16.-PLAN COMERCIAL

Pierre Schaeffer used the term acousmatic listening (1952/2012) to refer to the situation of listening to a sound divorced from its source. The term was derived from accounts of Pythagoras’ teaching, where students sat and listened to their teacher delivering lectures from behind a screen, remaining unseen throughout. Within Greek pedagogical theory placing all the student’s attention on the content rather than the source of that sound resulted in more effective learning. For Schaeffer, the situation was analogous to that of listening to pre-recorded sound through a loudspeaker.

When listening to, for example, a recording of a train, the listener is listening to the sound of a train and cannot see the original train. Because of this gap, only afforded by the time-travelling magic of tape recording, Schaeffer argued that the sound of that train could be understood as a separate entity; as an object distinct from that original source. He called this the objet sonore or sound object. This sound object could now be analysed according to parameters such as pitch, grain, density or timbre, notions entirely separate from the source of that sound (the train made of pistons, wheels and slamming doors, for example).

Schaeffer subsequently developed the strategy of reduced listening, which was premised on an intentional bracketing-off of sound from its source, to exploit further this acousmatic situation and to allow a deeper understanding of sound as a thing-in-itself¹.

For Schaeffer, after days in his studio, the sound of a train did become something other than ‘a train’. He notes how it slipped from being ‘bound to objects and events in the material world’ (ibid) - and became something in its own right. It was the acousmatic mode of listening that afforded Schaeffer this transformation, and it was in the strategy of reduced listening that he could creatively exploit this. It was because he could separate sound and source through the novel technology at his disposal that he could entertain such a transformative relationship with his material.

2.3.1 Incidental Music And Scrib

Returning to Open Studio, I was very interested in the acousmatic situation of listening and its potential for offering listeners a more creative and open response to sound and the possibility to, through their listening, reimagine certain sounds as something other than their source². I was interested in finding ways in which participants could get that sense of the ‘whole art being in the hearing’.

1 Schaeffer’s work drew heavily on Husserl’s notion of bracketing and epoche (see Kane, 2007 for a discussion of this issue).

2 This was an idea I had been exploring in my work before my PhD and also within an ongoing academic interest in the claims of representational sound practices such as field recording, that made mimetic claims on the presence of a source in a sound recording (see Scott, 2013c for a more detailed example of this idea.)

Figure 7: Scott, D. (2012) Incidental Music My first two Open Studio works were installations that encouraged interaction from the audience to trigger various sounds through touch, sounds that were then spatialised through the Clore Education Space at Tate Modern via a laptop and eight speakers. The first, entitled Incidental Music³ (Scott, 2012a), was an installation consisting of assorted items of ‘rubbish’ (cardboard boxes, plastic, paper cups etc.) on a table that were attached to a number of contact microphones (see figure 7). Visitors could manipulate the rubbish to create their own improvised composition, with the title referring to the fact that the sounds made were incidental to the act of rummaging and manipulating the objects.

The second work Scrib (Scott, 2012b featured three black panels, again amplified via contact microphones, fed through delays and effects and then spatialised. Audiences were encouraged to draw, scribble and write on musical manuscript paper that was placed on the black panels, so creating a soundscape of scribbling sounds across the room (see figure 8).

2.3.2 Reflections On Incidental Music And Scrib

Both Incidental Music and Scrib played with acousmatic listening by routing the sounds made by participants to the speakers via a delay effect of between one and thirty seconds.

3 See USB file ‘2 Incidental Music.wav’ for a sound recording of the installation.

The sounds were processed in different ways, retaining some of the qualities of the original sound, but also being distinct enough to take on a new grain or timbre.

Figure 8: Scott, D. (2012) Scrib Some children responded to this temporal gap by running from the sound source to the speaker, attempting to catch the sound as it emerged from the speaker. The work also encouraged a lot of interaction between the participants, with families trying out sounds and rhythms and discussing what they sounded like. Many visitors didn’t really scribble, as I had hoped, and instead used the pencils as drumsticks and played the panels percussively. For many, my careful arrangement of objects and speakers (as well as light) was merely a backdrop to making a lot of noise.

I suggest my own desire to foreground an acousmatic listening seemed to work against my objective to ‘create ambiguous and fluid space in which children can gradually create their own modes of navigation and understanding.’ Both works were essentially closed-systems, and part of their closed-ness seemed connected to the limited and reductive nature of the listening I was concerned with. They disallowed a listening between participants, and

participants were limited by the materiality of the objects they were presented with. Other sounds they made, other things they listened to were not implicated in the work, and so were ignored. In this regard, the works inhibited the imaginative leaps I wanted participants to engage in. Or, perhaps more accurately, the work was allowing imaginative leaps, but I had no real understanding of what they were, so I felt at the time that the work was failing. The notion of the acousmatic and the more strategic technique of reduced listening all contributed to a ‘reduced’ work where listening was bracketed towards a particular activity of sounding, rather than opened up to the imaginations of the participants and their multiple listening encounters in the space, acousmatic or otherwise.

In 2012 I was also aware of the problems in creating a space for listening⁴ and in making the listening the central focus of the work:

It has been a challenge to create a listening space that both focuses attention on listening without being too directive, too obtuse or too ‘barely-there’. Many visitors to Open Studio are looking for something to make, something that can then be gazed at, held up and told, ‘I made you’. Sound is ungraspable, and once there is gone again. Listening is even more elusive: even if they are directed and told ‘how’ to listen (close your eyes, focus on the sound in the speaker, move around etc.), how can one know if the visitor is listening ‘properly’? So sound could frustrate the visitor: nothing is made, nothing is seen, and nothing is held longer than a second. (Scott, 2012e)