Currently the flow, that is to say, the temporal organisation with which sounds reach us, is characterised by continuity and almost uninterrupted progression. In the context of music services, silence is often not an option; it is solely a prerogative of the listener. While the initial act of engaging a playback function represents a single, discrete action, it enables an infinite sequence of musical selections, potentially including tracks not selected by the listener. These selections are determined by the specific service or platform involved.
Silence is necessary! My approach to this topic is that silence cannot be exclusively defined as the “absence of sound”, nor as “non-action”. Silence is an event in its own right. It is the conclusion of an event in order to experience a new one and/or to conceive one of its own. Listening is not meant here as a physiological event but as an act of involvement with the world, a creative act. This creative act requires a flow that includes interruptions and a variable progression. How this flow is managed reveals itself to be an act that is more compositional than exclusively perceptual.
Off, on, off, on. In the gesture of changing the station of the old analogue radios, in the movement of the potentiometer with which it was possible to choose one channel or another, is contained this composition, which makes listening an active and embodied gesture. The political choice to create a personal flow, a rhythm of one’s own, makes listening an active practice that can at times trace our perception, at times betray it. One of the flows that can be referred to is also the changing of our role, from listeners, only apparently passive, to co-composers or even unique creators of sound events.
Error (in this research, “error” and “imperfection” are considered to be two sides of the same coin) is one of the most concrete phenomena that can be studied. Error connects us directly to the materiality of sound and the body, and to its fallibility. Error also connects us with time and uniqueness, with the opportunity, or otherwise, of being able to replicate a performance, a playback, a listening. In the creation of sound objects using lofi techniques, error occupies a wider conceptual space than the definition of “wrong sound”. The imperfection of carriers such as vinyl or audio cassettes is obviously transmitted to the sample, thus creating rhythmically swaying sound atoms with low audio definition and almost totally out of the creator’s control, so that the analogue factors peculiar to media and equipment transcend that world and trespass into the digital, signalling their material presence. Thus the error is no longer wrong but rather a “sound patina” made up of this set of imperfections that refer to an unknown past, not well identified, where an action generated a sound. A past that is so much in demand today that it creates the paradox that, in the absence of these characteristics, they are reproduced artificially, especially in particular genres of music.
These “imperfections“ connect with the idea Epstein calls material fragility: “Where the object or instrument used in sound production is damaged in such a way that it can no longer successfully carry out its function as sound-maker” (Epstein 2017, 42). The impermanence of the device suggests the impression that the listening we are doing may be our last and, at the same time, suggests that those sounds were made with equipment that is destined to wear and tear and deteriorate (a statement that is not so obvious in listening to audio files). This makes each listen and each playback unique.
Monty Adkins is an advocate of this concept, incorporating it into his writings on ambient music. In this paper, the concept is employed in two specific senses, as delineated by Adkins: first, as a state of tension/error; and second, as the presence of a material object. The state of tension read in the sense of “error”: “Fragility is a state of tension in which the sound’s ‘failure’ is offset by its continued temporal movement forwards. Within this there is a sense of both beauty and danger. The beauty is of something prone to failure that needs attention, and the danger is of it ceasing to function musically” (Adkins 2019, 125). About the presence of a material object: “We listen to digital sound files but enter a deceit that the music is fragile – either because it is made with equipment prone to failure, or for other reasons” (Adkins 2019, 126).
The elements mentioned above (fallibility, temporariness, fragility, impermanence and uniqueness) all belong to an element that helps us to enact embodiment: the body.
With definition, I refer to the sharpness of a sound object. In the domain of sound, there is a frequent utilisation of linguistic expressions that are inherently associated with other sensory experiences. These expressions function as metaphors or a universal language, facilitating cross-sensory understanding. Marc Leman, in “The interactive dialectics of musical meaning formation”, argues that physical properties of musical sound such as frequency, spectral density and loudness give rise to impressions of visual and tactile space, such as extension, density, weight, smoothness, roughness, sharpness. Leman, quoting Jan Broeckx’s article “Beyond metaphor: musical figures of ‘gestalte’ as expressive icons”, writes that these impressions apply to assessments of interactive experiences and the “intuitive apprehension of their inherent meanings” (Leman 2017, 15).
The concept of image sharpness, for instance, is derived from the sense of touch and, in this context, helps to create new cross-sensory meanings. The contours of a sharp image are sharp and defined. A lack of sharpness, on the other hand, generates blurrier contours.
At the same time, definition is a tool, a filter to be precise. So in this part of the paragraph, it would be more accurate to speak of “resolution” rather than “definition”. The utilisation of a reduced bit depth and sampling rate entails the deliberate selection of a smaller amount of information to affect the quality of the audio. This can be associated with more than simply space efficiency. To illustrate this point, one may opt to use the 32 kbps MP3 audio format not to reduce the size of the audio file, but rather to effect a transformation of its aesthetic quality. The audio resolution can be modified through the use of vintage instruments devoid of sophisticated technical attributes, consequently yielding a resolution that is not elevated. Alternatively, contemporary instruments can be employed, albeit with a low-resolution setting during the export process.
The central focus of this paper is directed towards the elements that accentuate or mitigate embodiment and disembodiment. The utilisation of flow, error and definition in this context has the capacity to either augment or mitigate disembodiment, contingent upon the manner in which they are employed.
Lofi techniques of sound production and editing favour discontinuous flow, recreate and emphasise imperfection in all its forms and use audio definition/resolution as a tool. Adopting this approach enables us to mitigate the disembodiment of sound by fostering the permanence of sound and its traces/gestures within the embodied loop, wherein the body serves as the conduit between the musician and the listener.
The flow, through the use of lofi techniques, is irregular, dense with pauses, with imperfect movements, at times readable and replicable with great difficulty.
The sound object has a beginning and an end, an unfolding, dynamic and constructive characteristics that relate to silence, with the rotation of sensory and expressive pauses (Giomi and Ligabue 1996, 38-61).1 Listening to a musician’s compositional choices triggers the creation of a personal thought, a specific diegesis that stimulates the development of a non-aggressive perception of silence. In practice, this trains us in an intimate and cre-active handling.
In the realm of Leman et al. already mentioned in part 1, the embodiment of these sound objects also occurs by recalling specific gestures and specific sensorimotor skills. In this research, the “performing gesture” is defined as the action that performs, and it is posited that this already contains sound in itself. It is not the finger that makes contact with the string, nor the mouth that opens in a specific manner to produce the syllable sung. Rather, it is the embodied chain that is created from the moment a sound (or, more precisely, a timbre) is conceptualised to the moment it is actualised. The “lofi flow” recalls gestures and actions that were characteristic of the early days of GRM,2 the cutting of the tape, the noises of the old circuit boards, the influence of electricity. Consequently, the sound object is retained within the aforementioned loop and, by extension, within the circuit inhabited and nurtured by the body.
As demonstrated in part 5 of this article, for instance in examples A1 and A2, the error is treated in a similar manner to a materialised cultural phenomenon for music, such as sheet music, recordings and more. So: “This human mind is also expended; it reach outside the brain into the environment, where it has created situations that afford musical interactions” (Leman, Lesaffre and Maes 2017, 1).
Imperfection, which is also present in the lofi techniques by constant reference to the DIY ethos, is a perceptive virtue for the embodiment of sound. Imperfection in this case is sensorially recognisable because it can be traced back to a material imperfection: an object that does not function as it should, produces audio consequences that we have heard before. The imperfection creates a timbre, a “sound cocoon” (Winston and Saywood 2019) that soothes and at the same time prompts investigation, sensory research.
It recalls a “What did I hear?” in the illusion of a similarity that, present or absent, makes one invest in ruminating the sound, keeping it inside so as to be able to recreate it, embody it, perhaps in the image and likeness of one's own sensorial experience.
As previously stated in section 1.3, transduction noise is an indication of lofi presence. This is due to the fact that it is substituted for silence, and can therefore be regarded as an error or imperfection. Silence can be replaced during the creative act by the material noise of transduction, when analogue sound is transformed into a stream of electric current, when the tape passes over the head of the audio cassette player. Transduction noise can also be the negation of digital silence, an artificial paradox in a method that denies immateriality except as dream, nostalgia and imagination.
Through its materiality and presence, transduction noise mitigates the above-mentioned schizophonic effect that necessarily arises whenever a sound is detached from its original source, as is always the case in sound reproduction, particularly in acousmaticity.
This mode of denial of digital silence brings the artificial production of sound objects closer to what engages us most naturally: our everyday sound field, what we hear around us, our soundscapes, which know nothing of absolute silence.
Regarding the definition less defined objects leave a more pronounced mark on the imagination. They are not clear and comprehensible statements, they are sentences left in the middle that can change meaning each time.
In the lack of definition lies the sensory possibility of persistence, just as when after staring even for a while at the sun or a very intense light source whose shape we sense, our eye retains its shadow for a while. A sound object with undefined contours lingers in our creative space longer (Nees 2016). Why? By focusing your attentional spotlight on the sounds, the information will more likely make its way into short-term memory. This is one of the necessary steps: from echoic memory (type of sensory memory that temporarily stores auditory information, which lasts no longer than 5 seconds) to short-term memory (Nees 2016).
In relation to the utilisation of resolution as a tool, it would be remiss to delve into its intricacies in this context. However, it is possible to mention a part of the subject that is functional for the purposes of this paper. In order to develop lofi techniques, obsolete (or defined as such) equipment such as walkmans3 and audio cassettes can be utilised, thus employing “modernism” hardware. Additionally, a digital “modernism” can be referenced, not solely through the use of computers and equipment with reduced technological capacities relative to contemporary models (due to their association with historical periods that have since elapsed), but also through the utilisation of audio formats with an “outdated” resolution in comparison to the technological capabilities developed in the present era. The employment of MP3 encoders operating at reduced bitrates and sample rates can yield creatively viable lofi artefacts for the design and realisation of sound objects employing lofi techniques.4