TONES AND NOISES

three kinds of soundscape, one music...

OUT OF TONE

'The first and principal difference between various sounds experienced by our ear,
is that between noises and musical sounds.'
Hermann Helmholtz

The gesture with which John Cage in 4’ 33’’silenced music and let the sounds of the environment speak, can be regarded as a symbol for a tendency that surfaces time and again, and with increasing stubbornness, from the beginning of the twentieth century onward.

It begins already in 1913 with the publication of  'L'arte dei rumori' where Russolo proposes to produce a whole array of sounds with new instruments that would surpass the rather limited repertoire of the traditional orchestra. Russolo was thinking of instruments driven by an electric motor. Variations in speed would lead to in variations in pitch. New impulses came from the development of techniques for sound-recording. Although it was already possible to record sound in Russolo's times, and although also with the traditional vinyl it was possible to manipulate sound (loops, cutting of the attack), it is only the introduction of the tape that made it possible to produce all kinds of sounds in a more economic way than building futuristic instruments. Already in 1948, Pierre Schaeffer was dreaming of a kind of sound bank that could be used in the same way as an orchestra (Phonogène, Morphophone). But it is only the electronic production of sounds that enables the production of the most diverse sounds without resort to existing materials. Figures like John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Györgi Ligeti and Luigi Nono also tried to get 'non-musical' sounds out of traditional instruments. And, in the wake of Cages 4' 33'', still others are interested in existing sounds from the given acoustic environment 'see: Bill Fontana*).

It is as if a countermovement has sprung up against the millennia old endeavour to build up an ever broader array of ever more refined musical instruments out of which tones were got that cannot be found in nature - as if music, after having conquered step by step the realm of artificial stones, suddenly felt betrayed in such Elysium and let itself glide away in the realm of nature from which it had detached itself with so much effort.

Let us examine what are the consequences of such 'revolt against the tones'...


THE FOUND SOUNDSCAPE

'The soughing, howling, and whistling of the wind, the splashing of the water, the rolling of carriages, are examples of noises…. '
Hermann Helmholtz

Let us first have a look at the extra-musical world to which we have been referred by John Cage, and in which man has of old been submerged.

It consists, in the first place, of the countless natural soundscapes: the rustling of leaves, the dripping of the rain, the murmuring of the brook, the sound of the surf, the drone of waterfalls, the rumble of volcano's, the howling of the storm wind, the roaring of the thunder. Next, there are the somewhat more 'musical' sounds produced by animals: the chirping of crickets, the quacking of frogs, the howling of wolves, the bleating of sheep, the shrieking of seagulls in the port and the singing of birds in the wood. But, of old, these sounds are overpowered with the sounds produced by man. In an idyllic past: the cries of the hawkers on the market,  Bühlers sounds in the workplaces - from the hammering of the blacksmith to the threshing with the flail - the hooves of horses and the barking of dogs, the mooing of cows in the stable, and the ringing of the bells over the city or the drum roll and the clash of arms on the battlefield. But, from the industrial revolution onward, we are surrounded with the more violent successors of these idyllic sounds: the sometimes infernal sounds in factory halls, the drone of the cars in the cities, the ringing of tram bells, the howling of airplanes and the thundering of trains. But foremost new soundscapes are emerging: in the interiors, after the ticking of the clocks and the ringing of the alarm bells, now the humming of the refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and washing machines, the ringing of bells and telephones; but especially outdoors where entirely new kinds of soundscapes resound: the fascinating soundscapes in station halls and airports, the applause of the public in a concert hall or the crying of football fans in a football stadium, steam flutes, mist horns,  not to mention Marinetti's sounds of the battlefield: the whistling of bullets, the rattle of machine guns, the boom of guns, the wailing of sirens, the drone of bombers and the droning of tanks.

The most salient feature of these soundscapes is the random distribution of the sources of sound over space: think of the countless thunderstrokes on our right, on our left, before us and behind us when we find oursleves in the middle of a storm. While the visual world is rather a kind of scene whereupon we look perspectivally from within the confinement of our body, the sounds of the audible world surround us: we can also hear the sound behind us, and that holds also for the pattering of the rain on the roof,  the song of the birds in the wood,  the chirping of the crickets in the plains. And also the objects in the aural space are no opaque bodies that hide each other from view: aural space is - phrased in visual term - transparent. And therein resides precisely the magic of the song of the birds in the woods: while our eye stumbles everywhere upon the impenetrable foliage of the forest, sounds come to us from the remotest distance, not hindered by more nearby sounds . And when the bells ring over the city, it is as if an immense space is opening behind the facades that enclose us from all sides. Another important difference is that aural space - except for the sound of the surf or the drone of the highway - is discontinuous by nature: it consists of  points lighting up for nothingness - silence - like stars from the darkness of the cosmic night, or luminous fish from the deep sea. In our natural visual world, the objects do not loom up from the dark: rather are they embedded in a continuous visual fabric in which behind each thing another one can be seen. But aural space is foremost discontinuous in the temporal sense, emergent: the natural state of the world is silence, and sound is only an accident of that essence. That is why we do not have 'ear-lids' with which we can withdraw from the aural world as we withdraw form the visual world with our eyelids. Only when some sound becomes audible, does also aural space emerge, a new world that as it were opens up the visual world. Because the visual world confines us within the limits of our own visual appearance, reduces us to a minuscule object in the middle of an ocean of other visual objects whose appearance only eclipses ours. In sharp contrast with the fable that, ever since Merleau Ponty and Lacan has become ineradicable, things do not gaze at us, but rather eclipse our appearance. Only the thing or the being that lets hear of itself, seems to call upon us, or to address us: the indifferent visual world around us suddenly seems to be inhabited and animated. Just imagine the stars above us not only to twinkle, but also to softly tinkle like little bells: how hospitable would that icy darkness form those fathomless depths around us not have become? Do here perhaps lie the roots of the phantasm of the music of the spheres? In any case, it explains why we feel our soul expand as in an ocean when the birds begin to sing around us in the forest - as is so masterly set to music in Wagner's 'Waldweben' (Siegfried). Or why we suddenly feel welcome when we hear the echo of our voice resound in the mountains. Such redoubling of our voice is only the faint echo of the contagious multiplication that is so congenial to the world of sound: a bird never singing alone, its song induces all the other birds to sing. And that holds also for the crickets and frogs, for sheep and wolves, the cuckoo and the lion. That is why the audible world is in the first place a world inhabited by countless similar souls and not - the phrasing is appropriate - the speechless presence of indifferent appearances that only eclipse ours.


THE DESIGNED SOUNDSCAPE

Tönend bewegte Formen sind einzig und allein Inhalt und Gegenstand der Musik
Hanslick, Eduard, "Vorn Musikalisch-Schönen"

Back to earth now. For the found soundscape is only the unintended offspring of the working - or the raging - of the forces of nature, the thriving of animals and the doings of man: it is not deliberaty designed to be listened at. That is why we either experience it as a disturbing factor or as a familiar background.

Of a totally different nature are the soundscapes that are deliberately designed with the explicit intention to silence such disturbing or reassuring backgrounds - or at least to overporwer them: think of the gongs in eastern temples, of the ringing of bells, of the drum roll and the flourish of trumpets that invites us to lay down our work and to stop our conversation - or of the call of the Muezzin that prompts the entire community to bow in prayer, not otherwise than the bell in Millet's countryside that rings the Angelus three times a day. In so far as these soundscapes silence the world, they are 4' 33'' on its head: since Cage wanted, conversely, to let the found soundscape penetrate our ears.

cage upside down

But just because those gongs and bells and trumpets make an overall animated aural space emerge amidst the inhospitable visual world, people cannot help to let them resound to their heart's content: not otherwise than the crowing of the cock, the ringing of the bells is echoed from other neighbourhoods of the city or from other villages in the country, and also the trumpets are distributed over the four quarters of the compass - which is stylised in the disposition of the musicians and the singers in the four arms of the basilica of Saint Marc in Venice. Thus, a kind of aural architecture is realised: the counterpart of the visual avenues over which processions move, or of the squares and buildings where the community gathers. In sharp contrast with visual architecture, that, just like the visible world, is always present, such aural architecture tends to be merely periodical, as is usual in the aural world.

The question may be asked why this form or aural architecture or spatiotemporal design - which, judging from the examples is already fairly old - seems to remain stuck in an rather archaic technological level. The mist horns, sirens and train whistles of the industrial age resound louder than the gongs, bells, horns and trumpets from the previous age. And that opens new possibilities: the louder the sources of sound - the acoustic beacons - the wider the horizon of aural space and the larger the scope of a possible aural architecture. But these possibilities have only been worked out for practical purposes: think of the mist horns in ports and sirens over the city and industrial plants. For the time being, we can only dream of an aural architecture the aural beacons of which would surround us from all sides like the columns in the Alhambra - not to mention aural urbanistic projects that would be the aural counterpart of the planning of Paris along the axis from the Louvre to the Arc the Triomphe and further**. On occasion of festivities, prehistoric fanfares are still parading over the Champs Elysées. One can imagine the effect of the advent of a computer directed aural space conjured up by powerful high-tec sources of sound extending far outside the urban agglomeration!

Such aural architecture would unfold according to totally different patterns than visual architecture. Visual space is always constructed along axes radiating out from a centre: the opaque visual objects that surround us ask for an orienting open view on wide horizons: preferably an axis in front of us, and one to the left and to the right (binocular orientation). Since sounds surround us from all sides, the basic pattern of aural space, on the other hand, is not so much the cross (or the cube) as a pattern of concentric circles that surround us like transparent curtains in many layers. In principle, that space could also extend in vertical direction. But, although we can raise in the heights  - think of  Stockhausen's helicopters or the drone of bomber planes - the countermove to the depth is far more difficult to realise, except on the rather modest scale of - again Stockausen's - spherical concert hall.

Of course, counterparts of the less geometric and more aleatoric bursts of thunder could be conceived in more natural sites like lakes, deserts, deltas and mountains. Only in fireworks can, on the background of visual violence, a kind of foreplay be heard of such more aleatoric architectures. On the podiums of our concert halls, a kind of scale-model of such projects could be heard in 1962: Györgi Ligeti's grandiose ‘Poème symphonique’ for 100 metronomes  - although it is significant that also this creation resorts to the rather archaic metronome. If we would remove the metronomes from the scene, and spread more powerful equivalents over real space outside, a space filled with sonorous beacons would emerge, and, via condensation in ever changing concentrations resounding from ever changing places, gradually dissolve in silence. That would be something of a prototype of a real 'tönend bewegte Architektur' ('a soundingly moved architecture') - to paraphrase Eduard Hanslick saying about music: a genuine aural architecture unfolding in time - really, and not just through the movements of the contemplator, as will always be the case in visual architecture. A paraphrase of Hanslick - with the understanding that we are not talking here about music, but of non-metaphoric, literal architecture! Which is a totally different matter as we shall soon see...

The reduction in scale should remind us of the fact that there is also something like small scale aural objects (aural 'sculptures'), which, just like real furniture and decorative objects help to design an interior space. Here also, we have to content ourselves with examples from our aristocratic past: think of the splashing of fountains in ornamental gardens, the whistling of real of pneumatic song birds (Villa d'Este), the bells on horses and carriages, and what have you. Only Murray Shäfer, in his book 'The Soundscape', proposes to design a park with different kinds of floors, so that, when it rains, we could walk about amid ever changing sounds - say a ''tönend bewegter' Carl André, a combination of visual and aural design).


THE EVOCATIVE SOUNDSCAPE

Of a totally different kind is the soundscape the sounds of which are, just like those of aural architecture, deliberately produced by man, albeit this time not to transform the real word according to our wishes, but to create an imaginary world that puts the real world aside

Of old, man imitates the sounds of animals. Especially in the theatre, specialised instruments are developed: metal plates to imitate thunder, or revolving discs against cloth to conjure up the wind. In this tradition, Russolo wanted to construct instruments to evoke industrial noises. But it is only the advent of sound recording - aural photography or 'sonography' - that opened the sluices for an unlimited expansion. Initially, it was used to reproduce music itself. But soon after the invention of the tape recorder, Pierre Schaeffer made a montage of noises recorded in the Paris railway depot: 'Etude aux chemins de fer' (1949). Using  meanwhile further developed techniques, Bill Fontana had the noises from Europe's busiest train station in Cologne resound around the ruins of the former 'Anhalter Bahnhof' in Berlin - a first phase of completion of this new development.

We are dealing here with imitation - mimesis - in the literal sense of the word. Just like the tactile dimension is conjured up when looking at a two-dimensional image, just so is the visual dimension conjured up when the concomitant aural appearance is rendered: with the call of the owl its presence, with the voice in the radio the face of the speaker, with the recording of the bells of Rome the image of Saint Peter's square, with the chirping of the crickets, the Provence - and with the noises of the train station the concomitant platforms and passengers under a huge iron and glass vault. 

Not only the sounds of objects and beings can be imitated, but also their (dis)place(ment) in space. In theory, scores of loudspeaker would have to be placed all around the audience in a given space. More economic, though, is the combination of the use of the 'musical perspective' (loud = nearby, soft = distant) with a disposition of loudspeakers in a circle around the public - the aural counterpart of the two-dimensional image. The number of speaker can be further reduced as a consequence of the fact that a sound rendered from two loudspeakers simultaneously is heard as coming from in between. The technique is further developed in the so called 'surround sound' in the cinema, where it is mostly used in combination with a real - three-dimensional - rendering of movement: the spacecraft is first moving in real space from the backside to the front, where the movement is taken over by 'aural perspective'. Also the rendering of height and depth are possible in principle, but turns out to be rather difficult, especially in the dimension of depth, just like with aural architecture. 

The fact that it suffices to render aural appearance to conjure up the concomitant visual appearance only widens the possibilities to conjure up imaginary beings - as already the Aborigines understood when they conjured up their ghosts with 'bull-roarers' (oval pieces of wood turned around on a cord) to intimidate their initiates. But also here is it tape recording that turns the light on green. In the beginning, it was used for pure documentary purposes, as in the 'World Soundscape Project' of R. Murray Schafer in the early seventies. But already in the early fifties composers began to manipulate the tape (slowed down or speeded up, loops, cutting), to filter the sounds, to manipulate the recording (contact microphones) and, more recently, digital manipulation opens unknown perspectives. Together with the increase of technical possibilities, also the number of imaginary events in imaginary worlds increases: it suffices to listen to many a passage form the tape of Stockhausens 'Kontakte' (1960) to become aware of the enormous progress that has been realised with the still primitive techniques of those times. In its turn, the progress in the electronic studios stimulated the search for new sounds produced with traditional instruments. In many a case, sounds are produced that are experienced as being the aural appearance of imaginary things of beings. Thus, in Ligeti's  'Aventures' (1962), the soprano proceeds to laughing, groaning, hissing, and, in his Sequenza V, Berio has the trombone produce all kinds of anthropomorphosis sounds.


MUSIC

..the tones of all musical instruments are examples of musical sounds.
Hermann Helmholtz.
 
Although many people would not object to call soundscapes 'music', less evident is it to label Bach's or Beethoven's music as 'soundscapes'. For good reasons: although music conjures up an imaginary world, just like the evocative soundscape, it does not rely on aural appearances. In his Lied 'The Crow', Schubert does not render the croaking of the crow: he rather gives impulses for her (silent!) flight. While ordinary aural mimesis conjures up a world through rendering aural appearances, music conjures up a world through providing impulses for movement. That explains why music, as opposed to ordinary aural mimesis, preferably evokes silent events or beings. For, not only the wing beat of Shubert's crow, also the swimming of his trouts is completely silent, and that holds especially for the inner stirrings of which music is more fond. That explains also why it so catches the ear when suddenly, amidst the silent world evoked by music, the call of the cuckoo resounds, not to mention the clap of thunder, as in Beethoven's Pastorale... The particular thing about music is, on top of that, that those impulses for movement are not only rhythms, but tones in the first place, tones that are part of a tonal system that is borrowed from the melody of speech. So that movements are structured in time like sentences, and endowed with expressive modalities, just like the words of language (see 'Musical space and its inhabitants').

It is precisely because music is not aural mimesis, that it preferably uses sounds that do not remind of something: the sounds from musical instruments with a timbre of their own and producing pure sounds with a fixed pitch: you would not hear such a thing in nature.

It will be apparent now that aural mimesis and aural architecture are of a totally different nature than music. Let us give an overview:
 

SOUNDS AND NOISE

Some possible misunderstandings must be cleared up. For, we began this essay with pointing to the fact that the development of music in the past century has been governed by the strive to get rid of traditional musical sound and to let ordinary noises come to the foreground. Meanwhile, we know that such strive has inaugurated the developing of the new territory of aural mimesis.

But it would be a serious mistake to state that the dividing line between music and ordinary aural mimesis runs where sounds become noise: also the range of musical means has widened accordingly. Let us listen to the massive clusters in  Ligeti's Volumina or  Atmosphères. We do not have the impression of being confronted with a being that produces such noises. Rather do the gliding complexes of sound conjure up the silent changes of an appearance reminding of those on Rothko's paintings  – magnified into cosmic proportions, and become invisible at that, spiritualised: for, music is not only the world of silence, but also the world of the invisible. No traditional tones, hence, in Atmosphères. But what music ...! Or take the 'Interludio secondo' from Nono's Prometeo: here also do we not hear the sounds of imaginary beings - rather are we dealing with the silent and invisible movements of tellurian monsters. No tones, hence, but surely music: for also these gliding sounds, revolving upon themselves, are conjuring up specific movements of specific beings or phenomena, not otherwise that a chaconne of Bach. which does not mean that clusters - or tones - are always music. In Nono's Quando Stanno Morendo, the scordatura of the four strings of the cello tuned on a half tone above, a half tone below, and a quarter tone from the f, produce, together with the filters, a infernal industrial sound, of which Russolo could only dream. No music here, rather pure aural mimesis....

The question, then, is not so much wether we are dealing with tones or noises, but rather why sounds are experienced as impulses of movements, or as aural appearances. Decisive is the recognisability of the sounds. In Stockhausen's Kontakte, many sounds on the tape are nearly discernable from existing sounds - those of engines, especially when they move up and down in glissandos, as when somebody were playing with the accelerator pedal. When, on top of that, they also move in space from one loudspeaker to the other, we cannot help being reminded of spacecraft. The instruments, on the other hand, remind of nothing but themselves. That is precisely why they can effortlessly function as impulses for movement and why they are experienced as 'musical', even when the tam-tam is producing toneless noise. In a composition likes „Aiyt“ (Konzeptstück 4) for 10 instruments and tape (2001) from Christoph Ogiermann, on the other hand, where sounds are heard that as such do not differ in principle from those in Kontakte, we unmistakably find ourselves in pure musical space. And the reason is that Ogiermann has them resound on a fixed pitch and on the tones of a scale, so that the layers come to relate to each other as tonal intervals. How much the recognisability plays a crucial role is apparent especially when pure tones are not moving discretely, but 'glissando': the association with movements accelerating or slowing down can then no longer be avoided. It suffices to listen to Ligeti's 'Glissandi' (1957) to become aware how compellingly we are here referred to the domain of pure aural mimesis - the pure evocative soundscape.

Although Helmholz, in his time, could without problems identify tone and music, the recent developments in music and the unstoppable advent of aural mimesis compel us to draw the line more precisely. Crucial is not the difference between tone and noise, but the dividing line between evocation through providing (tonal) impulses for movement on the one hand, and rendering aural appearances on the other. In order to make music, one has to resort to sounds that remind of nothing else. Of old, such have been the pure and fixed tones of musical instruments, but all sounds that do not 'remind of' apply. Such extension of musical means can only be welcomed; the array of phenomena that can be conjured up is extended accordingly. Helmholz formulation is, hence, merely a special case of a more fundamental and general state of affairs. Conversely, aural mimesis can resort to tones, when their timbre or their melodic pattern reminds of existing sounds - think of the call of the cuckoo and the claps of thunder with Beethoven. But, since the sound of instruments reminds in the first place of musical instruments themselves, aural mimesis of musical sounds is the means par excellence to conjure up ...musical performances: the first and obvious task for aural mimesis. And that holds not only for discs and tapes, but, ironically enough, also for Cage's music for prepared piano: which only imitates the sound of percussion instruments, and only differs from a recording in that the imitation is so imprecise that it rather makes us think of imaginary instruments than of existing ones. John Cage as the champion of 'aural photography'....


SPECIAL VARIANTS

Three kinds of soundscapes - and music: that should not make us forget that there are many hybrid forms - even when we only now understand that we are dealing with hybrid forms.

To begin with, aural mimesis can go hand in hand with visual mimesis or otherwise, as when we see the train on the screen before us and hear the accompanying sound in the loudspeakers around us . Aural mimesis is at its best when it is purely aural, not only because there are many things that are heard without being visible, but also because aural mimesis is then relieved of the task to additionally conjure up the visual appearance of its imaginary creations. And above all because the isolated aural appearance can now be combined with real or imitated visual appearances that do not belong to it: think of 'Sound Island' where Bill Fontana's had the sound of the surf in Normandy resound around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He thus created a new kind of  ‘object surréaliste’ (assemblage): a 'cross-sensory objet surréaliste'.

Again, musical mimesis can of course be combined with ordinary aural mimesis. We already referred to Beethoven's Pastoral and Ligeti's  'Aventures', Nono's 'Quando stanno morendo', and especially to Stockhausens 'Kontakte': exemplary when in minute 17, about the middle of the composition, a sound that has been travelling in glissando through space finally dissolves into its component rhythmical pulses and then suddenly is confronted with its musical counterparts on the piano. Think also of Respighi's 'Pini di Roma'... As a consequence of the development of aural mimesis, the relations are gradually reversed: many a soundscapes is nowadays seasoned with genuine music (zie: greenmuseum).

And, finally, aural mimesis can seamlessly be combined with aural architecture. The nature of the sounds emitted by the sound beacons does not matter in principle. Although recognisable sounds have a major drawback: were we to use the roaring of the lion or the howling of the wolf, our very aural architecture would threaten to be transformed in the evocation of the savannah or the forest - or be debased to sheer deceptive illusionism, as when, when hearing the claps of thunder, we would haste to seek shelter. Pacifying sounds, such as the surf of the sea or bird songs from the rain forest, apply more readily, but the imaginary effects will not fail: which everybody, who fancied to let the murmur of a brook resound in a landscape of desks on the working floor, would soon find out... These examples make it abundantly clear why aural architecture - not otherwise than music - tends to resort to purely artificial sounds that remind of nothing except themselves: exemplary already in the ringing of bells or the flourish of trumpets. The purely 'musical' tones of these instruments are all the more welcome, since, with the ringing of bells as well as with the flourish of trumpets, precisely the vertical axis of musical space is erected, the very axis that is so difficult to realise in real space - and that as well in the height as in the depth: although the giant bell that Tarkovsky has the bell-founder cast in Anton Roublev is hanging high in the tower of the cathedral, its ringing seems to resound from the depths of the earth - a genuine  'Ruf aus der Tiefe'. So that musical space here elegantly solves the technical problems in realising the vertical dimension....


DIE GEBURT DES SOUNDSCAPES AUS DEM GEISTE DER MUSIK

In his endeavour to give his creations a name - or to provide them of a respectable aura -  Pierre Schaeffer asked himself: "Something has been added, a new art of sound. I am wrong when I call it music?"  His question has to be answered negatively - even when his creations continue to be called  'musique concrète': 'sonography', by analogy with 'photography', would have been a better alternative. And that raises a new question: why was it not evident from the beginning that, next to music, there is something like aural mimesis and aural design/architecture? Why could everything that sounded - Cage's 'sons trouvés' included - pass for music?

Most important evildoer has certainly been the fact that music has for a long time been considered as the paradigm of non-representing, non-mimetic - abstract - art. Failing the concept of mimesis, the scheme above collapses like a house of cards – no longer is it possible then to distinguish four kinds of 'sound games'. That was not much of a problem, as long as every composing was music indeed –  as has been the case until far in the twentieth century. It became something of a problem only when the extension of the array of sounds came to be experienced as an extension of the domain of music - even where in fact a new territory had been entered, that of aural mimesis. Because at the same time the musical means came to encompass a broader array of sounds, it was not from the beginning evident that we were dealing with a double development. Especially not since there were many hybrid compositions. And foremost not because it were often the same people that were active in the new domains, using the same instruments: thus, Ligeti's 'Poème symphonique' belongs in the world of the 'soundingly moved forms' just like marbles that one would throw from marble stairs; his 'Glissandi'  belongs in the world of aural mimesis, and his  'Atmosphères' in the world of music pur sang, while, finally, his 'Aventures' is a hybrid form that combines music with aural mimesis...


LET THERE BE LIGHT ...

But it is not because the soundscape is born 'aus dem Geiste der Musik', that we should not cut the umbilical chord that binds it to its respectable mother. Such is more than ever necessary: the false consciousness that everything that sounds is music has wreaked a terrible havoc!

It has in the first place checked and handicapped the development of the evocative soundscape. With hindsight, it can only amaze us why someone like Pierre Schaeffer did not find from the beginning the appropriate methods of composing for his 'objets sonores', and rather felt called to integrate them in 'melodic structures' and even 'gavottes', as if they were 'tones' instead! It speaks volumes that the development of the soundscape - apart from the evolution in the cinema, where the soundscape is combined with images on the screen - suddenly proceeded faster and more purposive when, from a totally different world as that of musicians, people like Murray Schafer began to record the 'acoustic environment' on tape. Only here cutting and editing, like in the film, has been used as the most obvious way of composing - something also Luc Ferrari soon understood. That is not to say that a soundscape could not be more than a mere aural background: it certainly could also render a more organically structured event, or even a dramatic plot. But only then would we inevitably stumble upon the inherent shortcoming of aural mimesis: that the overwhelming majority of objects and events are bluntly inaudible! When you would turn off the sound in a dance temple, practically nothing would be there to be heard anymore! (see: Visual music). That is precisely the reason why, in matters of sound, not aural mimesis, but musical mimesis has been developed!!

And had art not been treated on the same footing as design, we surely would have witnessed, in that high technological ear of ours, the far more important emergence of a genuine aural design and dito architecture, as sketched above. Nowadays the term 'musical architecture' - a veritable contradictio in terminis as we know by now - is used to denotate all kinds of phenomena like the filling of diverse rooms with background music or background sounds - not the disposition of aural beacons over an extended surface in real space, as otherwise columns and obelisks, trees and fountains, buildings and towers - or buoys on the surface of seas and lakes... How differently would things have evolved, had a proper designation like 'aural architecture' been used and had the proper association with the aural architecture from pre-industrial times been made from the beginning....

But foremost music would have fared better. The development of an autonomous aural mimesis with appropriate materials and appropriate ways of composing would have made it clear that, in music, sound does not render an aural appearance but rather provides the impulses for movement, preferably with tones that are part intervals determined by tonal relations. Tonal relations: for, although all the tones comprised within a glissando from low to high qualify for ordinary aural mimesis, when it comes to music, pitch cannot be determined at, as Stockhausen would have us believe: only Pythagoras’ discrete tones will do, although nowadays they may go hidden in sounds that have rather something of noise or in complex clusters of tones. For only such tones structure musical space in layers of octaves and, what is even more important, only they provide dynamic and expressive intervals. It is telling that aural architecture can suffice with (the repetition) of single sounds - think of the ringing of a bell or the call or the sound of a mist horn. Finally, a clearly understood differentiation of music, aural mimesis and aural architecture would have prevented the inglorious implosion of musical space as a consequence of the disposition of loudspeakers and musicians alike over the four corners of space around the public: imagine Ligeti's Atmosphères - not to mention Beethoven's Ninth - played by an orchestra the musicians of which were disposed on the seats of the Coliseum, in an oval around the public in the arena: spectacle – soundscape – everywhere! But form the music, nothing would be left. Nothing more unmusical than 'surround sound' – that ideal belongs in the world of aural mimesis, but foremost in the world of aural architecture.

Wherewith is demonstrated again what havoc can be wrought by wrong ideas - or, conversely, as we hope, how stimulating good ideas may well be.....


© Stefan Beyst , August 2004       


 * Bill Fontana's musical sculptures: the shadows of John Cage.
** For the technical problems that have to be overcome here: see the last paragraph of            'Musical Space and its inhabitants'.      

BOOKs

SCHAFER, Murray R: 'The Soundscape' Destiny Books, 1977,1994.
SCHWARTZ, Hillel: 'Noise and Silence: The Soundscape and Spirituality'
               
   

 

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referrers The World Soundscape Project Matt Borghi

* as an extra: a poem by Carlos Barbarito (John Cage, 4' 33'') In the centre of the world, a piano, silent; music, the noises of the world: there is no animal that does not cry out, squawk, howl, puff, snort; there is no thing that does not grind, chirp, squeak, ferment, exhale. In the centre, a man motionless at the keyboard; the music, the noises of the others: stammering, stuttering, applause, groans, calls, imprecations, belches, flatulence, entreaties, supplications, curses, songs. (Translation Brian Cole)

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