Abstract
Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s differentiation between organic and inorganic matter, this chapter explores, in a historical and theoretical perspective, how the synthetic merging of sound, medium and environment into a groundless mediatized field of surrounding sound became a defining factor in the history of sound technology and in experimental, electronic and popular music. First, I discuss the ambient implications of synthetic, electronic and acoustic sound masses in the music of Edgard Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gÿorgi Ligeti. Subsequently, taking Phil Spector’s early hit productions as a paradigmatic example, I develop the notion of generalized pop as a form of material everyday synthetization of music into ambient sound design.
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Notes
- 1.
Eno quoted in Tamm (1995, p. 52).
- 2.
- 3.
The examples are all well-known and well-established examples within the Western canon of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music and sound design, and they will come as no surprise. My intention here is not to introduce a counter-narrative to the established cultural-historical accounts by digging out alternative or overlooked cultural expressions (the obvious necessity of such endeavors notwithstanding). On the contrary, I wish to give a new, critical, onto-aesthetic perspective on the already established narrative of the history of sound, art and technology by exposing its deep ambient implications and inclinations.
- 4.
As Stockhausen asked in 1961: “what have record and radio producers done up to this point? They have reproduced: reproduced music which in past ages was written for the concert hall and opera house; exactly as if the cinema had been content only with photographing old stage plays. […] The listener at the loudspeaker will sooner or later understand that it makes more sense that music coming from a loudspeaker be music that can be heard only over a loudspeaker and by no other means” (Stockhausen 2004, p. 376).
- 5.
Georgina Born (2013) has, among others, emphasized how the genealogy of sound art can be traced back to Varèse’s topological notion of music as spatially organized sound. As Born writes, the “copious topological, spatial and mobile metaphors coined by Varèse to imagine and describe the sonic material of his musical works—shifting planes, colliding masses, projection, transmutation, repulsion, speeds, angles and zones—[prefigures] the later interest in spatialisation in electronic and electroacoustic music and what has come to be called sound art […]” (Born 2013, p. 2).
- 6.
This can perhaps one of the reasons why Stanley Kubrick’s decision to use Ligeti’s Atmosphères, Lux Aeterna and Requiem as the musical accompaniment for some of the most cosmically spectacular passages in his 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was such an effective match: The non-sound of outer space is cinematically rendered and sonified as a synthetically deterritorialized, abstract-concrete non-place of continuous ambient variation.
- 7.
For discussions of Spector’s personal ‘Spector sound,’ see Théberge 1997, p. 192; Zak 2001, p. 59; Moorefield 2005, p. 9; and Milner 2009, p. 152. As Théberge argues, for instance, although it is “difficult to locate the beginnings of a public awareness of this phenomenon with any degree of accuracy, clearly by the early 1960s the notion of a ‘sound’ was part of the vocabulary of popular culture. Phil Spector was perhaps the first pop producer to be recognized as having his own unique sound—‘Spector Sound’ (also known in more general terms as the ‘wall of sound’)—and a variety of recording studios and musical genres soon were identified as the promoters and/or possessors of a particular ‘sound’: for example, the ‘Nashville Sound’ and, somewhat later, the ‘Motown Sound’ (Théberge 1997, p. 192).
- 8.
Albin Zak argues that Spector, with his technique of musical repetition, “wanted to capture the feel and energy of live playing” (Zak 2001, p. 58). The effect, however, is in fact quite the opposite. What gives the technique of repetition its effect—an effect, which would later become a key factor in the contemporary digital production aesthetics of sampling, looping and sequencing—is precisely the elimination of live-performance energy to produce a standardized, anonymized and indeed non-live ‘media sound.’
- 9.
Spector sought to bring “to life a specific sound that had no counterpart in reality […], no connection to real-world sound” (Milner 2009, p. 152). This otherworldly synthetic effect was something that was immediately discernible for the musicians and technicians involved in Spector’s production sessions. According to Albin Zak, a “typical recording session” at the time was “dedicated simply to capturing a clear and transparent representation of a performance of the script. Spector, on the other hand, was seeking a sonic image that could not be represented in musical notation. Its only existence prior to recording was in his imagination” (Zak 2001, p. 59). As Larry Levine, Spector’s engineer at Gold Star Recording Studios during the early 1960s, describes the sound they heard in the control room during a Spector session: “See, it was not truthful at all […]. What everybody strives for in studio speakers is truth; this didn’t in any way duplicate what you heard in the studio; it was just exciting and thrilling and full-bodied. The musicians would come into the control room for the playback and just be blown away. They simply could not believe that what they were hearing was what they’d been playing, and it made them excited” (Levine quoted in Milner 2009, p. 152). Yet, the sounds he produced were of course very real indeed. His synthetic strategies made obsolete the old distinctions between nature and artifice, original and copy, the real and the medial. After Spector the ‘natural’ and ‘real’ sounds of recorded music are synthetic sounds.
- 10.
The procedure was first introduced during the recording of Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah (recorded in august 1962). According to Jack Nietzsche, Spector’s close collaborator and leader of his studio band, The Wrecking Crew, a typical Spector session would involve “four keyboards… a grand piano, a Wurlitzer electric piano, a tack piano, and a harpsichord… three acoustic guitars, three basses (acoustic, electric, and a six-string Danelectro bass), electric guitar, three or four percussionists, a drummer” (Nietzsche quoted in Zak 2001, p. 78). For a more detailed description of Spector’s collaboration with The Wrecking Crew and the practice of accumulating musicians in the studio, see Moorefield 2005, p. 12, and Brown 2007, pp. 100–105. Interestingly, Spector not only applied this synthesizing principle of sonic accumulation to the soundscape as a whole. He also used it locally to construct new sounds by mixing different sources during recording, thereby introducing techniques that to some extent resemble the production of sound masses in Varèse, Ligeti and minimalist drone music. The quintessential example of this is his design of the famous ‘drum sound’ on Be My Baby. In addition to the regular bass and snare drumbeat played by drummer Hal Blaine—recorded with an overhead mike, multiplied and added a powerful reverb—the sound consists of a number of ‘added’ sounds such as claves, tambourine, castanets and handclaps. Such techniques of synthetic layering of disparate sounds into a single unit are of course ubiquitous and commonplace in today’s digital music production. But in early 1960s pop music, the effect was arguably dramatic. While still functioning musically as a drum beat, it no longer sounds like a drum by referring indexically to its premediated source, but has become a distinctly and exclusively mediatic sound, both more abstract and more material at the same time, ready for continuous mediatic (re)distribution. It has become the ‘Be My Baby drum sound,’ copied and sampled continually ever since.
- 11.
More precisely, distortion, overdrive, fuzz and similar effects function by ‘cutting’ individual waveforms into a deindividuated massive plane of condensed sound. Tremolo and compression are different methods for modulating a sound’s amplitude to create a more regular and standardized, synthetic waveform; tremolo by applying an inorganically regular pulsation to the ‘organic’ sound signal, which to some extent equalizes and synthesizes the individual properties of the sound; compression by condensing and approximating the different parts of the sonic material to the same level of volume. Various forms of sonic filtering synthesize the signal by subtracting a selected part of the frequency register. And finally, reverb, delay, chorus, flanger, phaser, sustain and similar effects are forms of sonic massification that function by repeating a sonic event at different volumes and temporal intervals creating a diffuse synthetic pattern that eventually envelops and expands the ‘original’ signal in a sonic mass.
- 12.
See Holt 2019 for an intriguing sonic fiction of the political and subjective implications of this generalization of pop sound and the everyday “affects of living in the soundscape of contemporary pop” (ibid., p. iix).
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Schmidt, U. (2023). Synthetic Strategies. In: A Philosophy of Ambient Sound. Palgrave Studies in Sound. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1755-6_6
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