Hearing the Music of Others: Pierre Schaeffer’s Humanist Interdiscipline

Abstract

Traité des objets musicaux (Treatise on musical objets) represents the culmination of Pierre Schaeffer's thinking on the nature of music and sound. Building upon more than a quarter century of broadcasting and compositional research, Schaeffer's book saw immediate adoption as a research guide by the composers and technicians of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), the experimental broadcasting unit Schaeffer founded in 1958. It has since taken on a reputation as one of the canonical texts of the academic electroacoustic tradition as a whole. Now, a half century after its original publication, Schaeffer's finely wrought metalanguage for the relationship between human listening and musical sound is finally beginning to appear in English translation. 2 The lack of translation until now, however, has not hampered the growth of a robust and independent anglophone tradition of Schaeffer scholarship. There is a particularly strong current of critical writing building upon Schaeffer's thinking about the affordances of an 'acousmatic' approach to sound, that is, when sound is encountered in the absence of a visible source. 3 With few exceptions, however, the focus has been upon putting Schaeffer's ideas to compositional work rather than their implications for the descriptive study of music more broadly. Historians have similarly treated Schaeffer's theoretical work as a footnote to his endeavours as a composer and engineer. 4 And yet these studies frequently invite us to think of 1 Early versions of this article were presented at the 2015 Annual Conference of the Royal Music Association in Birmingham and the weekly research seminar organised by Benedict Taylor at the Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh. I would like to express my gratitude for the generous feedback I received from John Dack, Kyle Devine, Brian Kane, Peter Nelson, and three anonymous reviewers. Thanks are due as well to Marcelle Deschênes, who provided invaluable primary sources from her private archive in Montreal.

“Things begin to speak by themselves”: Pierre Schaeffer’s myth of the seashell and the epistemology of sound

“…Jacques Bouveresse reads Valéry's Cartesianism, following Valéry's own remarks on philosophy, as a paradoxical "antiphilosophical" Cartesianism, and Valéry's "system" as one in which the mind is only understandable in its transformations (1995,379). Bouveresse's reading allows us to see that Schaeffer's engagement with Valéry could have produced a more unstable form of systematicity than that implied in the avowed desire to discover the universal properties of listening to which Schaeffer ultimately devoted his efforts (Chion 2019, 24-25;Valiquet 2017). This more unstable systematicity could, perhaps, have maintained the autonomy given to the voice of the object, the object as an object of encounter.…”

Re-hearing the Past in the Age of Digital Re-Production A Sonification of Media Artefacts

“…Acknowledging, in part, the influence of Pierre Schaeffer and subsequent composers and researchers on the object-based sound installation, his "acousmatic approach to sound" is as important as his mediated listening experiences as a basis for the "discovery of 'possible musics' in the future." [11] In his compositions, the quantised matrices of melody, harmony and rhythm fall away to reveal a textural and temporal flow of sound as a "post literate sonic experience." [11] However, what Brian Kane terms the epistemological gap, the technically mediated space that dissociates an object's effect from its source, has seen a reaction from sound artists that have sought to expose and foreground the sounding object as a significant part of their works.…”

“…[11] In his compositions, the quantised matrices of melody, harmony and rhythm fall away to reveal a textural and temporal flow of sound as a "post literate sonic experience." [11] However, what Brian Kane terms the epistemological gap, the technically mediated space that dissociates an object's effect from its source, has seen a reaction from sound artists that have sought to expose and foreground the sounding object as a significant part of their works. [12] In a turn away from the dematerialised objet sonore of Schaeffer's musique concrète the visibly present object can be seen to be a (re)turn to l'objet concret (and a turn away from l'objet sonore), an essential aesthetic element of the object-based sound installation.…”

“…the random digits and normal deviates. [11] Subsequently, RAND Corporation has noted the tables have become "a standard reference in engineering and econometrics textbooks and have been widely used in gaming and simulations that employ Monte Carlo trials 10 " and were "routinely used by statisticians, physicists, polltakers, market analysts, lottery administrators, and quality control engineers." [128] This book is the source stimulus for the ideation of a non-deterministic sound installation.…”

“…The random number and normal deviation data sets are now publicly available from RAND Corporation's website. 11 Could this data be transformed and utilised to create a connection between the book and the electromechanical computer? This question is the basis of the Click::RAND research project which uses indeterminacy as an artistic construct.…”