Chapter 9 : The imaginary musical space

When we speak about vibrations, then sound objects and sound beings, it is about the same phenomenon, but with different levels of meaning.

In mathematical and in the other domains, the word "space" addresses all the possible positions for the entities which are analyzed. For example the space of Euclide's classic geometry addresses geometrical figures which we draw, the urban space addresses buildings, streets and places, the interplanetary space addresses stars and planets, etc..

Our analysis led us to look according to four different points of view at the same phenomena of the music, so by characterizing four levels of space: physical, acoustic, sound and musical.

The physical space contains molecules of air which can move by the wind or move by vibrations. The process which affects the listener is to make the membrane of the eardrum vibrate.

The acoustic space contains the signals of the waves of vibration, which modify in the time and occupy a range of the frequency spectre. The process which affects the listener is the frequencial analysis made by the organs of the internal ear.

The sound space contains sound objects which evolve in duration, presence, color. The process which affects the listener is the hearing, the result of which is to store what was perceived into the immediate "phosphorescent"  memory.

The imaginary musical space contains sound beings, which are evoked or re-evoked by the sound objects. The process which affects the listener, the listening, is of cognitive order; one of the results is either the transfer into permanent  memory, or the recollection of recognizable sound beings throught the formants. But, while the processes analyzed from the level of the acoustic vibration up to the level of the hearing are almost objective, the cognitive process is proper to the person of the listener or the musician composer. It is a subjective process.

Space level	Considered items	Process	Result
Physical	Vibration waves  of the molecules of air.	Vibration of the eardrum.	Excitement of the hearing nerve.
Acoustic	Signals of the vibration waves	Frequencial analysis.	Transmission into the brain.
Sound	Sound objects.	Hearing.	Storing of sound objects into immediate memory.
Musical	Sound beings.	Listening.	Aesthetic interest.

Figure 1 : process results according to the considered space level .

The listening process

The listening process addresses the mental operations concerning the sound objects in transit in the immediate memory, to identify or recognize sound beings among these and through their formants.

Logic of the listening

The upstream processes, going from the vibration of the eardrum to the recording in immediate memory, are analyzable objectively according to a common scientific approach: they respect cause and effect relations ensuing from constraints of the sound environment, from cultural customs (in particular the mother tongue facilitates specific sets of phonemes) and of the biological state of the receiver.

At the end of this chain, the last constraint is the size of the span of immediate memory of the listener, that is the maximal duration which he can reliably record without actively implementing a listening process. We can be made an idea of the size of this span, called also phosphorescent memory, by measuring for example either which is the length of a sentence pronounced in an incomprehensible foreign language which it is possible to repeat at once and in its entirety, or, which is the maximal length of the phone number which we can compose from memory just after having heard its statement and without any mnemonic trick.

So, the processes which take place in the physical space, the acoustic space and the sound space are of predictable nature, determinists. On the other hand, beyond, in the musical space, the listening process does not respect any more a similar logic based on cause and effect relations.

This does not mean that its result is indefinite. Indeed, a listening process follows another logic. As any process of the knowledge, it is driven by a finality: look for the best possible yield of  the communication, that is collect a maximal quantity of information with a minimum of effort.

Indeed, to identify or recognize persistent sound beings from not persistent sound objects, the listener will adapt the way he listens to in order to decrease his effort and to increase the pleasure of discovery which the music proposes him.

Figure 2 : enigm (lake of Villefort, Lozère)

Mental operations

The way of listening is so proper for every listener, according to his personality, to his musical culture, to his current concerns, etc. Naturally a given work will causes effects which will be different for different persons, and possibly for different times of hearing of the same person.

Nevertheless, although made differently by some or the others, the mental operations are similar.

An aspect of the trend to saving consists in grouping formants between them to constitute super-signs, less numerous but more complex than the elementary formants. It is the same operation which, at the level of the language, groups together the phonemes in words, the words in groups, the groups in sentences, etc...

The listener will so try to identify chords, melodies, rhythms, or whole fragments of sound landscape. This activity requires a focus of the attention to find points of reference and connecting thread.

At the same time, not indispensable elements will be discarded: there is selection. For example, by identifying a melody for the first time, the listener will forget maybe which instrument played it at the moment, and to listen again with a different focus would be necessary.

Adapting permanently his listening to privilege the search for more complex formants, the listener so gains in previsibility: when he recognizes a super-sign (for example, a melody), he can hope that  the continuation will be very close to that he has already remembered. He can then, in a more economical way, focus the listening only on the possible variant or break, with thus a renewed pleasure.

Adaptation and selection are the magic words of the explanation of the living world by Darwin. Every listener also uses these operations to better receive the music.

Aesthetic interest

The result of the musical process, the emotion, thus comes to connote or give a meaning to the sound being which is identified. This meaning is very personal for every listener. Nevertheless it relies on a global cultural basis related to the fact of being a human beings sharing places and time with other men.

This first analysis is true for the initial phase of identification or recognition of the sound being by the listener, that is most of the time at the beginning of a work or in a part of a work. It's the same in the cinema, in the theater, or in a novel, when we settle the characters and the scenery: we already look at each of them with sympathy, antipathy, or a more complex feeling from the entering on to the stage.

Then the music takes place, and the author takes us in a story of interactions between these sound beings. These interactions also create feelings, which modify and enrich the initial sense: it is the creative part, specifically brought by the musician and passed on by the listened work.

The initial sense

R. Murray Schafer insists on the evocation of archetypes and noises proper to the civilization :

Noises related to water :	The sea, the rain, the brooks, Gurglings and atmospheres of foetal dumping, ...
Sounds related to the air :	The wind, the thunderstorm, the breath, ..
Sounds related to the ground :	Earthquake, avalanche, pebbles, caves and subterranean atmospheres, Trees, wood, ...
Sounds related to fire :	Explosions, fireplace, matches, fireworks,  ...
Animals :	Sea and land birds, Horses, cattle, farmyard, dogs, cats, Wolves, wild animals, Insects: fly, bee, cicada, mosquito.
Human voice :	Spoken voice, shouts, whisper, tear, singing, laughter, cough, groan, ...
The human body, its rhythms :	Beatings of the heart, the breath, Footsteps, applauses, banging of fingers, Make love.
Sound landscapes :	The country, the city, the harbour, the shore, the station, ... The house, the kitchen, the meal, the bathroom, the bed, the doors and the shutters ... The stadium, the feast, the parade, the religious ceremony, .. The radio and the TV.
Mechanical sounds :	Weapons, war machines, Locomotive (steam, diesel), train, streetcar, subway, Car, truck, motorcycle, marine engines, tractors, Propeller aircraft, copter, jet plane, rocket, Hand tools: hammer, ram, saw, scraper, file, Pneumatic drill, power drill, power saw, sewing machine, ventilator,...
Call sound signals :	Bells of church, Clarion, hunting horn, siren of factory, Tick-tock of clock, Horn, whistle, siren of boat.

The direct reference to these sounds or noises can become directly integrated in a musical work :

either the recording of such sounds supplies directly the materials of the work, as in the concrete music (ex: " variations for a door and a breath " of Pierre Henry);

either sound effects are quoted in an instrumental music (ex: the till, the alarm clock and the beating of heart in the album " The dark side of the moon " of Pink Floyd; ex: sirens, wheel of lottery, typewriter and revolver in Eric Satie's " Parade ");

either it is the instrumental imitation of natural sounds (how many times the timpani simulate the thunderstorm, how many times the flute feels to be a nightingale!);

either finally, and we should have begun there, the music is sung: it is the voice and the breath of one or some of our fellow men who reach us.

But mostly the evocation does not come from the conscious recognition of such or such sound explicitly integrated into the work. The phenomenon, more or less unconscious, consists in connoting the sound beings which contain formants similar to those of the archetypes. For example:

a regular beating at the rate of a clock can remind that the time passes ;

large movements of intensity or color can evoke the sea ;

a duple time joins naturally to the walking, or to the locomotive ;

fast jerks are aggressive as a squall of machine gun ;

random notes cast wet as the rain ;

etc.

To the fundamental archetypes and of civilization, we also need to add all which is related to the musical culture itself, and first to the musical instruments. They are often very beautiful, sometimes ancient, worked in noble materials by craftsmen heirs of ancestral knowledges.

The hearing of the sound of an instrument is already to be connected in all the music which we have already listened coming from it, and it is to be connected in the history and the geography of the music. It also is to be connected to the instrumentalist.

Figure 3 : at random of a walk in rocky heaps of Fontainebleau

Semantic enrichment through the music

So, while the performance of the work has not yet begun, the sound beings that the musician is going to make play are already implicitly meaningful for the listener.

During the work, the emotion arises directly from events in the sound space. To the effects of the appearances / disappearances of sound objects, it is necessary to add the effects of interaction between objects, which arouse new feelings which enrich the sound beings embodied by these objects.

In the same way, in the cinema, in the theater or in a novel, the characters are maybe initial archetypes, for example of thriller, western, history, mythology or of every day. And finally, even if it reuses abundantly archetypes, the work will allow to go farther, and to make imagine and understand complex personalities in situations out of the ordinary.

Music and communication

In the musical space, the produced effect is an emotional answer to the information carried by formants. The way this information is significant depends on connotations which become established with the person who receives the music.

The theory of the information can help us to analyze what happens. Let us retain two results which apply to the communication:

In order to make an information understandable by a receiver, it is necessary:

either it contains explicitly its own keys of coding ;

either the receiver shares the keys of coding with the emitter, that is the emitter and the receiver beforehand share a common language

The more the level of common language between emitters and receivers is high, the less the information needs to be voluminous to transmit the same concept.

For example, to transmit to a correspondent the concept of "screwdriver", it is necessary to use only 11 bytes to send the word written in English (by telegram or e-mail), it is necessary to use about 6,000 bytes for a phone transmission of the word orally, and approximately 20,000 bytes are necessary to  fax a drawing on paper to an interlocutor who does not understand English.

This proposition can be reversed in the following way: having a given volume of communication, we can communicate as more significant information as the emitter and the receiver beforehand  share a high level of language.

By arguing at the same time about the musical plan : the communication between musician and listener is as richer as both feel close culturally and emotionally. Symmetrically, the music can be  all the more purified and elliptic, while remaining "readable", because understood by those who learned "to read" the same language.

Speaking about Bach in a film of the Canadian television, Glen Gould explains the quantity of melodic and harmonic forms which can pass by three notes: exposure, fugue, canon, inversion, inverted canon, prelude, and his hand evokes it by circling trajectories before the fingers quickly brush the keys of the piano, then leave to draw volutes. He asserted that his mind was in osmosis with that of JS Bach, that it felt even his hesitances in certain musical phrases, and that he could correct some passages which would doubtless have been improved by the composer if he had still lived.

The musical imaginary

Our investigation reaches here the goal that we gave ourselves by beginning this essay, although it should be attractive to investigate farther that the domain which we went through. Beyond this point, our interest would get loose from sound beings to go towards the psychic phenomena which they arouse in the depthes of the personality.

Thus the imaginary musical space is not single: there is one for every person, and there is communication between the imaginary space of the composer and the spaces of his listeners through the play of the sound beings, which materialize by sound objects.

In the imaginary space of a listener, the sound beings are not an exact replica of those who are conceived by the composer. They are as close as the cultural base or the "sympathy" are already established.

We can then imagine two theoretical cases of situations, every real situation of the listener being situated between these two limits:

either the listener is a musicologist, a passionate person, even an initiated, who already understands everything to the personality of the musician, and who, possibly, becomes identified with him;

either, before the listening of the work, no common cultural base exists. Any communication would be impossible. Let us hope however that there is a common base of humanity, that would be only the desire of discovery of the other one.

In the first case, the musical message, although possibly hermetic for non-initiated, is going to wake at once a plenitude of feelings of profound understanding.

In the second case, it is necessary that the message is "self-carrier", that is the musician has to take care of passing on also the keys of his own imagination. There are many possible methods, for example:

the pedagogy: associate the music with a story, a myth, or a universal subject which the listener will associate with what he hears (Peter and the Wolf, Carmen, Pictures at an Exhibition, Forest Murmurs);

the persuasion: progress and variations from elementary, then more and more elaborated formants (minimalist music); this method can be from the initiative of the listener himself, who can listen again and again to the work and gradually become impregnated with it ;

the association with another way of expression: the sung text, the dance, the spectacle.