Long Live the Senses

Working at length and in detail with sounds, electroacoustic musicians often become deeply skeptical of “common sense” ways of conceptualizing what sound is and how we hear it. This book is partly about the failure and limitation of repeated attempts by musicians, scientists, and listeners to define and analyze the human experience of sound. For his starting point, however, Michel Chion turns away from analysis and looks to sound as it has been conceived and voiced in poetry and literature. He shows how sound can evoke, and report on, the kinds of spaces in which it occurs; he touches on the first awakening of sound in the infant human even before birth; he explores what sounds can tell us of time and duration, and how sound passes through the labyrinth of the ear. From here he opens up the labyrinthine questions of how our experience of sound is constructed, how we recognize the sound of language, how we distinguish musical sound from noise, and why certain sounds come forward from the background to claim our attention.

In the course of this journey, he often dips into the territory he has made very much his own, and on which his international reputation is largely based. Cinema, he says, is “a place where sounds cohabitate,” providing, as it does, unique opportunities, in the collision of dialogue, music, and background noise, to examine at close quarters the various kinds of listening that humans deploy and the interplay between them. But, if Chion’s work is more widely known in the specific field of sound in film, his roots are deep in the world of electro-acoustic music composition and, in particular, in the tradition of musique concrète. This begins with the experiments of Pierre Schaeffer, who in the 1940s and 1950s generated a new kind of music based on the use of recorded sound, theorized listening in a new way, and laid out taxonomies of sounds that are today increasingly used by researchers into auditory perception. If, in a review of a book by Chion, I seem to be giving undue attention to the work of Schaeffer, this is because Schaeffer’s approach is an underlying theme in much of the book and the explicit subject of part of it.

There is a massive, almost scandalous, time-lapse between the publication of the early writings on musique concrète and their availability to anglophone readers. This seems particularly extraordinary given the interest of the BBC in Schaeffer’s work by 1957 at the latest, with the broadcast of Samuel Beckett’s first (concrète-influenced) radio play, “All That Fall,” and the formation of the Radiophonic Workshop the following year. After I interviewed Schaeffer in Paris in 1986, I mentally gave myself the task of translating his Traité des Objets Musicaux, but found no one in England interested in publishing it. One chapter of Schaeffer’s Traité was finally translated for Audio Culture, edited by Christopher Cox, and published in 2004. Schaeffer’s À la Recherche d’une Musique Concrète, written in 1952, was first published in translation by UCL in 2012. The English translation of Michel Chion’s Guide des Objets Sonores has been available online only since the same year. Michel Chion’s Sound represents, in other words, only the second substantial book from this entire tradition to be available, as a book, for English readers. First published in France in 1998 under the title Le Son. Traité d’acoulogie, it has the virtue of being relatively up to date. Not a history of electroacoustic music, but a broad meditation on sound, it contains years of thought and experience that cover the whole period of this music’s emergence.

Michel Chion has chosen not to interpret sound in terms of the social and spatial interactions between human groups, as Brandon LaBelle does, nor in terms of questions of spiritual and secular power within a historical schema, as David Hendy does. He is not, like Seth Horowitz, especially interested in the connection of sound to...