Elizabeth Hoffman
Department of Music
New York University
24 Waverly Place, Room 268
New York, New York 10003, USA
elizabeth.hoffman@nyu.edu
“I”-Tunes: Multiple
Subjectivities and Narrative
Method in Computer Music
Astratto: Representational aspects of a computer music composition may forge a perspectival conduit into the music,
partly through conceptual boundary structures described here as “frames.” The perspectival conduit includes the
illusion of subjectivities inside the music and is called here the work’s “point of view.” These internal subjectivities
shape a listener’s sense of self, including role, location, and identity. Where and how does the given sound world let the
listener in, conceptually, to interact with the work’s point of view? This essay considers musical discourse that draws
on literary theories of narrative, but it also examines techniques that derive directly from computer music’s distinctive
features and capabilities.
introduzione
This essay explores how certain features in a defined
subset of computer music instantiate an elaborate
web of listener, composer, and sound world in a
manner reminiscent of a narrative phenomenon. IO
refer here to an interconnectivity free of temporal
or ontological logic, narrative-like in its evocation
of musical subjectivities which, in turn, alter a
listener’s sense of self in relation to the sonic world.
My focus is on fixed-media computer music that
either manifests some literality by using sampled
sound or else suggests a realistic context some other
modo. But my interest in any representational aspect
concerns only how it contributes to an abstract
viewpoint that is our conduit into the music.
Because the term “narrative” in vernacular usage
so often denotes teleology or plot, I emphasize that
this article‘s topic is quite different, referring only
to the suggested presence of a teller or a shower
of a “story.” The narrative viewpoints situate
the teller of the story, and by implication, IL
receiver.
Although this article is concerned with strategies
of reception and interpretation for selected com-
puter music, there is nothing theoretical to preclude
application to analog electronic music. The music
I cordon off is stylistically diverse, and exists as a
Venn-diagram-like “center subset” of “electroacous-
tic music,” “computer music,” “acousmatic,” and
“soundscape” music, as these labels are often used
to imply stylistic and methodological differences.
Music with narrative implications, by virtue of an
Computer Music Journal, 36:4, pag. 40–58, Inverno 2012
C(cid:2) 2013 Istituto di Tecnologia del Massachussetts.
open-ended set of techniques, exists in each of these
categories in their fixed-media forms. This article
uses the term “electroacoustic” at times, to refer
to phenomena which may, in theory, be digital or
analog.
In sum, narrative form in computer music de-
serves considered attention, both for its role in
the medium’s discourses and as a contributor of
analytic insights into particular pieces. By invoking
narrative analysis in listening to much computer
music of the sort delimited here, one can facil-
itate the emergence of meanings not otherwise
obvious.
The Phenomenon of Artistic Narrative
Narrative permeates our thinking, talking, doc-
umenting, and theorizing, even in nonfictional
contesti. In linguistic forms, it allows us to ob-
jectify our phenomenal impressions and to reflect
upon them and ourselves in the form of mem-
ories and histories (Arendt 1958; Kristeva 2001).
Consider, Poi, our artistic endeavors against this
backdrop. Artistic narrative is inherently more
structurally intricate; its source of subjectivity re-
mains cloaked in an infinite regress, pointing inward
(as if self-activating) and outward (acknowledging
the composer as creator) at the same time. “Life
histories generate meaning, but this meaning is
only accessible to the tellers and listeners of the
stories, not to their protagonists. This is because
human beings live fragmented lives whose mean-
ing always evades them; they thus need others
to tell their stories” (Tamboukou 2010, P. 117).
Although the relative value of objective versus
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self-reflective storytelling can be argued either way,
perhaps the following is a more facile point of
agreement: “A person is a being of semiosis . . . In
extensive interaction with other acting bodies and
the products of semiosis—speech, texts, artworks,
and meaningful action generally” (Kerby 1991,
P. 101).
Artistic narrative also connects us immediately to
an imaginary world in a de facto privileged position.
As mentioned, as we listen or read, we usually
know far more about the relevant situation than
does any internal character. We hear things (through
the narrator) that the internal characters cannot.
When the narrator is inside the story (cioè., “I heard
Sally say”), the implication may be that her or his
supreme knowledge comes from hindsight. When
the narrator is outside the story (“Sally said”), IL
implication may be of omniscience that transcends
rules of sensory perception.
Comparative Issues in Literary Theory
Versus Musical Theory
Narrative theory has, over decades, been tried on
by a range of fields including literature, history,
drama, film, philosophy, psicologia, anthropology,
the visual arts, and music. Of all of these media or
disciplines, literature still stands out as dependent
on narrative practice in a uniquely conscious and
cultivated way. It is therefore useful to ask whether
musical narrative tends to emulate literary models.
An alternative possibility, a view held by Byron
Alm ´en, is that narrative is an archetypal practice
underlying many forms of art and culture (Alm ´en
2008, P. 12). My own line of argument does not
depend on resolving this line of causality. I find
computer music analogues of literary concepts; IO
find computer music analogues of acoustic music
narrative discourse; and I also find idiosyncratic
computer music narrative discourse. Though there
are bridges between narrative and subjectivity
studies (per esempio., Cumming 1997; Kramer 2001; McClary
2004) or event schema perceptual studies (per esempio.,
Kendall 2010; Brunson 2012), the central concerns
of narratology are distinct.
Contributions to the Narratology
of Acoustic Music
Computer music narratology is valuable in its own
right, and it points toward a useful supplementation
of musical narratology at large. The latter’s examples
have been mostly limited to tonal music (per esempio.,
McClary 1986; Abbate 1996; Cumming 1997) Ma
occasionally include early or high modernism
(per esempio., Whittall 2000). The result is that many
sonic discourse techniques based on perceived
timbre, spectral weighting, and spatialization, for
esempio, have been preemptively excluded from
acoustic music study. (Notable exceptions are works
of Robert Cogan [per esempio., Cogan 1984] and Roland
Barthes [per esempio., Barthes 1977] which have utilized
spectral analysis and addressed “language as sonic
materiality,” respectively.) Whether theorists of
musical narrative would or could proceed to analyze
electroacoustic music with the same modalities
used thus far for acoustic music narratology, È,
therefore—for the moment—mostly speculation.
For now, we can at least see that investigating
narrative in computer music should secondarily
broaden the musical sample base for musical
narratology as a whole.
The Role of Realism in Computer Music Narration
Computer music provides virtuosic techniques for
infinite variations of sonic pseudo-realism. Signi-
fication that takes part in the medium’s narrative
is therefore sophisticated, merging artistic issues
with conceptual ones, and inviting a wide range of
interpretive responses. The potentially stark liter-
ality of computer music provides artistic openings
that do not exist in acoustic music, as evidenced
by the profusion of terms crafted by composers
themselves for their hybrid worlds. These include
sound surrogacy, simulacra, sound metaphors or
symbols, transfigurations, morphological match-
ing, source types, surReality, and other-worldly,
all described by Young (1996, pag. 73–93), anche
as environmental “signatures” and associated im-
agery (Truax 1996, pag. 49–65), to name a handful.
Valuable explanatory models such as those provided
Hoffman
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by Gary Kendall (2010, P. 63) and Suk-Jun Kim
(2008, P. 123) chart modes of inter-world concep-
tual fusion and categorization, and delineate their
complexities.
Ma, as richly nuanced as these hybrid sounds
are, their ability to persuade us to move from our
world to theirs is exponentially bolstered when
they are revealed to us by a subjectivity. We are
then pulled directly into the connective tissue be-
tween the multiple realities. We then hear not only
“signification” amidst “ambiguity” (Rudy 2007,
P. 5), Ma, as mentioned, we encounter a viewpoint.
It arises as we interpret the real-world allusions
as secondhand information; they seem to be “se-
lected” for us, through the eyes and the ears of
someone else. In this way, narrative design delim-
its responses; we simply cannot opt out of being
assimilated into its mechanisms. What happens
as we listen is typically one of two things: Noi
suspend disbelief and pretend that the simulated
sound world is reaching us directly, or we no-
tice its strangeness against our normal canvas of
directly perceived reality. (Film scholar Richard
Allen calls art which fosters the first response
“reproductive illusion,” and art which fosters the
second, “projective illusion” [Allen 1993, P. 22].)
Regardless of the nature of the illusion, we may
wonder about the reliability of our source. Is our
guide’s viewpoint anything like our own? Is our
narrator—the consciousness that selects “reality
bites” for us—communicating with us, or mostly
ignoring us as bystanders? Are we invited to the
other side, cioè., into the illusion itself, or do we
find ourselves listening through a keyhole? IL
“situatedness” of the listener is inherently a rela-
tional position, though the listener is coaxed into
it without consultation. So much has been written
about reader theory in music, but very little about
the listener’s passive but unavoidable engagement
with the conceptual narrative architecture of the
composition.
Semiotic Connections to the Listener’s World
In both acoustic and computer music realms the
narrator’s self-awareness is integral to the concept
of a “subjectivity.” To understand this in con-
testo, consider two examples, one acoustic, E
one computer music, both with discrete semiotic
suggestions. At the end of the second movement
of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, there is a moment
that can only be called the “bird trio.” Beethoven
labels three bird species in the score, but gives no
indication of a narrator (other than possibly im-
plicating himself) as inscriber of the story. Even if
we feel that the birds are communicating (Knapp
2000, pag. 292–296), we would not typically read
this scenario as “narrative” because there is no
indication that the birds reach beyond the bounds
of the symphony. They also do not seem aware of
having a narrative role. This is in stark contrast to
the bird that appears in Suk-Jun Kim’s What the
Bird Saw (2004), an electroacoustic composition
that portrays a bird who is indeed talking to us,
or sharing its reflections with us through vaguely
speech-like sound patterns. Inoltre, our “privi-
leged” viewpoint, which in this case seems to be a
physical location, appears to be roving, and nearly
on the back of the bird itself. The same (or another)
narrator seems also to be watching omnisciently
from a distance, and so we sense this perspective,
pure.
Regardless of the need for coordinated conceptual
and discursive techniques, semiotic discreteness in
computer music has opened up striking narrative
opportunities. Computer music has fomented the de-
velopment of devices that are barely even attempted
in acoustic music. These include the juxtaposition
of sampled and synthetic material; the imitation
of the real to create “simulacra” (Risset 1996, P.
29); and the very sampling process itself, che è
imprinted with signification by virtue of editing
and recording processes. In this technically sophis-
ticated way, referential sound in computer music
can do what Beethoven’s birds do and more. Sonic
allusions in electroacoustic media depict not only
events, but their locational specificities through re-
verberation. Even a listener lacking familiarity with
a conjured space will encounter its virtual charac-
teristics as a spatial specificity. All of these features
are significant, because semiotic suggestiveness
(per esempio., Burnham 1995) does not on its own evoke a
storyteller.
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Disruptions to a Texture, and Puncturing
of a Consistent Conceptual Boundary
In addition to having semiotic potential, referential
sound in electroacoustic music naturally stands out
formally. It can suggest—through textural isolation
or discursive interjection—that some agent put it
there, and maybe even that the sound itself is the
agent. This occurs because we sense an unexpected
and inexplicable break in the seam of the existing
rhetoric. (This notion will be discussed in detail in
the following section on the “frame.”) This sense
of agency is implied in Knapp’s analysis of why the
Pastorale’s birds may be heard as if communicating
with us (Knapp 2000, P. 291). Beethoven’s birds
protrude via texture (the rest of the score suddenly
evaporates), and via rhythm (each bird voices a
rhythmic kernel that is out of left field, if heard as a
purely musical motif). Knapp’s argument connects
with Carolyn Abbate’s thesis in Unsung Voices,
where she hears “voices” (including non-vocal ones)
as articulated disruptions in the discourse (Abbate
1996, P. xii). Implied musical agency has immediate
narrative suggesting power.
Even more dramatically maybe, implied musical
“consciousness” (of self or other), reveals our
location, relationally. If the music’s characters
know what we know, they share our locus. If not,
then we are observing them from outside their
mondo. Abbate’s sense of a pervasive “deafness”
among opera singers—deaf to the fact that they
are singing—is a case in point. The singers take
part in artifice (the singing) that unfolds within a
pseudo-realistic frame (the opera’s drama). They
cannot detect the artifice (Abbate 1996, P. 119 ff.),
though it is obvious to us. Another acoustic example
with different sorts of realities in play is Haydn’s
Abschied-Symphonie (No. 45) in which orchestral
players systematically leave the stage during the
final movement. The musicians are clearly meant
to seem aware of their political act (a musical move
that was Haydn’s way of urging Esterhazy to send
the players home). Haydn’s directive causes a non-
artistic action to become part of the artwork. As
a final example, consider Ives’s The Unanswered
Question, a somewhat mystical work in which
he directs the “The Silences of the Druids” (IL
strings) to sound from a distant location, symbolic
of their distant time. Ives’s realistic dramatization
is thus nested within an abstract musical situation.
Although listeners know the strings are offstage, IL
composition itself seems to suspend its disbelief,
accepting Ives’s pretense that part of the “music”
is in an otherworldly time and place. In all of
these examples, non-coincident reference frames, Di
time, place, and/or ontology, are interlaced; they are
broken open and newly interlocked, like puzzles.
An Essential Narrative Element: The Frame
It is useful to consider the concept of framing more
systematically in order to see its impact in computer
music repertoire. Toward this end, let us first trace
framing mechanisms briefly in a literary context that
demonstrates a high level of recursive self-reference.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (Nabokov 1962/2000)
is a novel that contains Pale Fire, the poem. (These
are already two non-coordinated frames. Although
we know the poem is by Nabokov because it is in
his book, the novel’s narrator tells us that the poet
is a fictional protagonist.) Footnotes to the poem
form the book’s main text, and simultaneously
these footnotes are the poem’s interpretation. IL
timeline is thus awry: The poem is generating the
novel, but the novel unfolds as if the poem is not
yet completed. Other interlocking frames are these:
Pale Fire the poem exists both in the novel and
outside of it. The commentary on the poem lacks
awareness that the poem is published in Nabokov’s
book. In other words, like Abbate’s opera singers,
Nabokov’s characters, who are obsessed with the
poem’s future, do not know that they are in a
book that contains the manuscript. Can inner and
outer frames be similarly convoluted in music,
particularly in computer music? Yes, Anche se, as in
literature, it takes tremendous conceptual skill; E
in music, the clarity is at least partly dependent on
nonverbal discourse.
Erving Goffman’s notion of “framing” is particu-
larly adept at revealing computer music techniques.
For Goffman, a frame is an organizational boundary
that we acknowledge through cognition. We do not
stipulate it or invent it; we notice the boundary
Hoffman
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from the way it functions. In looking for the frame
called “reality,” for example, he says, “this question
speaks to a small, manageable problem having to
do with the camera and not what it is the camera
takes pictures of” (Goffman 1974, P. 2). Hence,
reality is a frame; and the camera’s representation
of reality is another frame. Let us replace Goffman’s
“camera” with “audio recorder” and then replace
his “pictures” with “recordings.” (Our reworking
of Goffman’s sentence is now this: whatever sense
of reality is generated has “to do with the audio
recorder and not what it is the audio recorder takes
recordings of.”) This maxim is a helpful guide in
looking for “naturally occurring” frame types in
computer music composition. Goffman’s remarks
are reminders that our sense of “reality” can be
numerous things. “Lived-in reality” and the “audio
recorder’s reality” are just two. Goffman’s other
important point is that a frame is generated by
the nature of the recording device and (implicitly)
by the person operating it. “[Goffman] calls atten-
tion to the fragility of frames in use[,] and their
vulnerability to tampering” (Gamson et al. 1992,
P. 384).
Consider a tentative model of four propositions,
for frames that are operative in environmentally
suggestive or environmentally borrowing sound-
scape composition. This outline is not mutually
exclusive with other frame taxonomies that might
be discerned. The fourth proposition is the most
like the Nabokov literary example. It describes an
infinitely nuanced set of interactions between any
of the three previous premises.
Proposition 1: There is only one universe, ours.
Any fictional one is a substitute, extension,
or hidden aspect (including a memory) del
“real.”
Proposition 2: There are two closed universes,
the original and a simulacrum.
Proposition 3: There are two closed universes,
the original and a fabrication.
Proposition 4: There are two or more distinct
universes that are mutually permeable.
Characters from any of these universes
may communicate or move across frame
boundaries.
It is not difficult to place most soundscape-like
pieces in one of these categories.
Proposition 1 is closest, of all four, to realism
in that it posits an objectively perceptible world
which does not disrupt our communally shared
set of expectations. Paul Lansky’s as it grew dark
(Lansky 1992, composed in 1983) conforms strongly
in certain ways to this organizational boundary,
but nonetheless it fascinatingly stretches selected
aspects of normality (that we overlook). The piece
is composed around a particular recounting by
Jane Eyre of her recent dreams. The emotional
overtones of the text itself are ominous and full of
psychoanalytic innuendo. Like a hidden observer,
we hear a conversation between Jane and her future
husband—though we do not seem to be in the room
with them. We are let into the conversation through
a true hidden observer narrator, simply a conscious-
ness. Predominantly a text piece, as it grew dark
unfolds through a stream of heavily processed actual
voice narration. The processing techniques convey
everything from radio transmission distortion, A
changing sentiments of Jane, to non-acoustic dream-
like spaces. But the processed sounds miraculously
point to an entirely familiar, shared world, in the
fundamental sense that we perceive a person like us
who is sharing her thoughts.
Lansky’s most “reality-interventionist” tech-
nique concerning text here is to segment and
discombobulate the order of short phrases in one
large segment of the work (heard in Sound Ex-
ample 1, which contains 5:30–6:40 of the piece).
[Editor’s note: Sound examples are available at
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/comj/36/4
and will also appear on the disc accompanying
Vol. 37, No. 4 (Inverno 2013).] This disordered
text becomes a second stream running in the
background of the “real” one. As we hear two
simultaneous flows in different time frames, Di
words being said and thought, the resulting tem-
poral hocket adds intriguing commentary on a
semantic level. In no way is this hocket pre-
sented as a contrivance. Piuttosto, the impression
it gives is of a separation between speech and
thought, effected through spatialization and sup-
porting processing modifications. In sum, only
the sequentially intact spoken text is up close
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and truly clear to the listener. (This is the nar-
rative purportedly being told in the real time of
the compositional story.) The intermittent and
less linear “reverberations” of disordered text
fragments are located in a distant and fuzzily
non-real space. As a result of Lansky’s intricate
editing, we may be reminded of another completely
all-too-familiar phenomenon while listening:
the tension of simultaneous internal demands
to manage both our speaking and thinking
activities.
This is the text heard in Example 1:
“On sleeping, I continued in dreams the idea
of a dark and gusty night. I continued also the
wish to be with you, and experienced a strange,
regretful consciousness of some barrier dividing
us. During all my first sleep, I was following the
windings of an unknown road; total obscurity
environed me; rain pelted me; I was burdened
with the charge of a little child:"
(Bront ¨e 1847/1965, P. 366).
Proposition 2 describes a world analogous to
ours, but having different behavioral qualities and
laws. Francis Dhomont’s M ´et ´eores (1989) suggests
a simulacrum world in these ways. There are
gestures in the piece that the composer calls
“luminous phenomena” (Dhomont 1996, P. 31 Di
the program notes). They move in arc-like paths,
seemingly impacted by gravitational or atmospheric
forces. The gesture trajectories reach a sound
horizon (implied by a recurrent pitch location and
spatial endpoint); then they open up as if scattering
crystalline fragments. (This can be heard in Sound
Esempio 2, which contains 4:15–5:05 of the piece.)
M ´et ´eores is thus simulacrum-like in its use of sound
as a substitute for sight, and in its use of gestural
shapes that suggest analogous visual shapes. It is not
difficult to suspend disbelief and to hear the sound
as light. Ancora, we can distinguish Dhomont’s world
from our own—quite unlike the Lansky example.
Dhomont’s light patterns, sonified, are in our real
world typically silent. The sound recorder seems to
follow the phenomena from a huge distance away.
Hence the “narration,” if felt to be there, is likely to
be perceived as documentary.
In contrast to a simulacrum world, a fabricated
one (Proposition 3) departs explicitly from our own
reality framework. Returning to Suk-Jun Kim’s
What the Bird Saw (2004), we can trace this piece
as a clear example. Though purportedly a dream
(Kim 2006, P. 1 of program notes), the music does
not portray a “dream of reality” as does the Lansky
esempio. In Kim’s work, the composer becomes a
bird, and he experiences flight. (Sound Example 3
contains 0–1:30 of the piece.) Only in a fabricated
world can a bird share its experiences with us, E
can we join a bird in flight. As we listen, we feel
vicariously that we are flying. The remarkable thing
about this piece is its ability to create the sensation
of a first-person narrative with no explicit speech at
Tutto. There is, Tuttavia, bird-speech; the bird, through
spectral processing, sounds all too human. Questo,
pure, is a fabrication, suggesting not an analogue of
something familiar, as in the simulacrum, but rather
a surreal hybrid. It is largely through Kim’s use of
sound to create visual imagery relating to huge
depth perception and perspective that the listener
likely experiences sonic panoramas, as if from the
sky.
Approaches to a Narrative Analysis
of Computer Music
Both structuralist approaches and self-fullfilling
induction approaches have been critiqued widely
in literary analysis and other fields (Kramer 1991,
P. 142; Eco 1992, P. 827). Striving for some middle
ground, let us turn to six analytic terms to use
as a consistent but flexible analytic toolkit. These
terms will constitute a set of possibilities, but will be
untethered to a rigid hierarchical method that would
preclude applicability from the ground up. The six
terms we will work with are narrator, reflector,
focalizer, testo, story, and fabula. All of these
concepts are defined in Mieke Bal’s Narratology:
Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Bal 1997).
Bal’s attention in this well-known reference text is
mostly to literature, but he does embrace the notion
of visual narrative (P. 161 ff.). He is thus thinking
beyond semantics at the most fundamental level.
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Evidence of a Narrator
When stepping into a fictional computer music
mondo, we may naturally and unconsciously sense
evidence of an “I,” a self-awareness, as we identify
with some point of view. We may also seek to
locate an “I” consciously as we try to form larger
hypotheses about the fictional world. Why is it here?
Who created it? How are we privy to it? E, are we
being shown it, or are we trusting someone else’s
recounting of it? Fred Maus alights usefully on the
topic of agency as it is bound up with perceived
“I”-ness:
To the extent that musical surfaces are under-
stood as discourse, . . . there will presumably
be some sense of an agency that performs the
actions of selecting, riordino, repeating, E
condensing, in a time that is distinct from that
of the story. But this agency has a strange imper-
sonality, akin to the silent, invisible intelligence
that guides the montage of a film rather than a
vividly dramatized speaker like Huck Finn. . . .
Musical narrators are the shadows that are
cast when a listener plays with the distinction
between story and discourse. E [if understood
as drama] there may be no sense of a narrator at
all”
(Maus 1991, pag. 33–34).
Maus thus cordons off film and music as two
related art forms that are far less adept than literature
at modeling a narrative presence. Ma, as compared
with film, computer music has some discursive
tools that allow it to rebuff this pull toward “strange
impersonality,” if we are sympathetic to Maus’s
observation that it persists. At least one unique
element of computer music seems to qualify, E
that is the minimal apparency of the frame itself.
In electroacoustic sound, the frame of its postulated
reality is truly enigmatic. Infatti, if the lights are out,
or our eyes are closed, “Is it live or is it Memorex?"
may be a meaningful inquiry. Even if we see the
loudspeakers, and even if the musical composition
does not strive for Proposition 1–like realism,
our sensation—as listeners identifying with the
directorial intelligence—is unimpeded by a palpable
boundary. We may be convinced we are hearing what
the director heard. (In comparison, while watching
film, the literal frame, cioè., the screen, is front and
center in a way that makes it difficult to imagine
being inside a director’s head. The director more
likely seems at least one step removed, in front of
us.) E così, we can at least make a case for the
phenomenon of uniquely transparent “transport” in
computer music, of a listener stepping (figuratively)
into the ears of the director. If this sensation truly
happens, we are no longer observing the director,
but instead we become her or him. In questo caso,
paradoxically, any impersonality factor present is
possibly even an advantage.
Computer music has other unique discourse
methods compared with acoustic music and with
film. Per esempio, in computer music, a suggested
narrative presence (into whose ears and sensibility
we enter) can hear unrelated details simultaneously,
near and far, in a 360-degree swath (represented in
whatever spatialization format the computer music
is utilizing). The depicted paths of perceptual focus
need not imply bodily movement; in a fraction of a
second, sound events can be homed in on or ignored,
causing perspectival shifts even faster than the eye
can move.
“Listening paths,” manifesting the attention
patterns of a narrator who is tracking aural details
of any sort, can thus be highly personalized. Such
patterns implicitly model idiosyncratic thought
patterns of a distinct personality. By contrast, if a
changing visual focus were to track the elements
responsible for the same sound events, at a similar
pacing, this might require a physicality on the part
of the observer that would transcend the believable.
My hypothesis here is that our ways of listening to
a soundscape-like scene have the capacity for more
individual variation than our ways of looking at the
correlated visual scene.
There is yet another reason to argue that com-
puter music narration, compared with film, can
more easily be perceived as if emanating from a
personalized intelligence. Whereas a film’s narrator
may seem to be determining segments’ varying dis-
tances from the camera and speeds of concatenation,
a computer music work’s directorial intelligence
can do even more, by distorting reality in ways that
we typically find more believable in sound than in
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visual analogues. Per esempio, it is often through
a warped sonic reality that a listener experiences
a distinctly recognizable, and thus personally in-
volved, directorial intelligence. (Perhaps this degree
of accommodation is distantly related to the fact
that we are accustomed to “hearing through” a
wide range of vocal manipulations in an individual’s
speaking voice. In contrasto, extreme changes in bod-
ily appearance—say, a beard versus no beard—are
often surprisingly challenging for visual recognition
mechanisms.)
The very opening of Trevor Wishart’s Tongues
of Fire contains a strong example of this. Wishart
creates speech patterns that sound so bizarrely un-
ravelled or redacted and reconstituted (one cannot
even tell which) as to be incomprehensible. IL
piece opens with a 2-second “rapid solo vocal ut-
terance” (Wishart 2000b, P. 23), which is repeated
and then allowed to transform itself as if responding
to unseen forces. Intriguingly, both the sound of
the actual voice and its distortions through “spec-
tral tracing” (Wishart 2000a) transcend what we
normally assume a voice can do. Ancora, we sense
not only a human, but a recognizable personality.
This occurs because of consistencies of the distor-
tion techniques, given the extension of initially
present qualities that strongly suggest their cor-
relating mouth and tongue movements. But more
interesting, maybe, is the possibility of hearing the
distortion as a “distorted hearing.” An objective
description might thus be that of a person trying
to speak in tongues (let’s say); whereas a subjective
description might be that of a narrator listening
beyond the semantics, either because of disinterest
in the words or because the other communicative
aspects of the speech contour have grabbed her or
his attention. Wishart’s highly distorted allusion to
reality might thus be read as a figurative portrayal of
what “Mr. X’s” voice (cioè., its inflection, its pacing,
its emphases, its window into the personality behind
Esso) sounds like to the director.
Evidence of a Reflector
Even readers unaware of narrative theory will
likely be versed in “first-person” versus “third-
person” character development. This is the subject
of enormous analytic attention in literature. Just
Per esempio: Kafka’s revision of The Castle from
the first person (teller-character) to the third person
(“K.”) (reflector-character) (Stanzel 1981, P. 7) O
simply a “reflector” (Jahn 1997, P. 443) is deemed by
Stanzel to allow a release of the protagonist “from
the reader’s demand for an explanation of the count-
less inexplicable and mysterious circumstances
which surround the hero.” A teller-character must
try to explain herself or himself; a reflector-character
need not (Stanzel 1981, P. 155). So, we observe K.
rather than meet him. Sometimes we seem to be
“mind-dropping” on him (to use an analogy with
eavesdropping). Reflectors do not narrate or trans-
mit, but instead create a “covert or dissimulated
mediacy” (Stanzel 1981, P. 5). As suggested through
the Kafka example, “what is presented through a
reflector-character [also] makes no . . . claim [A
completeness]. The selection of elements from the
world seems to be arbitrary, determined by the
reflector-character’s experiential and existential
contingencies” (Stanzel 1981, P. 8).
But how might musical mind-dropping be done?
In literature, the narrator, typically using third-
person pronouns, needs to keep talking, Ovviamente, if
we are to observe anything. Intriguingly, computer
music can actually “stop talking” and just let us
into the reflector-character’s mind. There would
seem to be a body of work which has used this
device, whether or not the composers have in any
cases intentionally emulated literary discourse or
non. So, how, in computer music, especially without
dialogue or text, can we hear the difference between
the stance of a reflector-character and that of a
dedicated narrator? A narrator (teller-character)
is trained to recount for us, and therefore, con
much more completeness, typically. Così, IL
focus of the audio scene is likely to be broader
and temporally more contiguous. In comparison, UN
reflector-character may reveal idiosyncratic sonic
distortions or locational markers. Infatti, given its
naturally nonverbal discourse, computer music may
be more naturally suited in certain ways to this
technique than is literature.
Robert Normandeau’s Jeu (Normandeau 1990,
composed in 1989) creates an opening tableau
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that seems aptly described as movement from a
teller- to a reflector-character. The work’s opening
moment of sung male voices, a large group from
which an individual voice sometimes pokes out,
suggests a strong subjectivity. It is vibrant and
declamatory. Out of context, one could hear the
voices as moving in faux syntactic patterns for over
a minute, with glottal-like rhythms and delineated
spatial paths constituting the virtuosity of the
vocal “play.” The opening source material is in
fact taken from Perotin’s twelfth-century Viderunt
Omnes, a highly melismatic plainchant. It is as if
the pitch counterpoint of the original is transformed
into pure rhythm, driving a mostly monophonic
sonic stream now. Given the concept of the piece,
Normandeau’s connection of even the transformed
counterpoint to the idea of “play,” or “rules of
the game” (Normandeau 1990, P. 14 of program
notes), casts an entrancing light on the activity of
the singers. It is also reflexively pointing toward
the play that the composer himself engaged in,
deforming the very ancient singing style through
computer manipulation.
At approximately 2:05, the apparent reflector-
character appears. We are not “told” anything
directly by this character; he (to use the gender
implied by the opening context) does not sing or
talk. But we are transported instantly to his location,
hearing and “seeing” a happy and chaotic scene of
young children playing through his ears. Intrigu-
ingly, from c. 2:25 until 3:00, both the narrator(S)
and the reflector-character co-exist—they are soni-
cally overlaid—though clearly they do not inhabit
the same place or time. (This sequence is heard in
Sound Example 4, which contains 1:00–2:45 del
piece.) In a given interpretation, one of the opening
narrators and the reflector-character could, at 2:25
into the piece, conceivably be the same person,
inhabiting different moments in time and different
“positions.” The simultaneity that Normandeau
creates with these two different individuals would
be difficult to portray in literature or in film. (Split
screens could attempt this but would tend to im-
ply two cameras rather than simply omniscience
across time and space, as the conflated sound layers
can do.) Normandeau’s reflector-character’s sonic
perception is idiosyncratic, in a way that raises a
set of philosophical questions that can even per-
haps be tied to those Wittgenstein raises in his
debates about “private language,” “showing ver-
sus saying,” the limits of semantics, and notions
of the inexpressible. As Steward Candlish and
George Wrisley write: “After all we seem to under-
stand the question in §256 [COME] ‘Now, what about
the language which describes my inner experi-
ences and which only I myself can understand?’
But is Wittgenstein suggesting we only seem to
understand this question? The matter may not
be clear” (Candlish and Wrisley 2012). Can we
ever express what we mean? Bypassing language
and modeling direct experience, computer music
narrative can in fact explore this vast question
artistically.
Elements of Literary Narrative
A narrator does not always communicate directly
to the listener or reader. Bal addresses this by
expanding the narrator concept (as do others, per esempio.,
William Nelles [1990]), into a more nuanced bipartite
structure containing a “focalizer” possibility as well.
In other words, a piece may have a narrator who is
also the focalizer (but who tends to be called simply
the narrator); it may have only a focalizer who is
not narrating; or it may have two subjectivities:
a focalizer who sees all and, simultaneously, UN
narrator.
Focalization and Narration
A focalizer inhabits a position that phenomeno-
logically precedes, or may conflate with, IL
narrator’s. As Bal states, “focalization refers to
the story represented, and the concept of narra-
tor to its representation, by acting as the steering
perspective on the events (or fabula)" (Bal 1997,
P. 162). Nelles’s recommended revision to fo-
calization theory is similar to that presented in
the 1970s–1980s by G ´erard Genette (Nelles 1990,
pag. 366–376). For both, a focalizer is an experiencer,
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a “filter.” One advantage of including the term
“focalizer” is that it explains how the reader or
listener senses impressions. In the case of music,
we can actually gain access to what the focalizer
hears. In sum, a focalizer shows, and a narrator
tells. Sheer presentation (as opposed to a mediated
re-presentation) can be compelling: “‘what is the use
of a book,’ . . . ‘without pictures or conversations?’”
as Alice (in Wonderland) notes (Carroll 1865/1971,
P. 7).
Ma, how do we sense, if we do, that a subjec-
tivity is sharing with us what she or he (or it)
hears? Certamente, overt speech where the narrator
uses the word “I” achieves this. Think of I Am
Sitting in a Room (Lucier 1990, composed in 1980),
or Katherine Norman’s Hard Cash (and small
dreams of change) (Norman 1997), in which sam-
pled voices speak in first-person voice: “I think”;
“I believe.” Articulation of an “I” invites us to
identify, and states unequivocally that it is her or
his perspective we are hearing. If no subjectivity
is apparent, our sense of subject position is not
easily mapped onto another ego. We more likely
remain in our own respective subject position,
outside of the work, looking in, courtesy of the
focalizer.
Testo, Story, and Fabula
The text (or “discourse”) is the most discrete level
of syntactic structuring in a narrative medium. È
specific to a genre. In an electroacoustic work, IL
“text” might include significatory spatial panning
or reverberation, Per esempio.
The story arises from the discourse; more specif-
ically, the story is what Bal and many literary
theorists call “selective temporal reordering.” It
is a subset of the “logically and chronologically
related events that are caused or experienced by
actors” that is the “fabula” (Bal 1997, P. 5). IL
story, in other words, is “merely” how the fabula is
told. The analytic concept of the fabula, it seems,
is to point beyond the borders of the composition
itself. Whatever we infer as a larger pre-existing
framework (which thus can change) influences our
interpretation of the story. An explanatory theory of
a story is thus never complete.
Temporal Considerations
Bal’s re-ordering techniques, cioè., storytelling tech-
Carino, include “direction,” “anachrony,” “dis-
tance,” “functions,” “span,” “achrony,” “slow-
down,” “pause,” and “frequency,” to name a hand-
ful (Bal 1997, pag. 79–111). Some of these refer to
time perception itself. Bal’s discussion of time
management in narrative points to an interesting
inference, that chronology itself can be an arbitrary
organizational tool for grouping elements of our
experiences into meaningful storage. Though Ab-
bate claims that music does not have a past tense
(Abbate 1996, P. 53), and this is true in the sense of
pure discourse, applying Bal’s list to electroacoustic
music illustrates persuasively the vast chronological
complexities and commentaries possible.
From Bal’s list, one of the most palpable
analogues in the electroacoustic medium is
“pause/freeze/slow-motion.” Such a gesture can
catalyze a shift in perspective, or it can invoke a
highly intensified moment. Time manipulation
in electroacoustic music, as in film, is manifest
mimetically, cioè., shown to us directly; and Bernard
Parmegiani’s La roue ferris (Parmegiani 2004,
composed in 1971) portrays this strikingly. (Sound
Esempio 5 contains 1:42–2:25 of the piece.) È
fundamental to the meaning of the piece, Quale
is in essence an expanded moment. Parmegiani’s
“frozen” moment is overlaid with other music that
nonetheless progresses normally in time. He thus
creates a sensation for the listener of engaging with
two temporal (and maybe locational) positions at
once, each with a radically different sensibility and
narrative role. Primo, there seems to be a focalizer
(possibly a narrator) implied by the opening tunnel-
vision-like textural “freeze,” with its obsessively
sustained pitches, A and F. (It is not a enactment of
an object freezing, but of a sustained substance, time
or experience itself.) Then, discrete pointillistic
melodic fragments move against this texture in
synchronization with a normal flow of time.
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Ways of Communicating: Showing and Telling,
as Realized in Computer Music
The traditional literary terms for “showing” versus
“telling” are mimesis and diegesis, rispettivamente.
These techniques may work in conjunction with
temporal deformation, or they may be resultant
qualities that are hard to pin on a specific dis-
course device. They are, nonetheless, useful analytic
distinctions. Even the most naturalistic sound
recording can imply diegesis if it causes us men-
tally to “hear” a narrator. Annea Lockwood’s A
Soundmap of the Hudson does this, in the form of
its audio release, which lacks the full installation
version’s content (Lockwood 1989). Though we hear
no footsteps, we sense the presence of a narrator
(or narrators) through the intricate concatenation of
overlapping river segments which each have a single
point perspective.
A mimetic experience, in contrast, typically
lacks signs of a narrator, and will tend to lead the
listener’s ears less intently. The electroacoustic
discourse that effects mimesis and diegesis does not
suggest that these two stances exist in a simple,
functional relationship. Sometimes it is the most
stunningly close-miked elements that allow the
listener immersion in a textural complexity that
cannot be absorbed without active attention. Hence,
a listener is directed on one level, and given no
direction on another.
In Sound Example 6, which contains 3:00–4:15
of A Soundmap of the Hudson, we hear a passage
that shows Lockwood’s authorial involvement, first
as focalizer, and then as narrator (as she points us,
fisicamente, to a new fragment of recorded river).
(It is also conceivable, Ovviamente, via some other
interpretation, that the opening bird might be read
as a narrator or reflector character.) By the time the
second river texture has come into full earshot, our
experience has shifted to a mimetic one; a bit more
work involving active listening is required.
A perception of mimesis versus diegesis may
also be based on our sense of the agency and
knowledge of whoever or whatever has led us into
the piece. In Paul Koonce’s composition Hothouse,
Per esempio, we are intermittently shown the
hothouse (but otherwise seemingly ignored) by
a focalizer/narrator, who is taking in the entire
scene from a third-person point of view. In between
these segments, the “anima” (Koonce 1996, P. 1 Di
program notes), or inner self of the narrator, allows
us into her or his (or its) psyche. What we hear
through the anima, in a first-person-like point of
view, are objectively unobservable, surrealistically
concatenated sound-thoughts. They are suggestive
of cognitive tendencies, since they restructure
recognizable but distorted sampled sounds, perhaps
as a language. We likely feel more detached, as a
distant observer, in the focalizer-revealed sections,
partly because no one is in the scene and we
may not know why we are there. We likely feel
more attached in the anima sections, owing to our
strongly directed attention that pulls us to identify
with the narrator. Sound Example 7, which contains
2:44–3:52 of the piece, takes us from the “anima”
(we are directed; told [diegetic]) to a “realistic”
section through a focalizer/narrator (we are shown;
not directed [mimetic]); then back to the anima. A
contextualize all of this with an extreme example:
in cases where “the title is the only utterance of the
primary narrator” (Bal 1997, P. 62) the diegesis is the
most minimal and imperceptible possible.
The Concept of Referentiality in Computer
Music Narrative
Mimetic discourse and diegetic discourse, in other
parole, do not necessarily map onto a respective
dichotomy of immersion versus detachment. In gen-
eral, Tuttavia, the potential is strong for computer
music to provoke a sense of immediate listener
attachment simply by revealing something. Part of
computer music’s unique narrative potential may
be a pushing back against what has been called the
“semiological victory” in philosophy (Kerby 1991,
P. 9), cioè., the ascendancy of the sign over the refer-
ent. In electroacoustic music, quite unlike acoustic
music, a “sign” may be nearly coincident with the
referent. Thus the sound of thunder in L’eau from
Annette Vande Gorne’s Tao (Vande Gorne 1993,
composed in 1984) (at 2:36 and intermittently for
a bit longer) is a sound referent that is a function
of real thunder; it derives its meaning directly from
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real thunder rather than from a system of signifiers.
“Direct reference theory is simply the view that the
semantic value of a complex expression in which a
name, N, occurs is determined as a function of n’s
referent” (Almotahari and Rochford 2012, P. 9). Ref-
erentiality thus has a semi-permanent home in the
materials of the sampled electroacoustic genre. Such
music can have both direct reference and semioti-
cally charged abstract material, a pairing not found
in film or literature to the extent found in music.
Empathy and Empirical Knowledge
Does such direct reference invite a hyper-intense
sort of identification for the listener, perhaps
leading toward Truax’s fourth soundscape principle,
meaning that the work enhances our “everyday
perceptual habits” (Truax 1996, P. 63)?
Suzanne Keen contends that what a listener
brings to the work is just as integral toward a
resultant bond of empathy as what the composer
has constructed (Keen 2006). Nonetheless, the di-
rect reference capacity of electroacoustic music
frequently leads to personal associations of a dif-
ferent order than arise in acoustic music listening.
Does narrative electroacoustic music thereby allow
a sort of empathic response not possible through
non-narrative referential music, or abstract music?
Is narrative empathy, in particular, qualitatively dif-
ferent from aesthetic “immersion”? Let us assume
that aesthetic immersion approximates a “freed
subjectivity” (Alm ´en 2008, P. 35), a sense of losing
of one’s self-awareness. Narrative empathy, on the
other hand, is a vicarious, spontaneous merging
with the sensibility of a narrator (or a character).
The distinction between oneself and the other is
still present, as is self-awareness. An interesting
question, as Keen puts it, is whether “we respond
because we belong to an in-group, O [whether]
narrative empathy [can] call to us across boundaries
of difference?" (P. 223). A unique aspect of electroa-
coustic music discourse is that a narrative point of
view may be a compelling feature on its own, even
if a set of sampled sounds is actually less interesting
than reality.
Selected Theories of Musical Narrative,
and Other Theories with Potential
Application to Computer Music
Are there any analytic insights that musical narratol-
ogy might productively add to the study of computer
music? Consideration of Abbate’s provocative the-
ory in Unsung Voices (Abbate 1996) actually helps
to highlight the uniquenesses of the electroacoustic
genre. Abbate prefers to call “narration” something
that is specifically an “act” by an “I,” whether
human or not (P. 19). E, for her, true narration
requires distance; it is not the same as a miming of
reality (P. 27). If one is sympathetic to her points,
they lead to a greater appreciation for the range
of unique discursive techniques in electroacoustic
music that both articulate an “I” and that create a
non-replica-like reality. What stories can computer
music tell, in other words, that acoustic music
cannot? One example traced earlier is the sonic
modeling of a character who is truly in two places
or two times at once, through overlaid sounds.
Nattiez, as another scholarly reference point
of music narratology, simply disavows musical
narrative as a viable principle. For him, narration
happens only at the level of discourse, not story; so,
for him, the composer would be the only possible
narrator (Nattiez 1990, P. 249). If one is sympathetic
to Nattiez, a potentially revealing analysis might
address the discourse itself as a hidden story. (In
other words, “Why did composer so-and-so choose
the specific computer processing technique she or
he did, for such-and-such a passage?")
In contrast to the theories of Abbate and Nattiez,
Alm ´en’s musical narratology places even more
responsibility on the listener (Alm ´en 2008, P. 13).
Listeners impose narrative through hearing (P. 36),
as they re-evaluate ranked “marked” elements,
in relationships, over time (P. 51). He calls this
process “transvaluation.” In sum, for Alm ´en the
narrator is largely an abstract device through which
organizing, mediating, situating, and valuing take
place. For Abbate, the narrator is more directly
the sheer expression of a “self.” And, finally, for
Kerby, an “I” needs a “you” (Kerby 1991, P. 13),
potentially pointing toward analytic focus on the
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impact of the “gaze” of the electroacoustic music
on the listener. Kerby contends that narrative
is “indigenous to human experience . . . not an
imposition of art on life”; and he nods toward
thinkers like Hannah Arendt, with the conviction
that “I”s are not intuited through self-reflection,
but are constructed, in part through narrative (Kerby
1991, P. 12). To summarize as concisely as possible:
Alm ´en sees what we derive from narrative to be a
bit different in nature from what Abbate or Kerby
Vedere. Alm ´en talks of transvaluations according to
mythoi, rather than expression of a self. He is
interested in “cultures” more than in individuals.
His musical narratology would be interestingly
applied to electroacoustic music spanning many
years, toward locating culturally reactive paradigm
shifts. Kerby’s theory of narrative is most useful
regarding applications to electroacoustic music in
its reminder that narrative “is a primary vehicle of
[personal] ideology” (Kerby 1991, P. 13).
Finalmente, an approach focused on the listener
directly is James Phelan’s “rhetorical approach,"
which considers how story and discourse influence
what readers know, believe, think, judge, and feel
(Phelan 1996, P. 141). What Phelan points out, citing
the work of Peter Rabinowitz (Rabinowitz 1977),
is that the “audience” for a work includes both
a flesh-and-blood audience and an ideal one. IL
actual, living audience has impossible-to-predict
individual and sociocultural distinctions; and the
ideal audience encompasses the most perfect set
of flesh-and-blood listeners whom the composer
expects, or hopes, to address (Phelan 1996, pag.
215–218). Within the ideal audience is also an
imaginary construct called the “narrative audience,"
which describes the “observer role within the world
of fiction, taken on by the flesh-and-blood reader
in that part of his or her consciousness which
treats the fictional world as real” (P. 218). (In
the construction of the electroacoustic narrative
audience, where is the listener standing or floating,
in physical proximity in relation to the work? Is the
listener alone or in a group?) And last, a bit like the
innermost of a set of Russian nested dolls, another
important audience category appears as a subset of
the narrative audience. Called the “narratee,” it is
the “intratextual audience” (Herman et al. 2012,
P. 7) “directly addressed by the narrator” (Phelan
1996, P. 218). Another way to think of it is as “a
character position in the text, one that the narrative
audience in a sense observes” (Herman et al. 2012,
P. 7).
Analytic Methodology in This Essay
In the concluding thumbnail-analyses I ask several
questions of each work:
1. Who, or what, is the primary consciousness
(focalizer or narrator) through which we
enter the work?
2. Are there any other subjectivities who self-
consciously communicate with us? If so,
from inside or outside of the story? Through
a voice, movement, or some other means?
3. Last, what is the relationship between
narrator and ideal audience? Who is the
narrator attempting to address, and with
what agenda, if any?
“The presenting of material in a certain way
may . . . set up certain expectations and biases in
the reader” (Kerby 1991, P. 107). In definitiva, to look
at a musical work as a network of pathways for
the audience into an author-discourse universe is to
get at the author’s (composer’s) value system. How
is the audience addressed? Is the listener privy to
the characters’ thoughts, or are these kept private?
What sort of hierarchies or non-hierarchies amongst
subjectivities does the work enable? How much
responsibility or freedom is the listener given? Che cosa
are the propositions that govern the interrelated
frames of theorized reality? Each work is thus a
worldview.
Musical Analyses, Interpretations, E
Idiosyncratic Techniques
Pentes (1974), by Denis Smalley
This piece (Smalley 2000, composed in 1974) È
readily heard in four parts (beginning at 0:00, 3:09,
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7:20, E 9:22) delineated by textural, melodic, E
gestural divisions. In Part 1 we sense both a pri-
mary consciousness and intermittent personalized
reflector-characters. Even amidst the heterogeneity
of the opening section, a noticeable, quirky element
emerges briefly, from c. 0:09–0:23; and again from
1:28–1:53. This sound expresses itself in a fast,
pulsating eighth-note pattern, with a distinct for-
mant, a constant pitch, and fuzzy envelopes. I will
call this musical element a “little creature sound.”
This sound’s strong formant, and its movement
approaching and receding from the focalizer, sug-
gest agency of some sort. (Owing to some formant
nuances and because of a gestural language Smalley
develops here, a listener might actually hear these
as several “little creatures.”) (Sound Example 8a
contains 1:40–2:57 of the piece.) In Part 2, glissandi
emerge from and return to a singular cataclysmic
event. The focalizer remains. Part 3 feels like an
epiphany, a stepping into another piece. Its function
seems largely a sustained entrance for Part 4, In
which Northumbrian pipe melodies unfold, eerily
devoid of any acoustic context. Comprehension,
cioè., interpretation, of the pipes segment cannot be
a trivial aspect of an analysis of the piece. If one
listens to Part 3 with less connotative attention,
and more attention to the sonic surface, one may
notice another vocally suggestive formant (C. 7:30).
It lingers throughout Part 3. There is thus, Ancora, an
“I”-like sound in Part 3. (Sound Example 8b contains
7:50–9:06 of the piece.)
Although Part 4 might be the most obvious choice
for hearing a narrator—someone had to play those
pipes—I read this differently. The singularity of the
solo creature sounds in Part 1 (before the crowd
of similar voices joins in) and the suggestion of a
disembodied voice in Part 3 may be heard as subtly
linked. They are two internal sensibilities, neither
one quite human. The piper, lacking placement
in an acoustic-like space, ultimately seems not so
much a reference as a symbol.
The features in the musical discourse that
might signify a “self” in Parts 1 E 3 are thus:
singular, vocally suggestive formants; singularity of
timbre; textural and/or registral isolation; agent-like
movement (Part 1); lack of movement (Part 3);
and static pitch (metaphorically connoting stable
identity). To look at this piece from the point of
view of these two internal narrators and/or reflector-
characters (subject to one’s interpretation!) catalyzes
further meditation on the nature of their coexistence
in the same piece.
Is there an ideal audience, a narrative audience,
or a narratee?
The narrative audience seems to enter the work in
a spectator/auditor role through a focalizer (Parts 1
E 2); and later the narrative audience enters as a
singularity, as if from the inside, in an identificatory
role (Part 4).
A listener may easily step into the culminating
experience and personalize it, especially because
the melodies seem to happen internally (in one’s
consciousness). The first subjectivity (“I”) seems to
be talking to us; the second one, mostly to itself.
(This interpretation is based on movement: IL
first “voice” is energetic; the second is immobile.
It is also based on there being “pretend” acoustic
sound in the first, and no such acoustic context in
the second.) This subtle change of position lends a
subliminal story line to the work that concerns how
the listener is invited to participate in the work.
Example 8a contains the first character; 8B, IL
second.
The Wolves of Bays Mountain (1998),
by Judy Klein
Juliana Snapper reads The Wolves of Bays Moun-
tain (Klein 2004, composed in 1998) as “poles of
abstraction and immediacy,” referring to its starkly
juxtaposed processed sound and naturalism, Rif-
spectively (Snapper 2004, P. 11). This is a helpful
description of Klein’s unequivocal movement from
unreality to reality and back, with the piece’s outer
frame portraying a fictional domain, and the large
inner middle suggesting realism. But her real and
fictional worlds are mutually permeable (blending
one into the other), as is the actual frame of the
work itself. We sense authorial intervention in the
shimmering, digitally filtered wolf sounds at the be-
ginning. They seem to be cultural memories (L ¨owy
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2005, pag. 29–34), since no narrator has yet been
introduced. The focalizer (the composer, perhaps)
seems to be outside of the work. As the wolves are
uncloaked into their unprocessed forms, Klein as
documenter and director seems ever more apparent,
but as this happens, intriguingly, she moves into
the work herself. (This is heard in Sound Example 9,
which contains 3:30–4:15 of the piece.) By 5:11 we
likely sense that she is narrating—without words,
but with the sound recorder. We eventually leave the
naturalism (C. 16:40) moving again toward a sheen of
wolf facsimiles, and it is here that the wolves them-
selves seem to narrate, from an internally located
stance. Or, they are reflector-characters. Ironically,
though Klein herself does not speak in the piece, IL
wolves do. Their recorded vocalizations are truly
Quello.
Is there an ideal audience, a narrative audience,
or a narratee?
This is a political piece, and the narrative audi-
ence is coaxed to distinguish individual wolves’
vocalizations and movement patterns. This piece
is a stunning example of how sonic but wordless
narration can convey far more detail (of a certain
sort) than could literature or film imagery.
a plane from Russia, to Texas, it seems) that we
may construe a single person simultaneously in
the positions of focalizer, narrator, e autore. IL
composer is omniscient and omnipotent; but he also
gives himself a role as a mere mortal in the piece,
as interviewer (a role he also inhabited in “normal”
reality, when the samples were recorded). Despite
Appleton’s breaking the frame to step, as composer,
dramatically into the plane scene; he does not
ultimately strongly direct the listener’s attention.
The soundscape has a very mimetic feel, with great
freedom for the listener to rove the aisles, amidst the
single active music channel (electroacoustic music
only, Ovviamente) which seeps into the entire plane.
Is there an ideal audience, a narrative audience,
or a narratee?
Appleton’s humor in this piece frequently takes
the form of Shakespearean asides. The passengers
on the plane serve as reflector-characters, and so
the narrative audience is both a confidante (Di
the external narrator, Appleton) and an empathic
cohort (of the passengers). The ideal audience
will be appreciative of the conceptual intricacy of
the narrative design. (Sound Example 10 contains
2:00–3:30 of the piece.)
Sheremetyevo Airport Rock (2002), by Jon Appleton
Dodohead (1994), by Christopher Penrose
Sheremetyevo Airport Rock (Appleton 2004, com-
posed in 2002) presents an even more narratively
complex sound world than the previous example, In
that the piece is aware both of itself and of an outside
intervention. What is normally a hidden pretense—a
composer’s control of characters and events—is here
completely transparent, a part of the piece. (IL
characters themselves may know this; but it seems
more likely that, like Abbate’s opera singers, they do
not know they are in a musical composition. They
seem not to hear, Per esempio, the hijacked seatbelt
icon which punctuates each passenger interview
perfectly.) The frames of the listener’s reality and
the passengers’ reality are thus twisted together.
It is largely because we do not hear the voice of
the interviewer (who is recording passengers on
Penrose’s title is a reference to dodecaphonic reper-
toire. With the help of this initial prompt one can
then discern, from the opening moments of the piece
itself (Penrose 1994), a line of connecting motifs:
from repertoire that is nearly incomprehensible (A
many listeners), to oppressive piano pedagogy (for
an interpretive take on related themes, see Goode
2011), to a questioning of the notion of institution-
ally designated values. These topics lie on a warped
continuum that also includes themes of military-
industrial-complex coercion and conspiracy theory
(suggested by various borrowed media fragments).
Six aphoristic speech fragments intervene, like non
sequiturs, amid lengthy synthetic montage-like
episodes; and the piece, at first, may be barely com-
prehensible. But the narrative structure is intricate
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and of interest on its own. Dodohead demonstrates
consciousness of itself as a piece. The clearest exam-
ple of this is the woman’s voice that emphatically
exclaims at the opening, “A four-year-old will bang
away at the piano keys as hard as he can.” The
piece then bangs away at the computer for close
to four minutes, almost as if it were responding to
the exclamation, dared to do so. Finalmente, as if aware
that she is entrusted with the culminating cadence,
the woman insists “Enough!” There seem to be two
narrator types, the “composition-framing” woman;
and two men, who are internal narrators. Questo
narratorial sequence takes us from being addressed
by someone who knows that she helps to execute
Penrose’s piece, to being addressed by speakers who
have no clue that they are in this musical com-
position. (Sound Example 11 includes the musical
montage leading into the second exclamation, E
continuing until the third one. It contains 3:30–4:32
of the piece.)
Is there an ideal audience, a narrative audience,
or a narratee?
Each speech fragment will likely conjure up a
spontaneous personal association, quite possibly
as nonlinear as the exclamations themselves. Questo
piece seems, philosophically, to eschew the notion
of an ideal audience. Ancora, if there were to be a
hypothetical audience, it might include people with
some exposure to musical academia. It might also
include people (academic or not) who appreciate
style- and genre-crossing artistic experiments. IL
sample of a voice saying “Dream on!” is borrowed
from a context that explores the loss of a sense of
self as a valid reality check, namely, IL 1990 film
Jacob’s Ladder, directed by Adrian Lyne (Penrose
2011). Dodohead creates a Kafkaesque situation in
which the listener is vicariously unable to decipher
what is real and what is delusional.
Light Rain Laganside (2009), by Eric Lyon
The title and the program note of Light Rain
Laganside (Lyon 2009) indicate that the sound world
points to an experience and to a place. Questo 8 min, 27
sec–long composition can readily be heard as being in
three large block-like sections (starting at 0:00; 3:39;
E 6:15) plus a final, strikingly different section
(from c. 7:30 to the end). The piece’s sections take us
from a sense of first-person narration, to third-person
narration, back to first-person narration, and then
to focalization, rispettivamente. Here are some musical
discourse features that support this analytic reading:
Part 1 (narrator, first-person): The sense of an “I”
emerges from the strong and focused directedness of
our attentions. We are near to, and may even have
the sense of inhabiting the space between the ears
Di, the hypothetical narrator. This is partly due to
the textural tableaus’ sonic blurriness, a feature of
the piece’s obliteration of all distinction between
foreground and background. We hear the piece as a
monolithic swath of sound, rather than a hierarchy of
acoustic features. The most interesting aspect of the
strong-armed direction of our attention is that it hap-
pens through spatialization, within a unified sonic
texture. In other words, though the camera turns
(cioè., the narrator’s eyes and ears turn), nothing new
that would be called “object-like” appears on the
“audio scene” (Sundaram and Chang 2000, P. 2441).
Part 2 (narrator, third-person, plus reflector
characters): This section has hints of an acousmatic
approach (per esempio., Musiques & Recherches 2012) In
its environmentally suggestive sounds. Bell-like
events cast off voice-like formants. There is a
seductive counterpoint of at least four different
such voice-like entities throughout this substantial
section. (Despite the environmentally suggestive
nature of the source, the piece is entirely synthetic
in origin.) That they do not truly sound like real
voices dissuades us from invoking visualization
schemas as we listen. Therefore, we hear maximal
detail. The bell-voice entities are distinguished by
register, implied gender, spatialization pattern, E
length of utterance. My analysis here reads these
characters as being described by someone, cioè., IL
narrator. Another more complicated interpretation
might designate all of these voices as multiple
reflector-characters, seemingly talking with each
other rather than to the audience. Much different
from Normandeau’s “perceiving” reflector-character
described earlier, these characters seem to be talking,
contributing specific thoughts or memories. In either
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interpretation, of interest here is the emotional
content of the subjectivities that are articulated
through the musical sounds. (Example 12a contains
segment 3:28–4:40 of the piece.)
Part 3 (narrator, first-person): We are returned,
dramatically, to the viewpoint of the first narrator.
Part 4 (conclusion of the story): The piece’s
end is a torn-off page that pulls us abruptly and
self-consciously back to our world. This process
transpires over the course of about a minute, during
which time the coda points to momentary signifiers
of our reality; and what appears to have been a
substitute world now seems to evaporate. (Compare
this ending to that of Sheremetyevo Airport Rock, In
which the composer’s hand reaches in to tamper one
last time, and is virtually still stuck in the fabricated
world as the piece concludes.) Lyon’s ending gesture
elucidates the composer–composition relationship
almost as clearly, though it highlights the composer
as caretaker of the listener rather than as situational
provocateur. Light Rain Laganside’s coda strongly
exemplifies Nattiez’s sense of musical narration as
discourse. The piece’s detailed spatialization, even
in the stereo version, carves out an impression of
dissipation, as mentioned. (The work also exists in
an 8-channel and a 16-channel format.) But upon
careful listening one can hear that the coda has a
coda, and yet another coda. Each one arises as if it is
another layer of a mystery-sustaining curtain being
pulled aside, only to reveal a gratifyingly persistent
virtual world, even if more and more distant or
less and less palpable. (In the stereo version, Questo
is accomplished by the relative amplitudes of the
textures; in the multichannel versions, the revealed
section is situated in speakers further from the
audience than the “curtain” texture, che è
spatialized nearer to the audience.) Example 12b is
an excerpt from 7:58 to the end of the piece.
Conclusione
Computer music that alludes to an environment can
enable narrativity by articulating subjectivities and
by manifesting distinct cognitive boundary frames.
The narrative viewpoint serves as connective
tissue between our sense of lived reality and the
represented realities in the musical work. How we
engage with the narrative conduit is partly due to
what we bring to the work, but in no small part
also due to the myriad structural devices which
permeate this subset of electroacoustic music. IL
devices embed us in particular ways and pull us in
and out of frames, almost as a story in its own right.
While bearing certain similarities to both film and
literature, computer music discourse also possesses
unique capacities. In particular, its transparent
frame, along with its being relatively untethered
regarding sonic movement of invisible sources,
makes its “purported reality” potentially more
ambiguous than that of visual art. Electroacoustic
sound’s mimetic directness is also distinct, In
allowing us to hear what a character hears rather
than our simply being told about it. We inhabit the
locus of the narrator with particular immediacy.
The “I” in the electroacoustic medium can situate
itself—and thus the listener—in a host of relational
roles that highlight the movement between the
disparate realities as an experiential, cognitive, E
aesthetic feature of our listening.
Ringraziamenti
All sound excerpts are included courtesy of the
respective composers and their publishers: Bridge
Records (Sound Example 1), WERGO (Sound Exam-
ple 1), empreintes DIGITALes (Sound Examples 2, 4,
E 8), SEAMUS (Sound Examples 3 E 10), Lovely
Music, Ltd. (Sound Example 6), Mode Records
(Sound Example 7), INA-GRM (Sound Example 5),
and OpenSpace (Sound Example 9).
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