Composing through listening: awareness of the role of short- and long-term memory in the sound creation processes
The creative processes of electroacoustic music and sound arts are based on listening. It is therefore essential in these practices to develop compositional tools to qualify the impact of listening on creative choices.
When composing a work of sound art, at an empirical level, we are confronted both with the relationship with the listener’s capacity for retention and projection, known as short-term memory, and the activity of long-term memory.
According to musicologist Mariusz Kozak, the apprehension of the musical moment is characterised by a continuous and irregular oscillation between anticipatory and omphalic states. There are other theoretical approaches to music, such as that of David Huron, who considers apprehension exclusively from the point of view of anticipation, and which asserts that « surprise is biologically bad ».
Indeed, the question of bodily engagement is crucial in this reflection: does the body react to the environment? Or does it contribute to its creation? These questions raise the issue of perception as a means of creating a certain effect on the listener, or rather as the body’s desire to explore the phenomenon of sound.
Long-term memory, for its part, is responsible at the empirical level for the formation of more or less specific memories that are imprinted on the listener’s mind, and which also influence the present moment of listening. The sound configurations implemented in composition produce a certain potential, and favour a certain type of listening orientation, which can however change after a certain length of time.
These reflections deserve to be transposed to sound creation, since there is not yet compositional model that takes perception into account in the compositional strategies themselves. In the 1980s Gérard Grisey was one of the first to make explicit the need to take account of perceived phenomena in instrumental composition, and he based his model on the notion of predictability.
If we consider the sound phenomenon from the point of view of the potentialities and limits of our apprehension, we can then consider the organisation of sounds as possible successions or simultaneities of sound elements, more or less close to the thresholds of perception. The interaction between sound organizations and the embodied listener create some sonic situations which characterize the creative process.
This type of energetic model, which considers the active presence of the listener, is relevant to the study of « non-structurable » works such as Tryptich Part I by Eliane Radigue, or Principle by Ryoji Ikeda. In this case, the microvariations in the soundtrack can be qualified according to the listening tendencies they engender. The memory formed no longer reflects the unfolding of the work overtime, its temporal « architecture », but rather becomes the impression of an experienced change. The musical form would then be closer to the form of the memory: a change of state experienced. It is from this perspective, then, that we can rethink the symbolic dimension of the musical work, in terms of the lived experience we have of it.
Keywords: electroacoustic music, sound art, practice-based research, embodied temporality
Biography
Composer, sound artist, and PhD in « Practice and theory of artistic and literary creation ». Today she teaches « music and sound technologies » at Aix-Marseille University and conducts her research within the laboratory PRISM (https://www.prism.cnrs.fr/). Her research aims to study the temporality of sound creation processes with a recherche-création methodology. She is an expert in composition techniques that take listening into account in the creative process, as well as in models of musical analysis based on listening (theory of listening behaviours and embodied temporality). Her projects have been presented in venues in Marseille, France and abroad (HEAR, ESAPB, ESADMM, ENSP, GMEM, GMEA, FRAC PACA, MUSLAB, MUSINFO). She practices spatialisation and analogic synthesis. In 2019, she founded Radio Nunc with a group of artists, an independent web radio for sound creation (www.radionunc.org).
PRISM AMU, France – isottatrastevere@gmail.com