A sound can communicate a tactile sensation, a smell, an image, a taste. Sound approaches a sensory plane; it is no longer that thing that comes from nothing and lives in nothing until its end.
In electronic sound the disembodiment is more pronounced because the sound sometimes does not come directly from an instrument that we see. So we have to rely no longer on the gesture to summon the body but on the timbre. In sound design many steps move creation away from fruition and in each of these steps the sound changes and moves away not only from the source but also from the user. Lofi production techniques foreground the timbre and materiality of recordings, signs of authenticity but more a celebration of “bodies”: the musician’s body, the listener’s body, the bodies of machines and so on.
This research put forward the hypothesis that the design of less disembodied sound objects can be initiated through the utilisation of lofi techniques.
The utilisation of these techniques results in the creation of sound objects that evoke the producer’s performance and design gestures, thereby imbuing the sound with traces of its materiality. These sound objects, in turn, also contain clues of space and time, which, though not necessarily accurate, nevertheless lead back to a defined material space-time.
By preserving these traces of embodiment, the sound, whether produced or perceived, remains within the loop that constitutes the interaction between the musician’s/listener’s body and the environment, thereby nourishing it. During this process, the mind and body engage in a kind of abduction, or imaginative interpretation, of sound and timbre, giving rise to novel meanings, the transformation of existing ones, and the confirmation of others. The body, functioning as a synaesthetic apparatus, engages with sound in both the production and perception phases.
Part of the rhetoric of music production sees the aesthetics of transparency as a trick based on the attempt to erase all traces of the production process in order to provide a seemingly unmediated musical work (Harper 2014). By foregrounding the production process, the lofi techniques perform an operation similar to Mel Brooks in High Anxiety.
In the 1977 film, the director employs the technique of breaking the fourth wall on multiple occasions, a practice that is also evident in many of his other films. The camera moves forward to show a dinner scene inside a villa room until it collides with a windowpane and shatters it, distracting the diners from their conversation (YouTube 2017).
The camera is laid bare to shatter the diegetic illusion and remind the audience that what they are witnessing is a well-organised fiction. Similarly, audio lofi shatters the illusion of an ideal work perfectly reproduced by a transparent channel, emphasising the mediation that takes place in any act of communication. Low definition, in whatever way it manifests itself, becomes a sensory reminder of a process.
What else links sound embodiment so closely to the lofi philosophy and its techniques? These two factors are linked by one of the most popular types of listening and the most widely heard material to date. Lofi techniques help us to preserve further losses to fatal commercial choices towards music and sound in general.
One of the types of listening that is often used on a daily basis is already lofi, one can say “low definition” in a negative sense. The act of listening is often characterised by a non-participatory approach, with attention being allocated to multiple tasks concurrently. Listening occurs in a mobile context, with the auditory experience being shaped by transformative listening chains that conceptualise musical elements. An illustrative example of this phenomenon is the auditory experience of music through earphones, which effectively filters frequencies, thereby substantially altering the auditory perception of the music.
The format in which music tracks are released and their minute lengths have changed and changed the way we listen. Compressed formats, which reduce the size of audio files, are a counterpart to the micronisation of audio equipment, which extol agility and the ease of “owning” a lot of music or rather a simulacrum of it.
Lofi techniques help to preserve the concept of sound even in this form of listening and with these material formats. In what way? By relying on the concept of transformation. As already written above, the listening mode is a subtraction filter, as the format. Lofi techniques act both in subtraction and in addition, but certainly not in the interest of “slimming down”, for a culture that is much more oriented towards quality and slow time and averse to quantity and speed.
Lofi techniques can be the main tool for bridging the gap between the bodily experience of sound creation and its fruition and further (re)creation in virtu-reality. They are an excellent tool for dealing with the current mode of musical distribution, that might otherwise be an obstacle for certain genres of music. Electroacoustic music is a genre that is already uncommon, or at least less so than it could be. Conceptualising participatory listening with lofi techniques suggests the fact that not being able to totally control the listening chain of each listener, the musician/producer puts his creation in the hands of the listener who has at his disposal creative-active editing tools such as audio compression, listening mode and many others. The listener becomes a co-producer, a co-author of a rework, a remix of the original track.
This article provided an initial and preliminary idea of how sound matter can be explored through the meanings derived from embodied interaction with music, both in the production and listening phases.The sound objects targeted are taken out of their initial context and assigned meanings that belong to them or not, meanings that must necessarily be experienced on the body. The experimentation model presented here is not without its limitations. A significant gap in the model is evident in the examination of the process of embodied creation when working exclusively “in the box” (with the computer as the sole instrument). Furthermore, the exploration of the recording studio or sound laboratory as an instrument in its own right is lacking. The musician’s body, their instrument, and the environment form a loop that gives rise to new presences and new bodies, which can be considered as new instruments and products, as well as new meanings. Consequently, the focus of research has now been greatly expanded to encompass a broader range of embodied interactions offered by music to touch a wide range of functions.