TY - JOUR
AU - DYCK, JOHN
AB - In this article I consider the relationship between natural sounds and music. I evaluate two prominent accounts of this relationship. These accounts satisfy an important condition, the difference condition: musical sounds are different from natural sounds. However, they fail to meet an equally important condition, the interaction condition: musical sounds and natural sounds can interact in aesthetically important ways to create unified aesthetic objects. I then propose an alternative account of the relationship between natural sounds and music that meets both conditions. I argue that natural sounds are distinct from music in that they express a kind of alterity or “otherness,” which occurs in two ways. It occurs referentially, because the sources of natural sounds are natural objects rather than artifactual objects, such as instruments; it also occurs acoustically, because natural sounds tend to contain more microtones than macrotones. On my account, the distinction between music and natural sounds is both conventional and vague; it therefore allows music and natural sounds to come together. Intuitively, there is a difference between musical sounds and the sounds of nature. We listen to Hamish MacCunn's “The Land of the Mountain and the Flood” differently than we listen to the (Scottish) land of mountains and floods that inspired the piece.1 I take this as my starting point; it seems incontrovertible that such a difference exists. The difference might be ontological (musical sounds might be different kinds of things than natural sounds), or it might be perceptual (musical sounds might be perceived differently than natural sounds). It might be both. Whether ontological or perceptual, the difference between natural and musical sounds might be one of kind, or it might be one of degree. I leave these issues aside. For now, it is enough that, ordinarily, there is a clear difference between natural sounds and music. I will call this the difference condition. Any satisfactory account of the relationship between natural sounds and music ought to satisfy the difference condition. Previous philosophical accounts of the relationship between music and natural sounds have cut things up too coarsely. While these accounts satisfy the difference condition, they fail to satisfy another crucial condition, which I will call the interaction condition: musical sounds and natural sounds can come together in aesthetically important ways. This happens especially when natural sounds occur in musical contexts; it also happens in many works of sound art and in installations of music in natural environments. The fact that natural sounds and music can come together is not a threat to a distinction in general between natural sounds and musical sounds. Indeed, in many cases humanly made sounds and natural sounds are used so that they contrast with one another. But the fact that the two can come together at all is a threat to proposed accounts of the distinction, which cannot tolerate such a marriage. I begin in Section I by evaluating two prominent accounts of the relationship between natural sounds and music by John Andrew Fisher and by Roger Scruton. I defend the interaction condition as a plausible constraint on the difference between musical and natural sounds. Since Fisher's and Scruton's accounts cannot satisfy the interaction condition, I argue, they ought to be rejected. I continue in Section II by proposing an alternative account of the distinction between natural sounds and music. I consider a separate account from Fisher of the difference between natural sounds and artifactual, nonmusical sounds. According to that account, the difference is due to differences in the causal referents of the sounds. While the referents of natural sounds express a kind of otherness, the referents of artifactual sounds do not. I extend this account to provide a distinction between natural sounds and music. But this provides only a referential, or causal, dimension to the distinction between natural sounds and music. I argue there must be another noncausal, “acousmatic” dimension to the distinction between natural sounds and music—a distinction based purely upon tone. In Section III I develop this distinction, drawing on comments from John Cage. I argue that natural sounds tend to have more microtones (and microrhythms), and music tends to have more macrotones (and macrorhythms). This acousmatic distinction is both conventional and vague, but I take these to be virtues of my account. I. Two accounts of the relationship between music and natural sounds In an article entitled “What the Hills Are Alive With,” John Andrew Fisher () argues for a particular difference between natural sounds and music.2 In the course of his argument Fisher proposes main differences between music and natural sounds; I focus on these distinctions. According to Fisher, natural sounds, unlike music, are indeterminate. Fisher's basic argument proceeds as follows. He accepts two general conditions on aesthetic judgment. The first he calls the “guidance‐by‐object requirement”: for any object, O, our responses and judgments about O ought to be guided by the actual characteristics of O.3 The second condition he calls the “agreement requirement”: aesthetic responses to O can have standards of evaluation only if one can justifiably accept agreement about O. Fisher holds that there are no standards of evaluation for soundscapes; soundscapes are not determinative enough to provide standards of evaluation. But Fisher accepts that musical sounds are determinative enough to provide standards, since he accepts Kendall Walton's () claim that music, indeed all art, is correctly classified into artistic categories, which provide standards of evaluation.4 So appreciation of soundscapes is importantly distinct from the appreciation of music; as Fisher says, “our appreciation of the sounds of nature does not conform to the appreciation of music” (Fisher : 167). I accept Fisher's two requirements. I also accept Walton's claim, which seems as close to any orthodoxy we can currently get in philosophy of art. Rather, I want to challenge Fisher's indeterminacy claim, the claim that soundscapes are not determinate. Fisher provides three reasons for the indeterminacy claim; I focus on two. These reasons form the basis for Fisher's criteria for distinguishing music from sound art. They appear to be contrastive; they are intended to show that soundscapes are far less determinate with respect to their properties than musical works are. The first reason for the indeterminacy claim, what I will call “attentional framing indeterminacy,” is that soundscapes are far less perceptually determinate than music, with respect to the structure of our attention. This is known as the “frame problem” of aesthetics of nature.5 Fisher writes: Nature does not dictate an intrinsically correct way to frame its sounds in the way that a composer does. We can listen to the total ensemble of sounds or focus on some subset of the sounds, and I do not see how the nature of the sounds we are listening to dictates that one way of framing is more correct than another. (1998, 173) Fisher's thought here is that while there are many permissible ways to attend to soundscapes, there are not many permissible ways to attend to musical works. attentional framing indeterminacy: Music is framed by composers’ and performers’ intentions, which constrain correct attention to foreground/background; natural soundscapes are not framed by intentions; there is no constraint upon correct attention to foreground/background. It is easy to see how the indeterminacy claim is supposed to follow from this claim. If there are no constraints on our attention in listening to soundscapes, as there are constraints in musical works, then soundscapes cannot be perceptually determinate enough to provide standards of evaluation, as music can. The second reason Fisher gives for the indeterminacy claim, what I will call “temporal framing indeterminacy,” is that soundscapes are far less temporally determinate than music; that is, they are far less determinate with respect to their duration. It is easy to say when a musical work begins and when it ends, but it is difficult to say when a soundscape event begins and when it ends. As performances of musical works develop in time, structural relations and patterns emerge. Something as simple as the repetition of a theme takes time. In nature, are themes being repeated, perhaps in something like different keys or perhaps in altered guises? How long shall we listen for a repetition and what should we hear as a repetition? (Fisher , 173) In other words, it seems we can be pluralistic of admitting many different temporal ways of listening. There are potentially many ways of cutting up soundscape events. I will formalize this claim as follows: temporal framing indeterminacy: Music is determinate with respect to temporal framing; soundscape events are indeterminate with respect to temporal framing. It is easy to see how this distinction is intended to support the indeterminacy claim. Since there are many ways to “cut up” natural soundscape events, there are many ways to hear soundscape events; so soundscape events are not determinate and thus do not have standards of evaluation. But it is easy to know where musical works start and end; music, both works and nonworks, seems to come already “cut up.” So musical works are determinate and thus have standards of evaluation. The third distinction, which I will not dwell upon, is this: soundscape events are unique/nonrepeatable, whereas music is repeatable. In defense of this distinction, some sound artists have claimed that natural sounds are characterized by unexpectedness. However, I will not focus on this distinction; it does not seem as plausible as the others. Free jazz performances (especially totally improvised performances) are unique and unexpected. And anyway, unexpectedness is also a feature of sound art, which has standards of evaluation; so this distinction cannot support the indeterminacy claim. In both arguments, Fisher's main thought is that natural sounds are too indeterminate to provide standards of evaluation; music, on the other hand, is determinate, and hence can provide standards of evaluation. I believe that cases of sound art call this distinction into question. I will not use works of sound art either as cases of music or as cases of natural sounds. Indeed, it is difficult to know how to categorize sound art. Mandy‐Suzanne Wong writes that the term ‘sound art’ “has no fixed or agreed‐upon definition” (2012). And there is very little philosophical literature on sound art or electro‐acoustic music.6 For all I say, sound art may be categorized as neither music nor soundscape, or it may be categorized as both. I use works of sound art simply as clear counterexamples to general principles in the proposed distinctions between natural sounds and music, Attentional Framing Indeterminacy, and Temporal Framing Indeterminacy. Before I continue, however, let me say a little bit about the phenomenon of sound art. The term ‘sound art’ refers to an artform which has grown in popularity over the past twenty years; some works of sound art are also classified as performance art, as improvisational art, as installations, and as music. The artform is usually taken to originate from earlier in the twentieth century in Marcel Duchamp's sounding objects and Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrete, in which artifactual and natural sounds are recorded. As the genre progressed, recording became important to it. Alan Licht writes that in “the late 1940s and early 1950s, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry were taking recordings of documentary sounds and processing them to the point of unrecognizability, divorcing them even further from their original source and initiating the genre of musique concréte” (2009, 4). R. Murray Schafer recorded sounds of nature and mixed them for recording. La Monte Young and Max Neuhaus, prominent sound artists who crucially influenced its development, composed many works which involve combinations of natural, artifactual, and musical sounds. Iannis Xenakis's work Concret PH (1958) was a work important for the development of sound art in which the sound of burning charcoal was mixed electronically.7 Sound art undermines both Temporal Framing Indeterminacy and Attentional Framing Indeterminacy as providing distinctions of determinacy between music and natural sounds. Consider Temporal Framing Indeterminacy. It supports the indeterminacy claim only if temporal indeterminacy prohibits standards of evaluation. However, this is false; Temporal Framing Indeterminacy may be true—it may be true that music is temporally determinate and natural sounds are not—but that does not support the indeterminacy claim. For much sound art is temporally indeterminate, but it has correct standards of evaluation. Indeed, temporal indeterminacy is one of the only defining marks of sound art that theorist Alan Licht gives in a recent article, writing that a “sound art piece, like a visual artwork, has no specified timeline; it can be experienced over a long or short period of time, without missing the beginning, middle, or end” (2009, 3).8 If temporal indeterminacy prohibited standards of evaluation, then we could not evaluate sound art. Sound art is characterized (perhaps constitutively, in part) by temporal indeterminacy. But sound art is surely evaluable; we make artistic judgments about works of sound art. So temporal indeterminacy might be true—soundscape events might be temporally indeterminate—but that would not support the indeterminacy claim. On the other hand, Attentional Framing Indeterminacy may support the indeterminacy claim if it were true, but sound art shows that the claim is not in fact true. If Attentional Framing Indeterminacy were correct, sound artists could never reliably use natural sounds in music, since there would be significant disparities in the way intentional sounds are perceived and the way unintentional sounds are perceived. If Attentional Framing Indeterminacy were correct, the effects of these natural sounds would be totally unpredictable; artists would have no idea how audiences might respond. But sound artists have a reliable sense of how audiences will respond; it is crucial for evaluating their works that this is the case. In Shawn Decker's Green (2007), for example, intentional, electronic sounds mimic unintentional, natural sounds. In Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's 2008 installation A Murder of Crows, the sound of waves crashing is lonely; the sound of crows cawing produces a chilling effect. Susan Philipsz won Britain's prestigious Turner Prize in 2010 for her piece Lowlands, in which recordings of folk songs were played under bridges in Glasgow. The work incorporates music, artifactual sounds, and the natural sounds of water. In this work, the natural sound of the water produces a calming effect. One may object at this point that, in these works, natural sounds are included intentionally in works of sound art. When natural sounds are included by intentions, then they are determinate, and thus have standards of evaluation. I offer two replies. First, this is true only where the natural sounds are each intentionally placed. And this is not the case in many works of sound art, such as Cardiff and Miller's FOREST (for a thousand years), where the sounds in sound artworks are unplanned yet crucial. In such artworks it is crucial that the natural sounds can be reliably evaluated, even though they are unplanned. Such examples show that natural sounds can reliably produce certain effects, and it is on the basis of those effects that we can evaluate the works. Indeed, our evaluation of these unplanned environmental sounds is important for criticism and evaluation of the pieces; they are not merely settings. This reply claims that we can at least evaluate natural sounds in artworks in which they appear, even if we cannot evaluate them in isolation.9 But a second reply presses even this issue: Natural sounds in music and sound art have reliable effects. But this shows that natural sounds have standards of evaluation even in natural contexts, when they are not placed intentionally. This is because the reliable effects of natural sounds in music and sound art are continuous with reliable effects of natural sounds in nature. Many natural sounds have reliable effects in sound art only because they have reliable effects in natural, nonintentional contexts. Something more robust than mere intention is needed to anchor the reliable effects of natural sounds in artistic contexts. The water lapping in Phillipsz's Lowlands is calming because the sound of water lapping is already calming in natural environments; the sound of crows cawing in A Murder of Crows is chilling because the sound of crows cawing is chilling in nature. Such cases show that natural sounds often have reliable effects outside of artworks. Many environmental sounds are determinate with respect to attentional framing, even when they are not intentionally placed.10 There are other reasons to reject Attentional Framing Indeterminacy. The distinction between background and foreground is not clear even in music. Consider a Bach violin partita. Do you attend to the building of the melodic structure or to the rhythm? Do you attend to the building tension in the harmony? Surely there is a plausible, principled distinction between background and foreground, but it probably is not simple. So, as works of sound art show, neither argument for the indeterminacy claim succeeds. Attentional indeterminacy may support the indeterminacy claim if it were true, but it is false. Temporal indeterminacy may be true, but it does not support the indeterminacy claim. It is not just that these arguments for the indeterminacy claim fail to support it; it is also that there is an important reason to reject the claim: it cannot allow for the interaction condition. If the indeterminacy claim were true, there would be a drastic difference between listening to natural sounds and listening to music such that music and natural sounds could not interact to create a unified work of art. Natural sounds would be indeterminate and thus inevaluable; music would be determinate and evaluable. If such a drastic difference existed, then music and natural sounds could never be wedded together to create a unified artistic object. Musical sounds, on the one hand, would be framed; natural sounds, on the other hand, would be totally wild, unhinged, unframed, and unpredictable. The interaction condition could not be satisfied. But, for some artworks, it is crucial that music and natural sounds are unified in creating effects. Such unification could only occur if some natural sounds have reliable effects. Before continuing, I will defend the interaction condition in more detail. The interaction condition says that music and natural sounds can be wedded together to create unified aesthetic objects. This happens especially in the case of natural sounds in recorded music. The Beatles’ “Blackbird” and Ed Sheeran's recent pop single “The A Team” both feature birdsong. Otis Redding's “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” features the sound of waves cresting. In such examples, the sounds are heard as natural, but they clearly affect the recorded song. Consider Jon Hopkins and King Creosote's 2011 album Diamond Mine. The songs on the album were primarily gentle folk songs, but the careful sound engineering of the tracks drew heavily on located sounds of Scotland, including heavy use of natural soundscapes. The occurrence of these sounds is integral to the final work of art that is Diamond Mine. Someone who heard the songs without the natural sounds might be able to evaluate the songs, but they could not evaluate the album. However, it does not just occur in recorded music. Consider the works of Tan Dun, which draw heavily on natural sounds. Tan Dun's Water Concerto (1998), for example, involves several instruments, electronically amplified, which manipulate water in the foreground of a traditional orchestral context. The orchestra mimics many of the sounds of the water, which shows not only a contrast between the orchestra and the subtleties of the sound of water, but also the continuity between the water and the tuned orchestra. Indeed, one naturally hears the piece as illuminating both differences and similarities between natural sounds and artifactual, musical sounds. In all of these artworks the interplay between natural sounds and musical sounds is essential. But such interplay presents a problem for the indeterminacy claim. If natural sounds were not determinate enough to provide standards of evaluation, then they could not be compared with and contrasted with musical sounds. But that is exactly what happens in the cases above. In these cases, it is crucial that natural sounds can be heard as framed within a certain context if they are to be compared and contrasted against musical sounds. So, listeners’ attention to natural sounds must be reliably framed, contrary to the indeterminacy claim. A defender of Fisher's account might reply that we should ignore cases in which natural soundscapes and music are unified, for natural soundscapes are just natural sounds and nothing more. As soon as natural sounds are manipulated or combined with music—when natural sounds occur in intentional contexts—then one no longer hears a truly natural soundscape. Fisher explicitly limits his account along these lines. However, this limitation is not satisfying. For one thing, it is a crucial part of our experience of these works that we hear natural sounds as natural, even (especially!) if they are united with nonnatural sounds as in the examples. Any account of natural sounds, if it is to be useful, must explain how natural sounds can be interesting—indeed, how natural sounds can be crucial—when combined with music. Secondly, I appeal again to the fact that natural sounds in music (and other intentional contexts) are continuous with natural sounds in natural, nonintentional contexts. Natural sounds produce reliable effects in music and sound art because they produce similarly reliable effects in nature; think again of the examples about crows and water lapping. So we should reject the indeterminacy claim; Fisher's argument for the distinction does not hold up. The distinction between music and sound art is not based on a distinction of determinacy and indeterminacy, either attentional or temporal. More briefly, I also consider Roger Scruton's distinction between natural sounds and musical sounds. In fact the distinction Scruton makes is between musical sounds and nonmusical sounds. Scruton holds that we hear nonmusical sounds (including natural sounds) as referring to their sources; we hear them causally. By contrast, we hear musical tones acousmatically—as divorced from their sources. According to Scruton, “to hear sounds as music is to divorce them from the source or cause of their production” (2009, 146; see also Scruton ). Andy Hamilton (2009) calls this the “acousmatic thesis,” If the acousmatic thesis is correct, we hear musical sounds in a fundamentally different way than we ordinarily hear sounds. We ordinarily hear sounds as tied to their causal sources. I hear the sound of typing as the event of someone's typing; I hear the sound of rain as rain. But musical sounds express “pure events” that are dissociated from their causes. For Scruton, this distinction goes hand in hand with the claim that musical sounds—tones—are secondary qualities. Scruton's argument underwrites a distinction, again, between musical sounds and non‐musical sounds. Presumably natural sounds are a subset of nonmusical sounds. There are significant general reasons to reject Scruton's acousmatic thesis. First, this version of the acousmatic thesis threatens the interaction condition again, when we consider natural sounds in music. The claim that in mixed contexts we hear natural sounds as purely acoustic does not do justice to the aesthetic phenomenology. It is crucial that such sounds are heard as natural. Scruton can certainly say that we might listen to natural sounds as musical tones, and thus acousmatically. But this fails to capture the fact that natural sounds, when mixed with music, can contribute to the musical character in virtue of their naturalness, not just in virtue of their tones. It fails to meet the interaction condition. Scruton might seek to meet the interaction condition by arguing that, when natural sounds are mixed with musical sounds, we hear the natural sounds causally and the music acousmatically. On this sort of picture, one might say that the causal evocations of the natural sounds help to picture or place the music. Sounds of ocean make us think of the music being played near an ocean. This is a sort of “soundtrack” effect that the music has. But this is not enough. The occurrence of natural sounds in music does not just place it; it also affects how we hear the music, in musical ways. (Think again of Tan Dun's Water Concerto.) Such a claim still does not meet the interaction condition. Andy Hamilton provides a second reason to reject the acousmatic thesis. Hamilton has argued that the acousmatic thesis does not do justice to the experience of musical listening. If the acousmatic thesis is correct, then the experience of musical sounds is purely auditory and noncausal. But, Hamilton argues, the experience of musical sounds is not purely auditory. First, visual systems influence auditory perception generally.11 Second, sound is not only heard but felt, so there are prima facie reasons to think that music is not only an acoustic phenomenon. (Consider the contemporary percussionist Evelyn Glennie. Glennie is deaf; she uses her hands and bare feet to feel sound.) Third, we hear musical sounds causally. Hamilton argues that we hear musical tones as tied to the instruments which produce them; we hear the sound of a piano as coming from a piano. According to what Hamilton calls the “two‐fold thesis,” “listening to music involves both non‐acousmatic and acousmatic experience, and … both are genuinely musical aspects” (Hamilton 2009, 170).12 I accept Hamilton's twofold thesis; we do not listen purely acousmatically. In listening to music, there are aspects both of the acousmatic and of the causal. The twofold thesis will figure prominently in my own account of the distinction between music and natural sounds. So far, I have considered and weighed two prominent accounts of the distinction between music and natural sounds. I have found those accounts wanting. They succeed in meeting the difference condition only at the cost of failing to meet the interaction condition. I continue by developing an alternative account of the relationship between natural sounds and music, one which meets both conditions. I start by extending a different account from Fisher of natural sounds. II. a causal distinction In a later paper, “The Value of Natural Sounds,” Fisher () considers a puzzle: Why do we prefer naturally produced sounds to aurally indiscernible humanly produced sounds? Fisher's goal in the article is to provide an answer to this puzzle. Accordingly, his goal is to distinguish natural sounds from artifactual sounds—he is explicitly not concerned to distinguish natural sounds from music. Although Fisher does not intend for his account to apply to this distinction, I believe such an application is fruitful. I develop Fisher's account as a proposal for the distinction between natural sounds and music.13 Briefly, Fisher's account of the distinction is as follows: both natural sounds and artifactual sounds refer to their causal sources. But, following Elliot (), natural but not artifactual events and objects are experienced as being both (a) right and inevitable and (b) belonging to the land. The causes of the sounds thus have a kind of “otherness” or alterity, as Fisher says, drawing on Bernard Williams (). But then, since the causes of natural sounds have this “otherness,” natural events themselves—to which natural but not artifactual sounds refer—express inevitability and belonging to the land.14 Thus the sources of natural sounds express a kind of alterity. The sources of artifactual sounds do not seem inevitable or belonging to the land, so artifactual sounds do not express that kind of alterity. Since we prefer alterity, we prefer natural sounds, and so we have an answer to the puzzle.15 Fisher's account yields a natural distinction between natural sounds and music. While all sounds can refer to their sources, natural sounds refer to different types of sources than musical sounds. Natural sounds are caused by ecologically natural objects, which are experienced as being both inevitable and belonging to the land. In virtue of these causes, the sounds have a kind of otherness. Music is caused by instruments, artifactual objects, so musical sounds refer to those objects. But musical instruments—artifacts—are experienced neither as inevitable nor as belonging to the land. So musical sounds do not have this kind of otherness. Fisher again endorses what we might call a completeness requirement: that the whole entire soundscape must express inevitability and belonging to the land in order for otherness to be perceived. He acknowledges that the completeness requirement gives rise to a problematic implication for his account: there is a drastic difference between the way we listen to natural sounds and the way we listen to artifactual sounds. Given the completeness requirement, inevitability and belonging to the land can be properties of natural sounds only if natural sounds are unmixed with artifactual sounds. So we cannot allow for the significance of natural sounds when they are presented together with artifactual sounds. So this account, like the previous distinction between natural sounds and music, cannot accommodate the interaction condition. Fisher attempts to mitigate this problem by arguing that natural sounds are not appreciated in this way very often. But, in light of our present focus, we should not find this claim plausible. The worry is exacerbated both by the increasing popularity of sound art and by the increasing occurrence of natural sounds in music and installation art. Think, for example, of Cardiff and Miller's 2012 installation FOREST (for a thousand years), in which there is a combination of natural sounds and artifactual sounds: one hears, in a natural environment, “the cawing of ravens, the hiss of wind, radio static, laughter, gunfire”—along with a very loud “boom” (Wray ). Appreciating natural sounds together with both artifactual sounds and music is just the point of such works. In any case, Fisher offers a solution to the worry he raises. Fisher's solution is that, in such cases, both natural and artifactual sounds are appreciated as divorced from their causal sources—that is, purely acousmatically. As he says, “it may be possible to appreciate a mixed ensemble on the basis of listening to sounds in the acoustic phenomenal way” (Fisher , 35). Fisher's claim that we can appreciate a mixed ensemble only in a purely acoustic way is problematic, as we have seen. If Fisher's account in fact implied that we cannot attend to causal sources of sounds in sound art (as he himself suggests), it would be untenable. However, I suggest that Fisher's account does not have this implication. For we should reject the completeness requirement. Hopefully I have convinced the reader that we should accept the interaction condition. An account of natural sounds that cannot explain the allure natural sounds hold for us when mixed with other sounds is an account that is too restricted to be useful. Once the interaction condition is accepted, however, we can reject the completeness requirement straightaway. There is no need to hold that, in cases where natural sounds are mixed with artifactual or musical sounds, we must listen to natural sounds acousmatically. So Fisher's objection to his own account need not be taken seriously. Recall that we have accepted Hamilton's twofold thesis: there are two aspects of musical listening, one causal and the other acousmatic. Accepting the twofold thesis has a double‐sided effect upon our consideration of Fisher's (transposed) claim. I start with the positive. According to the two‐fold thesis there are two dimensions of musical listening: causal and acousmatic. Fisher has provided us with a causal dimension of the distinction between listening to music and listening to natural sounds; the sources of natural sounds express alterity, while the sources of musical sounds do not. Further, since we reject the completeness requirement, we can hold that we can listen to music and natural sounds together. This satisfies both the difference condition and the interaction condition—at least for the causal aspect of the difference. But the twofold thesis has it that, in addition to a causal dimension of the distinction between listening to music and listening to natural sounds, there is an acousmatic dimension. So we have more work to do. There is an aspect of our listening—the acousmatic aspect—that still does not distinguish between music and natural sounds. I take this to be problematic since, again, it does not respect the interaction condition. Without an account of the acousmatic distinction, it would be the case that, acousmatically, we listen to natural sounds in just the same way we listen to music. But it seems that, even acousmatically, we hear natural sounds as natural; we hear them in a different sort of way than we hear the music. In the final section, I spell out a way in which, in addition to a causal difference, there is an acousmatic difference between music and natural sounds. In particular, I argue that natural sounds (in addition to a causal alterity) have a kind of acousmatic alterity that musical sounds lack. III. an acousmatic distinction To develop this account of how natural sounds can express alterity in their acousmatic dimension, I draw on comments from John Cage in an interview with Joan Retallack: JC: The curious thing that makes [a work of Tan Dun's] audible as having something to do with nature is that it is microtonal. And this … has been recently on my mind. Not as nature really, but as the part of sound that was beginning to take my ear. As it gets microtonal it gets away from our scales, hmm? And our rules, etcetera. I think that's why . . . why it seems so close to nature. … As opposed to language, for one thing, and repetition and variation. When you hear sounds that have microtonal relations that are unfamiliar, you tend to think away from law toward nature, I think. … JR: So the microtonal, you think, takes us away from the repetitive particulars of our intentionally constructed world, including the constructed world of music, into a sound field that presents itself as audibly ‘other’—like nature, apart from particular intentions, and you think that's healthy for us to attend to. (Cage and Retellack , 187) The idea here is that microtones express some kind of sonic otherness that is associated with nature. My definition of micro‐ and macrotones is culturally contextual. Macrotones, relative to some tonal systems, are tones that are legitimate in that system (Hyer ). In the standard Western scale, macrotones are all and only the twelve steps in the Western twelve‐tone scale. Microtones are tones between these steps.16 (Most familiarly, Indian and Gamelan scales have more tones; there are still many microtones for these scales.) In human‐constructed environments—especially in our technological age—we are used to hearing macrotones. In nature there are more microtones for any tonal system. So we can carve out a Cagean distinction between music and natural sounds. Music tends to express macrotones; natural sounds tend to express microtones. Given the contextual definition of ‘tone,’ which tones are registered as microtones is relative to the tonal system of the listener's background. A listener who is used to a twenty‐two‐tone scale will find some tones to be macrotones that Western scale listeners would consider to be microtones. So some tones will register alterity for some listeners and not for others. But on this account there is still great overlap in which tones will register as microtones for listeners across musical traditions. It is not just microtones that we hear in natural environments. We also hear microrhythms and microtimbres. Consider a rhythmically irregular bird call, the hush of wind against trees, the flapping of wings, and the babbling of a brook. These are not just irregular sonic events tonally; they are also irregular with respect to rhythm and timbre. I will call this thesis “the microtonal thesis.” the microtonal thesis: Natural environments tend to have a greater variation of microtones, microrhythms, and microtimbres, than human environments. Cage's claim is that these microtones (and microrhythms and microtimbres) express sonic alterity. Cage is not the only one to express support for the microtonal thesis. In his book Noise, Water, Meat, Douglas Kahn () provides a history of this line of thought. He quotes Busoni as follows: Keyboard instruments … have so thoroughly schooled our ears that we are no longer capable of hearing anything else—incapable of hearing except through this impure medium. Yet Nature created an infinite gradation—infinite! who still knows it nowadays? (Busoni , quoted in Kahn , 85) Busoni seems to think here that we can no longer hear microtones; that is a little extreme, but it still arises out of a basic commitment to something like The Microtonal Thesis. The Microtonal Thesis has been endorsed by Claude Debussy,17 Henry Cowell,18 and Edgar Varèse, who thought that music ought to incorporate more microtones.19 Cage goes further, however, and says that, since we are unfamiliar with these kinds of sonic events, we hear them as expressing otherness. acousmatic alterity: Microtones (and microrhythms and microtimbres) tend to express alterity. The account of alterity Cage offers here is not a function of the way in which sounds refer to their causes. Rather, the interesting nature of these sounds derives from the fact that they are so different from music not in virtue of their causal sources, but rather in virtue of the tones, rhythms, and timbres that they ordinarily have. The account is thus acousmatic. Two implications of this account of the distinction: (1) the microtonal distinction between natural sounds and music is highly conventional. It is only a matter of convention that we attend to or notice fewer and less varied microtones (and rhythms and timbres) in our human environments than in nature.20 Which tones register as microtones is, again, culturally contextual. Indeed, several of the composers above endeavor to use microtones to imitate nature. (2) The microtonal thesis has it that the distinction between music and natural sounds is a vague one; each bleeds into the other. The interesting part of natural sounds is not exclusively the province of the natural. (Some birdcalls are macrotonal but natural.) And the microtonal is not exclusively the province of the natural. The claim is just that natural sounds tend to create microtones with greater and more interesting variation. As the jazz pianist Vijay Iyer () has argued, microtiming in jazz creates a unique rhythmic effect. The ethnomusicologist Charles Keil () has argued similarly that blues and polka music contain many tones that register as microtones on the traditional Western tonal system, and that it is a virtue of music that they contain microtones.So the distinction between the two is vague. But I take these implications to be virtues of the account on offer. The account explains our interest in the mingling of natural sounds with artificial (including musical) sounds. It explains why we find sound art interesting. Sound art, when it draws from natural soundscapes, is a way of listening to natural soundscapes. Both sound art and natural sounds in music invoke and draw attention to microtones. Sound art produces this effect this through natural means, sometimes through artifactual means, and sometimes by imitating nature or producing bizarre sounds. There is no principled reason why the two cannot occur together. The account also explains why we appreciate the occurrence of natural sounds and sound art in music, as in Tan Dun's Water Concerto. Environmental sounds—both human and natural—not only give us causal impressions; they also give us microtones (and timbres and rhythms) which we can contrast against macrotones (and timbres and rhythms).21 Furthermore, notice that a combination of microtones and macrotones turns up often in sound art (again, consider the Water Concerto). This explains an important aspect of sound art: it contains varying degrees of alterity in it, mixed with varying degrees of familiarity. As an added bonus, the account can explain our appreciation of the occurrence of artifactual sounds in music, when those sounds are microtonal. What about the voice? This seems like a counterexample to the claim that music and natural sounds are distinguished by their sources. On my view, music refers to artifactual sources and natural sounds refer to natural sources. But the voice can express both music in singing and natural sound in sneezing; both are caused by the same source.22 In reply, I affirm that the source can be both natural and artifactual. Human bodies are both natural and artifactual. Human bodily activities such as singing are caused by an artifactual kind of activity, so singing seems like music. Activities such as sneezing are a kind of natural activity, so sneezing does not seem like music. On the acousmatic dimension, the microtonal thesis further supports this line of thought. To the extent that singing fits a listener's tonal system, it seems like music for that person. (Singing sometimes does not fit a listener's tonal system. Tuvan and Inuit throat singing seems like a natural rather than musical sound for many Western listeners, since they incorporate tones that register as microtones for them.) And sneezing, which seems natural, contains many microtones. The voice—and the human body—is special in this regard, so we should expect some ambiguity in this domain. Artifacts are just those things within the realm of human enculturation, so human bodily activities are artifactual; but human bodies are also natural. So it should be no surprise that the voice can express both the natural and the artifactual. Before concluding, I will address an objection to my account. My account relies on the microtonal thesis, according to which the acoustics of the natural world are characterized by a greater degree of microtones, whereas musical systems are restricted to various sets of macrotones. I offered support for the microtonal thesis by considering natural sounds; in Henry Cowell's words, “the wind playing through trees or grasses, or whistling in the chimney, or the sound of the sea, or thunder” (1969, 20). But one might insist that such sounds are not tonal, because they do not technically have pitch. There are only very few natural sounds that actually have pitch, for example, birdsong. Most natural sounds—wind, rain, thunder—do not have pitch. So the microtonal thesis is drastically less significant than I have estimated, and cannot support my account.23 While this is the most serious objection to the microtonal thesis, I do not believe it succeeds in undermining the thesis. The Tan Dun Water Concerto example shows that sounds without pitch in this sense can still be musically interesting and can be heard as having pitch. So we can cash such cases out, not as microtone, but microtimbre. Anyway, I believe that this objection relies on a definition of ‘pitch’ that is not universally accepted. In his essay “Inside the Dream Syndicate,” Tony Conrad claims that: Noises are not ever pitchless, to say the least. … [M]achines suggest the patterns potentiated by manipulation and selection of high harmonic‐content timbre complexes, but infinitesimal control has to be used to get the precisely wanted range of interpretations. (quoted in Licht , 80) I conclude by emphasizing that my goal here has been modest. I have not given necessary and sufficient conditions for a distinction between music and natural sounds. Rather, I have explained what I believe to be a salient and common property that distinguishes the two, given our conventions: music tends to be conventional, while natural sounds tend to express alterity. This difference is expressed causally, since there is a difference between the sources of musical and natural sounds. But it is also expressed acousmatically. Acousmatically, musical sounds tend to express alterity the more they invoke microtones and microrhythms and microtimbres.24 Acousmatically, natural sounds tend to express the familiar the more they invoke macrotones and microrhythms and microtimbres.25 Footnotes 1. Thanks to an anonymous referee for this journal for this example. 2. Fisher argues that natural sounds cannot be evaluated objectively, as music can. Fisher's article has been taken by Hettinger and Parsons to provide substantial arguments for general subjectivism about environmental appreciation. Fisher resists objectivism about natural appreciation, most notably Allen Carlson's () influential position. See also arguments from Ned Hettinger () and Glenn Parsons (). Fisher discusses only the modality of sound, so he may not intend his argument to generalize in this way. 3. “[O]ur responses and judgments ought to be guided by the object of appreciation, by its actual characteristics” (Fisher , 171). 4. “[M]usic, as we conceive of it in our society, is an intentional activity of musicians (composers and performers) who produce a sound object to be appreciated, and our conception of this intended object controls how we listen to music and what counts as appropriate appreciation” (Fisher , 176). 5. Thanks to an anonymous referee for this journal for bringing this point to my attention. 6. Some work on the philosophy of sound art has been explored by Gordon Graham () and Andy Hamilton (). Graham () gives compelling arguments that sound art is not a musical art. 7. Alan Licht draws attention to Harry Bertoia's installation Sound Garden (1983), which “has organ pipes meant to sound by the wind” (2007, 76) and to Leif Brush's Terrain Instruments, “a series of works begun in the late ’60s, [which] are electronic devices that turn various environmental motion sources (leaves, wind, precipitation) into sound via various metal wires strung through trees” (2007, 77). 8. Licht says elsewhere that “sound art belongs in an exhibition situation rather than a performance situation—that is, I would maintain, a necessary correlative in defining the term. … Music, especially pop music, unlike sound art, is like an amusement park ride: there's a beginning, middle, and an end to it” (2007, 14). Note that some works of sound art, like Xenakis’ piece or Cardiff and Miller's Murder of Crows, may have a specified timeline. 9. Thanks to an anonymous referee for this journal for suggesting an important qualification here, one which makes this argument substantially more plausible. One may object to my claim that “totally unplanned” aspects of works renders them unintentional. Consider the cracked glass in Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. The cracked glass was unplanned, but still intentional, and thus figures in evaluation of the work. In the Duchamp case, however, the unplanned element is still licensed by Duchamp. In works of sound art, especially sound walks, part of the point of the work is to incorporate unplanned elements that the artist has not licensed before presenting it to the audience. These unplanned elements can be crucial for the evaluation of sound art works. (Obviously there is a thorny issue in the area: Do artists need to license each particular unplanned aspect, as I am assuming, or can they issue a “blanket” license over all unplanned features of the work?) Thanks to the editors of this journal for helping me think through this issue more carefully. 10. For a similar argument, see Parsons (). Thanks to the editors of this journal for helping me to present this argument more carefully. 11. The most famous example of this is the so‐called “McGurk effect” (McGurk and MacDonald ); for more discussion see Bergeron and Lopes (). 12. Davies () has made a similar point. 13. I am skeptical of the assumption that we actually do prefer natural sounds to artifactual sounds. 14. One might also say that these sounds symbolize rather than refer to naturalness and belonging to the land. Nothing hangs on this for the present discussion. 15. Some may find it unlikely that we ever prefer alterity, as Fisher's account has it. Since my account is a modification of his account, and not a total overhaul, I leave this objection aside. Thanks to Oz Blaker for pointing this out. 16. For example, if you run your finger up the fingerboard of a violin while running the bow across the string, you will hear many microtones. 17. Stockhausen approvingly reports that “Debussy once wrote about his ideas for an open‐air music which, he said, would allow the composer to get away from arbitrarily fixed tone values and forms” (Cott , 211, quoted in Licht, , 74). 18. “Natural sounds, such as the wind playing through the trees or grasses, or whistling in the chimney, or the sound of the sea, or thunder, all make use of sliding tones. … Instead of trying to imitate the sounds of nature by using musical scales, which are based on steady pitches hardly to be found in nature, such a composer could build perhaps abstract music out of sounds of the same category as nature sound—that is, sliding pitches—not with the idea of trying to imitate nature, but as a new tonal foundation.” (Cowell , 5, 18, quoted in Kahn , 88). 19. “I began to resent the arbitrary limitations of the tempered system, especially after reading at about the same time, Hemholtz's description of his experiments with sirens in his Physiology of Music. … The beautiful parabolas and hyperbolas of sound the sirens gave me and the haunting quality of the tones made me aware for the first time of the wealth of music outside the narrow limits imposed by keyboard instruments” (Varèse, , 42, quoted in Kahn , 85–86). 20. We might hear more tones than we attend to or notice in artifactual environments; my claim is just that we ordinarily do not notice or attend to microtones, even if we might hear them. Thanks to an anonymous referee for this journal for bringing this to my attention. 21. Additionally, it explains why human soundscapes are still interesting, even if usually not as interesting as natural soundscapes. There are many microtones (many of which are natural sounds) in human‐produced sounds, but not as many as in naturally produced sounds. 22. Thanks to the editors of this journal for raising this objection. 23. Thanks to Jared Martin for raising this objection. 24. Thanks to David Wolfsdorf for suggesting the phrase “salient and common property.” 25. Thanks to Nola Semczyszyn for inviting me to present a paper at the environmental aesthetics conference in Franklin & Marshall College in 2013. Nola initially got me thinking about these issues when she suggested this topic. Thanks to Nola, Matt Johnson, and the other conference participants for helpful comments and questions there. Thanks to Judy Lockhead, Jared Martin, and David Wolfsdorf for helpful comments at later presentations. Thanks to Oz Blaker, Phil Honenberger, and especially Andrea Baldini for providing detailed comments on an earlier drafts of this article. Thanks to the editors of this journal and to anonymous referees for this journal for very helpful and insightful suggestions. Finally, special thanks to Sarah Gokhale for reading multiple versions and suggesting many helpful revisions. REFERENCES Bergeron , Vincent , and Dominic McIver Lopes. 2009 . “ Hearing and Seeing Musical Expression .” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78 : 1 – 16 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Busoni , Ferruccio . 1962 . “ Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music .” Three Classics in the Aesthetics of Music 73–102. New York : Dover Publications . 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Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat © The American Society for Aesthetics This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The American Society for Aesthetics
TI - Natural Sounds and Musical Sounds: A Dual Distinction
JO - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
DO - 10.1111/jaac.12286
DA - 2016-07-26
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/natural-sounds-and-musical-sounds-a-dual-distinction-CShdBfNDDD
SP - 291
EP - 302
VL - 74
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -