Perceiving Sound Objects in the Musique Concrète.

Rolf Inge Godøy

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.672949

Abstract

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there emerged a radically new kind of music based on recorded environmental sounds instead of sounds of traditional Western musical instruments. Centered in Paris around the composer, music theorist, engineer, and writer Pierre Schaeffer, this became known as musique concrète because of its use of concrete recorded sound fragments, manifesting a departure from the abstract concepts and representations of Western music notation. Furthermore, the term sound object was used to denote our perceptual images of such fragments. Sound objects and their features became the focus of an extensive research effort on the perception and cognition of music in general, remarkably anticipating topics of more recent music psychology research. This sound object theory makes extensive use of metaphors, often related to motion shapes, something that can provide holistic representations of perceptually salient, but temporally distributed, features in different kinds of music.

Highlights

In parallel with the emergence of the musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer and coworkers dedicated much attention to the perceptual issues of this new kind of music, in particular to the so-called sound objects and their various features
Toward the end of CD3 of the Solfège, from track 64 and onward, Schaeffer’s conceptual apparatus is put into practice, with an anecdotic account of a composition factory where masses of sound arrive by truckloads, is processed further, and put together. In these tracks of CD3, we can hear how electronic and instrumental sounds, can all be handled with the same perceptual categorical apparatus
We have an overview of this perceptual categorical apparatus in the mentioned Summary diagram of the theory of musical objects (Schaeffer, 2017, pp. 464-467)

Summary

Introduction

In parallel with the emergence of the musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer and coworkers dedicated much attention to the perceptual issues of this new kind of music, in particular to the so-called sound objects and their various features. There was an attempt to find some common features among individual experiences of sound objects by the use of metaphor labels These labels, largely related to motion shapes such as impulsive, iterative, sustained, rough, smooth, etc., grew out of practical composition work in the musique concrète and ensuing discussions at the Groupe de recherches musicales in Paris. This focus on sound objects and their perceptually salient features was, and still is, a remarkable development in music theory. In being founded on perceived sound, and not on Western notation or other abstract paradigms, this theory emerged ahead of its time, and may from our present day vantage point be regarded as just as much a project of music psychology as of music theory

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion