Bioacoustics

Through an exploration of the use of technology within bioacoustics and the interpretation of the resultant data in order to assess human acoustic impact on nonhuman species, Mickey Vallee introduces the term “transacoustic community” in order to illustrate the nefarious and transgressive means these data are put to. Vallee makes the charge that the bioacoustics community hears without listening, having a different imagination of sound to other sound-based researchers. This imagination springs not only from the specific aims of that community but also from the audio technology used (that ultimately relies on visualization for its data access), and this leads to a visually biased interpretation rather than a refined aurality.

Posthumanist Voices in Literature and Opera

From a background that critically investigates conceptualizations and understandings of the relations and dialectics between the inner and the outer voice and the discursive implications of the posthumanist appraisal of vocality, Jason D’Aoust examines the “operatic voice” or the vocality of opera as it is practiced and understood in the present period. From a philosophically informed perspective, D’Aoust engages with recent reappraisals of phonocentrism in voice studies, and analyzes artistic works from different genres, comprising opera (Mozart’s The Magic Flute), literature (Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), and film (Scott’s Blade Runner), in order to show how opera practitioners, authors, and film-makers use the sonorous imagination to deconstruct the canon.

Musical Notation as the Externalization of Imagined, Complex Sound

Henrik Sinding-Larsen analyzes how new tools for the visual description of sound revolutionized the way music was conceived, performed, and disseminated. Early on, the ancient Greeks had described pitches and intervals in mathematically precise ways. However, their complex system had few consequences until it was combined with the practical minds of Roman Catholic choirmasters around 1000 ce. Now, melodies became depicted as note-heads on lines with precise pitch meanings and with note names based on octaves. This graphical and conceptual externalization of patterns in sound paved the way for a polyphonic complexity unimaginable in a purely oral/aural tradition. However, this higher complexity also entailed strictly standardized/homogenized scales and less room for improvisation in much of notation-based music. Through the concept of externalization, lessons from the history of musical notation are generalized to other tools of description, and Sinding-Larsen ends with a reflection on what future practices might become imaginable and unimaginable as a result of computer programming.

Glitched and Warped

Anne Danielsen focuses on the new rhythmic feels that have developed within the field of popular music since the 1980s through the use of new digital production tools. In particular, she discusses the ways in which these feels are produced through the manipulation of sound samples and the timing of rhythm tracks. Initially, Danielsen evaluates the formation of these new feels from two perspectives, one that sees them as a continuation of earlier machine-generated grooves and another that positions them as an expansion of the grooviness of earlier groove-based music in unforeseen directions. She then discusses how they constitute a challenge to previous popular music forms while, at the same time, they offer new opportunities for human imagination and musical creativity. Danielsen discloses such transformations across several styles and points to the manner in which the new technologies allow for combining agency and automation in new compelling ways, leading to musics and gestural movements that go beyond the natural human repertoire.

On the Other Side of Time

A musical imagining of the future and an exposition of a challenge to the normative historical discourse are the subjects of Erik Steinskog’s chapter on Afrofuturism. These topics are dealt with through a discussion of “blackness” and a theoretical discourse that addresses the musical style and polemical and political stance of afrofuturist musicians such as Sun Ra and others following in his path. Steinskog suggests that afrofuturist music is a form of sonic time travel that intertwines the modalities of time represented by notions of past, present, and future, his argument being that reimaginations, reinterpretations, and revisions of a normative past are represented in the technology and music of the black future.

Imaginative Listening to Music

Theodore Gracyk takes issue with the claim that imaginative engagement is a prerequisite for the appreciation of music; that the experience of expressiveness in music derives from an imaginative enrichment that allows music to be heard as a sequence of motion and gestures in sound or that the expressive interpretation of music is guided by imaginative description. While not completely rejecting an imaginative response to music, Gracyk instead opts for an imaginative engagement with music described as “hearing-in.” While not all music demands such engagement, hearing-in is not a trigger for imaginative imagery but rather a musical prop that invites the listener to attend to music’s animation, for example, in the form of musical causality and anticipation.

Empirical Musical Imagery beyond the “Mind’s Ear”

Freya Bailes deals with the topic of musical imagery, and she uses embodied cognition as a framework to argue that musical imagery is a multimodal experience. Existing empirical studies of musical imagery are reviewed and Bailes points to future directions for the study of musical imagery as an embodied-cognition phenomenon. Arguing that musical imagery can never be fully disembodied, Bailes moves beyond the idea of auditory imagery as merely a simulation of auditory experience by “the mind’s ear.” Instead, she outlines how imagining sounds involves kinesthetic imagery and she concludes that sound and music are always connected to sensory motor processing.

Improvisation

Justin Christensen deals with the bond between improvisation and imagination in artistic experience. Starting with a reassessment in continental philosophy both of how imagination is conceived and can be demonstrated, Christensen observes that the connection between improvisation and imagination has previously had little value in classic aesthetic theories. He then goes on to argue for the value of improvisation as a reflection of perception–action coupling that is central to newer theories that favor embodied approaches to music cognition. In the light of such theories, where perception, action, and imagination are seen as interdependent properties, Christensen proposes a greater recognition of the processes of musicking—including improvisation—to better understand meaning-making and the role of imagination in musical experience.

Systemic Abstractions

Martin Knakkergaard discusses how numbers have had decisive consequences for the development of a tone system of fixed pitch intervals and proportions in general in Western music. Knakkergaard takes as his point of departure considerations regarding the Ancient Greek’s mystical fascination with the number four, aiming to show how this preoccupation can be seen as the primary factor behind the limitations and restricted principles implied in Western music culture and practice throughout European history. Thus, the implied number is regarded as a dominating factor that guides, regulates, and controls human imagination and expectation toward musical artifacts—today maybe even more than ever before.

Consumer Sound

Søren Bech and Jon Francombe provide an illustration of how sensory analysis is undertaken in the audio industry. They demonstrate how the industry attempts to quantify the listener’s imagination—which is taken to include a range of modifiers of the listener’s auditory experience including mood, expectation, and previous experience—in order to ensure that the end result, the listener’s auditory experience or impression after the audio transmission chain, matches the intended experience as closely as possible. An example is provided of sensory analysis used for qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the listening experience in a personal sound zone. A perceptual model has been developed to reliably predict a listener’s sense of distraction (due to interfering audio) from the experience of listening to audio intended for a particular zone.