The notion of the embodied musical experience constitutes a pivotal element of this paper. Both the listener and the musician are regarded as integral components “in a closed interacting loop with her or his musical environment. The loop is constrained by the human body, hence ‘embodied’. It is assumed that human musical action and perception are reciprocal processes that fuel that loop, and that action and prediction are co-determined by constraints of the musical environment, as well as by those of the (corporeal) organism that interacts within it” (Leman, Lesaffre and Maes 2017, 1).
So this loop is characterised by its self-perpetuating nature, whereby the act of listening to or creating music engenders an interactive response from the loop “using sensorimotor, cognitive, emotional, and energetic abilities that optimize the interaction; it can be seen as an expression of the embodied mind” (ibid., 1).
The body paradigm applied in this article refers to Gino Stefani and Stefania Guerra Lisi. The body is seen as a “psychophysical place that is a matrix (mater) of the ‘meaning’ of existence” (Guerra Lisi and Stefani 2010, 71). This concept is analysed more extensively in part 3.1.
The process of disembodiment occurs regardless of the genre of music being listened to or created. However, it is important to note that the production of certain genres contains elements that can hypothetically disembody the sound to a more significant degree. Furthermore, certain ways of listening can have the same effect.
The content of electroacoustic music ranges from clearly identifiable sounds to more extensively processed/synthesised material without precise references. In a suitable listening environment, such as a concert hall with multi-channel sound projection, the clues for an embodiment are greater, but this is not the most common form of listening.
One typology of listening that concerns (not only) electroacoustic music is acousmatic listening. Pierre Schaeffer reflects on this in his Traité des objets musicaux and borrows the term from Pythagoras, quoting Larousse: “[...] referring to a sound that one hears without seeing the causes behind it” (Schaeffer 1966, 91).
The core concept of acousmaticity, which is evident in numerous contemporary listening practices, has become a well-established norm.1 It is worth looking into. The schizophonic effect, as initially theorised by Raymond Murray Schafer (1969), has gradually become a consolidated component of contemporary listening practices. In the contemporary context, radio and streaming services have become predominant media associated (wrongly!) with acousmatic listening.2 That has formalised acousmaticity as the prevailing form of listening in our daily lives.
Leigh Landy’s “something to hold on to” factor (Landy 2007, 34) challenges many distances. Here are two example to illustrate this point. In certain music creation modes, such as “in the box“ audio production,3 the musician’s body has little influence on sound. In the context of compressed audio formats there is a diminution of the auditory information delivered to the listener, particularly when the format is accessed via earphones.
The sound objects to be analysed in this study emerge from the intersection of two distinct traditions in music: the first being the tradition of Pierre Schaeffer and Bernard Parmegiani, and the second being the new techniques of sound production. These techniques encompass both those that originate in the analogue environment and those that come to life in the digital domain, as well as hybrid experiences.
Schaeffer created the term sound object, meticulously defining its origin, form, context and implications, dedicating an entire publication to it (Schaeffer, 1966). He also coined the term musique concrète: a form of music no longer determined by the traditional parameters of score and performance, but by the use of sounds recorded from natural sources, separated from their origin and manipulated. In Schaeffer’s words: “I have coined the term Musique Concrète for this commitment to compose with materials taken from ‘given’ experimental sound in order to emphasize our dependence, no longer on preconceived sound abstractions, but on sound fragments that exist in reality and that are considered as discrete and complete sound objects, even if and above all when they do not fit in with the elementary definitions of music theory” (Schaeffer 2012, 14).
Schaeffer adopts a diary-style format for his written works, a narrative typology that will be examined again in this article. This literary device is employed as a methodological instrument in investigative work, with the purpose of maintaining a record of the pathways, both practical and mental, traversed by the researcher.
The definition of sound object starts from Schaeffer’s treatise but also benefits from other investigative paths such as that of Curtis Roads. Roads defines the sound object as “a basic unit of musical structure, generalizing the traditional concept of note to include complex and mutating sound events on a time scale ranging from a fraction of a second to several seconds” (Roads 2004, 3).
In this research, an attempt is made to accommodate a range of sound objects that were not yet envisaged in Schaeffer’s time. To this end, a novel definition of sound object is proposed, one that draws from the preceding definitions but also incorporates the possibilities afforded by contemporary technological innovation: a sound (or a part of a sound or a set of sounds) conceived and/or realised, with a certain function to be part of a specific structure, but which can also make sense (exist) outside it.
Years have elapsed since the establishment of Schaeffer’s definition, and significant advancements have been made in the domain of electroacoustic composition and sound design. This new definition has been formulated to encompass a more extensive and nuanced range of entities.
Rather than a mere definition, it is a container, the spectrum of subjects that can be accommodated is broadened, and the sound object expands its form.
This expansion is critical for research purposes, in which the elements analysed have multiple origins, multiple forms and multiple destinations.
The term “lofi”4 is a phonetic contraction of “low fidelity”, and should not be regarded in this text as the antithesis of “hifi” (“high fidelity”).
The word lofi began to emerge as early as the 1950s, probably because “the inversion of hifi was so easily suggested and its meaning was so clear” (Harper 2014, 7).
Harper states: “Sound quality is not inherently or objectively poor or good, lofi or hifi, but must be constructed as poor through its relation to any technical and technological data in the context” (ibid., 11). For example, audio cassettes were not considered lofi in the 1980s: “Is it live or is it Memorex?” claimed one commercial, just as Maxell’s advertising campaigns claimed high fidelity (YouTube 2009). Following developments in digital recording, cassettes have been considered lofi since the 2000s.
It can be said that it will be exponentially so in the future if we consider the continuous technological evolution and the consequent new obsolescence of instruments that are now hifi. But the big difference is made by those who, as artists, deliberately choose these techniques in preference to faster processes and create a temporal short-circuit that can also serve to restart from old starting points but with new eyes.
Therefore, it is only after the introduction of digital technology that one can resolve the issue by referring to the lofi aesthetic as a conscious rejection of hifi.
By the end of the 1990s, the lofi aesthetic had reached the status of a mature and recognised field, encompassing a rich variety of stylistic and technical approaches and a growing number of practitioners and audiences. At that time, listening to even the most mainstream productions, one can notice a tendency to embrace or emulate some of the most superficial aspects of this aesthetic. An example of a well-known album is Dummy (1995), which Portishead created with production tricks aimed at deliberate sound degradation. They used lofi techniques of audio creation and editing, such as bouncing certain musical parts on tape, creating original loops, played by them, but degraded to respect the general philosophy with which this album was constructed. As Geoff Barrow says in an interview on KEXP: “We had to make stuff that actually sounded like it was taken from full records and then sampled that.”5
Due to the lofi aesthetic, musical sub-genres (or even actual genres) have emerged that self-label themselves by adding the adjective lofi (or lo-fi) before the genre name, for example: lofi hip-hop, lofi ambient.
These genres of music, along with a few others, were digitally created and mediated almost entirely via the internet. The following discussion will now turn to the case of lofi hip-hop, a subject has been the subject of detailed analysis in a paper written by Mike D’Errico. This sub-genre was made with lofi production techniques precisely to distance it from its “immateriality” of “internet-born” music and bring it closer to an unidentified past. This fictional past was defined as inhabited by music production objects. One of the stylistic hallmarks of the lofi hip-hop is the emulation of pre-digital methods of recording and playback, by creating imperfections not present in the original track, imperfections peculiar to the handling of objects used to produce music. Lofi hip-hop tracks frequently feature digital processing to artificially age and distort samples would otherwise be decidedly high fidelity. This usually takes the form of deliberately filtering out the higher frequencies of a sample, and, at times, layering a crackling vinyl sound effect over the track, to give the impression of a loop taken from a vinyl record; in other cases, producers sampled directly from vinyl or actually recorded onto tape to achieve the effects typical of these two media (D’Errico 2015).
Contemporary artists of the deception of “digital permanence and immutability” have adopted a strategy that mitigates the disembodiment typical of the digital world, which is further increased when the sound emission is acousmatic. They are hacking the perception of the virtu-reality.
A production made with lofi techniques is characterised by a number of distinctive attributes. These characteristics manifest as distinctive artefacts. For instance, whistles and crackles, indicators of low definition, have become salient in many musical genres that, although digital natives, draw on the analogue side of sound matter. But there are not only whistles and crackles among the markers of lofi. The presence of noise is another pointer. But what noise?
Caleb Kelly (2009) poses the question when talking about works that deliberately include noise as an integral part of their discourse: “If all communication is affected by noise, what is the noise in this case? Are we hearing the noise or are we hearing the content of the communication, are we hearing the noise of the noise or the noise of the content of the communication?” In this regard, Stan Link draws an useful distinction between noise as noise and noise as signal (Link 2001). Noise as signal is what a modernist aesthetic harnesses as a sound resource, noise deprived of its reference, contained through its integration into a musical structure and thus, to a certain extent, domesticated for artistic purposes. Noise as noise is what retains its potential for disruption, disturbance, intrusion rather than integration. Transduction noise functions as an audible marker of the materiality of the production process; it generates a perception of the recorded event as a real event, anchored in a physical time and space.
Noise becomes a creative argument, a further reason to listen, but also a reminder that the receptive act can take place one last time due to the impermanence and ineluctable deterioration of matter.
In their audio tracks musicians that use lofi techniques generate a specific kind of noise, probably caused by a malfunction but actually intentional. These artists engaged in experimentation with lofi techniques, a practice adopted by others. This phenomenon has attracted the attention of researchers and other authors, who have undertaken investigations into these methodologies.
Torben Sangild talks about this phenomenon by identifying three categories of noise derived from acoustics and information theory:
- acoustic noise: noises are impure and irregular sounds.
- communicative noise: in music, noise is often originally a malfunction of instruments or electronics (a disturbance of the clear signal), which is then reversed into a positive effect. The distortion effect of the electric guitar, for example, ubiquitous today, was originally an amplifier overload [...]. When you reverse a disturbance in a part of the music itself, it is not smoothly integrated but infuses the music with tension. There is still a play on the previously negative relationship between noise and signal when a noise is legitimised. This tension is an important part of the musical power of noise.
- subjective noise: ‘unpleasant sounds’. This is the common and colloquial, but also the most intricate, meaning of noise. And it is obviously a subjective definition (Sangild 2002).
Monty Adkins, composer, performer and lecturer in electroacoustic music, proposes a refinement of Sangild’s “communicative noise” into three subsections to analyse lofi ambient music:
- noise as intention;
- noise as interruption;
- noise as artefact in experimental ambient music (Adkins 2019, 136).
So musicians generate communicative noise suggesting the existence of a real aesthetic and theoretical desire to break down the distinction between noise as disturbance and noise as signal.
Another connotation of lofi artefacts is the ability to authenticate the space and time of the creative act. In contradistinction to the nakedness of acousmaticity, lofi artefacts attribute a time and place to the genesis and dissemination of sound.
The perceived space is not an accurate auditory image of the real space of the recording (the “familiar” and “intimate” environment) but simply a constructed image of a world made familiar by the inclusion of certain acoustic indices that serve to orient the listener towards an imaginary source as opposed to a “transparent” work in which the music (when reproduced on a high-performance system) seems to envelop the listener from “nowhere” without explicit reference to a point of origin.
This particular power to authenticate a recording is not the exclusive prerogative of transduction noise. A hifi recording of an instrumentalist in which any noise external to the intentional sound production but generated by it (the breath of the performer, the slight noise of the cloth of the musician's clothes, the sound coming from the closing of the keys of a transverse flute and so on) captured by a dedicated microphone and emphasised in the mix, would produce the same result.
In this way the work acquires a documentary quality by inscribing a past time in the audio and thus “authenticating” itself. This happens through the positioning of the recording in a “hypothetically real” (but at the same time also fictitious) time and space, as Katharine Norman and reflective listening remind us (Norman 1996).
The lofi work articulates two overlapping and interacting levels of the past: one is the past resulting from the construction of an imaginary original event that took place in a past time; the other is the “culturally situated” past that identifies the lofi imprint as characteristic of the pre-digital era, the mythical analogue era, the vintage, a past with connotations of nostalgia. Jean Baudrillard writes: “When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning” (Baudrillard 1994, 67).