Abstract
As has been well covered in histories of art, aesthetics and spectatorship across the humanities, the late modern period represented a time when ideas and anxieties about time, temporality and history passed amongst the various art forms. The notion that it might be possible to escape the determinism of form, transforming the common temporalities of music in order to bring musical experience into closer correspondence with that of the silent arts, rebounded amongst artists and composers. Works whose temporalities may be more closely related to reading than to A to B objective succession emerge, wherein chronométrie time may be interrupted, replayed, as well as sped up and slowed down. Though time is never evaded, the priority is on the present, as the listener is rendered free to exert a certain influence over the course of events, becoming an active agent in the work's unfolding.Comprising a body of theoretical and practical work, this thesis presents a thorough critical examination of this 'present of listening'. It asks what this new aesthetic means in a musico-historical sense; does it have a politics; what happens to artistic agency, musical meaning, and perception when form is suspended, or the here and now of listening in the world is prioritised over listening in a concert hall; in sum, how does musical experience change? Experiencing the present, as these works invite us to do, appears to foster a situation in which perception may genuinely be called 'creative'. Although imagined in different ways, the moment of listening becomes a performance, a kind or improvisation. But to what extent is this creative mode of participation already structured by the priorities it purports to escape? Do we listen freely, or do these works entail a more radical overhaul of the self? A process of unlearning, perhaps: one akin to 'antitechnique' improvisational practices?
Methodologically, the aesthetics of presentness is examined in relation to two dimensions of music and sound art; one, an objective dimension relating to time, form, and musical history; and the other, a subjective one relating to musical experience in everyday life. In the first case, presentness is considered amongst new ideas of temporality and non-temporality in the late 20th Century, where space comes to be extolled and time is equated with finitude. In the second, it is placed in conversation with ideas about emotion, autobiographical memory, and power. Here 'presentness' appears to represent a path to emergent experiences that are not steered by the emotional contour of the music, whilst also giving permission to alternative listening states such as trancing. These themes are explored over four sections that each take in a variety of perspectives, engaging literature, film theory, critical theory, philosophy, and perceptual and cognitive science. The ideas are sounded out and critiqued through the author's own compositional practice, which draws upon the sciences of psychoacoustics and music psychology to render audible to the listener the mechanisms of audition. Employing auditory illusions and perceptual anomalies, these spatial sound works are actualised by acts of voluntary and involuntary 'perceptual creativity', thereby dramatising the key problematic that runs throughout the thesis. Designed so as to 'choreograph' both general and particular aspects of auditory perception, they raise questions about freedom and control; attention, distraction and absorption; and what is innate and what is learned in auditory perception.
| Date of Award | Jul 2013 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Gary Kendall (Supervisor) & Eric Lyon (Supervisor) |