PIERRE SCHAEFFER

    The father of acousmatics, Schaeffer was interested in getting past the binary of source and receiver. In a specifically aural context, this dichotomy refers to the entity generating the sound (or wherever it emerge) versus the body listening (and inevitably exercising interpretive faculties) on the sound. Schaeffer attempts to move beyond this opposition by looking at the sound as it is, disconnected from our presuppositions about its origins (and thus suspending our conclusions about its meaning). He developed the idea of the "sonorous object," which demands interpretation as a sound-in-itself, rather than as just a marker towards its source. Neither is the sonorous object part and parcel with the medium of its production, or even the subjective experience of hearing it - it is a describable sonic event.

    For me, this last has particularly interesting signifying potential, that relates directly to timbre. It's no new idea that artists have been struggling to create meaning outside the limiting bounds of established systems of signification (for example, high literary modernism has often sought to work outside traditional modes of meaning by re-ordering and playing with words to extend beyond conventional vernacular). One particular quote that stood out to this effect is when Schaeffer says: "Such is the suggestion of acousmatics: to deny the instrument and cultural conditioning, to put in front of us the sonorous and its musical 'possibility.' " Like Barthes in his famous "Grain of the Voice" valorizes the "notional" over the "notational" (and timbre has always been a complicated thing to notate, people tend to notate the techniques that produce various timbres as opposed to describing timbre itself) as the locus of "everything that is voluptuous in meaning," so too does Schaeffer's sonorous object not reduce itself to pitch or amplitude or any one defining characteristic. It exceeds traditional associative meaning-making by not limiting itself to the conventional bounds of hearing a sound as emerging from a particular source, and interpreting it that way.

    He demonstrated this in a few particular techniques. The "cut-bell" technique consisted of splicing the attack off of a bell sound, and looping the attack-less sound. The result is the complete effacement of the "bell-ness" of the sound. The noisy, multi-frequency attack contained the characteristic elements that allow us to pinpoint the source (and mental image) of a bell. Without the attack, the sound bears no immediate signification, and opens up into wider potential meaning. The "closed-groove" is a means of re-hearing a seemingly familiar sound via random, short looping. The name comes from a skipping record, which creates a short, closed loop completely unrelated to the rhythm or timing of the original source. Upon repeated listening, the closed groove takes on a sonic quality all of its own, unrelated to the piece from which it was originally "sampled." Both of these allow for the development of a sonorous object, disconnected from the conventional chains of associational source detection. The obvious relationship to timbre permeates this idea, in that once we stop hearing in traditional categories of pitch, rhythm, amplitude, etc., we can begin a hearing of whole sound, timbral and textural entities out of context and thus asserting meaning on their own terms.