Music is meaningful; and yet, when we try and put our finger on precisely what it is about music that is meaningful, we usually end up resorting to rather vague, inarticulate terminology. The notion of musical meaning and metaphor turns out to be somewhat of a chimera. Certainly, we can say that music is symbolic-and yet, what is it symbolic of? One person's beauty is another person's excess. We can say that musical value judgements are obviously subjective, but can we say that a musical passage has an intrinsic meaning? Is meaning somehow encoded in notes on the page or magnetic stripes on a tape? The fact that a minor key symbolises sadness is usually taken as a musical given; yet, if someone hears a minor key passage as being happy, are they necessarily wrong? So, is this all our revered musical communication consists of: utilising clichéd musical symbols so that the audience can 'understand' us? What happens when we use a medium that does not naturally suggest such clichés, such as electroacoustic art?
All of these questions deal with the problem of the musical sign and the notion of communication. Certainly, the linguistic sign has had a long and healthy history, perhaps due to the quantifiable nature of language-that is to say, language is readily broken down into smaller articulatory units. Music, on the other hand, does not so readily undergo such processes. While various theories of the generative processes in music focus on analogies between small-scale units in language and the musical 'cell', these theories seem largely to break down when dealing with electroacoustic music, and indeed other forms of contemporary music, due to highly individual systems of hierarchy. Nonetheless, I believe it is important to present a brief exposition of semiological theories, as we are concerned with understanding the processes involved in human perception of sound and meaning in sound. By considering the impact the literature has on this investigation, we may ground the aesthetical approach within a solid framework of signification theory.
The notions of 'meaning' and 'communication' are discussed in the works by philosophers such as Saussure, Peirce and Barthes, who view the 'sign' as being essentially a relationship between semiotic forms: Peirce sees it as a triadic relationship between representamen (that which represents), the referent (the object that is being represented) and the interpretant (the new sign which is created in the mind through the act of referral). Saussure, on the other hand, sees signification as a dyadic relationship between a signifier and signified (the concept which is being represented). As we can see, the difference between the two stances is quite subtle-we can reasonably say that the signifier and representamen are equivalent; for Saussure, however, the signified is metaphysical (a concept or notion), while Peirce sees the act of referral as getting closer, somehow, to some 'real-world' truth (the referent). This last statement, however, is very much a matter of interpretation; as Nattiez says: "Peirce's thought is so complex, and so often contradictory, that reconstruction of the coherent Peircian doctrine seems at present nearly impossible.". However, Nattiez interprets the referent as "a virtual object that does not exist except within and through the infinite multiplicity of interpretants". Jacques Derrida goes a little further by doing away with the referent altogether, preferring to regard the act of signification as merely the assignment of an infinite chain of interpretants, without ever actually coming closer to 'the real world'. Nattiez is thinking along similar lines in the following definition:
a sign, or collection of signs, to which an infinite complex of interpretants is linked, can be called A SYMBOLIC FORM.
If we agree, then, that music is essentially a symbolic form, then we can begin to distinguish different significative strata in sound-saying that a particular extract sounds like a voice turning into bird-song is a very different level of signification from saying that it represents a human aspiration for freedom from oppression. I shall approach these levels in the electroacoustic context later. Suffice it is to say, however, that there has been all too little investigation into the significative realms of electroacoustic music, with some notable exceptions. This is primarily due to the argument that the significative realms, due to the individual nature of the interpretant, are too subjective to form the basis of any rational, non-normative discourse. However, as Naomi Cummings says in relation to the metaphorical realms of music:
The recognition that metaphor discloses a hidden mental reference at whatever level of discourse it occurs... does, however, necessitate a further admission, that allusions to the expressive content of music do not belong in an entirely separate class of explanation, since they, too, demonstrate a projection onto sound of aspects of our own mentality.
The recognition that the apprehension of musical metaphor is strongest in the electroacoustic domain, where referential sounds abound, is slowly being taken on board by commentators in the field. The degree to which common sound processes affect and transform the various significative levels, however, is still a largely disregarded area. To see the interactions between these significative realms, we will need to examine current trends in musical semiology, a discipline which attempts to shed some light on the fundamental structures and dimensions in musics as diverse as Wagner, Parmegiani and the Inouit.
Musical analysis has always tended to follow the current musical concerns; that is to say, an analytical system always tends to concentrate on the organicist canon of a particular style. The two notable systems are, of course, Schenkerian analysis (based on the premise of a functional tonality) and Forte's set-theory system (based on an intervallic approach to 'cells'). Needless to say, of course, these classical analytical system break down when considering electroacoustic music. Indeed, any analytical system concerned with the traditional Western note-oriented systems will be inefficacious in such a domain. Of course, this is part-and-parcel of the intentionally iconoclastic nature of the avant garde. This, along with other contemporary 'problems', has forced a focusing upon the objectives of analysis: that is to say, an analysis of analysis in the corpus of discourse on music. Only recently has the idea of musical semiology been introduced as precisely this sort of 'metametadiscourse'. Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Jean Molino, both generally regarded as having largely developed this train of thought, explain the semiological model of musical discourse as a holistic description of the processes that make up the physical states of a musical work, its creation and its perception. For this reason Molino preferred the term 'the total musical fact' over 'work', which usually connotes a single physical state of the work, ignoring the aspects of composition, performance and listening. By seeing music as essentially a symbolic form, Molino integrates the inherent relationships into a model of musical discourse which can be viewed in three parts, which he labels the poietic, the neutral, and the esthesic. The poietic level is essentially a structure, and is concerned with the chains of thoughts and actions that go into creating some physical thing which we call 'music'. In the case of music, these may include compositional strategies, performance practice, interpretation, environment and so on. The neutral level, or trace, is best thought of as the physical states or, as Nattiez terms them, 'immanent configurations' which comprise what has traditionally been thought of as 'the work'. In a general musical context this level will include some sort of score or scores. These scores may be prescriptive, for example a musical score or recording, or descriptive, by which I mean the actual sound waves in motion, which I will term 'signal'. The esthesic level is a structure as well, describing the complex act and chain of events which make up perception of the musical fact. Obviously the precise content of these levels of a musical work vary from work to work, from performance to performance, and from listener to listener. The role of analytical and meta-analytical discourse in the electroacoustic environment, then, is to generalise a set of premises from which we may deduce and examine particular characteristics of a work, within the general limits set by our perceptual faculties.
In his doctoral thesis, Emmerson critiques the tripartitional model as being over-simplistic in its approach to the trace level. He argues that:
To describe the musical process as two cognitive processes sandwiching a material object is to make too overt a distinction between substance and its apprehension. On the one hand one might argue that the two cognitive processes might be reduced to-however complex a series of-chains of material causation, on the other, that the existence of the material object may only be apprehended in a cognitive process, to all intents and purposes the object does not exist without such a process
He is here expressing two concerns: firstly, that the trace level may be further bifurcated and secondly, that the trace has is essentially a Platonic form. I mentioned earlier that in the trace level the distinction is made between some physical entity which can "use any medium of storage and communication dictated by the mutual agreements of the performers" and sound waves which are apprehended by the listener. Emmerson labels these the descriptive and prescriptive scores, respectively. He argues that both of these lie more properly in the realm of poietics or esthesics, and that the bifurcation is necessary due to the inherent cognitive and perceptual acts in the trace level which Nattiez seems to either overlook or ignore-the prescriptive score assumes some creative act, while the descriptive score assumes some perceptive act. We must therefore redefine the descriptive score to mean 'sound-data' or 'sound-image'; that is to say, an individual's apprehension of a musical work is necessarily filtered through their own auditory processes. Emmerson's argument is, I believe, as subtle as the difference between Nattiez's and Derrida's interpretations of Peirce, and would thus require some fairly hefty philosophical debate on my part to comb through the pros and cons. As I have neither the time nor space to do so, I will simply augment my discussion of the trace level by acknowledging the following distinction of Emmerson, who subdivides the esthesic level to include the two different types of information used when a listener describes the signal:
(a) Cognitive information: an attempt to describe the input without emotional connotation...
(b) Affective information: an attempt to describe the effect of the signal on the emotions
I shall refer to these two terms often throughout this text, but it is important to see the 'signal' is properly located in the esthesic dimension. I shall now examine the implication the tripartitional model has on the notions of communication and sound-signification.
One of the important consequences of the tripartitional model of musical discourse is the way in which it challenges the traditional concept of communication. In the traditional model, there is a direct line of communication between composer and audience; in the semiological model, however, any meaning given is the constructive assignment of a complex of interpretants to a particular form. Both producer and receiver predicate this assignment, and there is no guarantee that the interpretants will be coincident. Rather than a linear continuum of expressive and cognitive process, the communicative mechanism is necessarily interpretative in nature. This discrepancy has lead many contemporary philosophers to deconstruct the notion of communication altogether, leaving some artists wondering whether it would be better not to attempt any communication whatsoever. Nevertheless, this model is not to be taken as a complete denial of communication, rather that communication, per se, is no more than any particular case of various modes of interpretive exchange. As Jakobson explains, in order for communication to exist, both addresser and addressee require sympathetic codes. Whether this can ever truly happen, especially in such an ephemeral and notoriously indefinable phenomenon such as music, is of course one of the grand debates of literary theory, as Kristeva remarks:
...music is a departure from this principle of communication. It does transmit a "message" between a subject and an addressee, but it is hard to say that it communicates a precise meaning... If the addressee hears this combinatory as a sentimental, emotive, patriotic, etc., message, that is the result of a subjective interpretation given within the framework of a cultural system rather than the result of a "meaning" implicit in the "message".
As Stravinsky once said, "Expression has never been the immanent property of music". Nevertheless, the notion of communication is often considered to be the prime directive of composers. Electroacoustic composers, trying to break 'new ground' in the area of musical codes, face a problem of not communicating with their audience-this has long been the criticism of any music that strays outside of an expected affective vocabulary. However, it has always been the case that today's esoterica is tomorrow's fashion; as Herbert Brün puts it:
A speaker with a new thought has to solve a problem of anticommunication. The syllables "anti" are... not meaning "hostile" or "against" but rather "juxtaposed" or "from the other side"... Communication is achievable by learning from language how to say something. Anticommunication is an attempt at respectfully teaching language to say it.
So what does semiotics have to say about music, and in particular electroacoustic music? The centrality of the musical code in the electroacoustic environment becomes clear when we consider that there may only be vestiges of the traditional affective vocabulary remaining; perhaps this is why many listeners find electroacoustic music hard to 'understand'. A lack of traditional affective signifiers can be daunting and over-clinical for some listeners, while for others it symbolises a radical break from the received syntactical dogma. Many contemporary composers have thus taken it on themselves to create their own self-contained musical codes, which may often be an eclectic mix of musical and extra-musical influences. The work of Olivier Messiaen is a unique example of a often stringently consistent musical language which was nevertheless often diametrically opposed to the musical thought of his contemporaries. Boulez summed up the notion of a self-contained musical code with relationship to the Second Viennese School:
With Webern... the sound-clarity is achieved by the birth of the structure out of the material. I am speaking of the fact that the architecture of the work derives directly from the ordering of the series. To say it another way, schematically, whereas Berg and Schoenberg in some manner limit the role of serial writing to the semantic level of the idiom-the invention of elements that will be combined by a nonserial rhetoric-with Webern the role of that writing is understood as extending to the rhetoric itself.
Music has always been had close involvement with human activity, so much so that many cultures include music as part of daily rituals. Recent sociological studies showed a correlation between the general tenor of popular song lyrics and the current socio-economic trends. Molino:
The long history of expressive theories of music (music reflects or arouses the basic passions) and imitative theories of music (music depicts reality) illustrates perfectly how the music fact is everywhere not merely linked to but closely bound up with the whole body of musical facts.
Given that music can be understood as a symbolic form, we are now at a position to posit three levels of sound-signification in the acousmatic environment (after Peirce): the sound-index, the sound-symbol and the sound-metaphor. We can now look at these levels in detail:
1) the sound-index: relates the signal to the possible sound-source through aural resemblance. I have here synthesised Peirce's icon and index due to some confusion in the literature as to the sonic counterpart of these significative levels. This is a very basic level of signification, much as a picture of a tree resembles a real tree, we can say that the sound of a door opening, even though produced by a pair of speakers, resembles that of a 'real' door opening by virtue of its aural resemblance. This level of signification covers the mimetic, or referential, in sound-for example, Messiaen's birdsong can be considered primarily an icon.
2) The sound-symbol: relates the signal to the object by some convention or coded expression. While this is the domain of the linguistic sign in literary theory, we talk of the symbolic in music as that which is 'coded', such as the 'pathetic' minor second, or the way in which The Ride of the Valkyries signifies large German women wearing armour (in fact, all of Wagner's leitmotivs could be seen as quite specific sound-symbols). Interestingly, sound-symbols are often also largely sound-indexes; for example, any onomatopoeic words largely enter a coded vocabulary by virtue of their indexical properties. Similarly, instrumental effects such as tremolandi tend to be associated with tension by virtue of their index to physical energy. However, as the differences between different cultures' musics show, these sort of indexical signifiers in coded expression are largely non-standard.
3) The sound-metaphor: relates the signal to the object through an individual's own experience with the sounding world and the particular associations that the transformation or juxtaposition of these contrasting sound-objects may have. The works of Trevor Wishart have been a particularly rich area of metaphorical associations-he comments on the search for these metaphorical threads:
What would happen if we were to establish a whole system of relationships between sound-images, each having strong metaphorical implications. By articulating the relationships between the sound-images we could develop not only sonic structures... but a whole area of metaphorical discourse.
The traditional concept of metaphor in music has been on a more abstract, innate level; most of the research in this area focuses on basic psychological oppositions: opposition/cooperation, motion/stasis, tension/relaxation etc. In electroacoustic music, however, we may also focus on the metaphorical associations with particular referential sounds: a more direct, one could argue more synaesthetic, level.
In approaching and analysing metaphorical discourse in music, however, one runs the risk, as Nattiez would say, of falling into a rut of normativity. Nevertheless, one can argue that to deny the existence, or at least interpretation, of metaphor in music is to deny music its very essence. As Roger Scruton says:
It seems that in our most basic apprehension of music there lies a complex system of metaphor... [which] cannot be eliminated from the description of music, because it is integral to the intentional object of musical experience. Take this metaphor away and you cease to describe the experience of music.
How can we begin to understand metaphor in the acousmatic environment? We can start by recognising the different role of metaphor in instrumental and electroacoustic music. As I mentioned earlier, an affective assignation in instrumental music tends to be made at the level the musical code, or through a psychological/psychoacoustical opposition. In electroacoustic music, however, the use of sounds with an intentionally referential aspect allows another more direct level of metaphorical assignation. In this area of referential discourse, is it possible that there are certain metaphorical associations with sounds that we may take for granted? In short, can we argue the existence of the universal metaphor? Well, one can safely say that there is no such thing as a universal metaphor, per se; our interpretants are unique and subjective, grounded in a highly individualised set of socio-cultural bounds. Bearing in mind Scruton's advice, however, we should be able to postulate a generalised table of sound-metaphors, bearing in mind Barthes' warning concerning the dangers of a metalingual assignation of signification:
One can for instance ask some subjects about the meaning they attribute to a piece of music by submitting to them a list of verbalized signifiers (anguished, stormy, sombre, tormented, etc.); whereas in fact all these verbal signs for a single musical signified, which ought to be designated by one single cipher, which would imply no verbal dissection and no metaphorical small change. (sic)
We can distinguish two types of sound-metaphor: the extrinsic metaphor and the intrinsic metaphor. This distinction is made between a sound whose metaphor is a product of the extrinsic referral to a given object (e.g. a bird-like sound representing freedom) and a sound whose metaphor is a product of an intrinsic quality resembling a real-world physical system, and thus grounded in a psychoacoustical basis (i.e. a quickly iterating sound-object represents high energy, and thus a point of tension). I shall cover the intrinsic metaphors in my discussion of Denis Smalley's spectromorphology. For now, I shall discuss the different categories of extrinsic sound-metaphor.
One of the few commentators to have attempted such a classification of universals is the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who explains, rather nicely, the idea of extrinsic metaphor:
A sound event is symbolic when it stirs in us emotions or thoughts beyond its mechanical sensations or signalling function, when it has a numinosity or reverberation that rings through the deeper recesses of the psyche.
He posits several generalised universal metaphors:
He also points out the way in which sound symbols (or rather metaphors) change from culture to culture-the sound of waves would mean one thing to an island-dweller, where perhaps sea-faring and seafood constitutes a large part of their life; to a landlocked business person, the sea would mean something completely different; to someone who almost drowned, perhaps, the sound would symbolise something altogether more deadly. Schafer also argues that we are losing the original metaphorical associations with sound we once had.
He attempts a fairly comprehensive categorisation of sound-types. I have annotated them, where possible, with some metaphors that spring to mind:
As we can see, all of these metaphorical associations tend to not only context-dependent, but also individual-dependent.
It should also be pointed out that in many respects a single 'sound-object' cannot necessarily be limited to just one signifying role, as Molino points out:
...every sign is also in varying degrees icon, index and symbol... Music is by turns signal, indication, symptom, image, symbol and sign
The degree to which a particular object is assigned its signifying role is, of course, dependent on the listener's interpretative act; the composer, however, has the power to 'guide' this significative assignation through the interplay of a dominantly mimetic or a dominantly abstract sonic syntax.
Emmerson describes a division of musical discourse into the realms of 'aural discourse' and 'mimetic discourse'; being a codification of the degree to which a particular work exploits referentiality (that is, the degree to which the sound-objects are heard primarily as sound-indexes). This division is perhaps better thought of as a continuum; it relates not only to sound-images themselves, but also to the listener's own socio-cultural background. Mimetic discourse may be further subdivided into the fields of timbral mimesis and syntactic mimesis-that is, timbral mimesis being the direct imitation of the sounds of the natural world, such as the Futurist's intonamurori or Messiaen's bird-song works, while syntactic mimesis imitates the relationships between natural events, for example using the rhythms of speech, or attack-decay trajectories. Initiating a dialectic between the aural and mimetic poles in electroacoustic discourse provides a powerful means of control over the listener's states of apprehension, a practice unique to this medium. For example, in Wishart's Red Bird, the sonic transformations of the musical landscape lead the listener from appreciation of the spectromorphological mutations, to a deeper 'symbolic' web of images. Emmerson describes Red Bird as: "one of only a handful of works to have grasped mimetic transformation as a vehicle for the communication of ideas."
In Denis Smalley's Pentes, the sudden emergence of a mimetic identity (the Northumbrian pipes) throws the preceding aural discourse into a new light; the listener is forced to re-evaluate their spectromorphological investigations in terms of a new reference point. This sort of covert and overt interplay can very powerfully affect the way a work is apprehended, and thus the structuring that the listener imposes.
The abstractedness of the discourse, of course, relates to Smalley's notion of surrogacy. First-order surrogacy is the apprehension of so-called "primal gesture": that is, the recognition of source material and gestural cause. Second-order is traditional instrumental gesture. Third-order surrogacy infers a particular gestural type or sounding material, while remote surrogacy obfuscates both material and cause, leaving the listener with so-called vestiges of gesture, that is to say, a sense of "tensile, proprioceptive properties... characteristics of effort and resistance perceived in the trajectory of the gesture". Surrogacy is worth bearing in mind when considering the effects of the signal processes.
To what extent should the technological environment of the composer be taken into consideration when approaching works of acousmatic nature? As I hinted at in my introductory paragraph, I felt that the technological surroundings, the 'task-environment' of a composer, tends to act in a limiting manner. While this statement may seem to be rather odd for a computer programmer, let me further my case. For traditional instrumental music, the task environment was a two-dimensional configuration of various dots and lines, one dimension representing pitch and the other representing duration. This underlines the importance of these two parameters in traditional music, the 'lattice conception' as Wishart calls it. Composers were simply representing the particular combinations of fixed sonorities (the instrumental repertoire) in a codified format.
Now that we supposedly have freed ourselves from the limitations of the instrumental conception of music, many electroacoustic composers find themselves in back in a similar rut-MIDI, sampling, CSound scorefiles, physical modelling all show vestiges of the attempt to create 'electronic instruments'. This is not to debunk the good work being done by many practitioners in these fields, but one could say that in many respects the particular technological solution that a composer opts for does tend to reflect their compositional stance. That is not to say that digital sound processes free the composer from this sort of limitation; as I mentioned earlier, the artifacts of the digital algorithm can often process a similar sort of codification.
While as listeners we feel that transparency of technology is desirable, Di Scipio argues for an 'ethnomusicological perspective' when considering electroacoustic music from a musicological point-of view:
The study and analysis of electroacoustic music usually yields unsatisfying results if concerned primarily with the structure of the artifact per se. In traditional musicology, insufficient ethnomusicological awareness is shown, when compared with the vastness of actions that are afforded to the composer... its prime concern should be with the actions and mental representations involved in creating the music;
While this view is not useful from a perceptual point-of-view, it does call for an acknowledgment of the so-called "centrality of techné" in a hermeneutic or historical musicology, which thus becomes essential when considering composition-through-technology from an aesthetical outlook. Di Scipio again:
What is missing [from traditional musicology] is a methodology capable of characterising the technical processes and the designing tools that make up the compositional environment, models, representations, and knowledge-level strategies, which is understood as traces of cognitive and aesthetic paradigms specific to the medium. It is also shown that an analysis of such kind-drawing on the techné of the making of music-is indispensable in order to shed light on the renewed relation of sound materials to musical form in electroacoustic music.
While this may or may not be true, I believe what Di Scipio points to here is that the question of materials and form in electroacoustic music to a large extend depends on the technological environment, providing clues to the composer's cognitive relationship to the musical structures and discourses.
With the almost limitless amount of sonic possibilities available many composers choose to focus on a particular technological aspect, for example granular synthesis, which in some way encapsulates their current aesthetical stance towards sound. This is made particularly clear in the case of Barry Truax, whose workings on the development of the granular synthesis technique is related to his aesthetic of uncovering the 'inner workings' of a sonic source. In many respects, however, this aesthetic focusing which Truax, Di Scipio and Emmerson all seem to espouse in various forms, can be viewed as an attempt to construct a new musical code in the electroacoustic domain-in fact, the new music journals are littered with articles by composers claiming to have the ultimate in a self-contained computer music code. In many cases, however, it is often the aesthetical appeal of the process, the techné, that the composer/engineer is recognising, rather than the actual music, per se. Now that the solution-space of music has been broadened to its boundaries, any attempt to codify musical practice must result in an overbearingly phenotextual experience. As I mentioned earlier, electroacoustic music's strength lies in its resistance to codification: by strengthening the codification one runs the risk of weakening the musical argument.