TRASLADO Y CUSTODIA DE EXPLOSIVOS Y MATERIALES RELACIONADOS

Around the same time that I was discovering the work of R. Murray Schafer, I also became particularly interested in Pierre Schaeffer’s — and a few years later — Michel Chion’s ideas. In this next section, I will refer to Pierre Schaeffer’s ‘reduced listening’ as developed by composer Michel Chion, in his book, Le son, traité d’acoulogie (1998). Pierre Schaeffer (1910─1995) was a French engineer and music composer who developed new ways of making music by using technologies available at that time in radio studios. Schaeffer’s music used recorded sounds and electronically-generated sounds that were

edited and processed in the music studio. One of his first music compositions, ‘Étude aux chemins de fer’ (1948), consists of different recordings of trains. As the sounds used in

musique concrète could not be measured and named like those made by musical

instruments, Schaeffer created a system of description and classification that he called Solfège of the sound object (Chion 2016, 169). Sound objects are defined in Michel Chion as ‘every sonic phenomenon and event perceived as an ensemble, as a coherent whole — and heard by means of reduced listening, which targets it for itself, in-de-pendently of its provenance or its signification’ (Chion 2016, 171). In Schaeffer’s system, any sound could be part of a musical composition as long as it was detached from its cause. ‘Reduced listening’ in Schaeffer’s terms, is a manner of paying attention to sounds ‘for themselves’ without taking into consideration the cause that has originated them.

Michel Chion (1947) was Schaeffer’s personal assistant in the early ‘70s at the National conservatory of Music. His book, Le son, traité d’acoulogy (1998), is inspired by Schaeffer’s most important concepts such as the sound object and reduced listening. As the title suggests, this book is particularly interesting to me as it emphasises how listening works88_{. Below, I will foreground significant findings on listening by Chion that are} useful for my research.

2.2.1 Language, performative listening and silence

In his book, Chion stresses the role of language in the experience of listening. According to Chion, ‘the ear canal’s structure allows the privileging of frequencies within the range of human speech, while it tends to eliminate or attenuate sounds that are apt to impede verbal comprehension, namely, bass frequencies’ (Chion 2016, 19). Often, Chion uses the word entendre (hear) that in French also means to understand (comprendre), as if the activity of listening had to do with the act of decoding sounds. For Chion, the world becomes ‘legible’ because one has good descriptive tools:

When it is a matter of abstract objects, the richness of our descriptive references renders the visual world legible to our eyes. The visual world no more than the sonic world is given to us as structured from the outset. Rather, this structuration is a product of education, language, and culture’ (Chion 2016, 60).

According to Chion listening is performative: ‘when things are said, their manner of being changes’ (2016, 13). Naming is, for the composer, a deconditioning exercise that allows ‘a new type of preperceptual expectation and a much more elaborated structuration of listening’ (Ibid, 28). Chion suggests that hearing (entendre) is ‘already a form of making’ (2016, 57), which seems to relate to Alfred Tomatis’ idea that ‘one can only emit vocally what one hears’ (Ibid, 15).

Whilst discussing the work of Cage, Chion argues that silence is a sound that doesn’t speak (2016, 49). This does not mean an absence of sound, but he seems to refer to sounds that are unprocessed, raw, or unfiltered89_{. What he suggests is that, ‘in a sense, an infant} hears more objectively than we do insofar as he or she does not yet filter the sonic whole in order to extract the useful signal’ (Chion 2016, 13).

2.2.2 The audition of sounds

Below, I have gathered significant observations made by Chion on the perception of sounds in relation to frequency, noise, silence, and movement. He states that ‘audition is easier and more detailed at a low or moderate sound level than at an elevated one’ (2016, 22). He also indicates that ‘bass sounds mask more than high-pitched sounds’ (Chion

89 _{Chion’s discourse evokes the idea of a continuum of sounds that could be compared to what I experienced}

in Istanbul. Following his ideas, it is probably due to my knowledge of Schaeffer ideas that I was able to perceive these sounds and give to them a meaning: ‘The Schaefferian criteria provide the means (…) to begin to perceive units, points, and lines within the apparently undifferentiated continuum of the audible universe. Needless to say, it is not a matter of little landmarks placed here - and there, and we cannot reduce everything that is presented to our ears to these basic forms. But in order for the apparent sonic “flux” to little by little change in appearance, it suffices that it be punctuated, carved up, partially structured by the forms that we peel away from it and by the sound maps and more or less shifting types that we learn to delineate within it’ (Chion 2016, 60).

2016, 26). Furthermore, for the composer, high-pitched sounds pass through other sounds more easily than low-frequency sounds.

Chion indicates that noise is necessary to appreciate the clarity of music. The sounds of a guitar, for instance, would be reinforced, thanks to the noises produced by the finger when touching the strings. Chion indicates in his book that any musical system requires what is located outside of it and seems to be foreign (Chion 2016, 63). In addition, he suggests that a sound that is moving is easier to locate than one that is static. If the listener moves the head, the sound will change (especially if that is a high-pitched sound). Also, a sound that moves away becomes a different sound (it is not simply the same sound, but softer according to Chion).

Chion also asserts that ‘the sound that you stop hearing or producing releases or allows other sounds, which you previously could not make out, to come into perception’ (2016, 85). He argues that ‘a sound must be silenced in order for another to exist’. Chion observes that the silence that follows the interruption of a sound gives the impression that this silence is listening to us (2016, 61). Silence makes our listening more accurate but also give us the impression that something or someone is listening to us. Silence, according to Chion, is ‘like a bright light illuminating us’90_.

In his book, Chion explains that listening is not simply an activity of passive recognition, but it is also, in a way, about rebuilding or restoring the sounds we can hear. For instance, ‘an octave is as a rule perceived as shorter and more compressed in the high range than in the middle’ (Chion 2016, 22). As a result, when listening to music one corrects (unconsciously) this effect to compensate this deformation. Chion also refers to the ‘cocktail party effect’ to describe how the process of listening involves ‘making’ sounds (p.27). In situations where one cannot perceive all the sounds that are produced during a conversation because of noise, ‘listening’ recreates the missing sounds.

90 _{‘An exceptionally quiet environment puts us in a position to be able to make out the smallest sound, but}

also to be able to be everywhere heard. Silence is then like a bright light illuminating us. This silence makes us vulnerable with respect to the sounds that we make, whereas the sound [ bruit ] of another’s voice is like a mask in relation to any sounds [ bruits ] that we produce’ (Chion 2016, 91).

According to Chion, one does not strictly listen to a sound from the beginning to the end, but rather just to the beginning. He explains that the ear, after a few seconds, anticipates how the sound will end. Consequently, it is much more surprising for the ‘ear’ to pay attention to the beginning of a sound than to its ending. For Chion, all sounds are continuous or linked to each other. It is in the process of listening that one separates one sound from another. For Chion, perceiving sounds involves a process of pre-perception. One does hear sounds, or rather recognises them, according to a grid of existing sounds already heard in the past or similar to those already heard. ‘The ear’ restores sounds, rather than inventing them.

From Chion’s ideas, we can note that language is fundamental to the process of listening. If one does not understand a sound (entendre), he or she might not be able to produce it or even hear it. Nevertheless, it remains unclear if, for Chion, the language of sounds is universal or does change according to different cultures. For instance, is the diversity of languages linked to the diversity of ways of perceiving sounds?

If sounds are always continuous, it might be that in my Istanbul experience I would have been able to, for a few moments, hear this continuity and experience a sort of pre-language listening or listening without hearing (in the sense of comprendre). However, if what we can hear is informed by language, how could I have ignored — during the Istanbul experience — what I had learnt from R. Murray Schafer’s literature about environmental sound?