Changing Roles: The Value of the Listener
For a soundscape composer, this recording process is not merely a tool to capture a composition, it itself becomes the “creative and exploratory” activity that defines the work. Within the recorded sounds, there is always more that exists unheard, even for the composer themselves. In regards to The Place, for example, John Luther Adams has remarked how “…the sound world of The Place has exerted a lasting influence on the way I hear …my ears have become more finely attuned to the breath of the world around me.”[4] For the composer, the act of listening becomes even more important than the act of creating. Derrick suggests that this increased listening prompts “a shift towards direct engagement with spatial, temporal, acoustic, geographic, social and narrational aspects of the location.”[5] In other words, the soundscape to the composer or recording artist becomes less about the individual sounds making up the landscape and more about a holistic perspective that explores how sounds relate to the organisms and phenomena that surround it, how the sound is an expression of place. As this place is “met” with and filtered through the artist’s compositional techniques, the broader soundscape becomes a meeting of inner and outer worlds, a dialectic between the abstract and referential to be discussed in greater detail later in this essay. By letting the inner vision meet outer observation, a composer can reach, as Ferneyhough describes, “a place whose qualities he had not been able to imagine before undertaking his journey his journey, whose qualities, in a certain sense, might be said not to have existed at all.”[6]
The breakdown of roles in soundscape composition continues at the place of the performer. Most soundscape compositions, in fact, don’t require performers at all. Field recording, electroacoustic composition, and sonification replace human performers with technological ones. This seems contradictive given soundscape composition’s message of reintegration of human with environment, and eerily suggestive of Varèse’s prediction of a future of the mechanization of music, where “the performer, the virtuoso, ought no longer to exist: he would be better replaced by a machine, and he will be.”[7] But as we’ve seen, the role of technology in these situations isn’t necessarily to put up a barrier between “human” and “nature” – rather, technology is a tool that allows a listener to extend their senses. In a way, the composer indeed gains what Varèse describes as a new flexibility and ability to “find new intensities” within the realm of sound.[8] Technology can allow a listener to hear previously unheard sounds and therefore develop an even deeper connection with the soundscape.
Because the soundscape composer is now listening as much as the audience member is, they take on equally important roles. Again, as an early proponent of shifting the central role of understanding music to the listener, echoes from Cage resonate here. Cage’s definition of music as “sounds heard” implies that music depends on listening and the unique perspective that the listener brings to a piece – whether that listener be the composer themselves or an audience member.[9] John Luther Adams has expressed influence from this idea. In Adam’s own words, “the center of music is no longer the omniscient composer. It’s the listener. And the composer is free to be a listener too. The broader implications of this musical worldview are ecological. Cage taught us that music is Nature and Nature is music.”[10] As pieces like Norman’s Window, Polli’s Sound-Seeker, and Pijanowski’s Record the Earth show, by requiring active participation from the listener, the listener assumes a greater responsibility in shaping the meaning and message of the piece. In her essay “Real World Music as Composed Listening,” Norman describes real-world music as emerging from an explicitly “listening-centered” aesthetic. In this manner, soundscape composition entails what Norman describes as a process of “re-discovery,” in which a listener must piece together the recorded materials a composer uses in order to make sense of the meaning behind the work.[11]
While a soundscape composer may desire to guide their audience towards a sense of connection to the environment or soundscape they present through their work, the type of connection that results will be unique according to the audience member’s individual memories, associations, and experiences. Hildegard Westerkamp has noted that this can result in a struggle to reconciliate the experiences of the composer with the experiences of the audience member. Returning to the theme of foreign and familiar, the composer’s desire to instill meaning in the sounds they use is complicated further by the fact that the sound sources might have originated in a place, situation, or culture that is foreign to the audience. The composer themselves may have developed a close relationship to the sounds during the field recording process, but an audience member may only be able to recognize certain sounds through mediated ways, background knowledge provided by books and media “several steps removed from the original physical place and experienced time.”[12] In other words, they cannot truly connect to the soundscape presented because they never experienced the sounds firsthand themselves. Westerkamp proposes that herein lies the challenge of the soundscape composer, the fact that in the face of “corporate globalization,” they must “to bridge the gap between audience and the compositional language that originates in foreign places and transmit that which assists us to be open to foreign cultures, to hear and understand each other.”[13] More than ever before, music becomes a communicational process, an open dialogue between composer and audience, and audience and composer. For Westerkamp, it is the link between the composer and audience that generates energy for change.[14]
So how can a soundscape composer foster a communication line with their audience? Firstly, a composer can treat their work as more than a one-way line of communication. John Luther Adams, for example, finds joy in discovering his piece anew through the lens of the audience’s perspective – “One of a composer’s fondest aspirations is that someone else will make the music theirs, giving the music a life of its own.”[15] Another factor that shapes the communicative quality of soundscape compositions is in that soundscape composers are interested not only in the sounds themselves, but in how we respond to them. The piece becomes less about the content of the piece itself and more about the experience of it. This attitude could be in part inherited from the philosophies from sound art. Michael J. Schumacher, a sound art gallery proprietor, has described that for him, “…sound is experience, so there’s no point in trying to make it into an object as a collector’s piece, so I’m trying to create situations where people come to it as experience, and value that.”[16] In a similar vein, Adams describes the primary intention of The Place as “…not to convey information. It is to provoke experience.”[17]
In a way, this sense of experientiality circles back to the indeterminate role of the soundscape composer. When an audience member encounters a given sound in a composition, we make sense of a sound based on both our “experiential network” (memories, previous knowledge) – and the way we think the composer wants us to hear it as part of the composition.[18] When a listener knows that the piece has an author, they assume that each and every sound has a reason for being what it is and where it is in the piece – they have trust in the composer’s intentions. But with pieces that incorporate field recordings or sonifications of environmental data, the listener becomes aware that the composer themselves isn’t making all of the decisions. With this type of indeterminacy, unexpected sounds and surprises causes the listener’s attention to switch from “content to container.” Parmar describes the resulting listening experience as a tension between “self-intended” and “composer-intended” listening, with the piece becoming at once “a subjective experience interpreted compositionally,” or as “a direct representation of objective reality.”[19] As a result, inner and outer worlds meet. It is at these crossroads where the connection with the soundscape begins, but such a place cannot be arrived at until the traditional roles of composer and audience member become blurred.
[1] Ferneyhough, Brian. “Shaping Sound.” In Sound. Kruth, Patricia, and Stobart, Henry, eds. Darwin College Lectures, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.
[2] Fischer, Tobias. “Interview with Jana Winderen.” Tokafi.com, Web. http://www.tokafi.com/15questions/interview-jana-winderen/. (Accessed 10 July 2016).
[3] Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. London: Continuum, 2009. Print.
[4] Adams, John Luther. The place where you go to listen: In search of an ecology of music. Wesleyan University Press, 2010.
[5] Derrick, Reuben George. "Acoustic illuminations: recorded space as soundscape composition." Doctoral Thesis, 2014.
[6] Ferneyhough, Brian. “Shaping Sound.” In Sound. Kruth, Patricia, and Stobart, Henry, eds. Darwin College Lectures, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.
[7] Jackson, Myles. “From Scientific Instruments to Musical Instruments: The Tuning Fork, the Metronome, and the Siren.” In The Oxford handbook of sound studies. Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. Oxford University Press, 2011.
[8] Jackson, Ibid.
[9] Adams, John Luther. The place where you go to listen: In search of an ecology of music. Wesleyan University Press, 2010.
[10] Adams, Ibid.
[11] Norman, Katherine. "Real-World Music as Composed Listening.” Contemporary Music Review, Vol. 15, Part 1 (1996).
[12] Westerkamp, Hildegard. "Linking soundscape composition and acoustic ecology." Organised Sound 7, no. 01 (2002): 51-56.
[13] Westerkamp, Hildegard. "Linking soundscape composition and acoustic ecology." Organised Sound 7, no. 01 (2002): 51-56.
[14] Westerkamp, Ibid.
[15] Adams, John Luther. The place where you go to listen: In search of an ecology of music. Wesleyan University Press, 2010.
[16] Licht, A. Sound art, beyond music, between categories. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2007.
[17] Adams, Ibid.
[18] Parmar, Robin. "The garden of adumbrations: reimagining environmental composition." Organised Sound 17, no. 03 (2012): 202-210.
[19] Parmar, Robin. "The garden of adumbrations: reimagining environmental composition." Organised Sound 17, no. 03 (2012): 202-210.