The acousmatic relates to the formal but is a looser and therefore broader characterisation. Musical form, as noted above, is understood in terms of musical elements such as harmony, pitch, etc. In other words, the notion of musical form bottoms out at the concept of tones: discrete sound-events specifically ordered about the frequency-spectrum. The notion of the acousmatic does not share this constraint: Let’s say I am walking in the woods and hear a creaking sound above me. An acousmatic response would be “That’s a very interesting high-pitched sound, intermittent and rising in intensity”… A non-acousmatic response, in contrast, might simply be to look up, while thinking, “Is that branch about to topple onto me?” (Hamilton 2007: 102)
To attend to the acoustic properties of sound at the exclusion of real causes would be to attend to just whatever parts of the sonic array can be perceptually distinguished. This then suggests a broader notion of ‘immediately perceivable properties’ that does not refer to musical elements. Recourse to the acousmatic can thus be useful in giving a characterisation of musical listening as being determined by immediately perceivable properties while not presupposing musical elements.
The term is associated with Pierre Schaeffer and the Modernist movement, denoting a listening practice where acoustic qualities are favoured over the literal origins of sounds. To listen acousmatically is to veil real-world causes from consciousness and attend only to intrinsic properties of sound. While the acousmatic was tied to art on the emergence of electronic music and musique
concrete in the 20th Century, the term has its roots in ancient Greece and
akousmatikoi– an ancient term used to refer to a school of Pythagorean thought.
Pythagoras is alleged to have given lectures from behind a screen, occluding himself so that his students could focus only on the words he spoke and not the speaker– akousmatikoi translating as ‘those willing to hear’ (Hamilton 2007: 100.) Many centuries later, advances in sound recording techniques provided another means to occlude sound sources and thus to ‘return to an ancient tradition… restoring to hearing alone the entire responsibility of hearing a perception ordinarily leaning on other sensory evidence.’92
It is important to note that both the example of recorded sound and of a sound source being occluded by a screen present the acousmatic as a way of listening that is forced upon the listener: in each case the sources and/or causes of the sounds are not available to the listener, ensuring that only the sounds themselves can be attended to. The practice of listening to a concealed sound source implies that the causal origins are hidden; sound recording can be hailed as a particularly efficacious means to realise the acousmatic, due to its technical capacity to dissociate sound from its source. This then is a strict sense of
acousmatic as ‘listening without seeing’. However, another looser sense has been given by Scruton (1999), according to which the tacit detachment of real causes is a necessary and basic aspect of music listening, one that obtains whether or not real causes are evident. As discussed in chapter 2, Scruton envisages a metaphorical sound-world where virtual causes and forces play out amongst tones, breathing life into sound through musical organisation. This treatment might seem to broaden the acousmatic by omitting any practical constraint in favour of the intentional constraint that sound is ‘heard “apart from” the everyday physical world’.93 If acousmatic listening depended only on bringing a particular intentional attitude, it would be a mode of listening pertinent to soundscape, musique concrete, tonal and atonal music alike. However, the acousmatic is reserved exclusively for cases of musical organization in Scruton’s (1999) view, where ‘musical’ denotes that belonging to the Western tonal tradition, although he does acknowledge a music-independent acousmatic experience in later work (2009).94
The concept of the acousmatic that can help elucidate a phenomenal view does not have the condition either that acousmatic listening is reserved for musical tones, or that it is ‘listening without seeing’, although I concede that acousmatic listening does entail bringing a particular intentional attitude of detaching sound from its sources– such detachment is necessary for nonconceptual perception. This notion of acousmatic can be considered an element of the Modernist critique of prevailing artistic standards; by engaging with ‘acoustical’ rather than ‘musical’ qualities, Modernist composers could lay claim to an artform whose borders stretch just as far as the sensory modality in which it is grounded. 95 Much of the justification of John Cage’s music came from his exploration of this freedom, his willingness ‘to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for 93 Scruton 1999: 19, emphasis added. 94 Hamilton points out a further notion of acousmatic– ‘listening without knowing the cause’ (2007: 101). 95 However an interpretation of acousmatic listening that includes experiences of musical movement diverges from that made by Schaeffer, who considers a sense of movement as being not an aspect of the sounds themselves, but rather a perceptual effect of the sonic materials. For Schaeffer, the listening attitude adopted should be suppressive of such effects. Scruton’s view is distinct in that he suggests listeners ‘spontaneously detach’ sounds from information about their respective real-world causes.
man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments.’96 The irony of this critique is that the Modernist celebration of the acoustic has at its heart the traditional aesthetic notion of disinterestedness where purpose is subjugated to intrinsic quality: ‘To be interested in Satie one must be disinterested to begin with, accept that a sound is a sound and a man is a man’ (Cage 1961: 81) It could be argued that acousmatic listening has a transformative power to enlarge the aesthetic significantly, promising that music can obtain in any sonic form.
There is thus a danger here that the acousmatic conception merely reiterates the Kantian conception of the disinterested aesthetic attitude, and as such it is worth making absolutely clear the differences. As discussed above, the acousmatic provides a useful means of denoting a particular listening attitude, pertinent to aesthetics, whose primary characterization is in terms of sound rather than the musically aesthetic. The reasons for the acousmatic lacking the association with the aesthetic that the formal has relate in part to distinct lineage, with the acousmatic being formulated without reference to art or the aesthetic, and being appropriated by Modernists who endeavored to oppose the hegemonic system that had developed since the enlightenment and, particularly, Kant’s framework. But perhaps the clearest way to distinguish the acousmatic is by noting that it makes no assumptions of value or pleasure, central to the judgement of beauty, and as such clouds the line between the aesthetic– which must have some value component (even if not a pleasurable one)– and the merely perceptual. It is perhaps this character that for Scruton suggests the acousmatic as proto-music, entailing the pertinent intentional attitude if not the organization that brooks
value.
Indeed, without the tonal framework, the meaning of sound sources or artistic precedence, there are no obvious means to assign value to the acoustic qualities of sound, leading to Cage’s conjecture that there are no ugly sounds. The next chapter deals with value in detail, although it is apt to consider Cage’s claim here in order to suitably expand on the notion of the acousmatic and thus indicate the boundaries of music a phenomenal view imposes. Acousmatic in the relevant
sense is merely the awareness of the acoustic coupled with ignorance of the causal. I will attempt to show that acousmatic listening in this sense has the potential for value without reliance on musical elements such as tones.
Many soundscapes might offer valued acousmatic experience due to their richness and balance; consider for example a busy London coffee shop. One might hear the broken rhythm of footsteps panning across both axes as a waiter moves between tables; the clinking of crockery as he clears; the scraping of chairs and a slamming door; the whirring coffee machine and bubbling milk frother; the distinct hums of the air-conditioner and fridge combining as one and passing traffic– high-frequencies attenuated by the glazing– presenting as infinitely variable waves of white noise; the room filled with conversations, perhaps in a number of different languages, each of which employing different vocal ranges and timbres along with individual dynamic-/pitch-contours; and underlying it all is the bed of familiar pop music, tinnily sounding out from an inexpensive sound system. Such a scene has great complexity and intricacy, with a range of sound sources, many of which are constantly traversing space; a listener is active in this spatial complexity, holding the potential to substantially alter the phenomenology of the scene just by moving her head towards or away from particular sources.
It seems reasonable that one’s attention might be absorbed by this soundscape, but not out of desire for its sources, nor intellectual curiosity, nor its musicological ingenuity. Consider that the words used to summarise the above experience are apt to describe an aesthetic object: ‘intricacy’, ‘complexity’, ‘richness’, ‘balance’. These are pervasive words in aesthetics, while still being definable without reference to aesthetics. Such a soundscape, then, completely lacks the order of the tonal system but might nonetheless be granted aesthetic credibility. However, while such an aesthetic experience does not rely on the tonal system, it nonetheless depends on a particular order of elements: if a baby on the next table starts to cry loudly, attention would be interrupted and the value of the experience duly altered, just as it would if the pop music were played so loud that the speakers resonate, or it so happened that all
conversations ceased but one and attention was thus drawn to its content. The experience’s potential for value is in fact delicately poised, mediated by the acoustic properties of the soundscape. A complex non-tonal aesthetic experience depends on balance, variety and change, just as does a tonal aesthetic experience, and these qualities are understood by invocation of acoustic properties. A crying baby can spoil the experience just because it is a sound of high intensity at a high frequency.
There are no reasons to suppose this experience of a London coffee shop cannot be fully rendered in psycho-acoustic terms, and that the value of such an experience cannot be described using terms that aestheticians use to ascribe value. The distinction here is that the potential for such a soundscape to be valuable cannot be explained using a musicological analysis in terms of musical elements, but can be understood in terms of psycho-acoustic properties. The musically aesthetic, then, depends on (i) bringing an acousmatic attitude to sound, where real-world causes and sources are ignored, (ii) finding a value that depends on an ordering of psycho-acoustic properties that (iii) can be described using terms that have utility in aesthetic description. This invites the question of what relation (iii)– description in terms normally used to denote aesthetic value– truly has to value, but this is a question for the next chapter.