Sound Characters

A prolegomena to a concept (of sound as a living being)

The initial idea for the concept that I am calling Sound Characters first came to me about two years ago in an attempt to better conceptualize my life-long obsession with the physiognomy of sound (timbre, tone color) and the question of why and how it is that sounds can affect us in such singular and specific ways. Having been fascinated with the question of timbre for a long time, I have read a significant chunk of the existing academic literature on the topic. But while that literature has certainly produced useful and valuable research, I have come to increasingly feel that it has generally failed to capture the ways in which people tend to naturally conceptualize timbre in their engagement with sound in real-world situations.

I have subtitled this a “prolegomena”, since it is just a first attempt at articulating this concept. The text is written in the form of forty short paragraphs and loosely arranged into six thematic parts. The name “Sound Characters” is taken from the title of an album from Maryanne Amacher, while its conceptual structure is loosely making use of phenomenology (the philosophy of “first person experience”), specifically the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hermann Schmitz, as a toolkit for conceptualizing sound as it appears to us.

Starting from the primary methodological contention of phenomenology — that descriptions of phenomena as they appear to us can arrive at essential properties — my basic claim behind the concept of Sound Characters is that our descriptions of sound are not mere metaphors, but express something essentially true about sounds as they appear to us, and that we experience those sounds not as inert objects, but as “living characters” with certain attitudes and personalities, characteristic ways of moving and appearing that are a product of timbral matter in movement:

This is precisely what we express in everyday language when we say that a snare drum “splats”, a bassline “rolls”, a kick drum “booms”, a pad “shimmers”, a guitar part might even be “flying over our heads”. These are phenomenological descriptions of an encounter with the gesture that a timbral body in movement is making to us, appearing to us as a Sound Character. 

This piece was first published in Issue 11 of the Soap Ear journal earlier this month. I am posting it in its full length here with slightly different formatting. Soap Ear is edited by Lyle Daniel and Leah B. Levinson (of Agriculture and Cali Bellow). Since Leah has been on tour, Sunik Kim helped out with the editing and made some thoughtful comments that led to me adding some additional thoughts on the question of immediacy versus technique. Needless to say this is still all very much work in progress at this point, so I’m interested to hear any potential thoughts or questions you might have!

I.

“A novel, a poem, a painting, and a piece of music are individuals, that is, beings in which the expression cannot be distinguished from the expressed.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology Of Perception, p. 153.

1. The concept of Sound Characters is an attempt to create a concept that is adequate to its object: the concrete, real nature of musical sound (timbre, Klangfarbe, “tone-color”) as it appears to us in the phenomenal experience of everyday listening and music-making.

2. This is a concept born out of practice, insofar as it is an attempt to theorize my own personal experiences of listening to and making music, an experience that I do not think any of the current academic literature has managed to adequately capture.

3. Within the rather young field of timbre research it has long become a running joke that every book or article on the topic starts off by talking about just how little we (yet?) know about timbre. Albert Bregman’s 1990 classic work on music psychology Auditory Scene Analysis famously calls it an “ill-defined wastebasket category”. Despite a proliferation of research literature since, these kinds of theoretical category distinction problems (e.g. “timbre” vs. “pitch”) continue to occupy much of the existing research.

4. Current timbre research is largely divided into highly technical spectral analysis of physical sound waveforms on one side, and empirical psychological and neurological perception research on the other. Both produce useful empirical research, but neither can account for the “gulf” between a sound’s physical properties and our actual musical perception of it.

5. The most detailed existing philosophical engagements with timbre found in Jean-François Lyotard (God and the Puppet) and Vladimir Jankélévitch (Music and the Ineffable) have largely attempted to grapple with these problems by situating timbre as an ineffable sublime that is unintelligible to any kind of conceptual analysis.

6. And yet, these biting and seemingly “impossible” theoretical problems are hardly a concern in our actual everyday, real-life engagement with sound and music. When editing and manipulating audio waveforms on my computer, I do not feel like I am confronted with any sort of gulfing abyss. I can see in the waveform display if the sound is compressed or dynamic according to its physical properties, but I can also simultaneously hear those same properties in my phenomenal experience. The most impossible of transitions feels natural and seamless.

7. Similarly, much has been made of the supposed impossibility of rendering sound into language. And yet, when an artist comes into a studio and asks the mixing or mastering engineer to make the music sound “warmer” or to “give it more glow”, or even something as abstract as making it sound “more purple”, the engineer (even if they think such language is ridiculous!) will have an intuitive understanding of what these description are expressing and how they can be translated into material changes of the physical audio material.

8. To be adequate to these considerations, the concept of Sound Characters is phenomenological, insofar as it considers musical sound as it appears to us in lived experience. It is not concerned with theoretical debates over whether sound “really” ontologically is that way or merely appears “as if”. 

9. With this in mind, I think it is important to argue that descriptions of musical sound are not just vague metaphors or analogies. When we say that a sound is “warm”, we state something true and essential about how this sound phenomenologically affects our lived body — it really is warm. 

10. As such, I take as true the phenomenological contention that descriptions can arrive at essential properties of objects (sound in this case) as they appear to us. This phenomenological insight is also supported by recent empirical research by Zachary Wallmark (and others) that has found that the language we use to describe sound and timbre is by no means accidental, but follows certain rules and patterns that correspond to empirically observable spectral properties of sound.

11. I am primarily interested in sound in a musical context. Although many pages have been spilled on the difference between “sound” and “music”, I consider this to be another theoretical debate that is largely irrelevant from a phenomenological perspective. The fact that the sound of a car horn can be encountered both when walking through the street and as a sample in the context of a musical composition is entirely unremarkable to anyone except academics today.

12. In musical practice, it is impossible to neatly separate “pure timbre” from other parameters such as pitch and time, since they are highly interrelated. For example, on many instruments a low note produces a very different timbre than a high note. As such, the concept of Sound Characters extends beyond the common technical definition of “timbre”, encapsulating the holistic experience of musical sound as it appears to us.

II.

13. I am taking the term “Sound Characters” from the title of two albums — Sound Characters (Making The Third Ear) and Sound Characters 2 (Making Sonic Spaces) — by the American composer and sound artist Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009). Amacher was a pioneer of what later became known as sound art, working in the form of site-specific installation projects for most of her career. Her approach to sound and music was so unorthodox that Karlheinz Stockhausen, of all people, famously called her “an alien”.

14. What is unique about these albums is that they present the listener with combinations of tones with specific frequencies that — when played loud enough through loudspeakers in a room — produce a psycho-acoustic effect known as “otoacoustic emissions”, a virtual “third tone” that is often described as emanating from within the inside of the listener’s ears.

15. Describing this effect, Amacher says: 

“Tones ‘dance’ in the immediate space of their [the listener’s] body, around them like a sonic wrap, cascade inside ears, and out to space in front of their eyes … Do not be alarmed!”

16. I am here less interested in the specific nature of this psycho-acoustic effect and more concerned with the fact that I think that this image of “Sound Characters” dancing in and around the listeners body expressed something crucial about all musical sound insofar as it appears to us: sounds do not just “have” a certain character but they are characters with traits and personalities that we enter into a dialogue with.

17. I am here drawing inspiration from two philosophical concepts, Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “conceptual personae” and Hermann Schmitz’ notion of “synesthetic characters”. While being fairly different concepts, both of them explore how things that are not strictly speaking subjects —  philosophical concepts for Deleuze and sensual perceptions for Schmitz — can be encountered as being “characters” with some kind of “personality” or subjectivity.

18. In this context, Deleuze likens philosophical concepts to characters in a novel. This comparison also seems apt in the context of musical sound to me. Because what drew me to music in the first place was this infinite plethora of Sound Characters, each with a distinct personality, a distinct way of moving and appearing.

19. I think this is reflected in the wide variety of adjectives, verbs and adverbs we commonly use to describe musical sound. A sound as simple as a kick drum can be “round” or “spikey” with a texture that is “wooden,” or “metallic,” or “plastic”. It might move in all sorts of ways, be it a “boom”, a “punch”, a “slap” or a “thud”. We speak of a “walking bassline” and might add an additional adverb like “lazily”, “carefully” or “brutally”, already suggesting an image of a character in action and movement, like a figure in a silent film that is expressing personality through texture and kinetic movement.

III.

20. Again, my claim is that in the context of our real phenomenal experience of listening to musical sound, these are not metaphors. I really hear and feel the kick drum thunder and the bassline walk and the hi-hat dance, each in a specific, singular way that expresses the essence and style of their character.

21. I am here reminded of this passage from Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

 “The unity of the thing, beyond all of its congealed properties, is […] that unique accent that is found in each one, that unique manner of existing of which its properties are a secondary expression. For example, the fragility, rigidity, transparency, and crystalline sound of a glass expresses a single manner of being.” [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology Of Perception, p. 333]

22. This notion of a “single manner of being” is important, insofar as Sound Characters always appear to us as holistic beings. Traditional music theory still tends to think of there being some kind of “musical idea” that can be separated from the sound’s concrete appearance in a recording or acoustic space. This notion originating in Western classical music obviously falls flat on its face in the context of most 20th and 21st century popular music. Trying to separate “musical sounds” from mere “technical effects” in a dub reggae record is as nonsensical as trying to designate the low fidelity hiss and crackle of early blues recordings as a mere “artifact” that is extraneous to the “actual music”.

23. In thinking further about a Sound Character’s “unique manner of existing”, I am vividly reminded of an experience I had while standing on the off-side of the dancefloor at Berghain years ago. Like in a nightclub scene from a movie, from that position, the sound was blurred, muted and detail-less. Only the thundering of the bass and vague articulations of trebly hi-hats and percussion were still audible. And yet, somehow, suddenly, within that anonymous flow of sound of track after track, a new hi-hat pattern emerged that broke with that anonymity. Because even from that distance, with all of the detail blurred, that simple hi-hat pattern — being like all the others but also not like all the others — was so unmistakable in its tone and movement that within two seconds, I knew with absolute certainty what track was playing.

24. It is precisely this kind of experience that the concept of Sound Characters attempts to capture. How is it that, even with something as simple and supposedly generic as a TR-909 hi-hat pattern, I can immediately recognize, be singularly affected by, and enter into dialogue with that one specific sound, out of all the thousands and thousands of others?

25. Such experiences are far from accidental. They form the very core of what recorded popular music is. Musicians, engineers and producers will spend their entire lives “chasing tone”, trying to capture the singular expressiveness of a Sound Character. What makes someone dedicate their life to popular music is never generic or interchangeable, it is always that Motown bassline, that ECM reverb, those J. Dilla drums, that Basic Channel stab … sounds with their own singular character, somewhat reminiscent of what Deleuze calls haecceity: 

“A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject.” [A Thousand Plateaus, p. 261]

26. It seems to me that part of what makes a Sound Character a “character” is always a moment of self-transcendence in which a sound becomes more than its source and starts to evoke something more, something else, that moment when a guitar is no longer just “a guitar”, but an animal voice, a thunderstorm, a cosmic cry … take the infamous wah-wah pedal opening riff of Hendrix’ Voodoo Child (as a child, I could never quite get into my dad’s Rock collection, but even knowing nothing about its historical significance, I vividly remember being instantly captivated by that specific riff). One could attempt, as many have, to break the sound down into its constituent components — the guitar, the pedal, the amp, the style of playing, the recording process etc. — but this reconstruction can never arrive at what is more than its parts or components: the specific essence of that riff, the sound of an entire generation, a situation expressed through resonance and distortion.

27. While there is something raw and direct about this kind of affectation, I don’t think it is really a matter of the kind of naïve “immediacy” that is so often a cliché of classic rock. Rarely is there some kind of direct connection between guitar and audience. Sound is mediated in a variety of ways. Sound Characters can be highly abstract and entangled with very technical compositional techniques and that fact does not dampen their affective force. A Conlon Nancarrow piece bursts with labyrinthine technical composition, but within that labyrinth there is also a strong cast of characters appearing and acting in all sorts of ways — even the composition itself can appear as a character when virtual lines of pitch or rhythm take on a certain level of expressiveness.

28. While all sounds are characters in some way or the other, clearly, some are more expressive than others. Not every guitar riff is a Hendrix riff. Just because something is technically singular does not make it captivating or interesting. I think it is important for the concept of Sound Characters to be able to account for this internal qualitative difference. Can this be explained without falling back into a conceptual language of “genius” and “virtuosity”?

IV.

29. I here want to argue that the style and expressiveness of a Sound Character are simply an emergent property of the sounds’ audible sensation — material texture expressed through movement, what in Merleau-Ponty’s vocabulary might be called a “gesture”. A Sound Character is nothing but the sum of its timbral gestures, the articulation of a certain texture through timbral movement and kinetic expressions.

30. From a phenomenological perspective, this seems inherently plausible to me. When I listen to music, I am affected not by sound as some static thing but by evolving sound-shapes in movement and as movement, what the composer and music theorist Dennis Smalley calls spectromorphology. Electronic music especially — but also certain kinds of acoustic music — is only intelligible in this sense, as emergent expressive gestures drawn by the dance of a timbral and textural body in and through time.

31. This is precisely what we express in everyday language when we say that a snare drum “splats”, a bassline “rolls”, a kick drum “booms”, a pad “shimmers”, a guitar part might even be “flying over our heads”. These are phenomenological descriptions of an encounter with the gesture that a timbral body in movement is making to us, appearing to us as a Sound Character. 

V.

32. Sound is embodied, and so am I. I always listen to music with my entire body, from head to toe, entering into a reciprocal, almost mimetic, relationship with the Sound Characters I am encountering, the gestures I am receiving. I am reacting to the shapes drawn by the sound, expressively (re)interpreting its movements with the movements of my own body, the bobbing of heads, the shaking of waists, the swirling of fingers, the tapping of feet … I am not merely a passive receiver of sound, but an active participant in this “play of characters”.

33. Here, I am drawn to the philosophy of Hermann Schmitz, who makes the claim that prior to any kind of intelligible intellectual understanding, art affects us on a bodily (leiblich) level. Schmitz has some interesting analysis of how certain movements and shapes (what he terms Gestaltsverläufe, “gestalt-sequences”) can affect our bodily-affective disposition by virtue of their shapes and movements. He often brings up examples from architecture here, detailing how, for example, the difference in shapes and patterning in Baroque versus Gothic architecture creates very different bodily affectations. This seems to me a fruitful way to look at sound as well. The Gestaltverlauf of a Sound Characters shapes my bodily-affective reaction to it. A soft, noisy sound is going to cause a different affective reaction than a clean, percussive one, almost universally so.

34. Still, there is always a certain freedom here, a room for play. Different people can interpret the same sonic characteristics quite differently. Some people find sounds relaxing that most people would find intense or unnerving. Taking the notion of “characters” seriously, perhaps we just get along better with some characters than others, are more open to their gestures. There is always a certain prior predisposition, because we are always-already situated in some way. We don’t encounter a Sound Character in a vacuum, but always within the wider world that we are inhabiting.

35. That world also has a history. When talking about the perception of colors, Merleau-Ponty makes the interesting point that the cultural historicity of a color like red plays into our affective reaction to it. Could the same not also be said for sounds? It is impossible to just pick up and play an electric guitar in a vacuum. You are immediately thrown into a dialogue with the wider history of the sound of that instrument, the millions of Sound Characters known and unknown that make up that history, entangled with other musical and also material histories. Then there is of course also our personal musical history, a series of Sound Characters that are intertwined with the times and places of our own life. Even a guitar riff can become a form of time traveling, instantly taking one back to a very specific time and place.

VI.

36. In closing, I would like to think about how the concept of Sound Characters could be further fleshed out and developed in future research. I am here inspired to draw from the history of timbral taxonomies — few in number, but all the more rich for it — from Pierre Schaeffer’s epochal Treatise on Musical Objects to Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape, to Robert Cogan’s New Images Of Musical Sounds, to Megan Lavengood’s A New Approach To The Analysis Of Timbre, to Curtis Roads’ Microsound, to Augoyard and Torgue’s Guide To Everyday Sounds.

37. One commonality across these very different approaches is that they tend to situate timbre and musical sound within axes of opposing qualities. For example, Lavengood operates with the oppositions bright/dark, pure/noisy, full/hollow, beatless/beating, harmonic/inharmonic and percussive/soft. I think such axes can be useful when used not as absolute taxonomic categories, but as guideposts for the modal phenomenological space in which sound exists and evolves.

38. There is an interesting resonance here with Schmitz’ taxonomy of the phenomenological body (Leib), which he also situates within axes of opposing concepts such as wide/narrow, tension/release and sharp/smooth. 

39. I think that the phenomenal body of sound would be best conceptualized as being a sort of membrane: an elastic, haptic three-dimensional space with depth that forms the modal space within which Sound Characters express themselves. I am interested in further developing this, using resources from the above timbral taxonomies, as well as philosophical ones. I think this kind of descriptive conceptualization can also give rise to a more technical and conceptual kind of analysis.

40. Finally, I am interested in exploring how different Sound Characters can come together to constitute a holistic piece of music, reciprocally interacting and expressing each other, both actually and virtually. Music is always an ensemble of characters, playing on a certain stage, involved within a larger scenario.