1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Sound as a mirror
Sounds always reflect something from the mind. (Eliane Radigue quoted in Dax Reference Dax2012)
My first experience of a Francisco López concert was in Reference López2001. I sat in a chair, a little too close to the audience members beside me, blindfolded, a heightened awareness of my body in the space and a fear of my vulnerability building inside of me. As the soft sound rose, so did my fear, but it shifted from inside to outside of me. It was no longer internal to me alone but took form in the shared space of sound. In turn, this feeling morphed into something other than fear; there was a joy in recognising my internal experience made external. I could ‘see’ myself in the sound; I could ‘see’ the sound amplify my feelings, which also created a distance from them. I was also aware that this was just a reflection of my own mind, that those around me, as well as the performer, would be experiencing the sound in their own unique way. This was my first hint that listening could be an act of creativity, an active practice for heightening awareness of one’s own inner realm. This became the foundation of my own compositional practice, where I began to shape real-world sounds to reflect my inner experiences and to consider how I might bring audience members into this process of understanding the inner realm. I have continued to do so ever since.
There are many examples of researchers attempting to understand how people experience and make meaning from acousmatic sound (many of which are in the back issues of Organised Sound, including Atkinson Reference Atkinson2007; Andean Reference Andean2016; Barreiro Reference Barreiro2010; Batchelor Reference Batchelor2015; Godøy Reference Godøy2006; Kendall Reference Kendall2010; and Kim Reference Kim2010). They ask, how is electroacoustic music experienced in the mind? How might a shared language or framework be developed to understand it? How is narrative understood through such compositions? I contend that these questions are important yet on some level futile, in that acousmatic sound – in its inherent, ontological ambiguity – cannot be experienced or understood in a single, objective (or intersubjective) way. Instead, acousmatic perception is a flexile, slippery space of interpretation void of clear meaning. A listener’s response is context dependent and varies amongst individuals, based on the way different people think and experience the world. This highlights the function of perception to interpret and create – and its fallibility. In underscoring this flexile, amorphous quality of acousmatic sound while composing, I contend that a door can be opened to creative exploration and heightened self-understanding.
This article will discuss a process I developed through practice-based research to do so, called experiential listening. This is a practice of listening that embraces the ‘felt sense of complexity’ (Gendlin Reference Gendlin and Corsini1973: 330) of experiencing acousmatic sound, and the multiple ways it can be perceived by a listener. The article will give some background to my development of this practice, spanning the philosophical, theoretical, and practical frameworks behind it. This includes an introduction to Schaeffer’s conception of reduced listening, understood through phenomenology and the Husserlian epoché, and its extension by López; a critique of this approach by acousmatic theorist Brian Kane, based on his theory of the acousmatic gap; and my alignment with sound artist Verónica Mota, who also composes works of musique concrète to explore dark places of the subconscious. The lens of conceptual metaphor theory and experientialism is also used to contextualise my own approach to listening (rather than phenomenology), in its rejection of the ‘myths’ of objectivity and subjectivity, alongside its focus on metaphor in building self-understanding. It also outlines the psychological theories and meditation practices that shape my observation and analysis of my compositional processes. The practice of experiential listening is then described through the analogy of a therapeutic process (also known as experiential listening) used within experiential therapy. I will speak through my experience to describe this process, to highlight the value of experiential understanding, that acknowledging the ‘I’ of the researcher is integral to understanding the way acousmatic sound can be shaped and perceived by a listener. This reflects a way for intuitive wisdom about lived experience and the self to be revealed through sound art practice, and in turn, shared with audiences.
1.2. A note on terminology
Throughout this article, I will be discussing experiences that can be understood through the lens of so-called mental illness. However, all terms that medicalise these experiences will be italicised. This formatting decision stems from a central debate within mad activism and factions of mental health research regarding the validity of the medical model of mental illness. It invites readers to acknowledge that alternative perspectives may exist outside of this model. The term madness has also been italicised in recognition that while it is empowering within mad activism, it can be experienced as negative by others. All italicisation aims to provoke readers to question the power of language in shaping one’s understanding of the experiences being discussed, highlighting the value of communicating them through a language free of words – that of abstract, acousmatic sound.
2. BACKGROUND
2.1. Living mental illness and acousmatic sound: a reflective praxis
My approach to experiential listening has grown from a practice-based research project that used acousmatic sound as a tool to reflect upon and understand lived experience of mental illness and its relationship to trauma, through the compositional process. This project drew upon my combined experience of twenty-one years of living with mental illness and nineteen years of composing with acousmatic sound. Prior to this research, I had been creating intense, dramatic electroacoustic compositions and sound installations that had been described as reflecting ‘psychological terror’, ‘unspecified but terrifying dread’ (Priest Reference Priest2011), and ‘the uncertainty of a nightmare recounted’ (Day Reference Day2005). Themes of anxiety, emotional extremes, and madness were embedded in my work, yet much of this occurred on an intuitive level, as I drew connections between abstract sounds and my lived experiences of these themes while composing, with little reflection as to how or why.
Throughout this time, I had also observed that acousmatic sound could have a profound emotional intensity, especially when listened to in the dark. After my performances, audience members would often describe the experiences they had while listening. These were unique to each individual, yet often contained a related sense of intense emotions and sensory perceptions and a connection to memory, lived experience or imagination. As I composed, I would also often experience a felt sense of connection between sounds, emotion, memory, narrative and psychological experience, some of which also resembled reflections from audience members. Yet the exact content of these narratives and experiences was often unclear: a partially formed image; a sense of something deeper, not in clear view – this was how I experienced the process of composing. This led me to consider, could a deeper analysis of my practice help clarify what I could sense while composing but not articulate? Could this medium, with its emotional intensity, invisibility, ambiguity and power convey the experiences of mental illness that cannot be expressed through words? Could I use acousmatic sound to better understand the dense mass of indecipherable fear in which my mental illness often manifested? With this in mind, I set out to compose my own ‘first-person madness narrative’ (which is any text created by a person with lived experience of mental illness that reflects upon their experience) using abstract, acousmatic sound.
This approach to composing, however, seemed incongruent with what I had known of the history and philosophy of musique concrète. Developed in 1948 by French composer Pierre Schaeffer, musique concrète involves the creation of music from the assemblage of recorded sound material. It was born of the invention of the tape recorder, where its ability to record and playback sounds facilitated a movement away from composing with notes and scores, and towards shaping music from the material of recorded sound. In developing this practice, Schaeffer focused on treating sounds in a way that would shift them into a space of unrecognisability. He would often cut sounds into short fragments – ‘splitting the musical atom’ (Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer2012: 37) – to transform the sound into an object in its own right; to be heard as a musical object rather than a recording of a real-world event. My work is also based on the process of sampling real-world sounds and transforming them through fragmentation and repetition. However, the theory of acousmatic sound that Schaeffer shaped around his practice sought to build an objectivity into the experience of the sound object, which removed personal interpretation or connection to real-world experiences – the exact opposite of how I experienced my own work, and the compositions of others, as well as how many others appeared to experience mine.
Schaeffer’s theory was centred on reduced listening (écoute réduite), a practice developed by applying the principles of the phenomenological reduction to the experience of listening and composing with concrete sounds. The phenomenological reduction is an approach to analysing experience developed by philosopher Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology. It presents a way of experiencing ‘with no knowledge or perceptions in hand’. It consists of two simultaneous, interrelated processes – the epoché (also known as bracketing) and the reduction proper. The epoché ‘is a procedure whereby we no longer accept’ the ‘facets of our existence’ that we take for granted, disregarding all knowledge and presuppositions external to the phenomenological experience at hand. It does not involve a specific process per se, but is ‘the name for whatever method we use to free ourselves from the captivity of the unquestioned acceptance of the everyday world’ (Reference CoganCogan, n.d.). The reduction proper is this moment of transcendence, where the understanding is reached that there is something outside of what was previously accepted to be true. Taken together, the interrelationship between epoché and the reduction proper can be understood as follows:
epoché is the ‘moment’ in which we abandon the acceptedness of the world that holds us captive and the reduction proper indicates the ‘moment’ in which we come to the transcendental insight that the acceptedness of the world is an acceptedness and not an absolute. (Reference CoganCogan, n.d.)
As applied to musique concréte, reduced listening involves bracketing out any understanding of the sound outside of the phenomenon of the sound in itself, which Schaeffer saw as the key to experiencing real-world sound as music. The aim of reduced listening is thus to focus on
the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning. Reduced listening takes the sound – verbal, played on an instrument, noises or whatever – as itself the object to be observed instead of a vehicle for something else. (Chion Reference Chion1994: 29)
In doing so, reduced listening ‘repositions the listener away from an interpretive and culturally situated relation so as to direct attention to the phenomenal, essential features of sound and the musical work’ (LaBelle Reference LaBelle2006: 27).
Through his conception of reduced listening, Schaeffer developed a taxonomy of concrete sounds that is impersonal, steers away from imaginative, poetic or emotional interpretations (despite his own comparisons between musique concrète and poetry – in Chapter Seventeen of his manifesto In Search of a Concrete Music (Reference Schaeffer2012), he muses that conventional music is to prose what musique concrète is to poetry), and towards sterile classifications of sounds based on their fundamental, descriptive properties. The task of the composer of musique concrète, he argued, was to build an ‘analytical card index that will enable progress to be made in the understanding of the musical object’ (Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer2012: 221). In applying the phenomenological reduction to musique concrète, Schaeffer defines the composer as scientist who must remove the experience of the self, or anything beyond the intersubjective perception of sound, from understanding the sound, or musical, object.
However, as renowned contemporary Spanish sound artist Francisco López notes, when applying the phenomenological reduction to reduced listening, it need not exclude consideration of something beyond the sound while composing:
In my view, there is an implicit fundamental wrong assumption here: the effect of the phenomenological reduction is precisely a ‘something beyond’. You see, there is a common misinterpretation that comes – perhaps understandably – from the term ‘reduction’. The transcendental Husserlian Epoché is rather an expansion by means of focusing. The temporary suspension of judgment is not a more limited interaction with the world but rather the opposite. If we attend at the practice and its effects, the Schaefferian ‘reduced listening’ should certainly be more aptly called expanded listening. (López quoted in Isaza Reference Isaza2015)
López positions himself within the Schaefferian philosophy of musique concrète to emphasise this ability for sound to transcend its origins. He rejects the bio-acoustic approach to field recording and soundscape composition of many of his field-recording peers, who seek to represent natural and urban environments with a moralistic or political agenda. He emphasises the importance of this ‘temporary suspension of judgement’ in expanding the way sound is perceived. From his background as a biologist, he believes that a field recording cannot be a true representation of an environment, and thus must transcend it (Solomos Reference Solomos2016: 4). For López, placing audiences in touch with this ‘something beyond’ of Husserlian transcendence requires he remove himself and the sound source as much as possible from his compositional outcomes:
I have no interest in ‘representing’ anything specific with my music. I actually have a strong commitment to do just the opposite; that is, to develop a sonic world that is so devoid of meaning and purpose that it can be completely open for individual experience. A blank phenomenological terrain where everyone is compelled to create and move through. (López Reference López2003)
From an experiential perspective, my own work has a strong similarity to that of López’s, as we both create dynamic sound worlds of visceral intensity, which provide transformational experiences of real-world sounds. In performances, we also both place our audiences in darkness (his through blindfolding, mine through an absence of light), and perform from behind the audience, removing any connection between the sound and the visual realm. Yet, where López draws upon the notion of reduced listening to avoid representation, aiming to create a ‘blank phenomenological terrain’, my compositional practice instead considers how the reduced space of acousmatic sound might become a mirror into the mind, where the psychological perception of the abstracted sound material can reflect something about the listening self, and its interaction with the external world. This shifts the phenomenological reduction in acousmatic listening to the realm of metaphor, where the sound transcends (to some extent) its function in the real world to become a vehicle for something beyond it – a tool through which to understand concepts and experiences that are not only a direct result of the sound in itself.
This approach deviates from the typical debate surrounding composers who work with acousmatic, real-world sounds, which tends to focus on issues of identifiability and reference (or lack thereof) within acousmatic experience. Instead it addresses the central, ontological problem of acousmatic sound identified by Brian Kane in the most comprehensive critique of Schaeffer’s theory of acousmatic sound:
Beyond the compositional dilemma of acousmatic sound (to refer or not to refer?), one can detect the presence of a decision [by those who focus on this issue of reference] motivated neither by love nor distaste for reference nor by dispassionate philosophical reasoning, but by a recoil for the unsettled (or unsettling) relationship of sonic sources, causes, and effects inherent in acousmatic sound. To decide in favour of reduced listening is one way of negotiating sonic incongruousness – by demanding that it simply go away. To decide in favour of the source by ignoring the structural gap of acousmatic sound and reducing the effect to the source and cause is another. Neither addresses the central problem. (Kane Reference Kane2014: 150–1)
In contrast, my work addresses this central problem by leaning into the unsettling, incongruous nature of acousmatic experience, heightening the ambiguity of sound sources through the compositional process. This approach can be understood through Kane’s ontology of acousmatic experience, which highlights the importance of the structural gap between source, cause and effect of an acousmatic sound, where, as he states: ‘the being of acousmatic sound is to be a gap’ (Kane Reference Kane2014: 149). Within this gap, I find my mind is free to form connections between the sounds, real-world events, or more abstract concepts, thoughts, memories, feelings or lived experiences while composing and listening. Rather than debating, ‘to refer or not to refer’, my compositional practice maintains a felt sense of connection to the real world, while simultaneously moving somewhere beyond it – neither rejecting Schaeffer’s notion of reduced listening nor adhering to its restrictions. This ‘somewhere beyond’ is connected to dream worlds, the subconscious, emotion, and psychological perception – the space where the real and imagined worlds merge. This does not shy away from the unsettling nature of acousmatic experience but exploits it to represent and understand states of anxiety and distress, and the inner world of the psyche.
Berlin-based, Mexican sound artist Verónica Mota also recognises this ability for musique concrète to connect with the inner psychological world of the listener:
Many of my compositions try to take the listener to a dark place, the mind, where the subject is free to experience her/himself as a surrealistic poem. The journey is complex and sometimes even painful because the audience is confronted with their own dreams and fears which usually they suppress in daily life. To open a door to the human mind using the power of sound is a way to find who we really are and/or would love to be. It is all about our dreams and self realisation. Sound can be a key to get there. (Mota quoted in Verweij and Ijzerman Reference Verweij and Ijzerman2010)
The main premise of my research was thus to examine this potential for self-discovery through sound, bringing together my lived experience of mental illness and my sound art practice, to define a clear method for working with musique concrète that, in contrast to Schaeffer’s own approach, was meaningful to me as a composer. Rather than examine the sound object from Schaeffer’s position of objective scientist/composer, I aimed to highlight this internal, reflective quality of acousmatic experience and its connection to the subconscious, emotions, psychological perceptions and lived experiences of mental illness and trauma – examining ways in which they can be understood and represented through acousmatic sound. However, rather than exploring this from a phenomenological perspective, my focus was on observing the sound object through the lens of experientialism and a process of meaning-making using metaphor.
2.2. Conceptual metaphor theory and experientialism
Conceptual metaphor theory was proposed by cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By (Reference Lakoff and Johnson2003), first published in 1980. In this, they argue that metaphor is not just a tool of poetic imagination but inherent to the way all humans think, reason, and understand. They illustrate how no abstract concept can be understood without the use of metaphor; that language itself draws connections between abstract concepts and the concrete experience of existing in, and negotiating the world through, a human body – that all understanding is embodied. At the core of this theory is the notion of ‘imaginative rationality’, a process of metaphoric thought that ‘permits an understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another’ (Lakoff and Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson2003: 235). Imaginative rationality is central to my approach to composing and thinking through sound in my research, where an understanding of the lived experiences of mental illness was reached through the experience of acousmatic sound; and an understanding of my work with acousmatic sound was understood through my lived experiences of mental illness. In this context, sound performs as a metaphor for the lived experience of mental illness. Metaphor can be understood in its most basic and non-word reliant form as ‘a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2020). Sound is the ‘thing’ that becomes representative of concepts related to the lived experience of mental illness, the pathway to representing and understanding these experiences through compositional practices.
Conceptual metaphor theory also provides the foundation for experientialism, a branch of philosophy that rejects the dichotomous notions of objectivism and subjectivism at the heart of most Western philosophy and science – including that of phenomenology upon which Schaeffer’s theories of acousmatic sound and musique concrète are based. Like objectivism, experientialism acknowledges that there is a real world external to human experience that is stable and observable by all. Unlike objectivism, however, it also acknowledges that knowledge about the stable and observable environment can only be understood by humans through their embodied experience of the world and the conceptual systems they form around it. This renders true objectivity at times unachievable:
[b]eing objective is always relative to a conceptual system and a set of cultural values. Reasonable objectivity may be impossible when there are conflicting cultural values, and it is important to be able to admit this and to recognise when it occurs. (Lakoff and Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson2003: 227)
Experientialism thus acknowledges that there may be multiple perspectives to a situation that differ, but that each may be equally true. This also reflects the synergy between subjective, intersubjective, and objective readings of acousmatic music that I have observed throughout my years of practice, where each can hold equal value, even when contradictory. Acknowledging this tension becomes important to my creative process and understanding of the types of knowledge that can be gained through compositional practice.
Similarly (and in contrast to subjectivism), within experientialism, all knowledge about the self cannot be understood in separation from external influences on the self, such as culture and environment. Thus, the subjective does not only reflect that person alone, but the environment and people that surrounds them: ‘understanding emerges from interaction, from constant negotiation with the environment and other people’ (Lakoff and Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson2003: 230). My approach to composing and understanding through sound reflects this experientialist perspective, where generating knowledge of my own ‘subjective’ experience through the compositional process is used to heighten my understanding of the external influences that shape this perspective, thus generating a deeper level of understanding and knowledge about my experience and the forces that shape it through intuitive processes of sound composition.
2.3. Psychology, therapeutic practices and meditation
My methodological approach to this research is also underpinned by aspects of psychology and psychotherapeutic practices, as well as my personal meditation practices. This stems from my years of mainstream mental health treatment in Australia, which has involved a combination of individual psychotherapy, medications and skills-based group therapy sessions as well as a range of alternative treatments. The mainstream therapies have included insight-oriented psychodynamic therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, eye-movement desensitisation and reprograming, and humanistic and support therapies – all of which influence the way I approach composing. Many of these Western psychological frameworks have adapted aspects of Buddhist meditation practices for psychotherapeutic purposes, which, within this Western perspective, are focused on the notion of mindfulness meditation.Footnote 1 This involves learning to focus on and mindfully observing aspects of both internal and external experience, such as sounds, thoughts, physical sensations, breath, or emotions, without attempting to control them. Through this, I have developed a deep, experiential understanding of their psychological foundations and the implications of their practical application in the context of my own mental health treatment. They have also given me an ability to observe and analyse my emotions, thoughts, and experiences with a degree of analytical detachment, which underpins my research, compositional practice, and development of experiential listening.
This ability is also enhanced by my practice of Transcendental Meditation, which has involved twice daily sessions for the past eight years. This form of meditation was founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and involves repeating a mantra in the mind while sitting quietly for 20 minutes, taught over three days by a teacher trained in this method. This mantra has no meaning to the meditator, becoming a pattern of repeating internal sound that fills the mind while meditating. During lessons, the student is taught to bring a sense of effortlessness to the practice, observing the mantra within the mind without attempting to control it or the inevitable flow of thoughts that come and go around it. This practice has heightened my awareness of the ‘sound’ of the inner mind – the way some thoughts are heard while others are seen or sensed – giving me an experiential insight into the nature of my own thought processes, which has in turn influenced my approach to thinking through sound in my research. I have also engaged in regular sessions of sensory deprivation within a floatation tank, which promotes a similar meditative awareness of perceptual experience. It is through these meditative techniques that I can observe the internal processes that occur while composing.
The notion of experiential listening in compositional practice also draws from a branch of psychology known as experiential therapy. Experiential therapy encompasses a wide range of therapeutic techniques (such as Gestalt therapy, psychodrama and art therapies) in which experiencing is a key feature of its practice. Within such therapy, there is less focus on the use of any one specific technique, or common theory of human behaviour or psyche (as is the case with other forms of therapy, such as psychodynamic or behavioural therapies), with a preference for the constant adaptation of techniques to respond to the immediacy of patient experience and their felt senses: ‘Experiential psychotherapy works with immediate concreteness. One’s sense of immediate experiencing is not emotion, words, muscle movements, but a direct feel of the complexity of situations and difficulties’ (Gendlin Reference Gendlin and Corsini1973: 317). It emphasises potential over pathology (Najavits Reference Najavits2000: 235) and seeks to remove the divide between body and mind present within many therapeutic techniques (Gendlin Reference Gendlin and Corsini1973: 329–30). Within experiential therapy exists a therapeutic practice of experiential listening, which aims to connect the patient to the emotions and ‘the physically felt sense of complexity’ (Gendlin Reference Gendlin and Corsini1973: 330) of what they are experiencing, through their dialogue with their therapist, to uncover that which the patient may not be able to articulate through words alone. A similar approach underpins the dialogue I establish between myself and sound while composing, where I seek to reveal aspects of experience I cannot articulate through words.
3. EXPERIENTIAL LISTENING
Experiential listening is a method for shaping and understanding ideas through sound, then further integrating these ideas into the compositional practice to convey to audiences. It is a process whereby I am placed in touch with the intuitive wisdom within my sound composition, where I can observe and analyse it. This term connects the multiple foundations underpinning my research approach: speaking through lived experience drawn from mad activism (where those with mental illness are considered ‘experts by experience’); my philosophical alignment with experientialism; and the practice of experiential therapy. In experiential therapy, experiential listening is a practice employed by the therapist that involves ‘listening to the not yet fully articulated felt sense from which a speaker is talking’ (Friedman Reference Friedman2005: 217):
The listening response is an attempt to make contact with and carry forward this experiential flow [of felt meanings]. It is not enough for the therapist to just say back the client’s words. Words are not feelings. The listener is trying to point his or her words at the concrete experiential flow for which the listenee is making symbols (words). The listenee checks the listener’s words against this ongoing flow. When the listening response is just right, it has an experiential effect – the flow of experiencing is carried forward. (Friedman Reference Friedman2005: 222)
Through my research, I discovered a similar approach underpins the dialogue I established with sound while composing. With this dialogue, I aimed to discover and articulate the felt sense of my experiences of mental illness through the compositional process, and its resultant compositions. In this analogy, my position as composer becomes that of both patient and therapist. I approach my compositional decisions with the similar mindful eye of the therapist in experiential therapy, seeking to more deeply understand the relationship between my sound practice and my lived experience of mental illness.
While this method was not, in its origins, based on the therapeutic process of experiential listening, a comparison between them helps to explicate the compositional process. For instance, the process of experiential listening in therapy begins with a clearing of the mind on behalf of the therapist. I compare this to the reduction that happens within an acousmatic situation, where a sound is ‘cleared’ from its original context through the acousmatic reduction. Unlike reduced listening however, I do not further attempt to disconnect this sound from any associations with the real world. Instead, I acknowledge the gap between the sound and its cause, and the mind’s desire to reconcile it, and begin ‘listening’ to the way my mind fills this gap while composing (listening to not just the thoughts, but the feelings, bodily sensations, and emotions associated with it). This is similar to the therapeutic process of experiential listening, where the therapist ‘listens’ to not just the words being spoken, but also the body language of the speaker, and the therapist’s own emotional responses to what is being spoken. This is a form of listening that encompasses more than just the reception of sound.
The process then involves the therapist dialoguing with the speaker, mirroring what they have heard through an interpretative lens, which includes their felt sense of what the speaker is conveying. They then ask if they are correct. The dialogue continues until the speaker feels the therapist has heard correctly; the therapist checks to make sure this has occurred, removing their own assumptions and misinterpretations. This technique is driven by an underlying belief that the patient knows best; similar to my hypothesis that my intuitive processes of composing held deeper meaning, and that listening to this intuition would garner deeper knowledge about my experiences. Through the process, the speaker/patient gains a deeper understanding of what lies beneath their initial statement in a way that is meaningful to them. As I compose, I also experience a dialogue between the sounds and myself. I shape the sounds based on what I hear within them, which evokes further thoughts, feelings or memories through which I further adjust the sounds. There is a constant dialogue between compositional gestures, sounds and experiences that shapes the composition, as well as my understanding of the topic I am exploring through sound. This provides me with a deeper understanding of my intentions behind the composition and the ideas I am exploring through it, which then shapes the compositional outcomes and the framing devices I place around them (such as titles, liner notes or the way an audience member is led into and out of a listening experience). This in turn shapes audience response, generating an experiential flow between us.
Thus, experiential listening, as it relates to my compositional practice, involves the observation of all aspects of experiencing sound – not just the sound itself, but the thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and ideas generated through a listening experience. It considers how multiple aspects of memory, affect, sensation, frameworks of knowledge and imagination interrelate to create a meaningful experience of acousmatic sound. It can involve aspects of reduced listening, where the sound can exist as sound in itself, yet also considers where such a state might lead the mind, how this reduced listening state, which López (quoted in Isaza Reference Isaza2015) refers to as ‘expanded listening’, can open the imagination. It is a process of turning inward to develop a deeper self-understanding. Like experiential therapy, it accounts for the ‘felt sense of the complexity’ (Gendlin Reference Gendlin and Corsini1973: 330) of experiencing, but in this case, it is the complexity of experiencing acousmatic sound, its (non)relationship to meaning, its irreconcilable ambiguities, and the way the mind then fills its perceptual gap. Experiential listening, thus, examines where this felt sense might take the composer as listener, and how this can shape a composition, as well as an audience’s response to that composition. Unlike reduced listening, it is an interdisciplinary way of conversing with sound that brings multiple lenses to understanding an aural encounter. This reflects an experientialist perspective on acousmatic sound rather than Schaeffer’s phenomenological one. It rejects the need for an objective understanding of the sound object that is free of interpretation, while simultaneously recognising that such an object can exist. It focuses instead on the set of conceptual systems a listener understands the sound through and how that shapes their reception of it. This can then be used to consider how framing devices placed around acousmatic experiences for audiences might shape their response to the sound based on composer intention.
3.1. Experiential listening for self-understanding
The development of experiential listening grew from a research project aimed at exploring my lived experiences of mental illness and trauma through acousmatic sound. This research sought to understand these experiences through compositional practices, examining how the intuitive processes used to compose these works might contain knowledge about the experiences themselves. Sound composition was hypothesised to contain a form of intuitive wisdom that was not accessible through words alone. Through experiential listening, I was able to connect with this wisdom and found that, in relating to acousmatic sounds as metaphors and mirrors into my mind, I could deepen my self-understanding.
This involved a feedback loop between my compositional practice, my reading of first-person madness narratives, my research into psychology, trauma and emotional abuse, my own lived experiences, and ideas discussed in therapy. These all worked in synergy to form a deeper, intuitive understanding of my lived experiences of mental illness through a depathologising framework of ‘perceptual collapse’, alongside a reworking of the narrative that surrounded my understanding of mental illness in its connection to emotional abuse. These understandings could not have been achieved through words or bibliographic research alone.Footnote 2 This working method connects to a process of self-understanding proposed by experientialism, which involves:
Developing an awareness of the metaphors we live by and an awareness of where they enter into our everyday lives and where they do not
Having experiences that can form the basis of alternative metaphors
Developing an ‘experiential flexibility’
Engaging in an unending process of viewing life through new alternative metaphors. (Lakoff and Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson2003: 233)
Each of these points was performed through the compositional processes, with sound compositions forming the basis of new alternative metaphors through which to understand my experiences; and to engage audiences in this process. The key benefit in working with acousmatic sound to do this was its inherent ‘experiential flexibility’. The acousmatic gap and its resultant ambiguity meant a fluidity of meanings could be attached to the sounds while composing and analysing works. Sound could be ‘read’ and ‘written’ as a language operating on a different level to words, where multiple meanings, inconsistencies and paradoxes could coexist, as well as the experience of pure affect with no connection to meaning – all of which is also true of lived experience. My work with acousmatic sound was thus a way of constructing a narrative in the absence of a clear narrative, using feelings, senses and metaphors to reconcile my experiences. This led to a deeper understanding of my intuitive compositional processes, my lived experiences and the self that relates to and shapes acousmatic sound. In turn, this has given me a deeper agency over my tools of artistic practice and my ability to move audience members into affecting, self-reflective spaces with sound.
4. CONCLUSION
There is no right or wrong way to experience acousmatic sound as music. This article presents one way of doing so that is meaningful to me as a composer, one that lends itself to the exploration of inner states of psychological distress. It was conceived through the experiment that is practice-based research, which is a field of study that has the potential to evolve the bounds of how knowledge can be formed and what research can be. Experiential listening reflects a way for thinking through sound while composing, to discover layers of wisdom about experience that may otherwise exist on an intuitive, subconscious level alone. It removes the need for understanding acousmatic sound – or the way one experiences the world – through the objective/subjective dichotomy. It instead highlights acousmatic perception as a space where real and imagined worlds merge, which in turn highlights that true objectivity is rare, as is pure subjectivity. Instead, just as in life, understanding is formed through a dialogue between embodied experience and external influence. Experiential listening highlights the poetry of acousmatic sound that emerges from its structural gap, the ability for it to hold multiple meanings or no meaning beyond feeling, for it to perform as metaphor, for it to open the imagination, or connect with intuitive wisdom. It presents a way for shaping this knowledge for audiences, to communicate an experiential flow of meaning that is flexile and reveals perception to be a creative act. This in turn reflects how imagination inspired by acousmatic listening can be a pathway to reason and self-understanding.
