Damn, how did I miss this until now? Reading this generated that eerie feeling that occasionally makes the internet worth it, the excitement of finding out you’ve been thinking in parallel with a complete stranger. I wrote a bit about Amacher’s term on my blog a while back, taking what I think is a very similar interpretation. Striking how a short turn of phrase can convey a nuanced concept so vividly.
Really appreciate your description of the sound character as “the articulation of a certain texture through timbral movement and kinetic expressions” i.e. “emergent expressive gestures drawn by the dance of a timbral and textural body in and through time” and as “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”. You nailed it, imo!
One subquestion I find interesting is where this sense of sound’s evocativeness comes from. I’ve tended to assume it can happen in multiple ways: through direct resemblance to familiar sound phenomena (however distant, and however unconsciously registered), and through synesthetic association (such as with light or color). This crude, not always clear-cut dichotomy is just based on my own listening habits; given some of the stuff you’ve read, you may have a more nuanced way of understanding the issue.
Another thing, which I’ll try not to ramble about for now, is how the experience of “sound as a living being” surely goes back much deeper in our psyches than electronic music, and particularly how electronic music can suggest a kind of modern or sci-fi animism: music enabled by new technologies reawakening the oldest mystical feelings in new forms. For example, listening to parts of Pierre Henry’s “Variations on a Door and a Sign” I find it hard to shake the sense that I’m essentially listening to a doorway speak, creaking out strange incantations. This also holds true for newer and less overtly referential music; Autechre’s elseq 3 was probably where I first noticed this sort of experience happening.
As obscure as this stuff can seem to people when you try to talk about it, I agree that it’s of the utmost importance when listening. The context in which I was thinking about sound characters was as part of a series of blog posts exploring a listening mode I call “audio animation” (https://aloysiusplace.blogspot.com/2024/04/sound-characters.html being the relevant entry, with the other posts from 2024 building around it). Hope that shoehorning what I’ve written into a discussion of your excellent post is of at least some interest rather than obnoxious. If you’ve had any further discoveries with this topic I’d be very interested to read about them!
Ah, that's interesting! On my end, I kind of arrived at Amacher "in reverse", the concept really came out of reading a lot of phenomenology and then I randomly stumbled on those albums again and thought that was a good name for it. Do you have a source for the Amacher epigraph on your blog post? I have the Blank Forms volume, but some of the quotes I've seen online seem pretty hard to source and originate from defunct websites.
It definitely goes further back than electronic music, I just really abhorred the idea of doing "sound studies" where sound becomes this universal, transhistorical thing untethered from musical experience and wanted to keep a certain specificity to what I'm really interested in, which is electronic music.
Yeah the quote is just from that Blank Forms book (talking about the Mini Sound Series on page 246). Wish I knew of more writing about her work… intriguing as trying to get a sense of it through old message board posts and comments sections can be.
And yeah, I sure as hell don’t think your project needs to include some kind of historiographical survey of sound over the past 10,000 years or whatever. The animism connection I’ve been wondering about is very much a matter of what occurs (or can occur) on the experiential level. But if that sort of speculation does nothing for you personally, I don’t want to insist on it.
Again, if you feel compelled to write more about this stuff at some point I’ll greatly look forward to reading it. In the meantime, I should really start investigating more of the texts referenced in your post.
Damn, how did I miss this until now? Reading this generated that eerie feeling that occasionally makes the internet worth it, the excitement of finding out you’ve been thinking in parallel with a complete stranger. I wrote a bit about Amacher’s term on my blog a while back, taking what I think is a very similar interpretation. Striking how a short turn of phrase can convey a nuanced concept so vividly.
Really appreciate your description of the sound character as “the articulation of a certain texture through timbral movement and kinetic expressions” i.e. “emergent expressive gestures drawn by the dance of a timbral and textural body in and through time” and as “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”. You nailed it, imo!
One subquestion I find interesting is where this sense of sound’s evocativeness comes from. I’ve tended to assume it can happen in multiple ways: through direct resemblance to familiar sound phenomena (however distant, and however unconsciously registered), and through synesthetic association (such as with light or color). This crude, not always clear-cut dichotomy is just based on my own listening habits; given some of the stuff you’ve read, you may have a more nuanced way of understanding the issue.
Another thing, which I’ll try not to ramble about for now, is how the experience of “sound as a living being” surely goes back much deeper in our psyches than electronic music, and particularly how electronic music can suggest a kind of modern or sci-fi animism: music enabled by new technologies reawakening the oldest mystical feelings in new forms. For example, listening to parts of Pierre Henry’s “Variations on a Door and a Sign” I find it hard to shake the sense that I’m essentially listening to a doorway speak, creaking out strange incantations. This also holds true for newer and less overtly referential music; Autechre’s elseq 3 was probably where I first noticed this sort of experience happening.
As obscure as this stuff can seem to people when you try to talk about it, I agree that it’s of the utmost importance when listening. The context in which I was thinking about sound characters was as part of a series of blog posts exploring a listening mode I call “audio animation” (https://aloysiusplace.blogspot.com/2024/04/sound-characters.html being the relevant entry, with the other posts from 2024 building around it). Hope that shoehorning what I’ve written into a discussion of your excellent post is of at least some interest rather than obnoxious. If you’ve had any further discoveries with this topic I’d be very interested to read about them!
Ah, that's interesting! On my end, I kind of arrived at Amacher "in reverse", the concept really came out of reading a lot of phenomenology and then I randomly stumbled on those albums again and thought that was a good name for it. Do you have a source for the Amacher epigraph on your blog post? I have the Blank Forms volume, but some of the quotes I've seen online seem pretty hard to source and originate from defunct websites.
It definitely goes further back than electronic music, I just really abhorred the idea of doing "sound studies" where sound becomes this universal, transhistorical thing untethered from musical experience and wanted to keep a certain specificity to what I'm really interested in, which is electronic music.
Yeah the quote is just from that Blank Forms book (talking about the Mini Sound Series on page 246). Wish I knew of more writing about her work… intriguing as trying to get a sense of it through old message board posts and comments sections can be.
And yeah, I sure as hell don’t think your project needs to include some kind of historiographical survey of sound over the past 10,000 years or whatever. The animism connection I’ve been wondering about is very much a matter of what occurs (or can occur) on the experiential level. But if that sort of speculation does nothing for you personally, I don’t want to insist on it.
Again, if you feel compelled to write more about this stuff at some point I’ll greatly look forward to reading it. In the meantime, I should really start investigating more of the texts referenced in your post.