New Noise, New Sounds: The Industrial and Electrical Revolutions
Russolo and his contemporaries were practicing Helmreich’s second musical relation with nature, invoking. Rather than symbolically representing sound, instruments become onomatopoetic. Central to this scheme was Russolo’s search for new musical sounds and instruments, a mindset also found in composers such as Edgard Varèse, who expressed that “…Our musical alphabet must be enriched” and continually feel “…the need of new mediums of expression… which can lend themselves to every expression of thought and can keep up with thought.”[3] One important source for such new sounds became electronic technology. Varèse, known for his tape work such as his 1958 Poème Électronique and commonly referred to as the “father” of electronic music, certainly falls under this category. Another “invoking” composer drawing from electronic sources was Pierre Schaeffer. In his compositional technique of musique concrète, developed in the late-1940s and 50s, Schaeffer took tape-recorded sounds of everyday objects and events and processed them to the point of unrecognizability (i.e. by editing, speeding up and slowing down the tape, using distortion, etc.).[4] By divorcing the sound from the object that produced it, Schaeffer promoted what he called acousmatic listening. This term is derived from the Greek word akousmatikoi, the name for the disciplines who listened to Pythagoras’s lectures delivered from behind a curtain. Schaeffer contrasted acousmatic listening with écouter, a type of “everyday” listening that involves an awareness of he attributes of a sound's source rather than the attributes of the sound itself. Rather than listening to gather signs about the world, for the purposes of acquiring information, Schaeffer argued through his acousmatic listening and musique concrète an appreciation for sound itself.[5] Thus, Schaeffer’s musique concrète established not only a new conception of music, but a new conception for how to listen. For this new type of listening, technology is a tool that, rather than distancing us from nature, helps us better understand the very “nature” of things. By expanding beyond the limitations of traditional instrumentation, the electronic music of musique concrète allows for what scholar Edwin Faulhaber describes as “a new freedom for both artist and listener,” where such “technology as sampling and sequencing enables compositions that borrow from a myriad of musical styles and even everyday ‘noise.’”[6] In this way, the “invoking” techniques of Russolo, Varèse, and Schaeffer combat critical theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer, who condemn technology as a “part of a larger culture industry that induces social alienation and passive reception, empties meaning from life, and is controlled by a dominating and oppressive power.”[7]
“Invoking” composers such as Russolo, Varèse, and Schaeffer have used technology to posit an attitude of greater receptivity towards our natural aural environments. This attitude has become fundamental to the practices of experimental music of the mid-20th century, and ultimately, soundscape composition. In fact, they lead us to Helmreich’s third and final musical relation to nature, soaking. Soaking works are works that are literally and physically performed or recorded in the water.[8] Expanding this to nature in general, soaking works can be described as those composed, recorded, or performed within both urban and natural environments. This type of relationship characterizes the work of experimental musicians and sound artists beginning in the mid-1960s. These individuals, which include the sound artists Maryanne Amacher, Annea Lockwood, Bernhard Leitner, Max Neuhaus, Bill Fontana, and La Monte Young, as well as experimental musicians such as John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, take a step further Russolo's definition of music as any and all sounds, if chosen to be heard that way.[9] From the 1952 premiere of his infamous four minutes and 33 seconds of “silence,” for example, John Cage encouraged listeners to extend their ears beyond the stage and consider elements of the broader soundscape as music. Other sound artists were quick to follow Cage. Sound artist Christian Wolff’s early pieces have been described as “openings which let the sounds of the environment mingle with and perhaps even obliterate the composed sounds.”[10] In the spirit of Russolo, La Monte Young has cited his musical influence as all the sounds emanating from the environment around him, both natural and man-made: “the sound of the wind; the sounds of crickets and cicadas; the sounds of telephone poles and motors; sounds produced by steam escaping such as my mother’s tea kettle and the sounds of whistles and signals from trains; and resonances set off by the natural characteristics of particular geographic areas such as canyons, valleys, lakes, and plains.”[11] The emerging genre of sound art has carried on this celebration of all sounds. But this time, these artists were no longer thinking of their work in terms of a traditional performed concert setting with an audience. Treating sound as more of a medium than a live, temporal performance, sound art is often displayed as longer-term installations in galleries and museums. As an art “that posits meaning or value in registers not accounted for by Western musical systems,” sound artists explore the materiality of sound in ways that move beyond standard methods of composition, instrumentation, and concert hall performance.[19] One strain of sound art in particular resonates strongly with the themes of soundscape composition – the Land Art, or Earthworks movement. Coined by Robert Smithson, Earthworks, like sound art, concerns itself with expanding beyond the limitations of medium and display space. Similar to the search for music beyond the concert hall and away from standard musical instruments, earthworks artists left the gallery and fused their art with the landscape, using natural materials (e.g. dirt, rock, plants) rather than standard media like canvas, paint, or clay.[12] Claes Oldenburg’s Placid City Monument (1967), for example, consisted of a hole dug in New York’s Central Park. In his A Non-Site series, Smithson dumped outdoor soil from a variety of locations in gallery spaces.[13]
The increasing industrial noise of the early 20th century, however, was not music to everyone’s ears. In fact, significant antinoise campaigns took place between 1910 and 1940 as part of a general resistance to all kinds of mechanically generated sounds.3 Out of these campaigns came new ways to measure and manage noise, particularly urban noise. With the decibel standard of 1925 came technical instruments such as acoustic meters, which allowed for more “systematic and objective” means of measuring and comparing noise levels in the context of new noise restriction laws and policies.[14] Noise was not musical but a source of unwanted pollution to be measured and managed. Murray Schafer took this approach to noise in his development of acoustic ecology. For Schafer, anthropogenic industrial noise represented the very thing that was destroying natural and social soundscapes, increasing our sense of disconnection from the surrounding culture and environment. For Schafer, the city creates a negative “lo-fi” soundscape that masks sounds and isolates the listener.[15] Schafer’s noise here seems to expand beyond its definition in the physical sense, incorporating media scholar Frances Dyson’s notion of a noise and a Noise. Industrialization presents a “noise” as in a “local everyday acoustic noise” and a conceptual “Noise” as “engine of difference,” a “form of resistance to stultifying and exclusive cultural values.”[16] The bucolic church bells that once organized daily life where being taken over by a traffic of change – a change that Dyson describes as “an aesthetic demonstration of the necessity for discord that could very easily be mapped on to modernity itself.”[17]
The alternative to this change, at once a sign of both progress and destruction, is a peaceful return to Schafer’s hi-fi soundscape away from the threats of industrial noise. Here, “…man lives mostly in isolation or in small communities" where his "ears operated with seismographic delicacy.” The subtlest sounds can be important tools of communication for both the animals and humans living there: “…The shepherd, for instance, can determine from sheep bells the precise state of his flock.”[18] For Schafer, then, one might equate his definition of noise with anthropologist Mary Douglas’s notion of dirt as “matter out of place.” Noise, “sound matter” out of place, is a force that disrupts an implied natural order of things.[19] Kim-Cohen is highly critical of Schafer’s conception of the soundscape, positing that “The suggestion of an unadulterated, untainted purity of experience prior to linguistic capture [i.e., the soundscape before anthropological disruption] seeks a return to a never-present, Romanticized, pre-Enlightenment darkness.”[20] For Kim-Cohen, there is danger in idealizing the soundscape as something “pure” or “pristine” that we must return to in order to save it.
Soundscape composition represents an alternative to Schafer’s idealistic vision of an undisturbed nature. Picking up where these experimental composers and sound artists have left off, soundscape composition moves from a conception of music as about place to a music that is place in itself.[21] While there is not a defined group of specialists in soundscape composition, an emerging number of artists and scientists from diverse backgrounds have expressed an interest in not merely imitating or replicating an idealized nature through their field recordings, but in artistically exploring the complexities that come with personally engaging with nature. These individuals include the field recorders Bernie Krause and Jana Winderen, visual and sound artists Christina Kubisch, Andra McCartney, and Andrea Polli, acoustic ecologists Murray Schafer, Barry Truax, and Hildegard Westerkamp, experimental musicians Leif Brush, David Dunn, Francisco López, and composers with Western classical training such as Katherine Norman and John Luther Adams, whose works will all be explored in the following pages. For now, it can simply be acknowledged that the work of these individuals reflects the current state of a long-changing conception of music, nature, and their relationship to one another.
Soundscape composers prefer to invoke and soak in nature over evoking it. By constructing new electroacoustic sounds from scratch and using actual field recordings, soundscape composition strives to reach an authentic connection to nature that digs deeper than classical music’s attempts at replicating an idealized nature. This means that nature and its soundscapes must to be met as it is, in all its complexities. Along these lines, soundscape composer David Dunn suggests a definition of music as analogous to written language: “if music might be our way of mapping reality through metaphors of sound as parallel to the visually dominant metaphors of speech and written symbols.”[22] For Dunn, music-as-language is powerful because it provides with the tools to put names, or in this case, sounds, to the reality we experience. This music, as a method of mapping reality allows us to experience our connection to the natural environment in a physical and kinesthetic way rather than a merely virtual, descriptive, and metaphoric act of interpreting the symbols of the written word. This attitude aligns itself art theorist Wassily Kandinsky’s critique of the symbolic, evoked nature of Romanticism: “Imitations of frogs croaking, of farmyards… are worthy of the variety stage and may be very amusing as a form of entertainment. In serious music, however, such excess remain valuable examples of the failure of attempts to “imitate nature.” Nature has its own language, which affects us with its inexorable power. This language cannot be imitated.”[23] When we respect nature as its own language, Dunn explains that “the physical act of using our aural sense, in contrast to entertainment, can become a means to practice and engender integrative behavior.”[24]
The viscerality of soundscape composition marks a full departure from Pythagoreas’s abstract, mathematical music. By directly importing field recordings from the natural environment into their compositions, soundscape composers allow listeners to become a part of nature. Consequently, soundscape composition, accepts neither a purely romantic nature nature nor a scare-quoted “nature” as a cultural construction.[25] Rather, soundscape composers appear to take on the suggestion Timothy Morton posits in his 2007 book Ecology Without Nature. As a social construct, Morton explains that the meaning of “nature” is constantly changing, having come to variously represent “growth, change, process, continuity, purity, freedom, mystery, transcendence and even fantasy.” Morton suggests that we turn away from the polysemantic word “nature” to the word “ecology,” which “has the advantage of being defined in a manner not overly constrained by centuries of aesthetics and politics.”[26] What does the word “ecology” have to offer us that “nature” doesn’t? Humans must be a part of it. Yeang defines ecology as ‘living and non- living parts, together with (their) total environment, interacting to form a stable system.”[27] Because we are now a part of this system, the impact of our actions have a real responsibility and accountability that cannot be ignored – and in order to save “nature,” we can no longer stand outside of it.[28] This inclusive, holistic conception helps shape soundscape composition’s underlying tones of activism, responsibility, and engagement. To the soundscape composer, music has the potential to change the way we understand our relationship with the world, which in turn affects our thoughts and eventually our behaviors.
[1] Norman, Katherine. "Real-World Music as Composed Listening.” Contemporary Music Review, Vol. 15, Part 1 (1996).
[2] Norman, Ibid.
[3] 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.
[4] Kane, Brian. “L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction.” Organised Sound 12, no. 01 (2007): 15–24.
[5] Kane, Ibid.
[6] Faulhaber, Edwin F. “Communicator Between Worlds: Björk Reaches Beyond the Binaries.” Doctoral Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2008.
[7] Faulhaber, Ibid.
[8] Helmreich, Stefan. “Underwater music: tuning composition to the sounds of science.” In The Oxford handbook of sound studies. Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. Oxford University Press, 2011.
[9] Licht, A. Sound art, beyond music, between categories. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2007.
[10] Licht, Ibid.
[11] Licht, Ibid.
[12] Licht, Ibid.
[13] Licht, Ibid.
[14] Bruynickx, Joeri. “Sound sterile: making scientific field recordings in ornithology.” In The Oxford handbook of sound studies. Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. Oxford University Press, 2011.
[15] Schafer, R. Murray. The soundscape: Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Inner Traditions/Bear & Co, 1993.
[16] Dyson, Frances. The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology. Cambridge (MA): Leonardo, The MIT Press, 2014. Print.
[17] Dyson, Ibid
[18] Schafer, R. Murray. The tuning of the world. Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. Print.
[19] Licht, A. Sound art, beyond music, between categories. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2007.
[20] Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. London: Continuum, 2009. Print.
[21] Adams, John Luther. Winter music: composing the North. Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
[22] Dunn, David. “Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred.” The book of music and nature: an anthology of sounds, words, thoughts. Rothenberg, David, and Marta Ulvaeus, eds. Wesleyan University Press, 2013. Print.
[23] Licht, A. Sound art, beyond music, between categories. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2007.
[24] Dunn, David. “Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred.” In Rothenberg, David, and Marta Ulvaeus, eds. The book of music and nature: an anthology of sounds, words, thoughts. Rothenberg, David, and Marta Ulvaeus, eds. Wesleyan University Press, 2013. Print.
[25] Soper, Kate. What is Nature?: Culture, politics, and the non-human. Wiley-Blackwell, 1995.
[26] Morton, Timothy. Ecology without nature: Rethinking environmental aesthetics. Harvard University Press, 2007.
[27] Yeang, K. "Ecodesign: A Manual for Ecological Design." Great Britain: Wiley-Academy (2006).
[28] Parmar, Robin. "The garden of adumbrations: reimagining environmental composition." Organised Sound 17, no. 03 (2012): 202-210.
This page references:
- Pierre Schaeffer - Études de bruits (1948)
- Christian Wolff - Exercise 15 (1975)
- R. Murray Schafer - String Quartet No. 2 "Waves" (1976)
- Robert Smithson - Nonsite (Essen Soil and Mirrors) (1969)
- Luigi Russolo - Awakening of a City (1913)
- Edgard Varèse - Poème électronique (1958)
- La Monte Young - Dream House (1962-Present)
