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The Sharawadji Effect
- Wesleyan University Press
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The Sharawadji EVect A defining moment in my life came in 1993 while driving alone, from Ottawa to Montreal, in a dense snowstorm. I was listening to the radio, and the composition that was playing literally “lifted” my spirit into another level of perception . The work carried me into listening. I don’t recall what this particular piece was about, but I clearly remember and cherish the sensation it has left me. Ever since, I have been trying to touch and possibly create such a listening experience by means of electroacoustic soundscape composition. I still wonder what touched me that night. Was it the radio or was it the storm that caught my ear? Was it the combination of the two? Or perhaps it was the combination of three elements: the listening space, the radio broadcast , and me? Industrialization and new technologies have transformed our sound environment . New sounds have appeared, have transformed our concept of hearing, and have modified our aesthetic criteria in a decisive fashion. These aesthetic criteria have evolved to such an extent that we now willingly accept “noise” as music, but we also recognize that “music” can be noise. We hear diVerently today because we are increasingly listening to the world through the prosthetic loudspeaker, and our values of good and bad sounds are blurred by the seemingly endless oVerings of new technologies, combined with a generally poor public education in acoustic perception. Considering the phenomenon that Canadian scientist Ursula Franklin has described as “cultural conformity,” in which “the technology of an activity de- fines the activity itself and in so doing, excludes the emergence of alternatives ,”1 might the technology of sound production be defining the aesthetic of the sound? Are we choking under the pressure of electronic technology, incapable of controlling or directing it? Perhaps in response to these concerns, the notion of ecology and social responsibility of technological artists has emerged recently in the domain of electroacoustics. Artists from diverse disciplines are exploring and employing the soundscape in their work. Their interesting and timely reflections on prob- [ 123 ] claude schryer ⢇ lems of acoustic ecology are expanding the debate and nourishing discussions on the quality and organization of the soundscape in urban and natural environments and how our listening process has changed. I believe that artists, and electroacoustic artists in particular, can become a conduit for our collective memory and help us better understand the breadth of our acoustic environment, which we rarely actually hear in everyday life. They can propose new associations, acoustic games, and poetic metaphors, can challenge our perceptions of reality and pose fundamental questions about the coexistence of electronic technology in an environmentally aware and responsible way. For example, in 1992, the fm network of Société Radio-Canada (the Canadian French-language national broadcasting service) produced a special project called Droit de cité. The idea was to commission sound artists to transform Montreal soundscapes into musical performance pieces, which were broadcast live, without warning, during regular broadcasts. As a result, sound artists were able to shake the fundamental listening conventions of the average classical music listener. That same year, I and other sound artists created the Bicycle Orchestra, an electroacoustic band on wheels made of recycled bicycle and electronics parts, which performed in the streets and parks of Montreal. Our intention was to create a performance instrument that could demonstrate, in an amusing and inventive way, some basic principles of ecological thinking through the combination of street performance and electroacoustics. But for me the most interesting and eVective way to address the ecology/ technology paradigm is through electroacoustic soundscape composition. Since 1989, I have been in the process of developing a theory and a practice of electroacoustic soundscape composition that attempts to address some of these issues. It is my journey into the soundscape through the medium of electroacoustics that I want to discuss here, and my quest to discover the “unexplainable beauty,” or Sharawadji EVect, in the music of the acoustic environment. A term coined by seventeenth-century European travelers who had visited China, the Sharawadji EVect has been described by Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue as an aesthetic eVect that “comes about as a surprise and will carry you elsewhere, beyond strict representation—out of context”: In this brutal confusion, the senses get lost. A beautiful Sharawadji plays with the rules of composition, manipulates them and awakens a feeling of pleasure through perceptual confusion. . . . Whether in a dreamlike or anxious state...