Sound Symbols and Landscapes

Abstract

Chapter 4 of Pierre Schaeffer’s Traité des objets musicaux 2 is entitled ‘The Acousmatic’. According to the definition in Larousse the Acousmatics were initiates in the Pythagorean brotherhood, who were required to listen, in silence, to lectures delivered from behind a curtain so that the lecturer could not be seen. The adjective ‘acousmatic’ thus refers to the apprehension of a sound without relation to its source. It was important in Schaeffer’s development of the concept of the ‘sound-object’ that it be detached from any association with its source or cause. The sound-object was to be analysed for its intrinsic acoustic properties and not in relation to the instrument or physical cause which brought it into being. However, in our common experience, we are more often aware of the source of a sound than not, and studies of behaviour and aural physiology would suggest that our mental apparatus is predisposed to allocate sounds to their sources. We can see in a very crude way how this ability was essential for our survival in the period before our species came to dominate the entire planet. Even in the cultured detachment of today’s world, however, when we are listening to a concert of instrumental music, except where the texture is very dense or produced in a way which is novel to our ears, we are always very aware of the instrumental source of the sounds we hear. The formalization of musical parameters — the lattice of the tempered scale, the rhythmic coordination required by harmonic structuration, the subordination of timbre to pitch and its streaming to separate instrumental layers — is in many ways an attempt to negate the impact of the recognition of the source (human beings articulating mechanical sound sources) and focus our attention upon the logic of the musical structures. Part of our enjoyment of the music, however, remains an appreciation of the human source of the sounds themselves, which is also in a sense distinct from the articulation of non-notated parameters of the sound through performance gesture.

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