The Musical–Narrative Dichotomy: Sweet Anticipation and some implications for acousmatic music

Abstract

Acousmatic music is heavily informed by a central duality which lies at the heart of the art form, between the musical layer on the one hand, and the narrative layer on the other. Emphasis shifts between these two layers, and they interact to construct further layers of meaning. In his book Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, David Huron proposes that our responses to musical stimuli are in fact identical to our responses to real-world stimuli, and follow the same processes. This appears to negate somewhat the dichotomy of musical and narrative layers. We propose a shift in perspective away from a vision of parallel musical and narrative layers, and towards a dualism built from staggered response times to different aspects of the same material.

Narrative Modes in Acousmatic Music

“…As has been argued elsewhere (Andean 2010;2014a), one of the obvious elements of acousmatic music that sets it apart from other musical forms in its degree of narrativity, is the potential use and presence of recorded real-world material. This ranges from short, discrete, isolated materials, to the use of dominating, full-bodied soundscape recordings offering a fully formed sonic environment containing any number of sonic agents, backgrounds, and details.…”

“…To some extent this is due to the characteristics and genesis of the genre: on the one hand, acousmatic music's deployment of recorded real-world materials tends to carry with it a range of realworld references and associations that almost inevitably evoke a narrative experience of the work (Andean 2010); on the other hand, however, this narrative aspect results from much deeper features of the principles of the genre, due in no small part to the phenomenological emphasis of Pierre Schaeffer (1952; in the birth of the art form. Of course, many say the same of music in general -that musical experience is a fundamentally narrative experience (among others, Almén 2008, Grabócz 2009, Tarasti 1994).…”

“…This allows the acousmatic composer to establish order, expectation, and anticipation, and thereby also to thwart expectation, to surprise, delay, or deny (Andean 2010). Consider, for example, the immediately recognised and understood pattern of the bouncing ball -a series of accelerating impacts; or, of a fall -a descending glissando, followed by an impact.…”

Narrative in Form: A topological study of meaning in transmedial narratives

“…Wishart draws a parallel between composition with sounds and composition with sound-images, mostly referring to representational sound objects. Given Petitot’s descriptions, however (see previous section), the referential nature of image construal is inherent to our conceptual functions, based in part on the natural organisation of morphologies and our schematic representation of them, and therefore does not need to apply to representational material alone (Young 1996; Andean 2010). When remote surrogacy (Smalley 1997: 112) is dominant, there is a ‘[u]seful way of interpreting the “abstract” phenomenon’: ‘matching certain aspects of a sound’s morphology to known source-cause patterns, though these may be fleeting, hybridised or in a state of constant flux.…”

“…In the same article he addresses the issue of potential uses of sound imagery, in the context of spectral transformations, in mediating a coherent articulation between the spectromorphological and the referential (see Young 2007: 28–32). This is quite concisely described by Andean (2010), who proposes that, even in the case of a composer working from a musical rather than a narrative standpoint, the effects of the sound image will ‘[a]lmost inevitably construct a string of mental imagery’ (ibid. : 110).…”