First part :
to listen to

 

 

Figure 1 : the listener's ear

 

Have you already observed in detail the following scene: a person who listens to a disk in his living room?

If you describe the person, his attitude, the room, the furniture, the possibly other persons or animals, you bring no relevant element on what is presently happening for this listener concentrated on the music.

It is necessary to imagine the microscopic holes on the surface of the CD, which are lit by the laser beam, then the low, the high and the mediums sounds which flow towards their respective loudspeakers, the acoustic waves finally reconstituted and which propagate in the room, bounce on walls, go around the obstacles, enter the head, fill the brain and put the person in contact with the musicians.

By what phenomena the musicians and the composer bring this listener to have the pleasure to know and to share their emotion? If we could describe this process in an appropriate language, could we also use this language to help to structure the composition of the music?

This first part is intended to understand how the musicians can pass on to us so many unspeakable things by playing of vibrations of the atmosphere.

This question was already the subject of numerous articles, essays, even controversies. Nevertheless no clear synthesis of the process of listening of the music seems to us to have been still proposed.

Approaches often start from precise and demonstrated scientific considerations. It will be rather the music, with an artist's soul, that will guide us, and not triple integrals. We shall thus adopt an aesthetic point of view, while basing on the observation of things.