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Here is an ambitious work about sound. A rarity.
Sound has been ignored by our civilization. The printed word, television, photocopy:
the visual obliterates sound. The image is king. Image designs, describes, fascinates.
Instantaneous, synthetic, understood in a single glance. With sound, we must
be ready to listen, to lend an ear. Sound has duration: to understand it you
need time. Time, a luxury for man today, man in a hurry.
Sound is often diluted in the surroundings. Over numerous radios, in the supermarkets,
the airports, a warm bath, a functional sound: music becomes Muzak. Or it becomes
a by-product, waste. Pollution. Ephemeral of course, but invasive. Silence too
is a luxury.
Recordings and electricity have changed our relationship to sound: happily,
sometimes for the better. Verba volent, scripta manent, goes the old Latin proverb
(words fly away, writings remain). Today it no longer applies. Today we have
at our disposal the most diverse collection of recordings: sounds of nature,
animals, music from other times, other civilizations. Sound is no longer the
audible trace of vibrations from visible, physical, identifiable objects. Electric
and electromagnetic devices, and more recently the computer, tailored by Max
Mathews to calculate sounds, open up unprecedented possibilities. John Chowning
and I myself have contributed to develop them with our research and our music:
no longer content with preexisting sounds, we have composed the sound itself,
sculpting, drawing it out, coloring it, shaping, and even forming it as we deliver
it; creating paradoxes, auditory illusions, sensory errors, perceptual truths”,
as the physiologist Purkinje says; to play on the sensory strings of the auditory
mechanisms to create sounds that seem to be familiar, but are different because
they escape mechanical constraints; to suggest virtual sound environments that
evoke an imaginary, nonmaterial universe through sound. We can live the acoustic
experience in completely new ways, as the composer Francois Bayle says.
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But images leap into view when we hear something. We dedicate more effort, more
time, more research, more money, to the visual, than to sound. We have reached
the point of absurdity, as when Frank Lloyd Wright chose a form for a concert
hall that was absolutely the contrary of what was needed for the acoustics.
The cases of vinyl records cost more than the discs themselves. In the theater
or ballet, lighting is exquisitely calibrated, but the sound system more often
than not is a disaster, the sound is distorted, or too loud, or both. Sound
is not known or misunderstood, that which is known is too diffuse, and too much
reliant on sporadic efforts. Pierre Schaeffer, a radio personality, has proposed
concrete music and a solfege of the sound object. Claude Levi-Strauss has insisted
it is urgent to collect sound samples of civilizations that are on the way to
extinction. The Canadian composer, Murray Schaeffer, has advocated for half
a century an auditory ecology, and a defense of our sound heritage: some institutions
have shown concern, such as UNESCO and Simon-Fraser University in Vancouver.
In France, the New Spaces Association has begun the study of sound design as
well as sound design in architecture and the urban environment. Emile Leipp
has attempted to reconcile academic acoustical science with the complex reality
of music. And Alfred Tomatis, to whom we shall return, has founded his therapeutic
practice on music.
Psychiatrist Bernard Auriol works in the same field. His work is invaluable:
he writes of his experience and his reflections, and relates various aspects
of the world of sound to that of the human being and to its profundities.
Because listening is the generative experience. Before we can see, before we
are born, we hear. And sound plays a vital role. Of warning. Of marking out
territory or a mating cry in animals. Sound surrounds, envelops, penetrates
- the ear has no eyelids. Sound connects, from the Latin: religare. Someone
who loses sight becomes more dependent, but less isolated than one who loses
hearing. The composer André Jolivet likes to remind us that music has
it ancestral source in the magical expression of religiosity in human groups.
Sound can be incantations, singing, charm, enchantment. Music.
And certainly sound is a vehicle for words that privileged form of human communication.
The Greek democratic city-state could not exceed a certain size, so that every
citizen could hear the orators debate public matters in the public square. Pythagoras
spoke from behind a curtain: if I listen badly, I understand nothing. On the
radio, Hitler fascinated his audiences: according to McLuhan, his image on television
would have deflated him like a windbag.
The work of Bernard Auriol has much to say about sound. It is not encyclopedic,
but it brings together information from diverse disciplines. He dares hypotheses
but without hiding behind a mantle of authority. Doctor Auriol is a clinician,
a therapist, and his job is to alleviate psychic suffering. But his practice
is accompanied by constant research and evaluation. He has already written an
Introduction to Methods of Relaxation, which orients the reader to various methods
of reaching the state of paradoxical awareness. In the present volume he describes
the methods of treatment that modify hearing by electronic means: the alteration
of directionality, of volume, calling to question the sound universe can help
unmake habits, blockages.
The sonic treatments of the pioneer, Alfred Tomatis, mentioned above, a controversial
and even criticized figure, never suffered doubt (this is not the case with
Bernard Auriol), even though some of his premises appear quite controversial.
But Tomatis also has numerous enthusiasts: and nothing can take away from him
the great merit of having made us remember with great eloquence the forgotten
ear.
My own research has to do with music and sounds: I do not pretend to give a
profound judgment on the theories and psychiatric practices and therapies envisaged
in Bernard Auriol’s book. The hypothesis of a listening posture that can
induce auditory deficit intrigues me. Its premises seemed to me quite problematic,
but then physiologists were able to confirm quite recently in fact, that the
active mechanism of the cochlea can, upon an order from the brain, cause the
muscles to increase selectivity in this or that region of frequencies.
But you do not need to be a specialist to be interested in the key to sound,
in its interpretations, its stimulating, original points of view. The proximity
of the organs of hearing and balance are evoked in two inseparable arts: music,
the movement of sounds, and dance, the movement of the body. Philosophy is something;
but music, music, sir, music· Music and dance are everything that is
necessary· Music and dance, that is all one needs. Later, Bernard Auriol
suggests that the pleasure of music to listen and to play have their source
in prenatal life: the revival of sounds and movements born in blindness. Surely
music brings together pulse and organization, spontaneity and discourse: each
kind of music has its grammar. We must remember that the Viennese musicologist
Heinrich Schenker, by analyzing tonal music, came up with the concept of a deep
structure of generative grammar fifty years before Noam Chomsky. To the image
of music, spoken myths according to Levi-Strauss, the unconscious according
to Lacan, are structured just like language and also dance, that has vocabulary,
grammar, and in certain cases double articulations.
Who does not honor music does not deserve to see the light of day, Ronsard (the
poet) has said. We can speculate endlessly on the hold that music has over us,
the jubilation at hearing it free, delicate pleasure of a useless occupation
(Henri de Régnier). According to Leibniz, music is a secret calculation
that the soul makes instinctively. Susan Langer remarks on the analogy between
perceptive movements set in motion by music, and the movements of the spirit.
For the theoretician Leonard Meyer, the primary experience of music is a dialectic
of fulfilled or disappointed expectations; the disposition of the listener can
emphasize the cerebral, sensory, emotional or connotative, the calculation of
proportions, sounds and colors, archaic movements and archetypes, or extra-musical
references. For many, among whom is the composer Luciano Berio, music speaks
to us of our condition, our place in the world, of what transcends us. The music
play seems to be situated at the frontier between order and chaos, at the same
time surprise and to mould for what is to come; it perhaps puts in relief, as
Bernard Auriol suggests, the socialized sonic rites of unconscious memories
from the dawn of our existence. The musical phenomenon functions often, despite
considerable differences between listeners, their past, their hearing, doubtless
appeals to a common basis of shared subjectivity.
These are nothing but speculations. No better than anyone else do I know what
music is. But often I am sure that there is music. Beauty is in the eye of the
beholder: this Arab proverb too, forgets the ear. Even the least free, the most
functional animal emissions can be music. One of my most vivid memories: in
these Australian forest there were a thousand virtuosic sound motifs, and intoxicating
chains of melody uttered by a lyre bird, enchanted, carried away, insatiable
for his own sound. Indifference of the female, witness to this procession of
sound, nevertheless an unforgettable memory of an ephemeral creation. But is
it art? In any case, an intense musical experience. According to the composer
Francois-Bernard Mâche, the music of the twentieth century seeks laboriously
to make a connection between living universal myths, a new world of sounds created
by humans, and the immemorial sounds of nature.
The book of Bernard Auriol invokes myths, ancestral archetypes ö Echo and
Narcissus ö as well as new techniques without which the therapies he describes
could not have come into being. The connecting thread: the key to sound, listening.
Listening. A way to touch from a distance, exquisite sensibility. Bernard Auriol
reminds us, we can perceive tenuous vibrations that displace the tympanic membrane
by increments smaller than a hydrogen atom. We must be attentive to preserve
the delicate structures of the ear. And hearing, an active process, as stated
at the beginning of the book, accomplishes the prodigious work of unraveling
a sonic magma and extracting incredibly precise and differentiated information.
What machine could distinguish between two sounds arriving at the ear with the
same volume, say fifty decibels, for example, and discern that one sound came
from a strong and distant source, and the other from a source that is closer
and softer. And yet this is a distinction that we make all the time. Hearing
constantly makes inquiries that permit us to distinguish the source of multiple
sounds, simultaneous or successive, to assign their provenance from different
sources, to evaluate their positions, to visualize the size of their sources,
to infer the modes of sound production. A tour de force if we realize that each
ear receives only variations of pressure, very slim information. The psychologist
Alfred Bregman proposes a clarifying analogy: by watching two corks bobbing
at the edge of a lake, according to the waves arising at the surface, wouldn’t
it be an extraordinary feat to be able to deduce the position and movements
of fishes or other beings under the water, solely by observing the waves?
Allow me to invoke several soundscapes I have lived, that signify for me the
simple marvels of sound and the subtlety of acousmatic hearing from invisible
sources. At Treburden, in Brittany, behind a gorse hedge, the pervasive sounds
of a calm sea ö thousands of bubbles of foam breaking on the sand. In the
Malaysian jungle, you can see no further than your arm, but all around, above,
below, near and far, you can discern crackles, brushings, gratings. glidings.
In the Black Forest, one autumn day, a more reassuring world of sound, incredibly
legible in its subtlety: the rustling of leaves more or less dry, the whispering
of the breeze, drumming of woodpeckers, whistles of songbirds, and very far
away, a plane - intermingling without obstruction, as in zen bhuddism. And finally
near Marseille: in the suffocation of summer, at the bottom of a hillside path
that opens to creek of Sugiton, the many impenetrable buzzings of bees, and
the microscopic explosions of seed in the heat. And as one goes up the slope,
a profound sound appears, wide, deep, but tiny, nearly inaudible, like a giant
foghorn coming from far away: before descending to the frontiers of silence,
the sounds of the neighboring city, forgotten, repressed, no longer appeared
on the surface of consciousness.
Hearing and its abysses. This luxuriant book risks it. Reader, look to hearing,
by reading, experience this immersion!
Jean-Claude Risset
English translation by Roberta Prada
approved by J.C. Risset
©
Copyright Bernard AURIOL (email :
)
December, 6, 2007