Introduction
A sound is a complex event that may carry a range of different kinds of information. In the process of working with sound in artistic practice – be it a sound installation, a musical composition, or something else – access to the sound itself is at the same time both completely unproblematic and very enigmatic. It has a source and discernible sonic qualities; it may have a direction and a space; and it may give rise to several emotions, sometimes many different ones at the same time. A sound can be completely metaphysical, imagined as part of a dream, or it can be so physical that it is felt by the entire body. It can be painful or beautiful, harsh or soft. The balance between the information it may disperse will obviously depend on what kind of sound is dealt with, and all its parameters usually change to a significant degree over time: the attack and the decay of a trumpet sound, for example, may have completely different qualities. In electronic music, the same continuous sound may in the beginning appear to have an obvious and clear source yet end as an almost completely abstracted and deconstructed noise.[1] How can sound as a carrier of information be explored “despite its amorphous and volatile character” (Truax 2002: 22)? How can it be researched and analyzed through artistic practice in sound art, and how may such analyses contribute to a broader understanding of it?
This paper departs from ideas developed in the artistic research project Goodbye Intuition (GI).[2] The focus of GI was on improvising with "creative" machines. Playing with a machine that has little or no sense of intuition – neither according to the standard meaning of the word nor the meaning explored in this paper – reveals the complexity of the role that intuition plays when working with sound. One of the results of GI was the realization that even though the machine was patently unintuitive, the human improviser tended to project a sense of intuition unto it regardless.[3] What will be offered here is my continuation of the ideas explored in GI, primarily the impact and meaning of intuition as a means to understand sound art practices. I have been working with methods similar to those used and developed in GI (see Frisk 2020) where the research is carried out in a lab session in which my artistic processes are documented. Out of these sessions particular events are subsequently extracted and studied. The specific events I have chosen to study here have been selected to some extent based on purposeful sampling (Patton 2002). Intuition, in the sense that the French philosopher Henri Bergson uses the word, has been explored as a possible method[4] in this practice. Hence, my sound art practice is the primary source. More specifically, many of the electronic tools I work with – for example, programming languages, DSP processing systems, analog circuitries, and so forth – are often approached with methods more closely related to science and technology. However, in this paper, one of my ambitions is to attempt to understand these modes of sound production through intuition; it is not the analytical measurement of a gesture or of a sound but rather a holistic analysis of it. I will explore whether Bergson’s method of intuition may be useful for this purpose.
When playing an instrument, the sound is, to some degree, woven together with the gestures one performs as the music evolves. For the electronic music composer, sitting behind a computer screen for hours, the situation is different. There may not be any significant relation between the movement made to produce a sound – hit a key on a computer keyboard or play back a recording – and the sound, which can be an incredibly complex sonic event. Given a more holistic view of sound practices, several questions arise of which three are of particular interest to me:
- Questions relating to the contents of the sound – its shape, its gestural aspects, its space, etc. – need to be investigated by means of artistic practice in the studio. These contents can be analyzed deductively, one by one, but the design of the various tools which make this possible makes it difficult to successfully understand them together.
- The tools of a modern studio allow the composer to turn from a tiny detail of a sound to the whole in a blink of an eye, which is helpful in editing, as it adds precision, but may further contribute to a fragmentation of the material.
- The system of reproduction of sound in the studio is in almost all cases completely different from the one that the music will ultimately be played back on. For that reason, the composer will necessarily have to engage in a constant act of imagination – sometimes without much knowledge of the ultimate performance space – to complement the sound produced in the studio.
The hypothesis explored in this paper is that these and other questions may be addressed by exploring the impact of intuition involved in practice, which in turn rests on an artistic sensibility for imagining how sound may be experienced.[5] As a composer and improviser, I can make myself intuit sound in a way that makes it possible for me to engage in a fluid relation to the material; this is to some extent what I train to do as a musician. In this case, the sound is not best described as an object, but rather as an ongoing activity. The sound is not merely perceived but created and recreated in the act of an inner and outer listening process.[6] It should be noted that here I am primarily discussing listening experiences from the point of view of the artist, not listening in general. My knowledge and experience as a practicing musician allow me to understand the flow of sound in time and act upon it in ways that may not always be useful to a listener. This understanding is not easily translated into analytical knowledge, and it may also be incompatible with the notion of sound as an object. I can transform my listening both in time and space and imagine what the music will sound like in another environment. I can experience it, not as an external object that I exploit but from within it, together with it: from the inside. The specific usage of inside here comes from Bergson, as will become clear later in the text, and it has advantages but also obvious difficulties. The word carries with it an unfortunate connotation that includes assumptions about a division that may not make sense and can even be counter-productive. In reality, there is an ongoing continuum between inside and outside that makes pinpointing either position difficult or futile.
There have been many attempts to develop approaches toward understanding sound. The influential work of French theorist and composer Pierre Schaeffer (1966) made sound objects phenomenologically accessible to the listener through the act of reduced listening where the sound source should be disregarded. Denis Smalley (1986) developed the concept of spectromorphology – an analytical tool to trace the spectral changes of a sound over time –that builds on Schaeffer's theory. Professor of design William Gaver (1993) opened up an ecological perspective and pointed to a new ontology of sound, an ecological approach that musicologist Eric Clarke (2005) further developed. Other attempts include the concept of sound as an (un)repeatable object (Dokic 2007) as well as numerous theoretical and artistic explorations and developments of the abovementioned theories.