Understanding 3 Words in Music Research: A Vernacular Primer
Mar 4
8 min read
0
0
Voice:
In a musical context, the human voice can partly be thought of as a musical instrument. In fact, most musical “instruments are (just) physical or virtual prostheses that expand the sounding possibilities of the body” (Rognoni & Wistreich, 2024, p. 68), and, according to some, the emotional impact that instruments have on us are actually just versions of the sympathetic emotions we are evolutionarily hard-wired to experience when hearing the human voice (Cox, 2001, p. 195). As a result, the voice can be thought of as a kind of ur (meaning original)-instrument or “voice-object” in certain situations, like when its timbre is more important than the thoughts it is been used to express (Abbate, 1991, p. 10). However, the voice is also one of humankind’s most reliable indications of a cognitive subject because it is so tied to the expectation that another human, like the listener, who is themself a subject, has produced it. After all, unlike other instruments, which have “long and complex” lives after their first owners are done using them (Rognoni & Wistreich, 2024, p. 67), the human voice sonically lives and dies with its owner, and each is as unique as the body that produces it (Burgess & Murray, 2006, p. 167) – that is, at least before the advent of recording technology, which, for the first time in history, allowed the sound of the voice “to transcend the boundaries of time” (Devine, 2019, p. 212), and enabled an “other,” such as a composer or recording engineer, to alter its constituent components in ways that had little to do with the subjectivity of the individual who produced it initially (Babbitt, 1964).
Before the widespread dissemination of sound reproduction technologies, the idea of a non-human producing something akin to a voice would have been profoundly confusing to most people. In fact, when the Cuckoo clock was first introduced to Tongans in the 1700s, many assumed that it was alive and was mediating communication between the divine and human realms (McMurray & Mukhopadhyay, 2024, pp. 1-2) because it made apparently autonomous sound like humans (i.e., cognitive subjects) do. The latter sentiment at least was also shared by many in the West upon the invention of both the phonograph and the gramophone (Bohlman & McMurray, 2017, pp. 10-11); however, the notion of a voice emanating from something inhuman has been a musical and literary fascination for millennia in the West, ranging from the Roman-era anthropomorphization of the phenomenon of the “echo” in Ovid’s Metamorphosis (Ovid, 1567, lines 337-434) to the automaton, Olympia, in Offenbach’s (1881) 19th-century opera, The Tales of Hoffman; both of which unsurprisingly are associated with being “voice-objects” because both figures were characterized by a lack of semantic content (or meaning) in their utterances (LeVen, 2018, p. 19) (Abbate, 1991, p. 10) -- content that long predates language’s written form, and which, like the voice initially exclusively used to convey it, may very well be the stuff from which human consciousness itself arises (Jaynes, 1976, p. 66).
Notation:
Notation is the primary means by which specific pieces of music were propagated in the West before the advent of recording technology (Rosen, 2012, p. 26), and is the main reason why we can still hear music created before Thomas Edison first heard sound played back on his phonograph in 1878 (Sterne, 2003, p. 1). It also entails that composers who use it are encouraged to completely audiate their music – i.e., hear it in their head “in advance of (its) performance” and transmit it to other musicians who only subsequently give it sonic life (Blum, 2023, p. 91). In an even stranger turn, some composers (including this author) do not audiate parts of what they write at all and merely assume what sections of their music will sound like out of their past experience with manipulating the visual representations of musical ideas on a page.
Music notation also selects specific “parameters” for what it records. In the case of modern staff notation, this means the pitches and rhythms of a piece have primacy, whereas elements like articulation, timbre, etc., are more roughly described, oftentimes just through linguistic description on a score. Perhaps paradoxically, almost all aesthetic judgments of the performances of Western art music actually stem from how effectively a musician interprets the things that fall outside these parameters, like a piece’s overall artistic message, the exact emotional affect with which it should be performed, etc. (Rosen, 2012, p. 27). These “parameters” are also certainly not the same for all musical notation systems, such as Chinese guqin tablature, which places a higher emphasis on “attack, articulation, and tuning” but is less specific about rhythmic structure and pitch (Chua & Rehding, 2021, p. 142). It is also worth mentioning that even in the contemporary Western classical tradition, the data that notation can encode, such as “timbre, pitch inflection… and so forth,” are constantly being expanded with new techniques outside of traditional staff notation (Stone, 1980, p. xv).
All of these systems of notation have interesting points of intersection and departure from written language systems, as both logographic and alphabetic writing (as distinct from ideographic writing, which conveys concepts independent of their linguistic, or “semantic,” expression – i.e., numbers or pictograms) (Denise Schmandt-Besserat, 2015, p. 2) can similarly be thought of as “sound-objects” because, like musical notation, both systems of written communication visually represent sound (McMurray & Mukhopadhyay, 2024, p. 5). Both music notation and semantic writing systems are instances of visual data encoding sound, but it is also possible to invert this dynamic and inscribe visual data in sound. The B side of the Golden Record on Voyager 1 is an example of this, as this gramophone record has pictures encoded in it that, when played, humans, because of how our brains are currently wired, merely perceive as a very low buzz (Chua & Rehding, 2021, p. 149-150), indicating that the ways we notate information – musical, visual, semantic, or all of the above, after tens of thousands of years, can still be engaged with in novel ways.
Archive:
An archive in music research, most broadly, is a kind of physical space or object that protects “things” from the passing of time – like the Golden Record, which is “gilded to avoid corrosion” as it travels indefinitely through time (Chua & Rehding, 2021, p. 134). The “things” that any archive protects from time, however, can vary wildly, ranging from physical objects like musical scores in a library to temporal events like specific musical performances in the form of sound recordings, which, were it not for them being preserved as a physical object, or “spacialized,” by recording technologies, would disappear “irrecoverably down the temporal vortex into the past” (Chua & Rehding, 2021, p. 132). More abstract concepts like listening itself can also have an archive – in this case, one could consult relevant written texts (which spacialize concepts) to understand how humans experienced and conceptualized the act of listening in different time periods, a process that, like how aesthetic judgments of Western music often hinge on a musician’s ability to read between the lines of notation, oftentimes must stem from reading beyond the linguistic sign (meaning the literal words in a written archive) or “against the grain” (Ochoa Gautier, 2014, pp. 3-4) in much the same way that a psychoanalyst must listen to their patient by understanding the unspoken language of their unconscious (Barthes, 1985, p. 256).
The extent to which archives can ever preserve a musical phenomenon entirely is also dubious. Despite what some might think, even if one were to construct a theoretically perfect archive that could take a musical instrument from, say, Ancient Greece, and preserve it unchanged to the present day, it arguably would not sound the same, despite the laws governing the sound waves that would emanate from it being constant (Chua & Rehding, 2012, p. 162), because not only would the proprioception (or relationship to one’s body) of the person striking the sounding body be different in the present day than in ancient Greece (a phenomenon that is compounded when the musical instrument is the human body itself in the case of the voice), but the listener’s perception of the sound waves would also be different, given how many of our contemporary “understandings of the acoustic… emerged” as recently as the 19th century (Ochoa Gautier, 2014, p. 5) – a development that continues to evolve, given how vastly different the techniques of musicians from the 19th century sound when compared to more contemporary performance practices (Moreschi, 1902) (Sutherland, 1963). As a result, when encountering any object preserved in an archive, whether it be linguistic or sonic, one must work hard to understand it from an emic perspective (meaning from the perspective of the people who created it), which always involves bending one’s awareness “like a receptive organ” (Barthes, 1985, p. 253) towards the object; and even then, we are bound to project our preconceptions onto the source material, for, like with notation and language itself, “there is always a filter. Interfaces cannot be effaced” (Chua & Rehding, 2021, p. 151).
Works Cited
Abbate, C. (1991). Unsung Voices : Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth
Century (1st ed.). Princeton University Press.
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1977740
Babbitt, M. (1964). Philomel for soprano, recorded soprano, and synthesized sound
[Recorded by Bethany Beardslee & RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer]. (1971).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D1nueFTy3g
Barthes, R. (1985). Listening. In R. Howard (Trans.), The Responsibility of Forms (pp. 245–
260). Hill & Wang.
https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/0533/Barthes%2520Listening.pdf
(Original work published 1982)
Blum, S. (2023). Concepts, Models, and Metaphors. In Music Theory in
Ethnomusicology (pp. 85–103). Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199303526.001.0001
Bohlman, A.F., & McMurray, P. (2017). Tape: Or, Rewinding the Phonographic
Regime. Twentieth-Century Music, 14(1), 3-24.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572217000032
Burgess, S., & Murray, S. (2006). A Review of For More than One Voice: Toward a
Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 39(2), 166–169.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20697145
Chua, D., & Rehding, A. (2021). Transmission. In Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record
and Music from Earth (pp. 129–165). Zone Books.
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1hhj167
Cox, A. (2001). The Mimetic Hypothesis and Embodied Musical Meaning. Musicae
Scientiae, 5(2), 195–212.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/102986490100500204
Devine, K. (2019). Plastic. In Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (pp. 81–128). The
MIT Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=5902734
Jaynes, J. (1976). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Houghton Mifflin Company.
LeVen, P. (2018). Echo’s Bones and the Metamorphoses of the Voice. Greek and Roman
Musical Studies, 6(1), 14-25. https://doi.org/10.1163/22129758-12341309
McMurray, P., & Mukhopadhyay, P. (2024). Acoustics of Empire. In Acoustics of Empire:
Sound, Media, and Power in the Long Nineteenth Century (pp. 1–34). Oxford University
Press. https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/142399
Moreschi, A. (1902). Ideale [By Tosi, P.] (Original work published 1882).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKGlD-FXZzM
Ochoa Gautier, A. M. (2014). Introduction. The Ear and the Voice in the Lettered City’s
Geophysical History. In Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century
Colombia (pp. 1–30). Duke University Press.
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1841089
Offenbach, J. (1881) Les Contes d’Hoffmann: Oiseaux dans la charmill [Recorded by Mabel
Garrison, Francis Lapitano & Rosario Bourdon]. (1916).
https://www.loc.gov/resource/jukebox-18033.0
Ovid. (1567). The Third Booke [eBook]. In A. Golding (Trans.), The. xv. Booke of P. Ouidius
Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meeter.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?
doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0074%3Abook%3D3%3Acard%3D337 (Original
work published 8 C.E.)
Rognoni, G. R., & Wistreich, R. (2024). Expanding Perspectives: Materializing Musical
Instruments. Journal of Musicological Research, 43(2-3: Organology Special Issue),
57–75. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01411896.2024.2405712
Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Duke University
Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1167834
Rosen, C. (2012). The Weight of Society. In Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and
Literature (pp. 5–48). Harvard University Press.
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=3301263
Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2015). The Evolution of Writing. International Encyclopedia of the
Social & Behavioral Sciences, 25.
https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/files/2014/01/evolution_writing.pdf
Stone, K. (1980). Music Notation in the 20th Century: A Practical Guidebook. W.W. Norton &
Company. https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393950533
Sutherland, J. & Bonygne, R. (1963). Ideale [By Tosti, P.] Decca. (Original work published
1882). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiFZFwu0UWk