Reprise and a question Listening: Acousmatic and Embodied

MUSC265 Electronic Music Theory and Analysis Schaefferian (Pierre) listening emphasises abstraction through the phenomenological reduction (epoch) that allows reduced listening (ecout reduite) Schaferian (R. Murray) listening emphasises context through the idea of the soundscape How can we advance beyond these two opposed perspectives, the Schaefferian and Schaferian?

Beyond Schaeffer vs Schafer

Ihdes contemporary phenomenology, built on auditory field (focus, fringe, horizon), is one way, as it acknowledges both reduced and contextual listening as possible approaches to the complex and heterogenous experience of listening Another possibility is to look at the body (and imagined bodies) as a mediator of abstract and contextual listening; body as midway point between the mental/internal and physical/external, subject (listener) and object (world)

What is embodied listening?

Concept of embodied listening (EL) presumes inter- action/relationship between mind, body and world EL a sub-field of embodied cognition which assumes the following:
The human mind-brain is an organically embodied representational system, a system that enters into states that are systematically interrelated and that stand in intentional relations to the environment in which the human organism is embedded Nussbaum in Ferrar

 Embodied cognition assumes and investigates the body as a an active component in cognition:
Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time. As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent. When we talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors like Im looking forward to seeing you or Im reflecting back on the past, said Lynden K. Miles, who conducted the study... It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements. Angier (2010)

Note the similarity to a phenomenological approach (interrelation, intention, embedded)

The distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body Our body is not the object of an I think: it is an ensemble of lived meanings that finds its equilibrium I am conscious of my body via the world [just as] I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body Merleau-Ponty

Embodied cognition regards mind-body-world as an ensemble through which our consciousness operates How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body, said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of whats going on. Angier (2010)

Listening Exercise
In listening to the following example attend to the following:
Acousmatic listening: when/why/how do you focus on sound itself ? Embodied listening: when/why/how do you focus on your own or another implied body?

Pleasure and embodied listening

Music is intimately connected with body movements. Until recently, research has almost exclusively examined the impact of music on body movements [entrainment]. Yet findings on embodied cognition in other domains suggest that the influence might also work in the opposite direction: Real or imagined body movements during music listening may codetermine music preferences. We had participants listen to music and concurrently activate muscles whose innervation has been shown to be associated with positive and negative... It is concluded that body movements, both real and imagined, may play an important role in the development of music preferences. Sedlmeier et al The autocentric or subject-centred senses focus on basic responses and feelings of pleasure and displeasure. The emphasis is on subjective reaction to something. Autocentric perception is primitive and basic and it is no coincidence that it is associated with the child's first relationships with the world. Smalley

Alvarez, Javier. Mambo la Braque

Displeasure and embodied listening

It is not often that a piece of music makes me cringe. Yet this is precisely the reaction I have when I listen to Christof Migones Crackers [which] is composed from the sounds made by cracking human joints. Migone alternates raw recordings of joints cracking and interviews with the crackers with tracks in which the materials have been processed and reshaped into compositions which draw out and transform their latent musicality Later, I experienced a similar bodily reaction while listening to another piece: Ground Techniques by Neil Luck composed mainly of untreated sounds: recorded, but without further manipulation. The opening section comprises a series of breathing sounds (more specifically, the sounds of the inhalation of breath and the plosive sounds of the release of held breath), that are then imitated by instrumentalists. Listening to this, I found myself feeling tense, holding my own breath. Like Crackers, Ground Techniques explodes into sound when tension in the performing body can no longer be contained, spilling over the boundaries of the recording to touch the listening body. Sewell

Autocentricity and allocentricity

Autocentricity: natural, subjective listening for affect (emotion), including embodiment and environmental embeddedness; a reflexive and indicative relationship to experience Allocentricity: learned, objective listening for sonic qualities & abstract form, a disembodied listening ; an interactive relationship to experience
Autocentricity and allocentricity exist in parallelAutocentric responses [to electronic music] can be related to fear or apprehension initiated by the exaggerated magnification of the dimensions of realistic sounds the ways [acousmatic] sounds approach the listener and are perceived as objects existing in the space, and the bombarding of sounds at high intensity. On the other hand the practiced allocentric listener might find such autocentric responses rather crude and clichd... [Nevertheless] Shifts between autocentric and allocentric attitudes are thus a fundamental part of the listening process. Smalley

Embodied Acousmatic Listening?

The lack of a visible performer may turn the listeners attention back onto her own body Dusman describes how the absence of a performing body causes her to become more aware of her own reaction and of her position as an embodied subject. The lack of the very gestures upon which Fisher and Lochhead base their analysis causes a displacement of embodied activity from performer to analyst. The absence of these gestures forces an awareness of the implicit embodied experience of listening Sewell The metaphors of musical movement, the directionality of that movement, and the notion of tension and release achieve their significance from bodily experiences of moving, of spatial orientation, and of muscular feeling Fisher and Lochhead, in Sewell

Indicative listening: embodied cognition

Indicative listening closely relates to embodied cognition as an organically embedded representational system (Nussbaum)
If we extend [the indicative relationship] to include a wider frame of references to experience outside and beyond music, we immediately penetrate both more extensively and deeply into the relationship between musical experience and our experiences of living The concept of the indicative field and the indicative network has been created to explain the links between human experience and the listener's apprehension of sounding materials in musical contexts The notion of the indicative field/network comprehends relationships that are considered mimetic. Mimesis in music is the conscious and unconscious imitation or representation of aspects of nature and culture [the life-world]. Smalley

Embodied Indicative Fields

Gesture
Everyone has daily experience of gestural activity and is aware of the types of consequences of the energy-motion trajectory. Gestural activity is not only concerned with object play or object use but also enters into human relationships the [gestural] field does not stop with a physical act since tension and resistance also concern emotional and psychological experiences. Thus in music there is a link between the energy-motion trajectory and the psychological apprehension of sounding contexts even when physical gesture is not present. Smalley

Energy and Motion

There cannot be sound without energy in the spectral domain and there cannot be energy without motionThe listener can deduce the style of energetic physical action from the spectral behaviour of a sound, and even where the sounding body is not known or real, energetic tensions and releases are conveyed through spectral change Smalley Object/Substance In the object/substance field the popular sense of "thingness' is intended How can a sound be a thing when it has no material existence? First because actual sounding materials can be used, simulated or alluded to. Smalley

Utterance
The fact that the sounds of utterance are generated from within the body and that they are the essential vehicle of personal expression and communication, makes utterance intimate and emotionally charged. Therefore the listener's relationship with utterance is often reflexive rather than indicative In electroacoustic music the voice always announces a human presence, perhaps in a sounding context that is not regarded as directly human. Smalley

Behaviour
The placing of sounds in a context automatically ensures that some kind of relationship must exist among them. The term behaviour may refer to human behaviour deduced from the utterance-network, to relationships in and among the networks of object/ substance, environment or vision Smalley

Jerry Lewis, The Errand Boy (1961)

A proof of embodied listening through popular culture

Bibliography
Angier, Natalie. Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally. New York Times, 1 Feb 2010 Ferrer, Rafael. Embodied Cognition Applied to Timbre and Musical Appreciation: Theoretical Foundation. http://
www.bpmonline.org.uk/bpm10/ferrer_rafaelembodied_cognition_applied_to_timbre_and_musical_appreciation_theoretical_foundation.pdf

Sewell, S. (2010). Listening Inside Out: Notes on an embodied analysis. Performance Research, (July 2011), 37-41. Smalley, D. (1996). The listening imagination: Listening in the electroacoustic era. Contemporary Music Review, 13(2). VUW Online Journals.

Discography
Alvarez, Javier. Mambo la Braque. On Excitations [CD], CD 05-156, VUW Audiovisual Suite.