Applied
Plunderphonia: tagging electronic music with electronic music
Julio
d'Escriván and
Paul Jackson
Anglia
Ruskin University,
Cambridge, England
Abstract
Plunderphonics, a technique where the composer borrows music freely
from
any available musical sources, is arguably a direct descendant of the
work of Schaeffer in À la recherche d'un musique
concrète. John Oswald, who coined the term in his
presentation
at The Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto in 1985,
said
that “A sampler, in essence a recording, transforming instrument,
is simultaneously a documenting device and a creative device”
(Oswald, 1985). In defining the sampler as a documenting device, Oswald
introduces the possibility that by juxtaposing plundered material, new
knowledge may be derived from the relationship between the chosen
musical
extracts, one which is ‘documentary’ in nature and which
further illuminates the music it accompanies. Plundered sound objects
can
thus shed light on the original musical context in which they are
quoted,
simply by being heard. They may provide a catalyst for an intuitive
understanding of the original piece, and create new aural meanings. By
virtue of being superimposed or juxtaposed with a piece in which they
do
not originally belong, they function in a way that is reminiscent of
hyperlinks or even tags on web documents, as they are placed
arbitrarily
with the intention of furthering an idea or extending a concept or
signifying a degree of implicit categorisation. This is what we
understand by the generation of ‘documentary’ knowledge.
This paper aims to propose ways in which music can be ‘marked
up’ at the time of composition or as an analytic activity with
samples from original or borrowed sources. The end result is to show
how
this association of extraneous sampled material to the created or
analysed music provides a deeper understanding of the work as well as
extending its semantics.
Introduction
There may be no Hard Day’s Night without Blue
Suede
Shoes, no Tenney or Oswald without Elvis, no Solaris
without
Forbidden Planet, no Gesang der Jünglinge
without
Symphonie pour un homme seul, no Silence
by Cage without
Fischinger’s Visual Music or Alphonse Allais’
Marche Funebre. Every work leaves a trace. Every
work of music is,
at least, a trace of others that precede it and even, in a
’pataphysical sense, of others that will follow. Discussing the
symbolic form in his explanation of the analytical semiological
tripartition - the poietic/neutral level/aesthesic
- Jean-Jacques
Nattiez draws a useful corollary for our subject. He defines the trace
as
the physical and material embodiment of the work, which is accessible
to
the senses, and argues that the aesthesic process is ‘heavily
dependent upon the lived experience of the receiver’ (Nattiez,
1990: p12). Although he subsequently discusses how this is useful in a
prima facie consideration of the artefact itself -
a ‘neutral level’ of the work - arguably we could also
say that there is nothing neutral about the perception of an artefact
that brings into play the ‘lived experience’ of the
receiver. Perhaps the ‘immanent and recurring’ (Nattiez,
1990: p12) properties of any work are only those that we perceive
as immanent and recurring. Once identified as such, they become a
referential system for the receiver, in turn plunging the notion of the
neutral level into a recursive motion, which is not only unresolvable,
but also undesirable to resolve. The work of art, and in particular the
work of music, speaks to our imagination directly, that is to the world
of images/symbols/referents that is our life story. Arguably, this is
what may interest the listener most and may promote engagement: the
particular, the traceable, the possible thread.
This idea that looks for meaning in specific experiences or instances
was
explained very lucidly by Descartes, when, in the Discourse
of
Method (1637), he wrote:
‘I spent
the remainder of my youth in travelling, in visiting
courts and armies, in holding intercourse with men of different
dispositions and ranks, in collecting varied experience, in proving
myself in the different situations into which fortune threw me, and,
above all, in making such reflection on the matter of my
experience as
to secure my improvement. For it occurred to me that
I should find
much more truth in the reasonings of each individual with reference to
the affairs in which he is personally interested, and the issue of
which
must presently punish him if he has judged amiss [author’s
italics], than in those conducted by a man of letters in his study,
regarding speculative matters that are of no practical moment, and
followed by no consequences to himself, farther, perhaps, than that
they
foster his vanity the better the more remote they are from common
sense;
requiring, as they must in this case, the exercise of greater ingenuity
and art to render them probable’.
In the last fifteen years, truly democratic networks of knowledge have
been promoted through the world-wide-web: text that calls upon other
text
for clarification and expansion; images, video, personal testimonies,
technical as well as historical texts; a web of meaning, a semantic
web.
But there is a missing web, although perhaps one ‘under
construction’ - the musical web posited by, among others, Simon
Emmerson. Peer-to-peer sharing has, of course, created a web of music,
yet not one intentionally semantic. Musical tagging, or a musical
mark-up
language has yet to become as commonplace as de.li.cio.us tagging. The
future of formats such as ID3v2 tagging are promising to bring
something
akin to what we are discussing, but we have yet to see efforts to tag
music with other musics, in other words, primarily presenting a piece
of
music as an eloquent tag for an existing one, without, in the first
instance, transcending the language of music. It is also specific to
electronic music, for, similar to the way in which photography
operates,
audio samples (or recordings) present us with slices of other micro
worlds, separate from the one they may be made to inhabit.
Plunderphones
and Sound
Objects
‘The plundering has to be blatant
though’
(Igma, 2000).
In
an interview with Norman
Igma, John Oswald defines a plunderphone as ‘a recognizable
sonic quote, using the actual sound of something familiar which has
already
been recorded...’ Further, he distinguishes that from musical
quotation: ‘Whistling a bar of Density 21.5
is a
traditional musical quote. Taking Madonna singing Like a
Virgin and
rerecording it backwards or slower is plunderphonics, as long as you
can
reasonably recognize the source’ (Igma, 2000). The key characteristic
of the plunderphone is the ability of the listener to recognise the
source,
whilst a key element of the Schaefferian approach to the reception of
music
is, of course, reduced listening. It is clearly not the case that
Schaeffer
does not consider the semantic value of a sound object in his
evaluation of
listening modes, yet it is the attempt to reduce the listening
experience
at all that is noteworthy. Is it actually possible to strip sound from
its
sonic referents? We would argue it is not. The development of much
acousmatic music (or rather, electroacoustic tape music) from the late
1970s onwards may be seen, though, to be attempting precisely this.
Many
composers, on the one hand, look to abstract spectral characteristics
and
to explore purely timbral relations, whilst, on the other hand,
arguably
bewildered, non-initiated listeners try to make ‘sense’
out of the listening experience they undergo in the concert hall, the
result being a variable tension between compositional introspection and
an
enhancement of the aesthesic process. In works such as Jonty
Harrison’s Klang, for example, one could say that
the
recognition of the earthenware casseroles is essential to appreciate
the
compositional skill involved in creating a sound world of
casserole-derived
elements. Yet what will vary here is how ‘meaningful’ the
casserole sound object will be to the audience; how referential it is
will
determine, to an extent, how engaged the audience may become (and we do
not
discount the fact that many will be simply mesmerised at what you can
do
with an earthenware casserole!). When one listens to a work such as
Francis
Dhomont’s Point de Fuite (to consider a work that
has been
analysed specifically for its use of recognisable sounds (Roy, 1996)),
one’s experience relies on reference. In fact, within the Cycle
de
l’Errance, from which this piece comes, one finds sound
objects
that call out to each other, creating a web of signification proper to
the
collection of pieces.
The ‘significance’ of sound and sounding objects,
acousmatic chains, and other paradigms of musical semiological systems
continues to receive much attention. Whilst it might be argued that the
sounding object is arguably more referential to the
listener than
the sound object (Adkins, 1999), it is worth noting
that the
plunderphone represents an even stronger narrowing of referential
possibilities. In any case, these distinctions between the way in which
we perceive sounds and the intentionality in their creation or
borrowing
are but shades in a continuum of meaning, from the most contrived and
arcane to the most popular and mass mediatic. We might also add that
the
listener has an important role to play here. Rather like the sound of
the ‘silent’ tree falling in the imaginary forest,
reception must be accompanied with a degree of intentionality, the
listener necessarily drawing associations between sounding objects, and
participating in a process of semantic listening (or what, for the
purposes of this paper, we might term plundermapping).
To
paraphrase Emmerson (2001) quoting (or is it plundering?) Oxman
(1978), ‘listening is always selective and must be accompanied
by desire’. The notion of desire is, of course,
inherent in
three of Schaeffer’s four modes of listening, from
the ‘simple’ identification of sounds, to the more
sophisticated acts of entendre and comprendre.
Oswald’s active listener furthermore becomes a
participant
in the creative act, mediating between the intentions of the composer,
the consequences of conscious and unconscious associations by the
listener, and perhaps even the very instruments of sonic capture and
manipulation. Consequently, we would agree that analysis must also
recognise the accumulated experiences of both
the ‘creator’ and the ‘perceiver’, each
of whom cannot be but participants in the intention/reception game,
imbuing events with meanings, ‘speculations, influences,
techniques’ (Delalande, 1998) and webs of associations.
All acts of musical creation are, to some extent, acts of
plunderphonia, whether the appropriation and
manipulation of
material or styles is conscious and explicit, or a subconscious and an
anxious Bloomian response to the accumulated influences of others.
Similarly, we might assert that all listening is an act of
plundermapping, an active internal commentary on
known and
half-known material, operating at a musico-philosophical level
(Ballantine, 1984). By extension, Delalande’s assertion
that ‘morphological analysis which is not guided by a search
for pertinences either does not contribute a great deal or gets lost in
absurdity’ (Delalande, 1998) is clearly apposite here. When Oswald
states that blatancy is an important feature of a plunderphone, he
implies that the iconic nature of the plunder is creatively essential.
It
is for this reason that we are concerned in our research with the more
obvious sound imagery. A sound may be clearly referential, but that
does
not mean it will be clearly iconic. The Kyrie from Machaut’s
Messe de Notre Dame may be recognisable to some, but
is it iconic?
Arguably its use in Francis Dhomont’s Novars
represents a
class of sounds - early choral church music - and not a blatant
borrowing. For the sound to be iconic it must somehow be part of the
aurality of mass media.
The
Plunderphonic trace
So, what makes a sound iconic? The
strength of its
trace.
We can define the ‘plunderphonic trace’ as the
collection of plunderphones that can be assembled to represent a given
audio segment of an electroacoustic musical work under consideration.
Such segments we shall call plunderpoints. We can
also, more
evocatively, define the plunderphonic trace as all those musics and
non-musical images that come to mind when listening to a given work of
electroacoustic music. Music can - will - often suggest textual and
visual imagery, and these too are part of the trace. In Robert
Normandeau’s Montage rythmique, the fifth movement
of
Clair de terre, described by the composer as a
systematic
exploration of ‘elements of the grammar of cinematography that
have been transposed into the language of electroacoustics... each of
[the] twelve movements [being] composed of a soundscape, an
object’s sound’, the sound of a mechanism, possibly a door
opening and closing, embedded as it is within a poly-rhythmic
framework,
might bring to mind notions of transition, openness and closure,
freedom
and imprisonment, automation, machines, nature and man. Arguably, most
listeners will associate concrete visual images with sounds, be they
sounding or sound objects or plunderphones. It is, in fact, through
following this trace that we are able to witness that which seems
personal or anecdotal, that which makes the story interesting, that
which
may turn analysis into a creative exploration of the self and of the
author. In fact, if we bring to mind the experiments of Fischinger and
his visual music in the 1920s one could propose that certain images
will
imply sounds and, in that way, will be visual plunderphones. In this
sense Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin may be a
visual
plunderphone of Normandeau’s Montage rythmique.
The
Plunderphones
We would also like to present a prototype of an approach to collecting
and relating musical fragments of any length to a given piece of music
upon which one hopes to shed some light, or simply promote musical
understanding. In the process we also hope to illustrate how one could
create a work of ‘analysis art’, one in which our own
(necessarily) arbitrary associations may tell a new story on a familiar
subject, and by using a plunderphonic approach, sublimate the process
of
musical cannibalisation into one of musical ontology. To illustrate
these
ideas, we have developed a prototype software application, utilising
Cycling74’s MaxMSP environment, which allows users
to tag,
or mark up, sound files with instances of other musics, text and
images.
In full acknowledgement of the subjectivity of such an associative
process, we embark on this examination of our musico-semantic web - our
plunderphonia of experience - denouncing our own
subjectivity in
the understanding that all analysis tends to self-analysis. The
following
example illustrates the main work screen, which has been populated with
Normandeau’s Montage rythmique. The display
incorporates
scalable waveform representations of the entire piece and selected
sections, together with a dynamic frequency spectrograph. The user is
able to select portions of the music - plunderpoints
- that may
be ‘bookmarked’, via keystrokes, for later recall. Each
plunderpoint may be associated with an on-screen pop-up graphic for
ease
of navigation, which in turn may be used to reveal user-inputted
textual
annotations. Once marked, each plunderpoint can, in turn, be associated
with multiple examples of other music (plunderphones), text and images.
Associations may, of course, be spectromorphographic or freely
indexical
(the given example illustrates the plunderpoint associated with notions
of ‘doorness’, and its connotations of a separator and a
place of transition. Associated plunderphones include Trevor
Wishart’s Red Bird, Bernard Parmegiani’s Retour
de
la Forêt and Pierre Henry’s Variations pour une
Porte
et un Soupir). In this respect, the user is able to construct
an
analysis of the piece, drawing on their wider contextual understanding
and experience, and allowing previously unrecognised associations to
sit
alongside more formalised applications of analysis.
The
main PlunderPlayer screen
The main PlunderPlayer
screen.
Conclusions
and
Applications
Whilst the association of other works, images and fragments of
understanding with this extract is unashamedly subjective, the
listener’s proclivity to search for experiential and extra-musical
referents is well documented. James Gibson’s notions of
affordance - ‘the dynamic relationship
between a
perceiving, acting organism and its environment [which] is seen to
provide the grounds for the direct perception of meaning’ (Windsor,
1995), are conditioned by the listener’s ‘horizons of
experience’ (Nattiez). Arguably, such horizons develop and adapt
through processes of reception that are informed by synchronous and
asynchronous acts of juxtaposition, comparison and recursive commentary
of perceptual phenomena, acts that even the most ardent musicologist
and
semiologists cannot escape from - their lived experiences. This project
is clearly in its infancy, but it is our intention to develop the
system
into a framework for plunderphonic analysis: as a tool for students and
musicologists to construct their own understandings of chosen musical
works; as a self-reflective environment in which composers might
explore
and make explicit known and unknown influences on their own work; and
as
an instrument that allows the user to ‘play’ the trace,
participating in acts of analysis art. Whilst the intention here is
most
definitely not to undervalue objective and formalised methods of
analysis, a style of enquiry that reflects both the increasingly
ubiquitous manner in which information is available, and the
inherent ‘connectivity’ of electronic and web-based
media, may not only shed new light on old listening experiences, but
may
also help new listeners find ways of engaging with unfamiliar
experiences
through familiar associations.
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