Meaning in Electroacoustic Music and the Everyday Mind

Kendall, Gary S.

doi:10.1017/s1355771809990276

Cited by 23 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…There are many examples of researchers attempting to understand how people experience and make meaning from acousmatic sound (many of which are in the back issues of Organised Sound, including Atkinson 2007;Andean 2016;Barreiro 2010;Batchelor 2015;Godøy 2006;Kendall 2010;and Kim 2010). They ask, how is electroacoustic music experienced in the mind?…”

Section: Sound As a Mirrormentioning

confidence: 99%

The Acousmatic Gap as a Flexile Path to Self-Understanding: A case for experiential listening

Soddell

2020

Org. Sound

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Since Schaeffer’s development of musique concrète, there has been an ongoing debate regarding the value of the acousmatic reduction for engaging with real-world sound in music, and its relevance for composers and listeners. This article presents a way of working with acousmatic sound that is more meaningful to me as a composer, which I have labelled experiential listening. In understanding acousmatic sound through the lens of experientialism (as opposed to Schaeffer’s use of phenomenology), I have devised this method to form a dialogue between sound, composer, and listener through the use of metaphor, to explore concepts beyond the experience of just sound in itself while composing. It accounts for the felt sense of intuition that can form through working with acousmatic sound, presenting a way of using this as a tool for self-understanding. It highlights Brian Kane’s ontology of acousmatic sound as the being of a gap, exploring where this gap can take the mind of the composer and listener. This is illustrated through my use of experiential listening to gain insights into lived experiences of mental illness and trauma, which reveals inner wisdom about the listening self that can be negotiated through acousmatic sound.

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Section: Sound As a Mirrormentioning

confidence: 99%

The Acousmatic Gap as a Flexile Path to Self-Understanding: A case for experiential listening

Soddell

2020

Org. Sound

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“…As listeners, we try to understand our context dependent on the perspective from which we experience our situation, by attempting to recognise patterns and make connections between what we hear. 30 These patterns can produce a sense of ambiguity, perhaps making it difficult to discern the direct signification of what the sounds represent in the spaces in which we hear them. These ambiguities carry with them implications from the different contexts from where they are experienced, and the acousmatic experience of listening from a site provides psychoacoustic descriptions of audio environments.…”

Section: Environments and Sitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A question of backgrounds: Sites of listening

Holbrook¹

2019

Music Beyond Airports - Appraising Ambient Music

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In 1951 John Cage entered an anechoic chamber at the University of Harvard.He expected to hear silence; what he heard has now become a legendary anecdote about this experience. Twenty-four years later from his sick bed, Brian Eno had a revelatory experience of listening to music through a broken hi-fi while confined to a hospital bed. Although several years apart, these two individual experiences both stimulated new modes of engaging with, creating, listening to and understanding music. These two distinct creation myths (to use Seth Kim-Cohen's description 1 ) are reference points from which the discussions in this chapter develop. The intent in this chapter is to examine the site of listening in which these two events took place, not the physical locus itself, but as the contextual site in which these two events took place: namely, the 'background'. The discussion of ambient music will be centred around Brian Eno's Discreet Music (1975) and Ambient 1: Music for

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“…The fragmentation of Machaut's music presents an interesting combination of the medieval and the modern, while the filter sweeps have a novel gestural shape. The reference to Machaut in particular gives rise to a potential conceptual blend in which Dhomont and his French antecedent collaborate on an electroacoustic work (Kendall 2010). This conceptual blend might evoke some feeling (depending on how one identifies with the implicit French patriotism), but what about its relationship to the other layer?…”

Section: Triggersmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Feeling Blend: Feeling and emotion in electroacoustic art

Kendall¹

2014

Org. Sound

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Starting from the assumption that meaning in electroacoustic music is an outcome of the listener's mental processes, it is the goal of this essay to explicate the mental processes whereby feeling and emotion contribute to meaning when listening to electroacoustic music. This essay begins with a broad consideration of feeling and emotion with an eye toward artistic experience, spanning from basic emotions to nuanced phenomenal qualities. It then introduces the concept of mental layers in support of the multi-levelled nature of meaning, especially in this case, meaning that is felt as well as comprehended. These two preliminary topics precede the introduction of the feeling blend, an extension of blend theory as presented by Fauconnier and Turner (2002). Core issues for blend theory, such as what constitutes a mental space and what triggers a blend, are reconsidered in the light of practical examples from the literature of electroacoustic music. In conclusion, the feeling blend is proposed as an essential concept to understanding artistic experience and an intrinsic aspect of being human.

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Meaning in Electroacoustic Music and the Everyday Mind

Cited by 23 publications

References 15 publications

The Acousmatic Gap as a Flexile Path to Self-Understanding: A case for experiential listening

The Acousmatic Gap as a Flexile Path to Self-Understanding: A case for experiential listening

A question of backgrounds: Sites of listening

The Feeling Blend: Feeling and emotion in electroacoustic art

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