the notion of limitation and closure lies at the very heart of the concept of Garden, in turn indissolubly linked to the idea of paradise, a word that comes from the Persian paridaeza meaning enclosed orchard’ (Portoghesi Reference Portoghesi2000: 408). We do not have to look far to see evidence of this link: the stories of ArcadiaFootnote 5 and the Garden of Eden (from the Christian Bible) are but two examples. By incorporating recordings from the ‘natural world’ into their compositions, are soundscape composers not creating a sound garden, a circumscribed area in which they hope to create a perfect world? Certainly this is not contradicted by Schafer, who, through a description of a garden in Baghdad, remarks that ‘a true garden is a feast for all the senses’ (1994: 246). His chapter ‘The Soniferous Garden’ concludes with the wish that a Temple of Silence be erected within his ideal landscape, ‘the silence at the center of which may be heard the ringing of the great orbs of the Music of the Spheres’ (1994: 252).
The use of the word ‘garden’ in The Garden of Adumbrations is meant in ironic opposition to such idealism.Footnote 6 This garden is not circumscribed by any signifier of property; it does not demarcate an ideal zone, a pleasure centre nor a production floor. Instead of polis, it is a temporary zone, a place defined by a particular subject with a fluid viewpoint, whose trajectories and traceries make evident relationships, flows and patterns.
In practical terms, this zone is created for the listener through a nine-channel composition created using particular methods, materials, intentions and attentions. This section of the paper will explicate four such compositional modalities, in order to ground the concepts under discussion in praxis. One: sound sources were chosen to map a subjective sense of place rather than a geographically delimited space. Two: both ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ sound sources were used as material in a mutually reflective continuum (rather than in binary opposition) in order to express the machinic phylum. Three: a constantly shifting equilibrium between self-intended and composer-intended listening was created through disruptive techniques. Four: a significant degree of authorial control was conceded to the listener, to chance and to serendipity.
5.1. Mapping the subjectivity of place
The initial concept for this composition was that it would follow from a formal soundscape analysis in the manner of The World Soundscape Project – that is to say, a study of the ebb and flow of figure, ground and sound marks over the course of a fixed period of time in St Mary's Parish, Limerick City, Ireland. The reason for the choice of locality was familiarity, as this has been my residence for some years. However, as the theoretical underpinnings outlined in this paper were developed, a formal mapping seemed increasingly less appropriate, as this would invoke the nostalgic appeal of a structuralist ‘whole’, an objective sound world existing somewhere apart.
So, instead of using geographic proximity to dictate the space that would source the composition, my own embodied presence as I went about regular day-to-day activities was used to generate a subjective mapping of place. Sound material was gathered from family outings, travel to and from places of work and, most significantly, my own home. This sound world was first apprehended in an unmediated fashion, which is to say acoustically, in situ. Furthermore, this listening was unpremeditated, in that it preceded any compositional intent. This initial appreciation was later supplemented by close listening in the usual mediated fashion, by way of transducers (microphones and headphones).
5.2. Instantiating the machinic phylum
After recording, the contexts and intrinsic qualities of the captured sounds were investigated in relationship to one another, so as to roughly categorise this sonic material conceptually. Simple transformations were applied to some sources, in order to further explore their textures. I had a particular interest in utilising sources commonly perceived as opposing poles on the axis of natural/artificial, biotic/abiotic and so on, in order to find paradoxes in these dichotomies and emphasise instead their rhizomatic connectedness. One particular example will now be explained in detail.
While recording on the shoreline of Lough Derg, two pleasure boats passed each other out on the lake. Each craft's propeller blade excited cyclic motion in the water surface. These wakes intersected and just happened to be at the correct angle, frequency and phase to augment each other on their journey to the shoreline. This bare strip of rock between lake and woods acted as a resonator for the impulse striking the shore; strong local reflections amplified the sound of the waves. In short, the propeller–water–shore–woods construct had attained all the properties of a musical instrument. This is an instance of the machinic phylum, a concept developed by Manuel Reference De LandaDe Landa from Deleuze and Guattari, defined as a ‘set of self-organising processes’ spontaneously generated from inherent articulations and flows (1991: 6).
This particular emergent system has two special properties. First, it was created by the conjunction of components both ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’. But, in saying this, both terms are revealed for their deep connectedness rather than their dialectical opposition. The water is natural, pre-existing human beings, and yet undoubtedly the lake has been dredged and cleared in order to optimise its use as an entertainment resource. The shoreline is natural only in the first approximation, since the woods have no doubt been seeded and are regularly maintained. Perceived in this way, Lough Derg is little more than a stage set designed for particular human activities. The spontaneous occurrence of a musical instrument at the conjunction of its attributes is then not so surprising.
The second intriguing property of this example of the machinic phylum is that it required the attention of an observer to come into being. Without a subject carefully positioned in geometric relationship to its components – and furthermore carefully attuned in terms of listening possibilities – this assemblage would not have actualised as a musical instrument. It might instead have been perceived merely as a hindrance to fishers on the shore, or a reason for cheers by passengers on the boats. Thus the use of this instrument in the composition emphasises the subjective once again.
The question of how to manipulate this recording to optimise the listening experience can be answered by attention to its intrinsic qualities. At the peak of their amplitude, the waves had a cycle time of two seconds, a rapid pulse four times as fast as that which Schafer advocates as relaxing.
Normal breathing is said to vary between 12 and 20 cycles per minute, that is, 3 to 5 seconds per cycle. But breathing may be slowed down during relaxation or sleep to cycles lasting 6 to 8 seconds. Part of the sense of well-being we feel at the seashore undoubtedly has to do with the fact that the relaxed breathing pattern shows surprising correspondence with the rhythms of the breakers, which, while never regular, often produce an average cycle of 8 seconds. (1994: 227)
Here was an opportunity to develop the machinic instrument further, through deliberate compositional intervention. The central portion of the wave rhythm was copied and looped several times, then cross-mixed with the crescendo and diminuendo on either side. This forced extension and regularisation of the loudest portion of the pulse acted to emphasise the ‘artificial’ (which is to say, ‘unexpected without human intervention’) qualities of the sound. Though subtle, this modification enhances the estrangement the listener might feel when hearing something that sounds rather like a natural phenomenon but cannot be. The listener initially, and without much attention, applies causal listening to reference the sound back to those encountered previously in their experience – noticing a dissonance with experience they might attend further, thus increasing their engagement with the listening process. This is an example of how the composer can use particular techniques to create a richer, more nuanced listening experience, a topic that will be further explored in the next section.
5.3. Tension between self-intended and composer-intended listening
When encountering a sound in a composition we use our experiential network (that is, our memory) to relate this to known sounds previously encountered in the real world. Katharine Norman utilises Schaeffer's acousmatic formulation to define self-intended listening in terms of entendre.
Real-world listening – our ordinary, quite possibly creative, take on sounds as we attend to them in real life – might be classified, or included, as self-intended listening. While attention is the state of applying our mind to, in this case, sounds, intention is the determination – an active process – to ‘stretch out’ towards this state. Through intention we make the transition from passive hearing to attentive listening. (1996: 12)
This she contrasts with composer-intended listening, which occurs when a listener knowingly hears a sound as part of a composition (1996: 12). Knowing that the piece has an author, the listener assumes the sound has a reason for being what and where it is in the piece; in other words the intentionality of the composer is taken into account. This is closely related to Morton's use of the term medial to describe ‘statements (that) pertain to perception’ (2007: 37) and which make obvious to the listener the medium through which they are being conveyed. By increasing awareness of the communication channel, that channel is momentarily broken; our attention is switched from content to container. The composer may actively trigger this effect ‘through the introduction of surreptitious intentional confusion’; in other words, the addition of noise into the communication channel (Norman Reference Norman1996: 13). This can be implemented literally (with spectral noise itself), by way of unexpected disjunctions in material or dynamics, or using the ‘superimposition of material’ (1996: 13).
As an example, consider Luc Reference FerrariFerrari's Presque rien ou le lever du jour au bord de la mer (1970). This composition could, to a casual listener, be mistaken for a strictly documentary recording. But closer listening reveals repetitions and other evidence that this is ‘a subjective experience interpreted compositionally and not a direct representation of an objective reality’ (Parmar Reference Parmar2009b: 31). It is the confusion between these two interpretations that produces the frisson that activates the piece for the listener. Ferrari teases us with repetitions that might be referentially true or the product of composer intent. Did the boy call out twice in succession? Or did he call out in a similar way two days running, the composer having superimposed these recordings? The tension between these possibilities is created by a nuanced interplay between self-intended and composer-intended listening.
5.4. Relinquishing authorial control
In that same piece, Ferrari concedes a good deal of authorial control through the simple act of recording whatever happened outside his window. This empowers the sound material to speak for itself. A goal in creating The Garden of Adumbrations was to allow chance, spurious input and statistical processes a voice. However, this approach was countered with its opposite – obvious control over timbral transformations, structure, sonic gestures and other compositional elements. This dichotomy was achieved by applying one set of techniques (simple superimposition and time compression through editing) to certain conceptual sound groupings and a second set of techniques (those of musique concrète plus granular synthesis and so on) to different groupings. In this way The Garden of Adumbrations becomes a dialogue between self-intended and composer-intended listening.
Relinquishing control also means the composer must forget the constraints of ‘high fidelity’. Incidents of inharmonic spectra, compressed or clipped waveforms (‘noise’ in the colloquial sense) were not censored from the final mix. One such moment includes a squeal of feedback when a microphone was overloaded by too close proximity to monitoring headphones. A second example involves some indistinct objects impacting the microphone. These sounds are medial but not composer-intended, and so act to break the aesthetic flow; they are unexpected irruptions, nomadic moments. And as such they speak to a certain truth of the recording process that recording engineers generally remove. (Even though this effacement produces its own distinct aesthetic signs of the presence of those self-same recording engineers!)
Of course even ‘unexpected’ sounds the composer did not intend become composer-intended when included in the final piece. Anything present in the final mix of the composition is composer-intended by definition, and any listener who wishes to determine if it was ‘by design’ then faces an abyss of interpretation around the black hole of intentionality. For this reason The Garden of Adumbrations leaves room not only for mistakes and serendipities of composition but also for accidents of listening. By definition these cannot be predicted or planned, though certain procedures and attitudes can encourage them. Here are two examples. First, the composer can refuse to over-determine meaning through authorial control, leaving open semantic and referential spaces for the listener to later fill. Second, the composition can be treated as an ecosystem of mutually dependent sound objects, thus creating the potential for emergent properties of the system to arise. These methods have in common the treatment of sounds as components in a rhizomatic system of flows and networks.
A concrete example of this phenomenon is that many listeners hear a train in one particular section of The Garden of Adumbrations, though no train was recorded. The primary sound object is actually sourced from a trolley of clattering plates, but there are other objects intersecting this in a complex fashion. The timbre and rhythm of this intersection builds up a sound image that is referentially linked to the listener's experience of a train. But further, the fact that the theme of transportation was designed into the piece as one of the conceptual sound groupings opens up the possibility for a train to appear. This example demonstrates the spontaneous coming-into-being that characterises nomadology. Had certain sounds been cleaned, certain noises removed, cross-fades further defined, volumes constrained, and so on, the overall image might have been clearer, but there would have been no train.
6. Conclusion
This paper is based on two premises. First, that we, as biotic entities, are bound up in complex relationships with the myriad other components of our ecosystem, relationships that cannot be reduced to linear or hierarchical formulations. Second, that sound's immersive and haptic nature makes it particularly suitable for the expression of these relationships. Listening is an act of engagement with our environment; we build meaning from sounds through interpretive and relational processes. Environmental composition is hence at its most expressive when stimulating multivalent listening practices. Further, such compositions benefit from being constructed using the same elements – patterns, networks, balances, flows – that constitute the ecosystem itself.
We live in an acousmatic world; the separation of sound from its origin is no longer a novelty or aberration, but is rather a commonplace. Thus it is ever more important to develop an integrated and sustainable model of sonic practice that addresses the acousmatic, a model that does not forsake origin, context and intentionality. Unfortunately, the dominant Schaefferian ideology is built on pure phenomenology, rejecting historical and technological context. Schafer's soundscape is no more useful for the task, being based on the desire to reconstruct a high-fidelity past, an unadulterated aestheticised Nature set apart from us. As a more fitting generative metaphor, I propose Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome, one of the key concepts of a philosophy that posits music as integral and fundamental. This paper has only begun the process of suggested possible linkages between their work and our compositions.
Finally, this paper has suggested several possibilities inherent in the praxis of environmental compositional: the tracing of place through subjectivity, the machinic phylum as emergent intelligence, the interplay between self-intended and composer-intended listening, the creation of an encouraging milieu for accidents of listening to augment those of chance and statistical processes. These potentials are illustrated by The Garden of Adumbrations, a composition that aspires to being nothing more than an imperfect portrayal of its own ongoing processes, which document the act of being in a world of connections, shadows, representations and challenges.
Further imperfections will follow.
