Post #6: Listening Response

This week, I had the opportunity to read Franscisco Lopez’s article “Blind Listening” and to listen to Francis Dhomont’s Foret Profonde. These two works were an interesting juxtaposition–one an argument for the untampered recording of natural soundworlds, and the other a composite of unnatural sounds greatly transformed from the source material. As such, the two offer polar opposite, but equally valid perspectives in our question about the effect of recontextualizing sounds in electronic music.

The reading by Lopez emphasizes a counterpoint to the perspectives previously reviewed on this blog. In his article, Lopez idealizes untampered recordings–truly honest representations of sound worlds. He suggests that artists seeking to depict the natural world through sound should set their microphones in arbitrary positions and not edit the recordings, even to adjust the balance to create a stronger spatial sense with some sounds in the foreground and others in the background. Yet, Lopez later concedes that it is because our experience of the soundworld is so wrapped up with our other senses that a truly objective representation of the experience of sound is impossible. He points specifically to our ideas about what wind or rain sound like–ideas which are in fact more connected with learned associations between the sounds of plants and trees under such conditions than the physical sensation of the weather patterns themselves.

Especially captivating in my listening of Dhomont’s work was Track #7. The track included a rare, extended example of an English narrative amid a recording that uses predominantly the French language. The narrative, while not particularly evocative on its own, carried a beautiful aesthetic in the context of the piece as a whole. The bright, clashing sounds which permeate in much of the piece momentarily gave way for this moment as a female voice emerged. Simultaneous feelings of darkness, warmth, and simplicity, ideas which mark a romantic idea of Medieval life, surfaced like a lone island in a sea of electronic sounds.

This short moment of continuity–a story which, while superficial and brief, had a sense of direction–was unlike the vast majority of the piece. In fact, after much consideration, I still struggle to sense a larger story in the piece overall, a feature which perhaps gives this piece the same unromantic qualities which Lopez idealizes in well-crafted sound world (which is to say, an uncrafted soundworld). The sounds themselves have little meaning in the larger context (even more so for non-French speaking listeners like myself), but exist only for themselves as does all life in the natural world. This brings us to an interesting question: what draws us to stories–in music, or in literature, drama, etc.? Do they in fact remind us of who we are, or offer an escape into a reality which far removed from our own–a reality in which our lives individually and in the aggregate resemble a story, or at least harbor meaning?