Ashley Scott is a composer based in Sydney
We shall define theoretical objects which have at least some concrete (material, vibratory) reality and functions which connect and structure them, according to various kinds of necessity (conventional, creative). In a sense, this is to overstep the boundaries of semiotics (because it involves much study of the referent and relations other than those of 'semiosis') in the interest of establishing the conditions of denotation in the perception and classification of sounds.
1.
The Situation of Hearing: There are, on reflection, three non-metaphysical sites through which one can define the process which leads to the 'hearing of a sound'. Even though these fall into different genres of address in language (one is a real object, one an event, one an activity of consciousness), there can be no relevant objections to considering them upon the same level, once one demonstrates their connectedness. They are:
a) an EMITTER (ER): a material object, machine or agent which, due to some form of excitation or work, transmits energy as audible vibrations. The ER is the sound source, or 'sounding object'. It belongs in the order of action or motion.
b) an EMISSION (EN): what is given off, produced by the emitter due to some action. The EN is often characterised as a material (especially in a recorded, spatial state), but let us characterise it as an articulation of sound waves, to distinguish it from the 'stronger' force involved with the ER.
c) a LISTENING SUBJECT (SU): the subject is here dealt with as the site of perception, interpretations and judgement. These are the vital interior functions which will enter the account. For the SU, one can say that there exists an order of aspects which describes the subject's interrogation of the EN.
This constitutes what will be taken as a fundamental case, even though it is but one of a number of action/signal/perceptual chains which might be invented to study the transmission of sound sequences. The above chain plots the itinerary of 'a sound event' from source to its 'final destination': someone's ear.
The divisions of this itinerary are demonstrated in phonetics, where the vocal apparatus constitutes an articulatory stage (ER); the sound waves, an acoustic stage (EN); and the hearing apparatus, an auditory stage (SU).
2.
All this seems intuitively plausible: what are its characteristics? It is causal: according to the conditions of audibility (distance, loudness, frequency range), the chain describes the production of sounds, their dispersal and perception. The concern here is for the immediate sonic situation, such as might be taken from a 'random sampling' of any instant.
It is simplified: the chain ignores the mediations and additional processes through which the EN may have passed, in order to present it as an entity or actant in a tripartite situation - instead of it being dissolved into a relation between, for instance, the two halves of emitter (speaker) and subject (listener).
It is irreversible: it describes an itinerary of that which is heard, literally, at the speed of sound. Apart from the causal relations of the chain, which are fixed, the EN reveals a unique temporal ordering integral to it: it initially belongs to an irreversible order of duration. These principles are based upon the practicalities of listening - for example, a listener's interrogation of the EN reverses the chain in order to 'find' the ER (i.e., to source 'that sound'). The activities of thought don't always match the physical necessities governing its objects (they have nothing to do with a knowledge of acoustics as science or the just-mentioned irreversibility). However, it is important to define the objective situation which governs the activity of hearing, and this is essentially the background which acoustic science takes for itself, in order to concentrate upon the practical or interesting characteristics of the chain.1
3.
Having proposed this signal chain, it is (as above) typically validated for each individual by the very act of imaginatively reversing its flow, from audition back to action (encompassing the activities of identification and location): the subject 'envelopes' or absorbs the EN in a recorded, repeated or memorised form and seeks to identify the ER through this perception and to map aspects of the sound to the mechanical elements of the ER, or to a temporal sequence which it seems to present.2
Taken literally, the connection EN to SU is the condition of hearing, degree zero. Of course, the EN and ER are known in a different form to the listener than those relevant in acoustics: the EN must be provisionally accounted for as the perceived articulations of some kind of sonorous 'matter'. The ER is usually known as a referent, a technical artefact or some natural event, but it is only an object of auditory knowledge through some sort of action, leading to an emission.
This perception of 'sounds', audible entities, is assumed to constitute as valid an object of knowledge as the decomposed set of relations which describe the acoustic physics specific to any situation in correspondence to general laws. Musical knowledge can be assumed to follow the same outline and is in fact functionally complete (as is one's knowledge of the native sound-world), in reference to its own practice prior to science.
4.
Some comments are in order regarding the artificiality of this chain. Common auditory experience, which is not separated from all other sorts of perception, is contextualised before the fact by the listener's expectation of environment.3 The above situation would seem to describe the subject of an experiment, kidnapped by musical psychologists and placed in a 'neutral' environment, where stimuli are rarefied (the audiometrics lab, a soundproof room or headphones) and expectation is 'surprised'.
In the context of 'listening to the radio' or walking through a park 'hearing various soap-box orators', the subject's sound world is determined by their intentions and the probabilities of what emissions are offered.
These situations immediately plunge one into the world of what can be naively called 'forms', and the necessity of explaining how we perceive or derive 'contents' (as meaning), as well as providing a multiplicity of emissions not necessarily tailored for hearing. These are complex sound worlds, both in concrete and formal terms, although absolutely typical of real experience. But the first act is to make basic separations amongst the 'stimuli', and the world of SOUND (as the 'field' of potential sound events, which assumes metaphysical proportions) is swiftly reduced to a set of 'sounds' (defined occasions).4
This context of isolation is commonly used in psychology experiments, but the aim here is different: not reactions to stimuli from a wider environment, but response to and constitution of sound. This context differs from the above 'natural' situation in the loss of the subject's choice and focus upon a sound environment as a lived continuum, expressed as the listener's intention.
The 'signal chain' is proposed so one might examine the determination or definition of forms which the isolated subject engages in. The common factor within all instances of audition is that no matter what the subject derives from hearing (alerts, sensible and meaningful information), it is all derived from vibrations in the air, that is, it has a concrete basis. A 'body' of interpretation, which constitutes a phenomenology of form, is at work, consciously or not, within the hearing of any individual. It is for this reason that the auditory field (which is thus much more than just 'the auditory mechanism') is characterised by acts of hearing: there is no virtual concept of 'SOUND' worth positing, but articulated sonic forms, perceived and re-formed in the hearing of...5
The dialectic of the experience of form and of time is mediated, but not at all resolved through the functions of memory and those of recording and notation. This will be dealt with later, but 'form' must come first.
Let us say that a subject perceives an EN of which they have no prior experience or information (the 'unheard', the 'lost chord', etc.) - something for which there is no immediate comparison or meaning, no reference and thus no code or causality. The following chain applies: (ER) (EN-SU)
The ER is struck out of the chain as inaccessible (although it may be sourced later). The crucial relation is EN-SU.
It seems plausible that the listener will deal with this sound-event in a way which highlights its unfolding as an 'object', a sort of audible 'substance' (whereas before, it was more likely to be subsumed into the never-ending flow of phenomena). The following preliminary stages of getting to know this isolated object (essentially, calculating its dimensions and composition) seem possible:
SEGMENTATION (analysis of the perceived energy flow): is the sound discrete or continuous according to the acoustic parameter of amplitude? Are there recurrent features, oscillations in the intensity of the event, which suggest the breaking up of the flow into units which could be called 'audible segments'?
This is a purely mental operation - the sound is unaffected - but its trace in the listener's consideration is marked according to the criteria of what Pierre Schaeffer has called 'stress-articulation' (the points of intensity or gaps which reveal the modular nature of a sound-chain; the gaps between words and attacks of consonants in speech, etc., best demonstrated in the breaking up of a poem into syllables) thus rendering an energetic profile of the object and its separation from the chain or flow of sounds within which it is usually located. This stage which seems primary - because it is a matter of form over time - reveals the 'beginning' and 'end' of the object (its 'length') as well as giving an impression of its execution, whether it is discrete and singular, or one cycle of a repetitious sound.6
Figure 1: 'stress-articulation'.
This practice represents the first stage in the 'abandonment' of the temporal flow towards a static consideration of a sonic 'substance',7 which is as yet undefined.
CHARACTERISATION (delimitation of components): firstly,what within this segment is 'of the sound' and what is added by the environment, as reverberation, resonance, reinforcement and other 'distortions'? In attempting to separate the ER and EN as received, one loses the neat distinction between 'that sound' and the effects of the acoustic environment (an emitter is usually portable and its 'true sound' is known). The ramifications of taking the EN as the starting point must be accepted: acoustic 'colouration' is part of the EN (although, in terms of recognition, a listener may be able to define the environment in more detail than the emitter). More importantly, the basic morphology of the object can be defined:
Simple objects: a fused or single perceptible sonic form, with clear start and finish, basically discrete.
Compound objects: "consisting of objects which have more or less merged at the same instant into a single outline"8 in the manner of a chord. An entity with 'layers' or components.
Composite objects: composed of elements which overlap or succeed each other in the length of the segment, in the manner of a melody.
Figure 2.
Two themes emerge - that time is necessarily abstracted into memory, or a graphism, which parameterises time as one of the axes of a sonic representation and, that as 'segmentation', focused upon the global unity of 'that sound', 'characterisation' traces and splits this unity into the components of the whole object. Indeed, there is no other justification for these concerns, except that these components strike one as formations, identities in themselves. QUALIFICATION (componential analysis): firstly, what the listener might have seized upon immediately - impressions of motion, solidity, friction, hardness, softness, etc. - what are called sonic 'allures' which, like a vapour or type of luminance, radiate from the object. These comparisons are admissible, because by 'allure' is meant the immediate and synaesthesic sensuality of the sound, over and above reference and what might be mistaken as the connotative aspects of the sound, which tends to be too narrow.
These qualities are the ones most readily described in ordinary language (or rather, approximated); they belong to the immediacy of perception and do not 'need to be thought'. A parallel might be drawn with the 'direct' or onomatopoeic aspects of pronunciation and language.
This Qualification stage is also, within the analytic lineage outlined, a closer characterisation of the sonic components which make up the object, which will tend to lead even further into a temporality, graphism and to a certain extent, acoustics. There is insufficient basis to begin to define this so far, so it must be left for the moment.
The three procedures of segmenting, characterising and qualifying are operations through which the listener might define the perception, by operating upon it imaginatively and graphically. They cannot be called 'levels' (of some comprehensive theory) as there is as yet no plausible context for their deployment: we have not defined any sort of systematic procedure leading to the definition of 'sonic types'.
What has been gained from this dissection is a sense of complication - that knowledge stems from the contexts and constraints imposed upon perception. The everyday participation in the decoding of sound texts, or rather, known sound media, which is essentially a social practice, is thus relegated to one category of sonic experience which depends upon a plenitude of phenomena and pre-existing codes or protocols.
The sound 'substance' - which supports whatever derivations the listener makes of perception, as signifying, aesthetic, pertaining to natural environments, whatever - is not defined, but seems to be a necessary hypostatisation of what are only ripples in air-molecules in order to state that: 'sound may become an object of knowledge outside of so-called 'structures' and thus constituted, may be dealt with, even, as abstracted from temporality (its essential basis), according to criteria derived from the analysis of nothing but other sound-events'.
This has become possible through the technological fact of sound recording, which radically improves access to a) the concrete sound as a plastic item encoded on a spatial carrier-medium, and b) the repetition of the emission allowing a more concentrated hearing of 'that sound', or sufficient re-audition.v It is thus a rather complex environment within which this analysis can take place, crossing media boundaries (actual 'sound as recorded', 'sound as graphed or written') and requiring new expertise: that of hearing and judgement according to 'sound as emission' (not as bound to a source or instrument). A great revision of our judgement and sensibilities is obviously required, in order to come to terms with this.9
5.
The operations described created abstracted (consciously derived) identities (sound identities) according to criteria which are auditory (they did not require measuring instruments). The above stages were carried out in some order as acts not in an acoustic sphere, but by the 'ear and its brain' - the auditory apparatus - a representation of a concrete sound entity.
An instance of 'sound' was experienced: a segment of the world of 'SOUND' which is the total acoustic substance which might be articulated (formed) as communicative utterances or significative alerts.10 The aim was to try and experience by proxy - in writing - an un-named but real occasion: all the abstract, informative or meaningful characteristics of sound, intentionally formed or not, are derived from the concrete, purely physical features which were described in a preliminary manner above. This is assumed to be true through all the hierarchies which a system using sound waves as its carrier or medium might exhibit. Likewise, a means of designating sound-events will be similarly constituted. The preceding pages constitute the initial terms prefacing a study of sound perception through the terms of information theory and semiotics, proceeding to discussion of Pierre Schaeffer's proposals of 'reduced hearing'.
Référence: http://autonomous.org/soundsite/main.html