The spatiality of sounds. From sound-source localization to musical spaces
From Firenze University Press Journal: Aisthesis
Nicola Di Stefano, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
The question about the spatial vs temporal nature of sounds has drawn the interest of psychologists, philosophers, and musicologists throughout centuries. In psychology of perception, sounds conceived of as auditory objects have been often discussed in comparison to visual objects. When looking for principles of perceptual organization, therefore, a number of researchers put forward the allegedly natural analogy between the spatial dimension of vision and the temporal dimension of audition (e.g., Kubovy [1988]). In such accounts, auditory perceptual units are assumed to emerge from the parsing of the continuous auditory flow into identifiable fragments thanks to some kinds of temporal Gestalt-like principles (e.g., Tenney, Polansky [1980]).
By contrast, visual objects are mainly perceived thanks to spatial principles, for instance, the ability to detect change in texture, which is crucial for object segregation in visually-complex environments. Although such view does not necessarily imply that sounds lack spatial dimension, it seems to suggest, at least, that they are primarily defined and perceived as tem-poral entities.Beyond psychologists, philosophers have large-ly agreed on the priority of time over space in the conceptualization of sound. For example, Hegel defined sound as the «cancelling of the spatial situation» (Hegel [1835], vol II: 890), and Scho-penhauer wrote that music «is perceived entirely and only in and through time, completely exclud-ing of space» (Schopenhauer [1818], vol I: 294). More recently, Adorno (1995) claimed that «music is a temporal art (Zeitkunst)». In these characteri-zations, the dynamic change of sounds over time seems to override any other perceptual feature, including spatial localization. Such a idea is in line with relevant traditions in the philosophy of perception, in which auditory perception is con-ceptualized in terms of a temporal process. Start-ing with Husserl’s writings on time consciousness (Husserl [1928]), in which immanent phenom-enological time is seen as the special domain of music (Chatterjee [1971]), and extending to more general accounts of auditory perception, time is widely retained as the constitutional factor for the existence of auditory objects, including sounds (e.g., Nudds [2014]; O’Callaghan [2008]; see also Schaeffer [1966]).
In addition to psychologists and philoso-phers, composers have often stressed the temporal nature of musical sounds. For example, Stravinsky assumed the intimate relationship between music and time as foundational when he wrote: «Music is a chronologic art, as painting is a spatial art. Music presupposes before all else a certain organi-zation in time, a chrononomy» (Stravinsky [1947]: 28). For Schoenberg as well, music was temporal at different levels: «in a manifold sense, music uses time. It uses my time, it uses your time, it uses its own time» (Schoenberg [1950]: 40). Notwithstanding such a wide range of consen-sus on the priority of temporality in music percep-tion, other accounts have stressed the importance of the spatial dimension of sounds (see Harley [1994] and Macedo [2015a], [2015b], for reviews). As pointed out by Juha Ojala in his doctoral dis-sertation Space in musical semiosis (2009), the term «space/spatial» has been associated to music/sound in an impressive number of different occur-rences, such as acoustic space (e.g., Tohyama, Suzuki, Ando [1995]), auditory space (Blauert [1997]), composed space (Smalley [2007]), com-positional space (Morris [1995]), conceptual musical space (McDermott [1972]), instrumental space (Emmerson [1998]), listening space (Smal-ley [2007]), melody space (Todd [1992]), multi-dimensional music space (Juhász [2000]), nota-tional space (Morgan [1980]), pitch space (Lerdahl [1988], [2001]), sound space (Barrass [1996]), sonic space (Wishart [1996]), spectral space (Smalley [1986]), timbre space (Wessel [1979]).Most philosophical approaches traced the question of spatiality of sounds back to the locali-zation of sounds and the spatial region occupied by the sounding object (see Casati, Dokic [1994]: 44). For example, Nudds (2009) started his inves-tigation over sound with the question: «Where are sounds and where do we experience them to be?» (Nudds [2009]: 69). McDermott (1972) elaborated on the notion of musical space as a conceptual structure that allows us to distinguish between pitches sounded simultaneously that do not blend together indissolubly, i.e., that occupy different places in musical space (McDermott [1972]: 490). The concept of a unitary, «two-or-more dimensional space» has been related to musical ideas by Schoenberg ([1951]: 113). In such space, as Sch-oenberg noted, «there is no absolute down, no right, or left, forward or backward» (Schoenberg [1951]: 113). More formalized spatial accounts of musical sounds have also been proposed by musicologists, who tried to develop metrics for assess-ing the distance between sounds within musical space (e.g., Lerdahl [1988]; Reybrouck [1998]). Finally, spatiality has been used as original creative tools in live performances of sonic arts and electroacoustic music since the introduction of multichannel audio, utilized by artists like Schaeffer, Stockhausen, Xenakis or Boulez.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Aisthesis-13617
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/13617
