De frequentie van verbeelding

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De frequentie van verbeelding
Deltalezing 4, Hoge School voor de Kunsten,
Utrecht 13 mei 2009, 17u30

• Drs. P.M.G. Verstraete

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The Frequency of Imagination
Auditory Distress and Aurality in Contemporary
Music Theatre
sound
text
space
performative / theatrical
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Geluid als verstoring

• Frequentie aantal trillingen of golven per
  seconde (in Herz, Hz.)
• Menselijk gehoor tussen 20 en 20,000 Hz.
• Cognitieve dissonantie (Leon Festinger J.
  Merrill Carlsmith in 1957)
• De frequentie van verbeelding de mate waarin de
  luisteraar reageert met haar verbeeldend vermogen
  op de verstoring van geluid

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David Rokebys n-Cha(n)t (2001)
http//www.youtube.com/watch?v7uyEefnBfTg
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David Rokebys n-Cha(n)t (2001)

• The sense of hearing cannot be closed off at
  will. There are no earlids. When we go to
  sleep, our perception of sound is the last door
  to close and it is also the first to open when we
  awaken. These facts have prompted McLuhan to
  write Terror is the normal state of any oral
  society for in it everything affects everything
  all the time. The ears only protection is an
  elaborate psychological mechanism for filtering
  out undesireable sound in order to concentrate on
  what is desirable. The eye points outward the
  ear draws inward. It soaks up information.
  Wagner said To the eye appeals the outer man,
  the inner to the ear.
• (R. Murray Schafer 1977 11)

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Muziektheater als verstoring

• Definities van muziektheater in constante crisis
  zelfdefinitie, legitimatiestrijd
• Omgang met verstoring van geluid geen pasklare
  perspectieven die de verstoring compenseren zoals
  in de traditie van het drama
• Verbeeldingsprincipes van het post-dramatisch
  theater verzet tegen drama
• Muziektheater als MP3 perspectief in het
  luisteren maar niet eenduidig

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La DidoneThe Wooster Group (2007-2009)

• Francesco Cavalli's opera, met libretto van
  Francesco Busenello, (1641)
• Mario Bavas cultfilm Terrore nello spazio
  (1965)
• synergie tussen vroeg barok en pre-moonlanding
  sci-fi

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La DidoneThe Wooster Group (2007-2009)

• http//www.thewoostergroup.org/twg/projects/didone
  .html
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vfuFUoe3ruPE

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Acousmatiseringschizofoon perspectief

• Deliberately forgetting every reference to
  instrumental causes or preexisting musical
  significations, we then seek to devote ourselves
  entirely and exclusively to listening, to
  discover the instinctive paths that lead from the
  purely sonorous to the purely musical. Such
  is the suggestion of acousmatics to deny the
  instrument and cultural conditioning, to put in
  front of us the sonorous and its musical
  possibility.
• (Pierre Schaeffer 2004 81)

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Acousmatiseringschizofoon perspectief

• If some of sound art is concerned with what
  Pierre Schaeffer has called the acousmatic
  dimensions of sound, namely sound produced
  without visible or even definable source, other
  kinds of sound art are interested in the
  ambiguous embodiments or fixations of sound.
  Ambiguous because, despite all our instincts to
  the contrary, there are no sound objects. We
  say, hearing a sound, that is a siren, or, that
  is the sea, but objects are only the occasions
  for sound, never their origins. And there is no
  sound that is the sound of one object alone. All
  sounds are the result of collisions, abrasions,
  impingements or minglings of objects.
• (Steven Connor 2005 54)

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Horen en luisteren modaliteiten

• distracted or background-listening as the least
  conscious by merely being aware of the ambience
• listening-in-readiness as a mode of listening in
  which we are only aware of specific, mostly
  indexical sounds (associations with sounds that
  are built up over time)
• and analytical listening or listening-in-search
  when we most attentively and actively probe an
  acoustic environment with our ears in search of
  information.
• (Barry Truax 1984 19-24)

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De ruimtelijke impulsspatialisatie

• We never merely hear sound, we are always also
  listening to it, which is to say selecting
  certain significant sounds and isolating them
  from the background noise which continuously
  rumbles and rattles, continually on the qui vive
  for patterns of resemblance or recurrence.
• As with sight, and following Wordsworth, the ear
  half-creates what it thinks it hears. This
  language of sound is spatial. Why does the
  increase in frequency of a sound suggest that it
  is getting higher? In other words, the
  spatiality of sound is a reflex, formed by the
  projective, imagining ear, the ear commandeering
  the eye to make out the space it finds itself in.
  It is in this sense that ears may be said to
  have walls.
• (Steven Connor 2005 53)

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Questions?

• http//home.medewerker.uva.nl/p.m.g.verstraete/