Anacoustic Modes of Sound Construction and the Semiotics of Virtuality

Email: [email protected]

1. INTRODUCTION

The composition of music typically and traditionally presupposes its ultimate manifestation in sound – in physical, acoustic vibrations that can be heard by humans. It follows that composers often employ rationale based on sound ideas.

There is, however, a body of work that challenges this seemingly fundamental notion. Its compositional strategies are enacted in the domain of digital sound synthesis in which abstract schemata (kinds of information) have the potential to become sonic phenomena, but not inevitably or predictably so. We witness these processes by hearing what they leave as a trace, which is perceptually distinct from acoustically recorded sound (i.e., sound captured with a microphone) or synthetic sound derived from acoustic principles. This type of sound construction, divorced from representational intention, is suggestive of anacoustic as opposed to acoustic origins.¹

The common thread that links each example of anacoustic composition is the conception of data as sound. This article examines anacoustic modes from a technical and aesthetic standpoint, drawing attention to the way informational constructions (of sound or otherwise) relate to the material circumstances by which information is necessarily instantiated. Drawing from N. Katherine Hayles’s semiotics of virtuality (1999: 247–82), the term anacoustic links different discursive formations of sound, information and materiality. When applied as an analytical device to the creation and interpretation of acousmatic music, the semiotics of virtuality illuminate relationships between embodied complexities, representational absence, informational patterns and noise.² This orientation attributes significance to the digital audio medium as an idiomatic voice in itself as well as a hyperreal window into the physical, acoustic world.

For preliminary clarification, I borrow the term sound construction from Joanna Demers (2010) to describe the production of ‘new’ sounds through synthesis, which is distinct from sound reproduction: the re-presentation of an acoustical event via recording or the use of pre-existing, sampled materials.

2. ANACOUSTIC MODES OF SOUND CONSTRUCTION

One possible extreme in virtual semiotics, anacoustic modes of sound construction reflect a conception of data as sound. They employ types of synthesis which address the computer at the most fundamental and abstract level of coding: the syntactic level of information. Claude Shannon (the ‘father of information theory’) described this form of information in his mathematical theory of communication