Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T02:41:00.215Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Re-orientating Spectromorphology and Space-form through a Hybrid Acoustemology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2017

Edward K. Spencer*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, Lincoln College, Turl Street, Oxford OX1 3DR

Abstract

This article re-orientates Denis Smalley’s work on spectromorphology and space-form through a case study of electronic dance music (EDM) on YouTube. An EDM track and its related YouTube comments are analysed concurrently in order to examine how sound-shapes and sonic spatiality are experienced in practice on the social web. Using Stephen Feld’s notion of acoustemology as a theoretical base, I argue that semantic and somantic ways of knowing through sound are thoroughly entangled. A hybrid acoustemology model is outlined, merging spectromorphology and space-form with elements of ecosemiotics and music psychology. The model is then deployed during an acoustemology of the trance/breakbeat track Finished Symphony by Hybrid (1999). Selected YouTube comments on Finished Symphony uploads are coded deductively using the descriptive system of Gabrielsson and Wik (2003). A larger set of comments is subsequently collected for inductive content analysis, which highlights some wider issues relating to the words we use for music and sound. The article concludes by calling for vantage point shifts in music research.

Type
Articles
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was read at the Seventh International Symposium on Music and Sonic Art: Practices & Theories (IMWI, Karlsruhe). I am very grateful to John Dack, Hubert Ho, Pieter-Jan Maes, Huw McGregor, Paul Nataraj, Adrian Palka, Matthew Sergeant, Denis Smalley, Patrick Valiquet, and Sean Williams for their comments. I am also very grateful to Georgina Born, Eric Clarke, Isis Hjorth, and Laura Tunbridge for their comments on this final version.

References

REFERENCES

Acitores, A. P. 2011. Towards a Theory of Proprioception as a Bodily Basis for Consciousness in Music. In D. Clarke and E. Clarke (eds.) Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bangert, M., Peschel, T., Schlaug, G., Rotte, M., Drescher, D., Hinrichs, H. et al. 2006. Shared Networks for Auditory and Motor Processing in Professional Pianists: Evidence from fMRI Conjunction. Neuroimage 30(3): 917926.Google Scholar
Blackburn, M. 2011. The Visual Sound-shapes of Spectromorphology: An Illustrative Guide to Composition. Organised Sound 16(1): 513.Google Scholar
Blood, A. J. and Zatorre, R. J. 2001. Intensely Pleasurable Responses to Music Correlate with Activity in Brain Regions Implicated in Reward and Emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 98(20): 11818–123.Google Scholar
Born, G. 2013. Introduction – Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. In G. Born (ed.) Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Born, G. forthcoming. On Nonhuman Sound: Sound as Relation. In R. Chow and J. Steintrager (eds.) Sound Objects. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Brøvig-Hanssen, R. and Danielsen, A. 2013. The Naturalised and the Surreal: Changes in the Perception of Popular Music Sound. Organised Sound 18(1): 7180.Google Scholar
Brøvig-Hanssen, R. and Danielsen, A. 2016. Digital Signatures: The Impact of Digitization on Popular Music Sound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Butler, M. 2014. Looking for the Perfect Loop. In Playing with Something that Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Clarke, E. F. 2005. Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Clarke, E. F. 2013. Music, Space and Subjectivity. In G. Born (ed.) Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Climent, R. 2017. Composing Interactive Music with Physics, Graphics and Gameaudio Engines. Paper presented at Ludo2017: Sixth Annual Conference on Video Game Music and Sound, Bath Spa University.Google Scholar
Collier, W. G. and Hubbard, T. L. 2004. Musical Scales and Brightness Evaluations: Effects of Pitch, Direction, and Scale Mode. Musicae Scientiae 8(2): 151173.Google Scholar
Cumming, N. 1997. The Subjectivities of ‘Erbarme Dich’. Music Analysis 16(1): 544.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D’Errico, M. 2015. Electronic Dance Music in the Dubstep Era. Oxford Handbooks Online. www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935321.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935321-e-74?rskey=PxzW5F&result=63 (accessed 6 September 2017).Google Scholar
Di Pellegrino, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V. and Rizzolatti, G. 1992. Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological study. Exp Brain Res 91(1): 176180.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dockwray, R. and Moore, A. F. 2010. Configuring the Sound-box 1965–1972. Popular Music 29(2): 181197.Google Scholar
Etzi, R., Spence, C., Zampini, M. and Gallace, A. 2016. When Sandpaper is ‘Kiki’ and Satin is ‘Bouba’: An Exploration of the Associations between Words, Emotional States, and the Tactile Attributes of Everyday Materials. Multisens Res 29(1–3): 133155.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feld, S. 1996. Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. In S. Feld and K. Basso (eds.) Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Feld, S. 2015. Acoustemology. In D. Novak and M. Shakeeny (eds.) Keywords in Sound. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Gabrielsson, A. 2011. Strong Experiences with Music: Music is More than Just Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gabrielsson, A. and Wik, S. L. 2003. Strong Experiences Related to Music: A Descriptive System. Musicae Scientiae 7(2): 157217.Google Scholar
Gal, N., Shifman, L. and Kampf, Z. 2016. ‘It Gets Better’: Internet Memes and the Construction of Collective Identity. New Media and Society 18(8): 16981714.Google Scholar
Garcia, L.-M. 2015. Beats, Flesh, and Grain: Sonic Tactility and Affect in Electronic Dance Music. Sound Studies 1(1): 5976.Google Scholar
Gibson, J. J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Goehr, L. 2008. Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Hanslick, E. [1854] 1986. On the Musically Beautiful, trans. G. Pyzant. Indianapolis: Hackett.Google Scholar
Heft, H. 2001. Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Hine, C. 2015. Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
James, W. [1912] 1976. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, M. 1987. The Body In The Mind: The Bodily Basis Of Meaning, Imagination, And Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Juslin, P. 2013. From Everyday Emotions to Aesthetic Emotions: Towards a Unified Theory of Musical Emotions. Physics of Life Reviews 10(3): 235266.Google Scholar
Juslin, P. and Västfjäll, D. 2008. Emotional Responses to Music: The Need to Consider Underlying Mechanisms. Behav Brain Sci 31(5): 559621.Google Scholar
Maes, P.-J. 2016. 3Mo Model for Sonification of Physiological and Motion Parameters and its Potential for Sonic Art. Keynote presentation at the Seventh International Symposium on Music and Sonic Art: Practices & Theories, IMWI, Karlsruhe, Germany.Google Scholar
Meikle, G. 2016. Examining the Effects of Experimental/Academic Electroacoustic and Popular Electronic Musics on the Evolution and Development of Human–Computer Interaction in Music. Contemporary Music Review 35(2): 224241.Google Scholar
Melara, R. D. and O’Brien, T. P. 1987. Interaction between Synesthetically Corresponding Dimensions. J. Exp. Psychol.-Gen 116(4): 323336.Google Scholar
Monelle, R. 2000. The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays. Oxford: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Moore, A. 2012. Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. Farnham: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Norris, M. 1998. An Overview and Assessment of Selected Discourse on Electroacoustic Music. Unpublished Masters dissertation, City University, London.Google Scholar
Nyström, E. 2011. Textons and the Propagation of Space in Acousmatic Music. Organised Sound 16(1): 1426.Google Scholar
O’Callaghan, J. 2011. Soundscape Elements in the Music of Denis Smalley: Negotiating the Abstract and the Mimetic. Organised Sound 16(1): 5462.Google Scholar
Pappas, N. 2005. Aristotle. In B. Gaut and D. McIver Lopes (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edn. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Reybrouck, M. 2012. Musical Sense-making and the Concept of Affordance: An Ecosemiotic and Experiential Approach. Biosemiotics 5(3): 391409.Google Scholar
Sheets-Johnstone, M. 1999. The Primacy of Movement. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smalley, D. 1997. Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes. Organised Sound 2(2): 107126.Google Scholar
Smalley, D. 2007. Space-Form and the Acousmatic Image. Organised Sound 12(1): 3558.Google Scholar
Smalley, D. 2010. Spectromorphology in 2010. In É. Gayou (ed.) Polychrome Portraits No. 15: Denis Smalley. Paris: INA.Google Scholar
Smalley, D. 2016. The Composition and Perception of Sonic Spatiality. Keynote presentation at the Seventh International Symposium on Music and Sonic Art: Practices & Theories, IMWI, Karlsruhe, Germany.Google Scholar
Smethurst, C. 2016. Movement as Perception: Bergson, Deleuze, and Hybridity between Electroacoustic and Intelligent Dance Music. Contemporary Music Review 35(2): 275289.Google Scholar
Spence, C. 2011. Crossmodal Correspondences: A Tutorial Review. Atten Percept Psychophys 73(4): 971995.Google Scholar
Spencer, E. K. 2017. When Play Becomes Political: An Acoustemology of Major League Gaming Montage Parodies (MLGMPs). Paper presented at Ludo2017: Sixth Annual Conference on Video Game Music and Sound, Bath Spa University.Google Scholar
Stevens, R. and Stavropoulos, N. 2017. It’s in the Game: The Affordances of Video Game Technologies for Spatial Music. Paper presented at Ludo2017: Sixth Annual Conference on Video Game Music and Sound, Bath Spa University.Google Scholar
Straw, W. 1991. Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music. Cultural Studies 5: 368388.Google Scholar
Stuart, S. A. J. 2011. Enkinaesthesia: The Fundamental Challenge for Machine Consciousness. International Journal of Machine Consciousness 3(1): 145162.Google Scholar
Summers, T. 2016. Understanding Video Game Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tagg, P. 2012. Music’s Meanings. Huddersfield: Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press.Google Scholar
Tanzi, D. 2011. Extra-musical Meanings and Spectromorphology. Organised Sound 16(1): 3641.Google Scholar
Thelwall, M. 2009. Introduction to Webometrics: Quantitative Web Research for the Social Sciences. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool.Google Scholar
Thelwall, M., Sud, P. and Vis, F. 2012. Commenting on YouTube videos: From Guatemalan rock to El Big Bang. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63(3): 616629.Google Scholar
Valiquet, P. 2012. The Spatialisation of Stereophony: Taking Positions in Post-War Electroacoustic Music. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43(2): 403421.Google Scholar
Vaughan, M. 2016. Register, Dialect, Convolution, and ‘Crosstalk’: Reflections on ‘ … the Zones of Influence and Hybridity between Electroacoustic, Acousmatique Music, Techno, and IDM’. Contemporary Music Review 35(2): 166183.Google Scholar
Windsor, L. 2000. Through and around the Acousmatic: The Interpretation of Electroacoustic Sounds. In S. Emmerson (ed.) Music, Electronic Media and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Windsor, L. 2004. An Ecological Approach to Semiotics. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34(2): 179198.Google Scholar
DISCOGRAPHY Google Scholar
ATB. 1999. Clubber’s Guide to Trance. London: Ministry of Sound, MOSCD5.Google Scholar
Fatboy Slim. 1998. Right Here, Right Now. On You’ve Come a Long Way Baby. Brighton: Skint Records, BRASSIC11CD.Google Scholar
Goldfrapp. 2000. Felt Mountain. London: Mute Records, STUMM188.Google Scholar
Hybrid. 1999. Finished Symphony. London: Distinctive Records, DISN052.Google Scholar
James, B. 1978. Touchdown. New York: Columbia Records, JC35594.Google Scholar
Massive Attack. 1991. Unfinished Sympathy. On Blue Lines. Bristol: Wild Bunch Records, WBRLP1.Google Scholar
The Verve. 1997. Bitter Sweet Symphony. On Urban Hymns. Los Angeles: Virgin Records, CDHUT45.Google Scholar
VIDEOGRAPHY Google Scholar
distinctiverecords. 2011. Hybrid – Finished Symphony. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oeslAqeTEc (accessed November–December 2015 and December 2016–January 2017).Google Scholar
IndependenceHD. 2011. Hybrid – Symphony (Original Mix). YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cZR2NRcQIM (accessed November–December 2015 and December 2016–January 2017).Google Scholar
Ninsegalover. 2012. SSX Tricky – Psymon in Untracked. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUmP_Ibz5r8&t=52s (accessed December 2016).Google Scholar
zedk8. 2014. SSX Tricky [PS2] | Freeride with Mackenzie ‘Mac’ Fraser (Untracked). YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5wnId4Ovic&t=79s (accessed December 2016).Google Scholar