The term acousmatic appears frequently in the texts of this book. Yet, what does it mean?

An English neologism, which comes from the French acousmatique, has its origins with Pythagoras (6th century BC) who was (it is said) delivering his—uniquely oral—teaching behind a curtain to prevent his physical presence from distracting his disciples, allowing them to better concentrate exclusively on the content of his message.

Closer in time to us, at the beginning of this century, one finds in the two-volume French dictionary Le Larousse pour tous:

Acousmate. n. (from the Greek Akousma, what is heard). Imaginary sound, or of which the cause is not seen.

In 1955, the writer and poet Jérôme Peignot, at the beginning of musique concrète, used the adjective acousmatic, meaning ‘a sound that we can hear without knowing its cause’, to designate “the distance that separates a sound from its origins” by obscuring behind the impassivity of the loudspeaker any visual element that may be connected to it. In 1966, Pierre Schaeffer mused about giving his Traité des objets musicaux (Treatise on Musical Objects) the title “Traité d’acousmatique” (Treatise on Acousmatic). Finally, around 1974, to mark the difference and to avoid any confusion with incidental or transformed musical instruments (ondes Martenot, electric guitars, synthesizers, real-time digital audio systems…), François Bayle introduced the expression acousmatic music as a specific kind of music, as the art of projected sounds which is “shot and developed in the studio, projected in halls, like cinema.”

It is true that over the past twenty years, under the term electroacoustics there has been a proliferation of sound pieces which have little in relation to each other except a common use of electricity. It was therefore important to affirm, with precise terminology, æsthetic choices, a body of thought, and a language. It is also in this spirit that, since 1989, the Rencontres acousmatiques (Acousmatic Meetings) of composers in the south of France have been organized.

Thus, this music—or better: Acousmatic Art (Denis Dufour)—was conceived from its beginnings to be heard without the use of visual intervention. It does not involve any instrumentalist on stage—with the exception of the person who projects the work during a public performance in order to maximize the use of the given space. It organizes morphologies and sonic spectra, “images of sound” (François Bayle), coming from a multiplicity of sources, but that the absence of visual identification makes anonymous, unifies and prompts a more attentive listening. (Is it by pure coincidence that the hearing of blind people is reputed to be so refined?)

It follows its very own mechanisms that, due to their newness, require coherence and intuition. It is a causa mentale. Finally, it sets or fixes onto a medium (magnetic tape, computer disk or other) with precision and no maybes, the most subtle nuances chosen by the composer: what we hear doesn’t resemble what is wanted, it is what is wanted. This last point is very well presented by Michel Chion in his recent book, L’art des sons fixés, ou la musique concrètement (The Art of Fixed Sounds, or Music in Concrete Terms).

Further, let’s stress a fact that remains underrated. If music has always been closely associated with its reproduction by performers, as opposed to many other art forms that are once and for all fixed on a medium (painting, literature, cinema, video…), it is due to the impossibility to do so differently, and not by choice. Never before, until this day, could one capture, keep, and reproduce a faithful image of sound phenomena. Before it was necessary to use a more or less precise symbolic notation to capture the ideas of composers. This gave birth to a quasi-universal practice that we have no reason to complain about or tire of.

However, this situation is neither a fatality nor a law since today we know how to fix sound as we do for visual images or text. To pretend the opposite is only to rely on habit and on the largely publicized fetichism of the performer.

Acousmatic, the art of a century that prevents the disappearance of sound, is a new and autonomous art form which certainly finds in the compact disc—a genuine sound book—one of its most convincing vehicles. The seven works brought together here belong to this reality, still young but already engaged in the next millennium.

—Francis Dhomont,
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, July-August 1991


SOURCE: electrocd.com Francis Dhomont: Acousmatic, what is it?
2002|08|30