Sound is a physical perception of energy motion. It is caused by a movement in a medium – air, water, solid object – in the form of pressure waves. The differences in pressure are caused by the changing motion of particles (atoms and molecules) through matter (air, water, solid object). The initial action, which will be registered by our ears as sound or noise, causes the form of matter of the medium to alternatively compress and expand. These compression and expansion cause pressure changes in the air around our head, which are picked up by the ear as pressure changes felt upon the eardrum. Without an eardrum to detect it, there will not be any sound or noise.
Music is not sound. In any case, not any more than a cow is the grass it eats, or coffee is the plant Coffea van Rubiaceae. Before becoming music, sound has a long voyage and intricate life. Firstly, the sound-to-be is conceived in the particular reality of its host-environment, establishing a nuanced relationship with the Umwelt of the medium: the density, motion, viscosity, and temperature of the latter ultimately in-form the speed of sound, its frequency and amplitude. The sound wave is a result of the interaction of pressure and time, which determines the properties of sound, like pitch, intensity, timbre, and duration.
These characteristics constitute the genetic make-up of the sound.
Ready to go, the sound is birthed in the world of shared sonic reality where it endures a second articulation: it becomes a tribal, cultural entity by interacting with others as part of a specific habitat – a forest, urban, ocean soundscape – which to a large extend determines sound‘s further fate.
Now the real life begins.
Depending on its medium and environment (nature and culture), the sound could become a random, fleeting, destratified murmur on the lips of the wind – a moody ruffle,
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l‘air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.1
Alternatively, the sound could find itself articulated as a signifier in a message – a howl, a tweet, a word. In such a manifestation, there is not much space for freedom, so to speak: the sound is coded and confined to a small territory – in order to be (meaningful) it has to comply with the given order. Compliance and pliability are the means to the desired materiality. “Sound is language‘s flesh, its opacity, as meaning marks its material embeddedness in the world of things.” (Bernstein).
Indeed, the sound might be the least controllable of all sense modalities, inasmuch as we cannot handle it or push it away, we “cannot turn our backs at it, we cannot close our eyes, hold our noses, withdraw from touch, refuse to taste, we can‘t close our ears though we can partly muffle them” (Jaynes). There once was a painter who suffered an illness in his childhood, which left him profoundly deaf for several months:
His memories of that time are vivid and not, he insists, at all negative. Indeed, they opened a world in which the images he saw could be woven together with much greater freedom and originality than he‘d ever known. The experience was powerful enough that it helped steer him toward his lifelong immersion in the visual arts. “Sound imposes a narrative on you,” he said, “and it’s always someone else‘s narrative. My experience of silence was like being awake inside a dream I could direct” (Prochnik).
Sound is an aggressive storyteller. But we can‘t really blame it, for the sound itself is not free – it is never free, because it is always a product of action, of someone else‘s action, of someone else‘s intent. It is not the freedom that is of value, then, but the chance to be, the capacity for expression. And even then, while it is true that all kinds of agents have expressive timbres, for the sound to be someone‘s timbre is but a duty, a 9-to-5 job, a utilitarian expression – when I am a howl, I stand for the wolf, I mean wolf. Language is an order-word that compels obedience (Deleuze and Guattari).
Speak white and loud
So that we can hear you From St-Henri to St-Domingue
What an admirable tongue
For hiring Giving orders
Setting the time for working yourself to death
And for the pause that refreshes
And invigorates the dollar2
On the other hand, music, unlike language, approaches employment of sounds with a motherly attitude – you have to conform and study and learn, so you find a decent place in the world, so you shine with your own light. Or rather, sing with your own voice. Music is coded, perhaps even more coded than language; in a single musical phrase there is an organization on multiple levels with not much chance to zigzag. So again, it is not a freedom of expression that music offers, but a perspective and a voice. The perspective comes from exposure to and community work with others – the sound is taken out of its natural zone and commanded to a certain address through an artificial medium – a musical instrument – created with the sole purpose to accommodate and the ability to re-produce a specific kind of sound. Skin suit. An exoskeleton. Commanded into the high register of the oboe, for example, the sound finds itself into the family of flutes and clarinets, but it is also very aware of its neighborhood blending violins, horns and trumpets, piano and harp sounds – all very present, very intentional. The sound would have never found itself in such a learned company, if it was not for music. Music territorializes the sound, and, while it liberates it from the sedimentary confinements of a signifier, it codes and stratifies it into a highly controlled disciplinarian system. ― “To be chosen by music, I must be special”, the sound thinks; ― “it‘s a lot of work with a steep learning curve, but. . . I get to mesh with others. And if I am to play the solo, I get to be, to be someone with my own voice people recognize, remember, anticipate, listen to, and hearken. And love.”
And this is the pinnacle in a possible life of a sound – to be listened to for what it is. Listening affords it individuality, a creaturehood. When the oboe soars above the strings in a baroque adagio, one listens to the riveting succession of sibling sounds, and in that moment, one is not oneself, for one becomes-sound.
Consider what it is to listen and understand someone speaking to us. In a sense we have to become the other person; or rather, we let him become part of us for a brief second. We suspend our own identities, after which we come back to ourselves and accept or reject what he has said. But that brief second of dawdling identity is the nature of understanding language; and if that language is a command, the identification of understanding becomes the obedience. To hear is actually a kind of obedience (Jaynes).
When we listen to the sound, we are equals. In that, the sound has acquired a pure voice, unpolluted by semantic meaning, plentiful of information. By objectifying sound, music has subjectified it; by disciplining sound in its abstract machine, music has gifted it a selfhood. Sound has ceased to follow sense, music has made sense of sound.
To frame it otherwise, where sound is the flesh of language, music is the consciousness of sound.
Paul Verlaine (1944-1896), Art Poétique, 1885: translation Eli Siegel
(Of music before everything/ And for this like more the Odd—)
Vaguer and more melting in air,
Without anything in it which weighs or arrests.
Michèle Lalonde (b.1937), Speak White, 1968: translation Albert Herring
References:
Bernstein, Charles. Close Reading: Poetry and the Performed Word. Oxford University Press, 1998.
Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
Jaynes, Julian. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Mariner Books, 2000.
Prochnik, George. In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise. Anchor, 2011.