1. INTRODUCTION
A proverbial question asks, ‘if a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ The question is interesting not for its possible answers – which clearly depend on the definitions of sound and hearing employed – but because of how frequently it is repeated and the further questions it raises. Why is it that the sound is attributed to the tree? And, more tellingly, why is it that the tree is thought to make ‘a’ sound distinct from that of the wood of which it is part? The question reflects dominant attitudes towards sound – in particular the assumption that a sound – a particular sonic event – can be unproblematically approached as discrete. This is supported by idealised archetypes of sound such as the voice, sine tone and high fidelity recording and, in turn, underpins the notion that sound and music are reproducible commodities.
Experimental music, however, has been greatly influenced by those who have gone into the woods and listened. Those who have heard sound not as discrete but as ongoing. Those who have directed their attention to the sounding of the world. Those who position themselves as listeners.
The experimental music I refer to here I consider experimental in the manner proposed by John Cage (Reference Cage1973: 13) – as ‘an act the outcome of which is unknown’. Music, that is, which is somehow indeterminate, which exists in the moment of its airing, its hearing. Cage’s name is frequently the first raised at the mention of experimental music, or indeed at the beginning of writing such as this, as it is here. Both as a composer and as a writer, his work is so often cited that his famous visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard echoes through scholarly work in the area.
Cage is most well known for his piece 4′33″ – the so-called silent piece – which brings to mind a classical pianist sitting on stage before an unused instrument and an audience squirming awkwardly. However, Cage was a listener as much as a composer. The influence he has had is both profound and ongoing and I have found personally that even in deliberately seeking to move beyond the impact of his work it is emphasised further. This impact is perpetuated and magnified by the way his life and work have been canonised, but is no less significant as a result.
He was greatly influenced by transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau and, like him, by the outdoors, by nature. Also, Cage’s thinking resonates with the work of French philosophers Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres. All of whom share an interest in multiplicity, which I shall now explore, through experimental music and drawing on my own experiences in the woods, as a way of approaching sound. Experimental music is dynamic, heterogeneous, contingent and discursive and using it to explore sound as multiplicity undermines accepted understandings of sound, its reproducibility and the relationship between music and environmental sounds.
2. WALDEN
Thoreau built and spent a little over two years living in a cabin at Walden Pond, the site of which is now marked by the sign pictured in Figure 1. Famously, he wrote and published a book on the experience, Walden. What is not so often mentioned is that this place was only a short walk from the nearest town – Concord, Massachusetts – and surrounded by other residents. Indeed, it was built on a property owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. While it was in the woods it could not, by most standards, be said to be a particularly isolated or wild place. Nevertheless, he lived there, among the trees, and recorded his experience, writing about daily life at the cabin, the economics of such a life, the solitude it involves, the social dimensions of his time there and more.
Site of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. Photo: ‘Thoreau’s famous quotation, near his cabin site at Walden Pond’, Alex from Ithaca – Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License.
One chapter of the book in particular is of interest here. It is titled ‘Sounds’ and recounts in detail Thoreau’s experiences listening while at Walden. He writes of hearing the local wildlife but also the sounds of the communities nearby. Specifically, he notes an experience listening out for local church bells:
All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood, the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. (Thoreau Reference Thoreau1897: 192–3)
The sound that Thoreau writes of hearing – a melody which has ‘conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood’ – is an example of sound as multiplicity. It is not one sound but many, inseparable and yet not completely whole. Sound echoing ‘from vale to vale’ not as a repetition but as an ongoing sounding.
He came to listen not just for the bells – or the trains of progress that passed by his peaceful spot – but for the sound, the voice, the music of the woods themselves. He heard the space of the forest in its sound. ‘Nature makes no noise’, he would later write, ‘the howling storm – the rustling leaf – the pattering rain – are no disturbance, there is an essential and unexplored harmony in them’ (Thoreau in Bock Reference Bock2006). This notion itself, echoed in Bergson’s (Reference Bergson2007: 175) assertion that disorder is merely a different order than that which was being sought, would become an inspiration for Cage and his approach to music.
3. JOHN CAGE AND 4′33″
Cage’s work presents sound as multiplicity too. His 4′33″ is particularly significant in this respect, but to explain its importance I must start, as so many have, with the story of its development. As has been recited many times, the piece was, at least in part, inspired by a visit to an anechoic chamber, during which Cage discovered that what he thought was silence was in fact a whole world of new sounds just beyond the reach of the human ear. He exclaimed:
There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. (Cage Reference Cage1973: 8)
There is debate about the science of Cage’s claim – Peter Gena for one argues that humans cannot in fact hear the operation of their nervous system nor indeed, normally, their blood in circulation and suggests that Cage may simply have suffered from tinnitus – but as Kyle Gann (Reference Gann2010: 164) notes ‘medical fact leaves Cage’s basic point unscathed: our bodies do produce sounds of their own, and in the vast continuum of human experience true silence is virtually unknown’. Inspired by the possibilities around him, Cage employed amplification, microphones and loudspeakers to render audible previously unheard sounds, from his own vital signs to all the vibrational resources of the world (Kahn Reference Kahn2001: 192). Cage’s interest in, to use his own words ‘the physicality of sound and activity of listening’, could be described as phenomenological (Gann Reference Gann2010: 88). However, Cage had a broader interest in philosophy, as I will explain.
Gann details the story of 4′33″ in his book No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4′33″. The piece was premiered at the Maverick Concert Hall (Figure 2) in Woodstock, New York on 29 August 1952 (Gann Reference Gann2010: 2). It was written using an indeterminate process involving the I-Ching that Cage had developed and employed for determining the pitches, dynamics and durations of his previous work, Music of Changes. However, as he had already decided that the piece would be silent, indeterminate procedures were used only to determine the duration of the piece (Gann Reference Gann2010: 174).
Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. Photo: unknown – GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.2.
Interestingly, Cage claims to have used the process to build up each movement from shorter silences until he arrived at 4′33″ for the entire piece (Gann Reference Gann2010: 174–5). This suggests that perhaps he had already planned the piece to be approximately that length, which seems likely given its parallels with his earlier, unrealised, work Silent Prayer, for which he planned to compose a piece of silence roughly this length and to sell it to Muzak Co. (Gann Reference Gann2010: 128, 177; Kahn Reference Kahn2001: 178). Moreover, it demonstrated his theory that ‘there can be no right making of music that does not structure itself from the very roots of sound and silence – lengths of time’ (Cage Reference Cage1970: 81–2). Still, Cage’s process indicates that ultimately, for him, the piece is based on non-intentionality and the fundamental characteristic of it is duration.
According to the programme, on the night the piece was premiered the durations of the individual movements were 30″, 2′23″ and 1′40″ but when published the score stated the lengths of the three movements at premiere were 33″, 2′40″ and 1′20″ (Gann Reference Gann2010: 186). Cage produced a number of different scores for 4′33″, culminating in the version published by C. F. Peters in 1961 that replaces all musical notation with the use of the term tacet – ‘be silent’ – and states that ‘the work may be performed by any instrumentalist or combination of instrumentalists and last any length of time’ (Gann Reference Gann2010: 176–87). Clearly Cage’s thinking about the piece changed over the years and, in fact, he eventually made comments which indicated that he considered the piece, as Gann (Reference Gann2010: 186) writes, ‘simply an act of listening’ and as such it did not even need a performer.
Christof Migone (Reference Migone2012: 239) suggests framing the historical moment of the premiere of 4′33″ ‘from the perspective of the rustic backdoor, observing from outside, out amongst the breeze and the birds – those who are always performing 4′33″’. He comments – before, I must note, closing his book Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body with a quote from Thoreau on silence – that as music 4′33″ was ‘beholden to face the audience’ but as what he calls ‘unsound’, as a sound art performance it ‘propped the back door ajar’ and that door is now held ‘wide open’ (Migone Reference Migone2012: 239). Although his interest in separating sound art from experimental music is not one I share, his suggestion that 4′33″ was ‘beholden to face the audience’ is interesting, as is his prompt to contemplate the performance from a hypothetically open back door. The implications of this are clearer when pondered with reference to the site of the hall, which, as can be seen in Figure 2, is notably wooded, surrounded by well-grown trees. Given the apparent formality of the evening it is reasonable to think that the premiere performance of 4′33″ was directed at the audience and relatively contained, in various respects, within the concert hall. However, this does not extend to the piece itself – particularly for Cage.
Just what 4′33″ came to be for Cage is indicated in a little-cited essay that appears at the end of his book Silence titled ‘Music Lovers’ Field Companion’. Originally published in 1954, it is a short, humorous text which details Cage’s love of mushrooms. However, it is notable for the insight it gives into his approach to 4′33″ at that time. He writes:
I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece – transcriptions, that is, for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have had published. At one performance, I passed the first movement by attempting the identification of a mushroom, which remained successfully unidentified. The second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium. The expressivity of this movement was not only dramatic but unusually sad from my point of view, for the animals were frightened simply because I was a human being. However, they left hesitatingly and fittingly within the structure of the work. The third movement was a return to the theme of the first. (Cage Reference Cage1973: 276)
Here Cage hears music in the life of the woods – music with physical, perceptual and conceptual dimensions, extending beyond the sound physically present and what he hears to employ sound, hearing and music as concepts that frame his wider experience. Listening to his encounters as if but part of a melody ‘echoing from vale to vale’, as an expression of the indissoluble relations of that time and place – including himself as a listening subject. The music he heard there was specific to his experience as a listener, as he later articulated with his famous line ‘I have become a listener and the music has become something to hear’ (Cage Reference Cage1973: 7).
Cage became fascinated with the notion of always sound, an idea that he extended, as Douglas Kahn (Reference Kahn2001: 159) remarks, ‘outside the operations of his body to hear the vibrations of matter’ such that ‘sound was no longer tied to events but existed as a continuous state as it resonated from each and every atom’, ‘everything always made a sound, and everything could be heard’. Apart from setting into motion sound’s rise in contemporary arts and the acceptance of all sound, otherwise frequently considered noise, into the contemporary musical repertoire, Cage’s music and ideas, as expressed with 4′33″, have left those that follow to deal with the implications of a world where there is always a multiplicity of sound.
4. SOUND AS MULTIPLICITY
Sound as multiplicity has physical, perceptual and conceptual dimensions. It comprises many events, experiences and ideas, each of which can be considered distinct but remain nonetheless intimately entangled with each other. To discuss sound as merely phenomenal is to ignore the other, equally important, dimensions of its existence. Just as I have shown with the examples of Cage and Thoreau’s experiences and writing, sound is always multiple when produced. It follows, then, that it is so when heard. Moreover, sound exists conceptually as multiplicity. Sound is conceived in many ways, by different subjects and with a variety of characteristics, but is irreducible to any of these. Sound is a cultural artefact, but one that involves physical and perceptual dimensions, even if only implied or imagined. Perception of sound as a phenomenon, involving necessarily physicality, is only possible with a conception of sound. That is, it is necessary to conceive sound in order to perceive it. It is only possible to hear sound if you know it in some way. A conception of sound can even be used to hear sound without ears – perhaps by bodily feeling of low frequency vibrations or synesthetic experience – to remember or imagine it – as may happen with a melody, drawing out sound’s associative and mnemonic qualities – and, perhaps most powerfully of all, to consider it as a thing that can be recorded, stored and traded. Still, however, a conception of sound depends on involvement with the perceptual and physical, on sound as heard in some way. To explain the multiplicity of sound it is necessary for me to offer a more thorough grounding in the concept of multiplicity. While it is the work of Serres that I have found particularly influential, his work is to a large extent based on that of Deleuze and Bergson.
Bergson has been central to developing philosophies of multiplicity. Outlining his theory of duration, he explains multiplicity in his book Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Bergson Reference Bergson2001). He argues that number is a collection of units and as such ‘the synthesis of the one and the many’ (Bergson Reference Bergson2001: 75). Every number is one, he finds, a unity, but ‘covers a multiplicity of parts which can be considered separately’ (Bergson Reference Bergson2001: 75–6). He sees it as necessary to distinguish between two kinds of multiplicity: quantitative multiplicities, such as a flock of sheep comprising a number of animals that – considered to be identical and mapped in space – can be counted, and qualitative multiplicities, in which ‘heterogeneity contains number only potentially’ such that ‘consciousness, then, makes a qualitative discrimination without any further thought of counting the qualities or even of distinguishing them as several’ (Bergson Reference Bergson2001: 76, 77, 121).
In The Creative Mind, Bergson (Reference Bergson1992: 149) elucidates his concept of duration as ‘what we have always called time’ but ‘time perceived as indivisible’, it is, for him, a qualitative multiplicity with particular significance. He explains it using the example of a melody, recalling Thoreau’s description of hearing church bells through the wood – ‘when we listen to a melody we have the purest impression of succession we could possibly have … yet it is the very continuity of the melody and the impossibility of breaking it up which make that impression upon us’ (Bergson Reference Bergson1992: 149).
In his essay ‘Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity’, Brandon W. Joseph (Reference Joseph2009: 213) examines the influence of Bergson on Cage’s work. As Joseph recounts, Cage claims in one of the essays in his book Silence, ‘I believe, of course, that what we’re doing is exploring a field, that the field is limitless and without qualitative differentiation but with multiplicity of differences’ (Cage Reference Cage1973: 204–5; Joseph Reference Joseph2009: 219–20). The resonance with Bergson’s work here is clear.
Joseph (Reference Joseph2009: 220) points out that ‘Cage’s use of the term “multiplicity” in describing the heterogeneous and unlimited space of all sound’ was not occasional but had come up in his correspondence with Pierre Boulez about his work Music of Changes. Moreover, Joseph (Reference Joseph2009: 220) claims that Cage had most likely discovered Bergson’s work on multiplicity in 1951, before the premier of 4′33″. More certainly, as Joseph (Reference Joseph2009: 220) writes, ‘Cage’s mature understanding of silence as formulated in that year can be related to (if it did not, in fact, derive from) Bergson’s critique of non-being as expressed in Creative Evolution’, that what individuals understand as absence is actually the finding of something other than what they were seeking. This relates to Bergson’s account of disorder, which I have already addressed. Ultimately, Joseph (Reference Joseph2009: 222–4) finds that Cage ‘mobilized the idea of multiplicity (as a complex interaction that was in line with the actual, ontological existence of sound) against an idea of relationships as generally understood by the human mind’ to conceive existence, like sound, as multiplicity that is not cognisable as a totality but from which the actual is differentiated, echoing Bergson’s conception of multiplicity and suggesting uncannily both Deleuze’s concept of difference and Serres’s metaphysics of noise. Just as Deleuze and Guattari (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 32) explain in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the creation of multiplicity as a substantive marks ‘a very important moment’ because it allows escape from ‘the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one’ and thus dialectics, such that it is possible ‘to succeed in conceiving the multiple in the pure state’.
Instead of considering sound as discrete as people do things, it is necessary to theorise its existence in a way that accounts for its multiplicity. This is possible using Deleuze’s concept of difference. Although Deleuze did not describe his own work as post-structuralist, his thought can be labelled as such as it emphasises relationships. Chris Barker (Reference Barker2008: 18) offers a useful explanation in his book Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice when he writes, ‘post-structuralism rejects the idea of an underlying stable structure that founds meaning through fixed binary pairs’ such that ‘meaning is unstable, being always deferred and in process’ and ‘cannot be confined to single words, sentences or particular texts but is the outcome of relationships between texts’. Deleuze (Reference Deleuze1994: 56) argues that ‘each term of a series, being already a difference, must be put into a variable relation with other terms, thereby constituting other series devoid of center and convergence’. Sound cannot be considered merely phenomenal. Nor can it be placed in any other site, such as the ear or high fidelity recording. Instead, sound, in the way Deleuze (Reference Deleuze1994: 56) outlines, ‘must be shown differing’. Sound must be understood through differentiation. Sound, as multiplicity, straddles the general and the particular, and is individuated into particular sounds from other, related sounds through processes of differentiation such as listening.
Deleuze (Reference Deleuze1994: 41) further claims that ‘identity, produced by difference, is determined as “repetition”’. For him, repetition ‘consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different’ (Deleuze Reference Deleuze1994: 41). He argues, ‘individuation is mobile, strangely supple, fortuitous and endowed with fringes and margins … the individual is far from indivisible, never ceasing to divide and change its nature’ (Deleuze Reference Deleuze1994: 257). Employing Deleuze’s concept, sound as multiplicity based in difference can be and is individuated but only as part of a process of differentiation, which is itself unstable. A sound is still multiple when individuated, comprising yet more individual sounds.
Deleuze’s theory of difference helps to hear sound differently. That is, with an approach based on differentiation rather than identification. Using this approach it is possible to avoid seeking sound’s essence or attempting to define it, focusing instead on the multiple ways sounds are heard and treated.
Drawing on Deleuze’s conception of difference as well as Bergson’s ideas, I base my own work on the openness of Serres’s account of multiplicity, approaching sound as multiplicity that is known predominantly qualitatively but that is still both temporal and spatial. Sound, as such multiplicity, is conceived including a seemingly ever-expanding number of elements, such as infrasound, ultrasound, non-sound, recorded sound, digital sound and even unsound, heard by a variety of different organs, individuals and machines.
It is the work of Serres that initially led me to hear sound as multiplicity, particularly his book Genesis in which he offers an account of the multiple based on a metaphysics of noise. He writes, in the book’s introduction, ‘I hear sound and I lose it, I have only fragmentary information on this multiplicity’, succinctly summing up the quandary of my interest in sound (Serres Reference Serres2009: 5). He explains of the multiple:
Locally, it is not individuated; globally, it is not summed up. So it’s neither a flock, nor a school, nor a heap, nor a swarm, nor a herd, nor a pack. It is not an aggregate; it is not discrete. It’s a bit viscous perhaps. A lake under the mist, the sea, a white plain, background noise, the murmur of a crowd, time. (Serres Reference Serres2009: 4–5)
The multiple, he argues, ‘is not an epistemological monster, but on the contrary the ordinary lot of situations’ and this is the case with sound (Serres Reference Serres2009: 5). As Frances Dyson (Reference Dyson2009: 4) writes in her book Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture, ‘“Sound” – the term itself – is already abstracted: there is sound, inasmuch as there is atmosphere; like a dense fog, it disappears when approached, falling beyond discourse as it settles within the skin.’ Many of those who have turned their attention to sound have attempted to clear the fog so that they may see but I have tried, instead, to listen through it.
Developing a listening practice inspired by Thoreau, Cage and Serres has coincided for me with an interest in mushrooms, an interest which, as I mentioned, was significant too for Cage. Specifically foraging for wild pine mushrooms in the woods around Melbourne, Australia, the city in which I live. These mushrooms grow near pine trees and so searching for them has involved finding and exploring forests of these trees. Walking in and listening to these forests has helped me to hear sound as multiplicity – the wind in the trees producing a gently swirling noise that envelops all other sounds.
One forest I visit regularly is documented in Figure 3. Situated atop Mount Macedon, it is about an hour’s drive from the city. Particularly exposed to the wind, the tall pines there can produce an especially enveloping sound. I remember in particular one forage there late in the season. A dense fog sat over the mountain as the trees trembled and bowed in the strong winds that would bring rain from the northwest. After setting up my recorder, I walked into the forest, my eyes covering the ground for signs of mushrooms peeking out from under the dense layers of pine needles. Negotiating the false bracken and blackberries, I was aware of each and every step. I investigated the remains of felled trees and decomposing stumps. My attempts to identify mushrooms from the detritus of the forest floor influenced my listening, through which occasionally the sound of traffic in the distance or a plane overhead would slowly distinguish itself from the sound of the forest – sounds differentiating gradually, differing from the sound around them. Listening to the recording, it is only just possible to pick up the sound of me walking off, disappearing into the distance and then returning. The sounds of my intrusion are lost in the sound of the forest, along with the creaking of the trees and quiet murmurings of other animals.
Pine forest on Mount Macedon, Victoria. Photo: Ben Byrne.
Just as Cage recounted his experience as one of many performances of his silent piece, my forage could be considered a rendition of his work in which the three movements consist of me entering, exploring and then leaving the forest. But, this was not my intention. I was foraging for mushrooms, an act with which for me was embedded a listening to that time and place as music. This is not so far from Cage’s finding that fundamentally 4′33″ is simply an act of listening and perhaps only differs in my intention as a listener, but this is a significant difference. Eventually Cage argued that he no longer had any need of the piece and perhaps this is why – it not only opens music to all sound but presents sound as multiplicity and music as simply an act of listening that offers a way of encountering it (Nyman Reference Nyman1999: 2).
5. CONCLUSION
Walking in the pine forests near Melbourne it seems, as Thoreau noted of his melody, that the sounds I make out have ‘conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood’ (Thoreau Reference Thoreau1897: 192–3). This hearing of all sounds as related, as articulations of contact, brings a musicality to my listening but one that compels me to listen out rather than in. This is listening that is open rather than focused, offering a way to engage with the immediate environment.
According to Cage’s definition, music is experimental if its outcome is unknown. It follows, then, that experimental, or indeterminate, music undermines attempts at reproduction, offering listeners a chance to hear music for themselves. As Cage (Reference Cage1973: 7) has noted, ‘a composer knows his work as a woodsman knows a path he has traced and retraced, while a listener is confronted by the same work as one is in the woods by a plant he has never seen before’. Approached in this way, experimental music is music that is determined only in the listening of particular subjects – music that resists being treated as a discrete, reproducible commodity and is, instead, specific to time, place and perspective. This music presents sound as multiplicity – at once many sounds heard by many listeners.
Serres (Reference Serres2009), as I have mentioned, proposes a metaphysics of noise that emphasises the multiple. He argues that ‘noise cannot be a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, a silhouette on a backdrop, like a beacon against the fog’ (Serres Reference Serres2009: 13). He claims that ‘what are called phenomena alone are known and knowable’ (Serres Reference Serres2009: 18). Sound, in this way, is differentiated from noise, a process that experimental music foregrounds and explores.
Thoreau, Cage and Serres have helped me to find a way of approaching sound that treats supposedly individual sounds as related, individuated only through processes of differentiation, despite which they remain multiple. This brings into question the reproducibility of sound and the relationship between sound and its environment. Listening with this in mind, I encounter sound, through music, as at once physical, perceptual and conceptual, resistant to reproduction and instead embedded as part of its environment – sound as multiplicity.
