The Listener's Response

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Universit y of Exet er] On: 12 Novem ber 2013, At : 01: 57 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rprs20 The Listener's Response Piet er Verst raet e Published online: 29 Oct 2010. To cite this article: Piet er Verst raet e (2010) The List ener's Response, Performance Research: A Journal of t he Performing Art s, 15:3, 88-94, DOI: 10.1080/ 13528165.2010.527213 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 13528165.2010.527213 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. 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Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions The Listener’s Response Downloaded by [University of Exeter] at 01:57 12 November 2013   1 The original quotation reads as follows: ‘L’écoute est cette attention préalable qui permet de capter tout ce qui peut venir déranger le système territorial; elle est un mode de défense contre la surprise; son objet (ce vers ce quoi elle est tendue) est la menace’ (Barthes and Havas 1995: 728). [L]istening is that preliminary attention which permits intercepting whatever might disturb the territorial system; it is a mode of defence against surprise; its object (what it is oriented toward) is menace or, conversely, need; the raw material of listening is the index, because it either reveals danger or promises the satisfaction of need. (Barthes and Havas 1991: 247)1 In ‘Écoute’ (1977) Roland Barthes and Roland Havas formulated an ingenious perspective on the act of listening as mode of protection; one that was subsequently taken further by soundscape studies. However, so far the particular consequences of this idea have been largely overlooked in performance research. It may be of no surprise that in the same year R. Murray Schafer published his Tuning of the World. In this landmark book for sound studies, Schafer pairs the research objectives of the World Soundscape Project (WSP) at Simon Fraser University with a theoretical and ecological understanding of sound perception. Inspired by the psycho-acoustic insight of critical bands, which already supplied a scientific model for explaining the ear’s need for filtering mechanisms, Schafer’s project provides further data-driven evidence to Barthes and Havas’s postulate that listening is primarily predicated on an animalistic need for intercepting and, therefore, resisting the ‘menacing’, disturbing or even harmful qualities of sound. Indeed, already in the nineteenth century some significant medical reassessments of the inner ear paved the way for such a hypothesis. These scientific revisions led to the rapid development of (psycho) acoustic studies such as that of Sir James Jeans from 1937, in which the idea is presented that the oval membrane of the cochlea ‘serves as a safety device acting rather like the slipping clutch of a motor-car, which may save the oval membrane from injury, if the ear-drum is set too violently into sudden motion’ (Jeans 1968: 245). The modern understanding of human listening was informed by such popularized scientific lectures on psychoacoustics, which for obvious historical reasons in the alleged ‘Age of Noise’ drew attention to the condition of sound waves as both intangible and penetrating in their impact on the human body. Such acute awareness led Hillel Schwartz to claim that the ear’s agency in resisting its ‘indefensible’, ‘accumulative’ susceptibility and its lingering ‘breakdown’ – such as in tinnitus, ear aches and hearing impairment to various degrees – is part and parcel of our modern hearing culture (Schwartz 2003: 487, 493). Nonetheless, Schafer’s spatial notions of sound as soundscape in the 1970s finally translated such historical thinking of the ear’s active mechanisms into a scientific, quantifiable method. In reaction to Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of ‘reduced listening’ as developed in his Traité des objets musicaux (1966), which focuses attention on the specific qualities of a sound as object (objet sonore) without reference to its source or meaning, Schafer’s listening methods allowed for a quantitative analysis of the qualities of singular sounds but in relation to one another and to the Pe rf o r m a n c e R e s e a r c h 1 5 ( 3 ) , p p . 8 8 - 9 4 © Ta y l o r & F ra n c i s L td 2 0 1 0 D O I : 1 0 . 1 0 8 0 / 1 3 5 2 8 1 6 5 . 2 01 0 . 5 2 7 2 1 3 88 The Listener’s Response Downloaded by [University of Exeter] at 01:57 12 November 2013 particular environment, context or community in which they operate (Schafer 1977: 129, 134, 148). Besides Schafer’s singular attempt to adapt some of these methods to a study of the audience response to Harry Somers’s opera Louis Riel in 1969 (Schafer 1972), the mechanisms of listening in the theatre have not been properly investigated within theatre or performance studies, nor opera scholarship or musicology. As such, it is the modern – and historically contingent – considerations of listening and the modern listener presented by Barthes, Havas, Schafer and Schwartz that form the departure point for my investigation. The epigraph to this essay suggests that we first and foremost listen to sound indexically, because when listening is linked to survival, sound is potentially a menace; an interruption – and therefore, danger – to the listener, potentially disturbing one’s auditory pleasure and the gathering of acoustic information. Taking this idea further, I want to conceptualize sound in terms of auditory distress. I regard this rather austere notion as a metaphor for a particular, defining aspect of listening that opens up new perspectives on many of our auditory experiences in the theatre. The metaphor, however, reaches beyond the theatre: in our daily lives, we welcome acoustic disruption and literally take the ensuing distress upon us when we switch on our iPods, immerse ourselves in our mobile telephone conversations, or indulge in our home cinemas. Hence, I argue that auditory distress provides a conceptual basis for our understanding of how sound – in whatever manifestation – plays upon the spectator as a listener: a listening subject. The highly attuned and controlled space of the theatre hall never adequately compensates for the intervening power of sound, eliciting subjective responses in the audience: one simply has to listen. The distress in listening, which goes mostly unnoticed, manifests itself as an appeal to our bodies, senses and, primarily, to our (inner) ears. Frequently in experimental music theatre performances, and likewise in most post89 dramatic theatre performances, the act of listening – and thereby, the listener – is put to the test. This is the case in The Wooster Group’s recent music drama interpretation of Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone (2007–9), a production that combines post-dramatic and operatic performance art. Taking this performance as a case study, I will demonstrate that auditory distress can be understood not so much as an intentional, aesthetic strategy but as the departure point for all auditory perception, and therefore for both a (psycho)acoustically and culturally informed analysis of listening in the theatre. The specific theatrical context, with its regulating mechanisms, has the potential to turn the spectator into an acute listener, making her attentive to the filtering and imaginative positionings of listening which give salience, coherence, meaning and relative ‘closure’ to otherwise fragmented experiences. Listening should then be investigated in terms of the specific responses of the listener to the auditory distress, as highlighted by theatre mechanisms. In order to understand how these responses contribute to meaningful experiences (suggested by Barthes and Schafer), we need a theoretical framework that includes both theories of sound perception and signification. Through my case study, I will lay the founding concepts for such a framework. Consequently, I contend that a music theatre performance such as La Didone can be said to engage in present-day cultures of listening within the comprehensive though much contested space of aurality. AUDITORY DISTRESS AS A CONCEPTUAL BASIS La Didone provides an illustration of how auditory distress can work as a conceptual basis from which to understand how sound calls for an active response from the spectator in the listening act. The performance is derived from the 1641 Baroque opera by Francesco Cavalli. In The Wooster Group’s staging2, the original music drama is overlaid with Mario 2 The Wooster Group is located in Brooklyn, New York. La Didone initially came into being in response to an invitation from the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts in Brussels to stage works by Busenello. The performance was first presented in Brussels from 19 May to 24 May 2007. Following this, the production toured Europe. I saw the production given on 30 May 2007 in the Stadsschouwburg Rotterdam, as part of the opera festival ‘Operadagen Rotterdam’. Downloaded by [University of Exeter] at 01:57 12 November 2013 causes an urge to place the sound, to compensate for the auditory distress. In this sense, Steven Connor is right to suggest that there are no proper ‘sound objects’: there are only events as a result of constant collisions between objects: sounds are ‘always on the move, are hungry to come to rest’ (Connor 2005: 54). Seen this way, the confusion effected by the ventriloquised effects in La Didone forces a questioning of the very propensity of listening to give sounds a home, a point of rest: can we really pin a sound down to a source, an index that would satisfy a need, as proposed by Barthes and Havas? Here, the listener is encouraged by the collision of sounds to attempt to trace possible sources, connecting these sounds to others experienced beyond the context of the double narrative and the representation of the play. However, the sounds can also come to rest within the narratives, making at times the two diegetic universes collide. As is to be expected with The Wooster Group, the approach to creating the most meticulous of soundscapes breaks with a tradition of sound design in drama, where sound is usually ‘added’ and then in such a way as not to ‘disturb’ the drama as expressed through text. In The Wooster Group’s La Didone, on the contrary, the spectator is fully exposed to the disturbing quality of sound, even in the most pleasing piece of Baroque music. The soundscapes here reveal another reason for considering auditory distress as the basis for an understanding of auditory perceptions: they create an unframeable excess of auditory impulses in the listener. The performative power of sound burgeons in its excessive nature. This idea follows the rule of thumb that every sense perception is always in excess of the meanings and associations called upon by our experience. Verstraete Bava’s cult science fiction film of 1965, Terrore Nello Spazio, also known as the Planet of the Vampires. We constantly switch back and forth between the ancient story of Dido and the story of American astronauts fighting against an invisible enemy on the planet Aura, as if both worlds were running parallel to each other in time. The juxtaposition goes hand in hand with a shower of sound effects taken from the science fiction movie (montage by Matt Schloss): predictable electronic blips and beeps, but also an occasional wavering theremin sound. The hybridity of the performance lies not only in the use of different media – a video screen, text projections, and sound amplification technology – but also in the addressing of multiple senses with a bombardment of stimuli. The performance of Cavalli’s music further involves an unusual combination of acoustic and electronic instruments and voice amplification (with music direction by Bruce Odland). The rather odd combination of Cavalli’s opera and Bava’s cult movie seems justified by more than a dramaturgical twist. More often than not, the film seems to contain and compensate for sounds which otherwise seem to lack an origin or identification. At many instances, the actors on stage double the gestures of the actors in the movie and move their lips to the voices on the soundtrack. And vice versa: the dubbed voices are sometimes subdued and superimposed by the amplified voices of the actors on stage. These displaced sources of the voice give rise to uncanny effects. The actors appear to speak in some sort of double voice and confuse the listener as to the voice’s precise location and origin. This confusion creates the impression that the characters can easily be interchanged between cinema screen and theatre stage, and between the concomitant narrative worlds. It also reflects a primary factor in the conceptualization of distress as lying at the basis of our auditory perceptions: a sound is made up of collisions of sound waves; it never stems from a single sound source or one object alone. This displacement CHANNELING AUDITORY DISTRESS AND THE LISTENING SUBJECT In a rather throw-away remark in his book The Concept of Music (1990), composer and author 90 The Listener’s Response Downloaded by [University of Exeter] at 01:57 12 November 2013 Robin Maconie suggests that the activities of hearing and listening consist of keeping unwanted intensities at bay. This idea resonates with Schafer’s systematic analyses of the modern soundscape. Schafer demonstrates that sound is always spatially transgressing an acoustic horizon (such as the daily, urban hubbub, with a constant level of noise in the background), as well as the listener’s personal perceptual thresholds. Observing that our ears have no lids that can be closed at will, unlike the eyes, Schafer suggests that a sound always has to grab our attention, to distinguish it from the constant barrage of sounds entering our ears. Certainly, one might conceive of this ‘intervening’ nature of sound – and the ensuing distress – more neutrally in terms of a sensory stimulus, a stimulation of both ear and body, which might equally well be harmonious and pleasurable. However, such austere terms highlight a fundamental aspect of the specific ways in which sound addresses the listener, and how the listener reacts. The term ‘intervening’ then implies the need for the listener to respond, due to the threat posed by the excess of sound intensities. As a consequence, an acoustic community is always marked by the constant threat of auditory disturbance and a shared desire to control the (subconsciously) perceived menace (and the sound does not necessarily have to consist of high decibels to be perceived as threatening in this way). Similarly, an audience in the theatre is exposed to the intervention of sound that produces sensory excess, thereby producing a temporary acoustic community with some shared responses to the ensuing auditory distress. Schafer argues that, in order to compensate for the distress, by way of protection we have developed an elaborate psychological and cognitive mechanism for filtering out undesirable sounds (Schafer 1977: 11). What is desirable is here defined in terms of what we can cognitively and comprehensibly cope with. The mechanism that Schafer describes is a structure of listening modes that can be addressed by the nature of the sounds (for 91 instance, sounds that signal something or prompt our immediate attention, as opposed to background sounds) and their acoustic contexts providing spatial perspective. These modes are further developed by Michel Chion in his books on sound in cinema, culminating in Audio-Vision. Conversely, the excess of auditory stimuli in La Didone elicits a plethora of listening modes, highly subjective and idiosyncratic. For instance, the juxtaposition of the two sound worlds of the music drama and the science fiction picture could, in Chion’s terms, result in a causal listening mode in which one tries to distinguish and attribute the sounds to each world respectively, or to the live musicians in the corner of the stage; this might equally cause moments of evenly hovering attention or global perception.3 Depending on one’s position as constitutive of the subjective response to auditory distress, these different modes of listening put at stake the very urge for signification through what one conceptualizes as cognitively desired. This desire is compromised by an urge to place the sounds in a meaningful relation or context where they can temporarily come to rest. ‘Meaning’ should not, then, be conflated with what one can verbalize about these temporary fixations or indices of sound. Rather, it should be understood in terms of the listener’s relation to the sounds and the musical performance. A further argument for the urge of meaning through relation as a secondary step in the listener’s responses is revealed by the notion of the ‘sonorous envelope’. This psychoanalytical concept, referring to an early phase in infancy, expresses how the soothing wraparound ‘blanket’ or auditory ‘bath’ of sound in the maternal voice functions as an acoustic mirror which marks a split with the sounding environment in our early experiences of the world. As Connor has argued, this split highlights the experience of our auditory selves in relation to the sounding and surrounding world, in the midst of which we recognize ourselves as subjects (Connor 1997: 214). 3 Barthes’s psycho- analytical listening (1977), based on Freud’s gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit, in the latter’s 1912 essay ‘Recommendations for Physicians on the Psychoanalytic Method of Treatment’. Downloaded by [University of Exeter] at 01:57 12 November 2013 The gaze of the other, as Lacan praised Sartre for emphasizing, has entered the voyeur’s field of non-vision: it is an (offscreen) acoustic gaze, one experienced not visually, but acoustically, through the surprise of hearing another presence, of feeling him there acoustically, through one’s ears. (Hollier 1997: 33) The concept of the auditory gaze helps us to understand that sound as intervention can cause awareness of the auditory distress that is inherent to listening. Equally, in the theatre, sound, as essentially ‘invisible’ and ‘a-topical’ (placeless), can intervene and ‘disturb’ a visual experience, while nevertheless demanding a relation to contextually bound visual correspondences. In a theatre production such as La Didone, sound can similarly ‘frame’ us as listeners, and consequently as listening subjects. Instantly, we attribute indexical meaning to the sound, which could materialize into an image in our imagination when we do not find the sound source right away. At the same time, this index marks our relation to the sound. As such, the disturbance might make us aware of our own role and presence in the meaning that we attribute to the sound. Through this relation, we regain control over the auditory distress that affected our sensory selves. Verstraete Whether the envelope of sound in music theatre or opera can actually remind us of the split in our experience of our ‘selves’ is contestable. However, the concept helps to explain how we relate to the spatiality of sound, not only affectively with our bodies but also cognitively, as we try to make meaning of our surrounding world through the cultural discourse in which we are formed. The sonorous envelope calls upon the listener’s desire to attribute meaning to sound in relation to her own listening culture, and as a result the listener can then recognize herself as listening subject. This desire is specifically called upon in La Didone as a result of the impossibility of framing all sounds in a meaningful way, which brings the spectator’s sense of auditory self into a continuous state of crisis. This crisis is emphasized by the absence of sufficient visual stimuli and designative meanings. In this context, the principle of the ‘auditory gaze’, which Jean-Paul Sartre inadvertently describes in Being and Nothingness, can provide a perspective on how the crisis of the auditory self might be resolved. Sartre describes a peeping Tom suddenly startled by the sound of footsteps on a staircase behind him, bringing to his attention the presence of a third party (Sartre 1956: 349). The presence of an invisible sound intervenes and catches him in the act of looking, and the invisible footsteps are threatening to the voyeur’s gaze, as Dennis Hollier comments: THE SCHIZOPHONIC PERSPECTIVE Through the notions of the sonorous envelope and auditory gaze, one could come to the conclusion that sound’s ontology always seems to reside in a fundamental split. Equally, the driving principle behind The Wooster Group’s staging of La Didone is a radical dissociation, a splitting up which is substantiated by the disembodied voices that constantly travel between film screen and theatre stage. Actors dub the characters in the projected movie; they lip-sync to the opera singers and play air guitar, while the real singers and musicians perform live from a shadowy corner of the stage. At times the continuous sound effects protrude from the acoustic horizon determined by Cavalli’s score. Elsewhere, Dido’s heartbreaking lament on Aeneas’ departure becomes the soundtrack to a kitschy space fight. In both cases, the layered acoustic scenes seem to suggest a relative independence from the originating images. In Chion’s film theory, such dissociations between sound and image are discussed as examples of ‘acousmatization’: an effect of the mediation that marks the absence in ostension of an immediate connection between sound and its source (see, for instance, Chion 1994: 71–2). Although acousmatization principally affects 92 The Listener’s Response Downloaded by [University of Exeter] at 01:57 12 November 2013 our auditory perception, it is defined in terms of its initial reliance on visuality, or rather the absence of an immediately visible source or cause. De-acousmatization brings the source body of a sound (back) into sight.4 The word ‘acousmatique’ – as coined by Jérôme Peignot in 19555 – refers back to an ancient Greek context: the sixth century BC lessons in which Pythagoras taught his pupils by speaking from behind a curtain – like an oracle – so as to not let his physical presence distract their focus from the spoken word and thus the content of his message. As such, acousmatization is foremost a theatrical device closely connected to the masking of the actor’s presence, and even in physical presence, in ventriloquism. The splitting of sound is generally an effect of its enclosure in a recorded or transmitted medium. Schafer spoke in the most pejorative terms of acousmatic listening, renaming it ‘schizophonic’ listening, partly because of his ideal of restoring sounds to what he thought was their lost natural and harmonious state (Schafer 1977:237-45). For Schafer, schizophonia is pathological and symptomatic of modern listening, predominantly influenced by the invention of phonographic (i.e. recording) technology (Schafer 2004: 34-5; Truax 1984: 120-2).6 To him, the acousmatic effect of audio technology signals a fundamental negativity towards the modern subject who fails to synthesise all. Despite its pejorative underpinning, the term, combining the Greek schizo, meaning ‘split’, and phone, meaning ‘voice’ or ‘sound’, is a productive tool when applied to the space created in La Didone: it suggests a split listening situation, caused by removing the sounds from their original sources and reassembling them. By exposing the spectator to continuously split perceptions, La Didone foregrounds the ways in which the listener tries to find modes of listening to deal with these disruptions and fragmentations of the auditory space. Acousmatization becomes a viewpoint here, a schizophonic point of listening. As such, 93 schizophonia can be used as an aesthetic principle that helps the listener to search for perspectives, relations, or indices that feed the desire to and help her to interconnect the processes of looking and listening – to take up a position towards the acoustic excess, thereby gaining control over the acute auditory distress. Through its schizophonic perspectives, La Didone demonstrates how a performance channels auditory distress, demanding a much more active filtering process on the part of the spectator–auditor. Such listening perspectives manage the listener’s attention and, ultimately, the ways she positions herself towards the performance. However, in La Didone these regulative mechanisms also tend to deregulate the structure of listening modes, to the point of an impasse in meaning – a surplus that cannot be semioticized. This happens at instances when the schizophonic perspectives cannot anymore be compensated for by a comprehensible link with either of the diegetic worlds. It is these moments of surplus that sustain both the danger and the promise of the satisfaction of a need. They are the moments of necessity, enticed by the auditory distress, which set off the human imagination; these moments expose the desire to relate to the sounds as a listener in a community of listeners, in order to create a meaningful whole. C O N C L U S I O N : M U S I C T H E AT R E W I T H I N THE SPACE OF AURALITY The conceptual framework unfolded by La Didone is not peculiar to this performance. However, the performance demands a sense of listening that is uncommon, even unheard of, in most theatre performances. As a post-operatic performance, it lends a critical ear to what it means to be a listener in a specific context, with particular cultural attitudes of listening. In its play upon our auditory attention, the performance offers glimpses of awareness as to how our modes of attention are shaped and, equally, of how a cultural discourse is reflected 4 In fact, the latter has inspired Mladen Dolar to claim that the acousmatic is part of every sound perception and not merely an effect of electroacoustic mediation, as Chion claims. Dolar refers to the ontological atopicality of the human voice, highlighting the enigmatic qualities of the voice, but the idea can be extended to sound in general. This leads Dolar to conclude, somewhat paradoxically, that ‘there is no such thing as disacousmatization’ (Dolar 2006: 70). 5 Peignot first used the term in this way in the radio programme, Musique animée, a broadcast of the ‘Groupe de musique concrète’, 1955. 6 Schafer coined the term ‘schizophonia’ in his first book, The New Soundscape (1969). He situates the beginning of the ‘era of schizophonia’ with Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876 and the invention of the gramophone in 1877 by Charles Cross and Thomas Edison. No doubt, as Douglas Kahn has pointed out, the idea of phonography (as a particular realization of the ‘figure of transcription’) was introduced discursively long before these inventions, which “transformed [it] by their adoption within a technological sphere” (Kahn 1999: 16). Downloaded by [University of Exeter] at 01:57 12 November 2013 REFERENCES Barthes, Roland and Roland Havas (1991 [1977]) ‘Listening’, in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, 2nd edn, trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 245–60. Barthes, Roland and Roland Havas (1995 [1977]) ‘Ecoute’, in Éric Marty (ed.) Oeuvres complètes, Tome III: 1974–1980, Paris: Seuil, pp. 727–36. Chion, Michel (1994) Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, eds. and trans. Walter Murch and Claudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press. Connor, Steven (2005) ‘Ears Have Walls: On Hearing Art’, lecture given in the series Bodily Knowledges: Challenging Ocularcentricity, Tate Modern, 21 February 2003, FO(A)RM 4, Topography: 48–57. Verstraete in the ways we manage our attention in relation to objects of perception. Auditory distress is the vehicle to such awareness. Through our imaginative responses to the intervention and excess of sound, we tune into a cultural discourse and use it as a filter that manages our attention. As such, a music theatre performance such as La Didone displays the secret workings of aurality as a process that includes the part of our cultural discourse in which all meaning making, norms, values and ideas of hearing and listening are determined. In this sense, La Didone reveals aurality to be a discursive space that is continuously contestable in relation to our times and the dominant culture. Music theatre ultimately responds to the discursive space of aurality in relation to its audience. It is in this space that music theatre and the auditor–spectator can create meaning in relation to one another. Hence, a deeper exploration of the modalities of this relation between the spectator as listener and the mechanisms of the theatre that play (upon) her allows for a deeper awareness of the process of becoming a historical listening subject. Auditory distress in the theatre, then, reveals to us the specific, idiosyncratic, imaginative and structural responses of a listener who relates herself and responds to the sociocultural structures of aurality. Dolar, Mladen (2006) A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press. Hollier, Denis (1997) ’The Death of Paper, Part Two: Artaud’s Sound System’, OCTOBER 80, Spring 1997: 27-37. Jeans, Sir James (1968 [1937]) Science & Music, New York: Dover Publications. Kahn, Douglas (1999) Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press. Maconie, Robin (1990) The Concept of Music, Oxford & New York: Clarendon Press. Metz, Christian (1980) ‘Aural Objects’, trans. Georgia Gurrieri, Yale French Studies 60 (‘Cinema/Sound’): 24–32. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1956 [1943]) Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Washington Square Press. Schaeffer, Pierre (1966) Traité des objets musicaux: Essai interdisciplines, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Schafer, R. Murray (1969) The New Soundscape, Vienna: Universal Edition. Schafer, R. Murray (1972) The Public of the Music Theatre: Louis Riel: A Case Study, Vienna: Universal Edition. Schafer, R. Murray (2004 [1973]) ‘The Music of the Environment’, in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds ) Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, New York & London: Continuum, pp.29-39. Schafer, R. Murray (1977) The Tuning of the World, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Schwartz, Hillel (2003) ‘The Indefensible Ear: A History’, in Michael Bull and Les Back (eds) The Auditory Culture Reader, Oxford & New York: Berg, pp. 487–501. (Sensory Formations Series, ed. David Howes) Truax, Barry (1984) Acoustic Communication, Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Connor, Steven (1997) ‘The Modern Auditory I’, in Roy Porter (ed.) Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, London & New York: Routledge, pp. 203–23. 94