Eleven Theses on Sound and Transcendence

Abstract

I. Listening can only be localized in the ear by force of reduction. Imagine a room (call it the "music room"), in which sounds are heard; any normal person entering the room is presented with sounds which are audible only there, but which can be traced to no specific source ... A specific sound--middle C at such and such a volume, and with such and such a timbre--can be heard in the room. Yet there are, let us suppose, no physical vibrations in the room: no instrument is sounding, and nothing else happens there, besides this persistent tone. (1) The "music room" is a hypothetical. To function, it requires the force of reduction. This is most apparent in the claim that, "let us suppose," these sounds are correlated to no physical vibration. That moment authorizes the philosopher to distinguish the sonic from the musical: one vibrational, with everything that comes in tow, such as the acoustic, the resonant, the spatial, and the causal; the other, a pure event bathed in divine ontological indifference. II. To split the senses one needs techne. [The acousmatic situation] symbolically precludes any relation with what is visible, touchable, measurable. Moreover, between the experience of Pythagoras and our experiences of radio and recordings, the differences separating direct listening (through a curtain) and indirect listening (through a speaker) in the end become negligible. (2) Don't be fooled by this dubious negligibility. Even if one were to doggedly maintain the historical difference that distinguishes the Pythagorean curtain from the loudspeaker, the conceptual difference would be subsumed, for the modern-day akousmatikoi, by the end to which the technology is applied. Even the "music room" would require some hidden technology to remove the vibration from sound; otherwise it would be a supernatural experience. Techne is the prerequisite for isolating a sense modality. A philosopher's rule of thumb: veiling the visual unveils the auditory--and veiling is a technique. III. Techne is to be understood as both technique and technology, no matter how rudimentary. Cognitive scientists and German romantics agree: the closed eyelid and averted glance are the most rudimentary acousmatic techniques! Closing one's eyes while listening to sound ... evokes shifts in style of processing by modifying focus of attention, while keeping targeted stimuli the same. The main outcome of such a shift could enhance the perceived intensity of emotional stimulus, making positive attributes more positive and negative ones more negative ... Closing the eyes indeed characterizes a specific brain state that can be affected by the individual's mental set. Accordingly ... eyes closed position represents a well defined mental set by which perceived emotionality can be modulated, thus probing its neural respect. (3) Whenever Joseph [Berglinger] was at a big concert, he seated himself in a corner, without looking at the brilliant gathering of auditors, and listened with the very same reverence as if he were in church,--just as quietly and motionlessly and with his eyes fixed upon the ground before him ... (4) The eyelid can be projected outward, onto screens, veils and coverings: To explain the plan of the festival-theater now in course of erection at Bayreuth I believe I cannot do better than to begin with the need I felt the first, that of rendering invisible the mechanical source of its music, to wit the orchestra ... (5) The prevailing doctrine of nineteenth-century music aesthetics--the idea of "absolute" music, divorced from purposes and causes, subjects and clear-cut emotions--gave rise ... to the demand for an "invisible orchestra" concealing the mundane origins of transcendental music. What Wagner was able to institute in Bayreuth was also, around 1900, attempted in the concert hall. …