Acoulogy as a framework for environmental sound

Abstract

Electronic technologies enable the composer to select, repeat, fragment and otherwise manipulate and study sound. These possibilities have been a strong impetus in the development of innovative theories of sound alongside radical compositional practices using recorded environmental sounds. However, a holistic model that clarifies and maps the stakes of the various practices is lacking. Thus, I propose to elucidate the concept of listening intentions and to place it at the core of sonic art theory. In that sense, a model of acoulogy, as the study of listening, is a valuable framework to explain the heterogeneity of listening modes and the connections between composing and listening. This justifies a phenomenological approach, which focuses on a first-person description of the different ways to experience sounds. Several domains are thus identified concerning the potentials for abstraction contained in recorded sounds, like the relationship of the sound to its source, the paradigms of contextualized versus decontextualized sounds, found versus processed sound, and the relationship to reality. These concepts provide the basic vocabulary to describe and analyze different forms of sonic art.