Listening Strategies and Sonic Gestures
When it comes to listening, perhaps the question should be if any listening can be said to not be carried out from “the inside,” using Bergson's terminology. Nevertheless, technologically mediated listening in a studio while in the process of working artistically with sound still provides a mix of modalities that has an impact on the present discussion.
Bergson's proposed method may prove to be useful for understanding listening and creativity in the process of composition. As was discussed at the beginning of this paper, one of the challenges in artistic research is to acquire, and offer, access to the specific kinds of knowledge that the artistic process generates and makes use of. It appears reasonable to assume that Bergson’s method of intuition may help to gain insight into this kind of knowledge.
Furthermore, there are aspects of a sound that require the listener to be within the mobility of the sound to understand them. A sound of a car passing by has a notion of motion built into it. The spatial properties of the sound and the sound itself can both be purely imagined or highly concrete, and these properties are aspects of sound which are very difficult to analyze. The recording attached to Figure 3 was made for a piece for 60 speakers that premiered in 2019 in Stockholm. The extract is based on a recording of the sound of rain, and the dripping water is at the front of the sound field, but there are also other intruding sounds, sometimes quiet ones. As a listener, one may move inside of the sound and all of its discrete aspects, including the particular spatial properties of all the different sounds that are a part of it. Information about the sound may be gathered through an intuitive analysis, from within the experience of listening, and the spatial nature of the sounds helps with this. An experienced sound designer is likely to be able to recreate a soundscape like the one used in the extract of Locomotion with samples and synthesis based on analysis. Signal analysis of the recording may provide a large amount of additional information about the sound, while other aspects are extremely difficult to synthesize merely from an analysis. Especially the spatial properties of the sound are difficult to emulate from a technical analysis alone.
Returning now to the musician working with abstract sound in the studio. The relation between a recorded sound and its source may be blurred to a high degree. In these cases, the move to past experiences as a method for contextualizing and understanding a sound may be less obvious, in particular when the ambition is to create new sounds. However, the ability to use listening in combination with reflection or intuition as a method consciously paves the way for a different understanding of sound that is exclusive to this activity. This discussion touches on several topics that are outside of the scope of this paper, such as a general phenomenology of sound perception, music semiology (Nattiez 1975), reduced listening (Schaeffer 1966), and many other theories. Instead, I wish to focus the discussion on how Bergson's method – here “translated” into listening from the inside – can be useful in artistic research by putting forth a few examples.
One such example is the attempt to stage data transformations in compositions where one type of sonic gesture provides information for another. An obvious example may be a sound whose pitch in a sweeping gesture falls from high to low. The gesture of the pitch envelope may be transformed into a parameter to control the spatial transformation of the same sound from top to bottom or left to right.[12] There are certain mappings between different domains that appear more generic, whereas others are rather subjective. The process of understanding and recognizing these mappings relies on a listening from the inside that also engages the memory of past experiences, which further influences the way the sound is understood. As another example, imagine a mono recording of the sound example mentioned above, a car driving by. Although there is no spatial information in the recording, for a listener who has seen and heard a car passing by, it is not unlikely that they still experience the motion of the sound, as if the spatial information is added implicitly during the act of listening. Understanding these gestures on a detailed level also relies on listening practices that are embedded with compositional intent. Listening to sound itself becomes the source for further development of the material in a composition, and access to the various layers of the sound is supported by an intuitive mode of listening. From an intuition such as this, Bergson’s method of intuition suggests that an analysis can be performed that allows for the discovery of properties in the material that may be used to construct methods for sound synthesis and to develop compositional strategies. This method may give rise to information about elements of the artistic practice.
