1.2. Spatial reasoning / Space and place in electroacoustic music

 

Attempts to separate our auditory sense from other senses through acousmatic music have led to in-depth concerns about our acoustic reasoning. The ability to perceive sounds in various ways without external stimuli was, initially, the most basic and interesting motive in this study. For example, we experience a perceptual transition from an accelerated rhythm to a pitched sound and a chord created by gathering several notes into a single sonic event (a sound-image), meaning that we assume a qualitative difference from a quantitative difference. By pursuing this, sound - like a bowl - can contain our sensory associations, feelings and emotions of our present experience, which builds strong bonds in our memory as schemata. For example, language as a complex sound form can be said to be a container of our senses, knowledge and our life with which we communicate in society. Therefore, in the acoustic world, existence does not come from the vibrational propagation from the sound’s origin, but instead is a conceptual embodiment influenced by our individual senses and impressions. As humans, we can summon such events to our mind through sound. 

In this study, space is described and divided into two concepts: space as the empty space of the sound bowl (an experience dependent on our senses, a one-dimensional description) and place, the element that fills up space with various experiences (an experience of our imagination[1]). All of my compositions have perceptual conflicts of spatial deduction between not only space and place, but also place and place. The former confrontation may be easily found from the relation between aural and mimetic discourses in electroacoustic music. On the other hand, deduction from sound alone could arouse different consequence for defining a place. In Teles (2019), for example, there is a ‘water-falling’ sound, and it may result in different images for the listeners such as raining or a waterfall. To make sure of the spatial judgement, they need to search for context from other sounds such as a roll of thunder in advance (for raining), or dried footstep and skateboard sounds juxtaposed with the ‘water-falling’ sound (for waterfall). This process is required to concentrate on the spatiality of sound itself, that is, space. The suggested contextual clues may influence the spatial reasoning for listeners, which may result in them reconsidering the ‘water-falling’ sound.

The two experiences of space and place seem to be markedly different in their definitions. Nevertheless, to demonstrate their essential commonality, the sonic experiences of space and place should be described as a continuum rather than as completely different entities. Intentionality proposes that, in our reasoning, “all consciousness is about or of something”.[2] The directivity implies the act of pointing somewhere that our consciousness is moving, and also implies that there is a departure and a destination. This suggests that there are different states of existence whether they are spiritual or material. In other words, every sensation is spatial.[3] However, space and place may still be distinguishable by whether the sensation targets a physical existence or mental references formed by a schema in our memory. Referring to our memory, we may have rich impressions of the sound as if recalling a place in the past. Whereas, focusing on our senses, we may find an emptiness in the sound, that is, a certain desire to query the sound qualities in order to form a context through which we can understand the circumstances. ‘Sound is a bowl’, as described in the metaphor, the space - the emptiness of bowl as abstractness - would be the essence of aesthetic expression in acousmatic music.

 

1.2.1. Spatiality in music

Music as a temporal art form (Zeitkunst) consists of intervals between notes or events. In harmony, or even two-tone combinations as a method of measuring the phenomenon of consonance-dissonance, we might say there is space between not only a note and the successive (melody), but also a note and the simultaneous (harmony). The meaning of ‘interval’ is not merely interpreted as a span, gap or interstice between or within determinate entities, but also implies spatial distance as a prerequisite of co-existence. In addition, the co-existence can also involve the relation between the sound and the perceiver. In many languages, the sense of distance creates a number of words about the spatial divisions such as personal, demonstrative pronouns and local adverbs - ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘this’ and ‘that’, or ‘closely’ and ‘distantly’, which tend to signify relative distances from oneself. The meanings of these are closely related and mutually intertwined with the complexity of interpersonal intimacy and geographical distance.[4] These words essentially imply natural scientific principles in an acoustic world, such as that ‘the nearer the sounding origin, the louder the sound’ – in other words, the musical dynamics connote the sense of distance. Piaget and Inhelder (1967) insist that this principle of spatial relationship is essential for human beings and related study has been examined by many scholars.[5] As the music moved into a new epoch of electroacoustic medium, the notion of the spatial quality of sound has been broadened because sound is not only able to capture places by recording technology, but can also produce virtual spatiality. 

 

1.2.2. Spatiomorphology

Smalley focused on the intrinsic spatiality of sound by spectromorphology to contribute to building a framework for understanding the structural relations and behaviours of sound. According to Smalley, spatial conditions and motions determine spectromorphological factors which are in an inseparable relation with our spatial perception. His term spatiomorphology emphasises the unique focus on spatial attributes easily overlooked by listeners as a sound in itself.[6],[7] While mentioning the term spatiomorphology, he provided detailed categorisations into two generic concepts of spaces; composed spaces as “composed onto the recording media” and listening spaces in which “the composed space is heard”[8] This catergorisation is followed by well-organised subordinate concepts; internal and external spaces, and diffused and personal spaces derived from composed and listening spaces respectively (1991). In his writing, Smalley gave a lot of weight to the significance of external spaces “which is made apparent to us through reflections” and is described as a perspectival space – similar to visual space, where a “listener can apprehend spaces much broader than the real” by looking through loudspeakers as windows.[9] This taxonomy seems to give an elaborate objective portrait of the acoustic world and is a great analytical tool in the methodology to uncover the building blocks of the spatiality in electroacoustic music. Moreover, he extended the spatial perspective to include ‘a more integrated ‘ecological’ approach’ because he believes that ‘we cannot separate space itself from what produces it, nor from our experience of space in nature and culture’.[10] His Orbieu soundscape shows the detailed spatial description of the place in the spectromorphological approach, that is, the soundscape as an empirical ‘place’ interprets spatial qualities as a reasoned ‘space’ by a rigorous examination. In his reasoning, Smalley differentiated the space-form processes into three types; the ‘journey’ between spaces, an ‘holistic view’ and complex appearance of spaces (mixed forms of ‘journey’ and ‘holistic view’).[11] The journey could be a traditional narrative approach, which completes the storyline by the temporal process of switching the listener’s perspective.  Conversely, the holistic view connotes a certain acoustic place where each audible element and event is temporally accumulated and layered to form a still-frame in the listener’s mind. These perspectival processes are dependent subject’s intentionality.

 

1.2.3. Space-Forming: the primary stage of spatial reasoning

The microscopic and macroscopic perspectives on Orbieu soundscape are also applicable toward the majority of our music appreciation. Let us look into a simple example of the perceptual grouping in musical discourse. In Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949) from Quatre études de rhythm, the jumping notes, from the very beginning, show the spectral intervals between different pitches, which may evoke a sense of elevation. Also, the continuous alteration of each note’s dynamic may imply a sense of its spatial proximity and size. We may listen to the spectromorphological changes by concentrating on the quality of each note.  On the other hands, the spatial qualities of the notes, mostly resonating in the upper register, could be connected and fused together in a small group by virtue of a low tone that conveys the richness of its harmonic overtone and long duration compared to the others. This incorporation may create a landscape in which the individual pitches, as though crystallised sounds, form into a sensuous and emotional place in our mind. John Young (2016) suggests that the intervallic grouping could themselves be considered ‘moments’, which are one of four perspectives on form: musical rhetoric, moment, morphic and narrative.[12] While suggesting these ideas, he stresses the necessity to redefine the idea of form as “a more organic principle by which sound identities” for electroacoustic music rather than the traditional form as “a set of formulaic moulds that simply ‘contain’ music”.[13] The unstable and fragile flexibility of creating form is a natural phenomenon from human beings’ attempt to understand what we perceive, especially in music as a digital representation that is “the most abstract and context free form it has ever taken”.[14]

In phenomenological description, ‘to be perceived’ is ‘to be distinguished’. We cannot have any perception in homogeneous area. Merleau-Ponty described the phenomena as “The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms art of a ‘field’”. By having a rigorous reasoning of phenomena, when a ‘shape’ has its contour, it can be detached from its background, that is, our forming of the shape creates a space with a shape and background – space must exist by co-existence[15].

From Messiaen’s music, one may not see or deduce space as a general form. Similarly, the act of listening to electroacoustic music, especially for those who are unfamiliar with the genre, remains disorientating and difficult because of its abstract conception or myriad possibilities to build context and a sonic landscape. The concept of ‘form’, suggested by Young, attempts to identify and analyse particular features of sounds and those relationships in electroacoustic music which “frequently resists traditional reductive methods”.[16] I believe that the recognition of form is the initial step of spatial reasoning from sound.

 

1.2.4. Meaning: complexity of the reasoning

Truax claimed that the traditional abstract-oriented aesthetic in Western art practice concerns only internal complexity, which is the abstract structure of its materials and forms. He highlights the importance of taking account of ‘external complexity’ to maintain the balance and synergy with ‘inner complexity’, which will renew the appreciation of listener’s aesthetical response in electroacoustic music.[17] His proposed works of both ‘electroacoustic music theatre’ and ‘soundscape composition’ are context-embedded approaches to music creation, which are more dependent on the listener’s individual perspective on the connections between the sound materials. These perspectives are enclosed in his/her empirical evidence, knowledge. By using recognisable sounds, the forming process may become apparent in our mind. However, the formed soundscape appears to be a highly complicated process owing to the semiotic listening, which combines source-identification with the context-identification processes.[18] The moments, as semiotic entities, could collide or juxtapose with each other, which will produce different contextual meaning depending on the sound disposition in the individual’s listening experience.

The crux of the complexity may originate in the fact that an auditory stimulus cannot be completely detached from other sensations of a whole experience. Transmodal perception has been used to explain the complexity of spatial attributes. It had been regarded as the realm of subjectivity, but the neuroscientific evidence has probed the association that the processing models, such as learning, are the process of connections between neurons which control entire human sensation.[19] Every sensation contains intrinsic signification as an intentional object constituted by our body, pure motor intentionality.[20] The intentional object is not exposed clearly to our consciousness, that is, the meaning of the object can be varied individually because of the contextual dependency of perception that every sensation happens with another sensation, even though the act of listening to acousmatic music explores the primacy of the ear. The subject has formed a certain schema of any sensation and produced meaning out of schematic networks.

 

Schema

The term is frequently referred to in various disciplines, such as psychology, pedagogy and computer science, as a mental structure representing some aspect of the world. Each interpretation among the studies showed inconsistency, which was inevitable, considering the diverse usage of term in its history. Although its ambiguity has often been problematic for researchers, there is little debate over the function of schemas. Generally, the functions that can be discerned are the following: ‘facilitating encoding of new information, including inferential elaboration’, ‘guiding behaviour’ and ‘expediting retrieval processes (i.e., memory search and reconstruction)’.[21]

In terms of the function related to the encoding of new information, Piaget introduced schemas to the field of developmental psychology. In particular, he was interested in the education of children and believed the significance of the intellectual growth of children to be different from that of adults, who have strong existing schematic networks, i.e. an empirical knowledge of the world.[22] According to him, children employ the processes of assimilation and accommodation, adapting a new sensation to an existing schema and modifying the existing schema to embrace the new unclassifiable sensation, forming a schema for the perception and interpretation of their experience. Since Piaget’s theory, the concept has been described with various terminologies, including 'frame' and 'scene and script'. Minsky, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, attempted to develop a computational human-like mechanism through his ‘frame' construct, an extension and elaboration of the schema construct. Rumelhart extended Minsky’s idea and developed the notion of schema explicitly. According to the schema theory of Rumelhart, when people gain knowledge or information, they try to connect it with some structure in their memory so as to better understand it. In addition, individuals split knowledge or information into understandable pieces, categorising them to store and recall them later. Therefore, when individuals learn new knowledge, it can be processed in either a pre-existing schema or a newly formed one. Schemata are therefore mental structures that help humans to grasp new information and effectively recollect and use pre-existing ideas. However, our reliance on schemas could lead us to miss the details of the sensations from our experience. If the new information is similar to the pre-existing data, we can be easily prone to impute the new sensations to a component of the solid schema – that is why, in listening to electroacoustic music, we tend to rely more upon symbolic meaning than our senses as they tend to neglect the spatial attributes of space from listening to sound.

 

Schemata in listening

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Figure 2. Five layers in relation to memory system. (Kendall 2014)

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Kendall often referred to schemata to account for the listening processes of electroacoustic music. He used the word as an umbrella term and employed it to look closely at the mental phenomena in his five layers that exist in listening processes; Sensation, Gist, Locus, Contexts, and Domains (Figure 2). The schema plays a particularly active role across these layers, and the ways in which the sensory stimulation triggers schemas and schematic connections appear to be fundamental to the meaning-making process.[23] For example, to illustrate the schema in electroacoustic music, these five mental layers might be applied in the analysis of hypothetical hearing of Jonty Harrison’s Klang (1982). At the beginning of the piece, a new perceptual event appears as a pitched, percussive and sustained sound from the perspective of Sensations. The event prompts the listener to search for an overlap between its mimesis and schemas in order to comprehend it, which calculates an assumption of the event as a kind of bell or instrumental resonance by an anonymous performer in a very silent place at Gist. After a few seconds, Locus shifts the subject’s focus from the previously succeeding percussive sounds to a new gestural sound—a covering lid—and has a small certainty that the gestures of bell-like sound act differently from an actual ‘bell’, which does not have a lid. Now the schema of an earthenware casserole dish appears derived from long-term memory by virtue of reducing the ambiguity of bell-like sounds at Locus. Generally, the earthenware is not an instrument and is used in the kitchen for cooking, that is, it has specific schematic spatial attributes and the listener allows the contradiction of the usage in electroacoustic medium at Contexts. Thus, internal representation caused by sensory stimulation eliminates irrelevant schemata from each layer, which prompts the listener to focus on the artistic expression and its feeling in order to bring a sense of consistency to the electroacoustic listening - Kendall calls it ‘harmonisation’. Since the beginning, the structure of the piece has gradually increased from simple and intermittent pitched sounds to a variety of textural and timbral sounds through the interventions of other instruments and digitally processed sound. Contexts anticipate what is to come during the structural developments based on the schematic patterns learned earlier in its process. The comparison between this piece and the schematic knowledge of other electroacoustic music, which displays similar processes may be implemented by Domains. Therefore, each layer of the listening processes activates schemata, which may in turn activate other schemata throughout the layers. While listening, the sounds access the schemata from long-term memory, and are stored in working memory while they are active and organising within mental spaces. Therefore, we expect that any perceivable auditory stimulus will trigger the construction of a mental space in working memory. Then we can say the mental space is as the sound-image landscape: “the imagined source of the perceived sounds defined”.[24] Mental space has features to be linked with other schemata and relies on both the listener’s tendencies and the context—in particular, the context of working memory's other contents, which Kendall called schematic associations.[25]

                                                             

Blending

Fauconnier and Turner (2002) argued a similar idea of meaning formation by the notion of conceptual blending. According to their theory, blending “is a basic mental operation that leads to new meaning”[26], which is the foundation of the meaning-making in daily experience, including the arts.

The essence of the blend is the spontaneous discovery of a third interpretive schema (space/system/mediating coordinate space) that is a subset of both antecedently represented schemas with respect to some set of common dimensions.[27]

They analysed language using a combination of two words as a culturally-formed manner of inventing and disseminating blending schemes. As shown in the four-space model of blending theory, the blend, or new meaning, that is derived from two different input mental spaces (schemata) can be categorised from a generic concept, the generic space (Figure 3). Even though the notion of input can be easily regarded as a simple form or meaning, it is founded on enormous implications, extremely complicated meaning formed or trained by another conceptual blending.

This theory seems to parallel compositional expression in electroacoustic music closely. Kendall’s term harmonisation (2016) may be used not only when the two input mental spaces show a strong schematic association, but also during the incompatible or oppositional blending, which is a weaker network of interconnections where a contradiction will occur. The superimposition of contradictory inputs, however, is an exclusive privilege for composers by electroacoustic means.[28] The conflicting images may evoke more creative and imaginative thinking to construct meaning because the incongruences are highlighted in the process.[29] It is more active, energetic, vibrant, live or attentive than consonance, which has been often employed in the context of contemporary arts[30]: surrealist paintings (e.g. Max Ernst’s works) show the juxta- or superposition of unrelated images. In particular, acoustic information has similar spectromorphological characteristics, which may generate proximity and strong aural interrelationship from such irrelevant semantic combination.[31]McNabb’s Dreamsong (1978), Wishart’s Vox 5 (1986), Normandeau’s Memoires vives (1989) have well indicated the superimposition of different spaces and transformations between them. Kendall applied their approach for the analysis of electroacoustic music and concluded that ‘meaning in electroacoustic music sometimes emerges directly from schematic associations’, and, therefore, the context of an electroacoustic piece can become apparent under the interconnections of two schematic networks.[32] These networks are identical with Fauconnier and Turner’s blended mental space.

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Figure 3. Fauconnier and Turner’s four-space model (2002)

 

 

Summary

In this chapter, we briefly examined the structure of knowledge and meaning making within our consciousness. Schema could be described as a pattern of our thought, a bundle of our sense data, of neurons, all compressed in one’s daily experiences. It involves related feelings or emotions, and the encounter or conflict between the schema provides new meaning as well as more established feelings or emotion. From my perspective, I find the parallels between the idea of space-place and schema (which are both perceptual continuums between informative and summative) to be the quantitative difference of our experience – our individuality. This approach allows me to interpret all auditory experiences within the correlation of space and place because schema is concerned with all of our accumulated knowledge and sensory activities.

Each composition has representative schemas in various ways: ‘language’ for Atmosphere, ‘instruments’ for Nong-Hyun, S Quartet and Echoes, ‘stage’ for Connected Islands, ‘a place’ for A trace of directionality and Teles. The schemas have potential to be connected to other schemas in our memory, which is dependent on contextual clues offered by other sounds used in the compositions. Thereby, my composition strategy is to reconstruct and recreate the schematic associations with sound and its transformations. This approach may evoke diverse spatial experiences within the continuum of space or place from the act of listening, which gives new perspective and reconsideration on the sound.

 

[1] I would delimit the imagination which is a spatial and pictorial sense referred to our knowledge and memory.

[2] Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2012), p.7.

[3] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp.256–7.

[4] Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, p.47-50.

[5] Curtis Roads, Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic (Oxford University Press, 2015), p.240.

[6] Denis Smalley, ‘Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes’, Organised Sound, 2/2 (1997), pp.107–26 (p. 122).

[7] Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007), p.361.

[8] Smalley, ‘Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes’, p.122.

[9] Ibid., p.122.

[10] Ibid., p.54.

[11] Denis Smalley, ‘Space-form and the acousmatic image’, Organised Sound, 12/1 (2007), p.69.

[12] John Young, ‘Forming form’, in Simon Emmerson and Leigh Landy (ed.), Expanding the Horizon of Electroacoustic Music Analysis, (Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp.58-79 (p.68).

[13] Ibid., p.61.

[14] Barry Truax, ‘The Aesthetics of Computer music: A questionable concept reconsidered’, Organised Sound 5/3, 2000, p.120.

[15] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp.256–7.

[16] Young, ‘Forming form’, p.77.

[17] Truax, ‘The Aesthetics of Computer music: A questionable concept reconsidered’, p.126.

[18] Kim, ‘Acousmatic Reasoning: An Organised Listening with Imagination’, p.2.

[19] Timothy A. Keller and Marcel Adam Just, ‘Structural and Functional Neuroplasticity in Human Learning of Spatial Routes’, NeuroImage, 125 (2016), pp.256–66 (p.257).

[20] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 176.

[21] Vanessa E. Ghosh and Asaf Gilboa, ‘What Is a Memory Schema? A Historical Perspective on Current Neuroscience Literature’, Neuropsychologia, 53 (2014), pp.104–14 (p.105).

[22] 'Jean Piajet', Wikipedia [Website], https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean_Piaget&oldid=917602423 (Authored 2019, Accessed 24thOctober 2019).

[23] Gary S. Kendall, ‘Listening and Meaning: How a Model of Mental Layers Informs Electroacoustic Music Analysis’, in Simon Emmerson and Leigh Landy (ed.), Expanding the Horizon of Electroacoustic Music Analysis, (Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp.31-57 (p. 41).

[24] Trevor Wishart, ‘Sound Symbols and Landscapes’, in Simon Emmerson (ed.), The Language of Electroacoustic Music (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1986), pp.41–60 (p.44).

[25] Kendall, ‘Listening and Meaning: How a Model of Mental Layers Informs Electroacoustic Music Analysis’, p.42.

[26] Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (Basic Books, 2002), p.57.

[27] Mark Turner, The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity (Oxford University Press, 2006), p.41.

[28] Trevor Wishart and Simon Emmerson, On Sonic Art (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996/1st rev.), p.137.

[29] Kendall, ‘Listening and Meaning: How a Model of Mental Layers Informs Electroacoustic Music Analysis’, p.43.

[30] Ibid., p.45.

[31] Wishart, ‘Sound Symbols and Landscapes’, p.43.

[32] Kendall, ‘Listening and Meaning: How a Model of Mental Layers Informs Electroacoustic Music Analysis’, p.43.