Noise Objets Sonores and Altered States

Noise, Objets Sonores and Altered States: Listening to
Electroacoustic Music through Film

Andrew McManus
to be submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the PhD degree,
University of Chicago
May 2015
Advisor:
Prof. Berthold Hoeckner
Committee Members:
Howard Sandroff
Prof. Marta Ptaszynska
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Noise, Objets Sonores and Altered States: Listening to Electroacoustic Music through Film
I: Introduction: defining a blind cinema
In La Voix au Cinma and Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Michel Chion contends that there is
no such thing as a soundtrack. This is, of course, untrue from a mechanical and technological
perspective; a track containing sonic information running parallel to that of the video has existed
ever since the late 1920s, when film sound came to mean something more than acoustic musical
accompaniment. But for Chion the term serves only to designate empirically the simple end-to-end
aggregation of all sounds in a film - inert and with no active autonomous meaning. 1 Furthermore, Chion
argues, severing film sound from its image track removes all distinctions of source that can be
integral to a viewer-listeners' understanding of these sounds; they experience offscreen, non- and
meta-diegetic sounds in the same way as onscreen, diegetic ones. Film sound and image were also
once physically inseparable; outside of the film studio, no technology provided viable ways to
experiment with the manipulation of sound. As Julio DEscrivn notes, it is telling that the first
musique concrte experiments took place in French TV studios.2 He also cites John Cages The Future of
Music: Credo (1937), which mentions the necessity of using film technology to use sound objects as
instruments (in this case to compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heart beat
and landslide). But if a simple concatenation of sounds is by definition inert and with no active
autonomous meaning, then this presents serious compositional problems for those who order
sound in time for musical purposes. Pierre Schaeffer, writing about his tude aux Chemins de Fer,
asked the following question in 1948:
...if I extract any sound element and repeat it without bothering about its form but varying
its matter, I practically cancel out the form, it loses its meaning; only the variation of matter
emerges, and with it the phenomenon of music. So every sound phenomenon (like the
Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 39,
emphasis added
1
DEscrivn, Julio. Electronic music and the moving image, The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2007. 157
2
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words of a language) can be taken for its relative meaning or for its own substance. As long
as meaning predominates, and is the main focus, we have literature and not music. But how
can we forget meaning and isolate the in-itself-ness of the sound phenomenon? There are
two preliminary steps:
Distinguishing an element (hearing it in itself, for its texture, matter, color).
Repeating it. Repeat the same sound fragment twice: there is no longer event, but
music.3
Schaeffers argument that repetition is sufficient to transform a sound event into musical abstraction
was (and remains) obviously problematic, and it does oversimplify the results of his compositional
efforts. His eventual goal was the creation of a music that isolate[s]...various sound fragments,
manipulate[s] them, and link[s] these sound complexes together.4 The problem of Schaeffers
approach, however, was the listeners predilection to classify and contextualize preexisting sounds.
This subsequently led him to reject his own work, on the grounds that the train sounds were too
recognizable. John Cage may have better accomplished Schaeffers goals in Williams Mix (1952), but
this success required a gargantuan effort: 500 to 600 sound samples spanning six widely varying
categories, and a team of assistants trying to obliterate any clues about their sources by manually
splicing each sample into minuscule fragments.5 Technology may now make this process far less
labor-intensive, but the fundamental issue still remains, and all the more so in the realm of film
sound, which is inextricably linked to both image and narrative context. Could film sound actually
provide insight into musique concrte thanks to these links? What if film sounds failure to negate
external meanings were actually an asset to the composer and analyst? Is pulverizing a sound in the
manner of Williams Mix fundamentally necessary to the creation of an autonomously musical work?
To answer these questions, I will turn to Pierre Boulezs critical stance, as paraphrased by Joanna
Demers:
Schaeffer, Pierre. In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. Christine North and John Dack. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2012. 13
3
Ibid, 14
Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. 113
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...Schaeffers use of concrete sounds whose preexisting associations force a poetics without
choice, a situation in which external meanings are imposed upon the work. [He] continues,
to lend itself to composition, musical material needs to be sufficiently flexible, susceptible
to transformation, and capable of generating and sustaining a dialectic. 6
Boulez contends that sound objects can have too much active autonomous meaning, therefore
complicating Chions contention that a soundtrack is inert when excised from a film. An end-toend-aggregation of sounds assembled according to any logic (filmic or otherwise) cannot be entirely
semantically inert; it will still contain, or likely retain, some meaning for a listener deprived of the
image track. A useful dialectic can certainly be created from these meanings, one that is flexible
[and] susceptible to transformation. Thus Boulezs requirements can and do govern the creation of
a music constructed from the manipulation and transformation of preexisting sounds.
My intention in this study is not to simply remove the image tracks from films and attempt
to make musical sense of the result. Nor I do not wish to imply in turn that sound-design- or
concrte-style electronic music need be understood as a soundtrack to an imaginary film. Instead I will
focus on what film sound can tell us about electroacoustic music, for which we need to take into
account how this music generally functions within film. Film composers were, after all, the first to
use what we now call electroacoustic sound as a code for the unreal, strange, otherworldly, and
psychotic. It was in 1932, for instance, that Rouben Mamoulian used reverb, reverse playback and
even photographic techniques (exposing the soundtrack directly to light) to depict the appearance of
a deranged Mr. Hyde in Jekyll and Hyde.7 Thus the link between sonic artifice and the moving image
is also a long-standing physical and technological one. It raises the question of whether
electroacoustic music can ever truly be separated from some accompanying imagery, or from the
technologies that create it. But a viewer-listeners predilection to do these things in filmic contexts
Demers, Joanna. Listening through the Noise: the Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010. 28-29
6
DEscrivn, 159-160
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should still support a dialectic that can be generated and sustained by a composer of electronic
music. Cinema supports this contention in the following way: it folds the musical discourse of
musique concrte into a visual and dramatic environment, providing images that inform (or confound)
the understanding of the listener. In turn, acousmatic music draws on this understanding, creating a
unique aesthetic space that, when integrated back into a filmic context, adds crucial new dimensions
to a viewers experience of a film. This feedback loop is in part borne of advances in technology far
beyond what Schaeffer may have envisioned. But even in our age of the mashup, with innumerable
separate technologies for sound and image editing, there are still vestiges of this once inextricable
link in the acousmatic music of today.
Michel Chion has renamed silent film deaf cinema. I suggest that the musical descendants
of musique concrte often contain elements of a blind cinema. I introduce this term because cinema
provides a complex and multi-dimensional perception and understanding of sound, one that goes
far beyond simply assigning a sound an associated image. What film sound also provides for
electroacoustic music is insight into its psychology, subjectivity and position (internal or
external) within the experience of the listener. What creates this insight is not the cinematic image
alone, but rather the overall relationship of sound to a films diegesis. The filmic diegesis introduces
a new dimension for electronic sound, affording it a flexibility of context that more explicitly
deepens a listeners understanding than visual associations alone. This new dimension retains its
relevance even in the absence of the visual. And nowhere is there greater evidence of this than in
filmic contexts governed by hallucinations, psychologically altered states and point-of-audition
sound. The films I will examine below all engage, to varying degrees, with experiences of
psychological instability, breaks with reality, dreams and other surreal states.
My definition of blind cinema does refer to those many elements of electronic and
electroacoustic music that conjure up and directly engage with images and visual narratives. I do not,
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however, wish to imply that all electroacoustic music demands an understanding derived from the
meanings provided by the visual. But as I will demonstrate, blind cinema can encompass both
abstract and descriptive electroacoustic music; the idioms derived from a blinded cinema apply
to all types of musicalized sound. This binary is, of course, reductive, but I introduce it here as a
heuristic guiding my inquiry. How could abstract electroacoustic music possibly bear a relationship
to the visual? Is it not the intention of many composers to eschew directly descriptive sounds? If a
work of such music is clearly not structured based on images, what in-sight could film really
provide when such music appears on the soundtrack? There is even a problem arising from explicitly
descriptive electroacoustic music: how could sound too closely aligned with the visual achieve
sufficient autonomy to be considered musical?
The issues that arise here are worth unpacking, because they potentially contradict the
usefulness of blind cinema as an analytical concept. As I will explain further below, it is a films
diegesis and its associated idioms - not simply issues of sound-image pairings - that provide the
most insight. But there are crucial distinctions between the phenomenologies of hearing and seeing
that cannot be ignored. As Salom Voegelin argues,
seeing always happens in a meta-position, away from the seen, however close. And this
enables a detachment and objectivity that presents itself as truth. The visual gap nourishes
the idea of structural certainty and the notion that we can truly understand things, give
them names, and define ourselves in relation to those names as stable subjects, as identities.
The score, the image track of the film, the stage set, the visual editing interface, and so on can make us
believe in an objective hearing, but what we hear, guided by these images, is not sound but the realization of
the visual. The sound itself is long gone, chased away by the certainty of the image. By
contrast, hearing is full of doubt: phenomenological doubt of the listener about the heard and
himself hearing it.8
Thus sound as defined by image, according to Voegelin, cannot even be understood as part of the
acts of hearing or listening. How, therefore, could these sounds comprise autonomous music? The
Voegelin, Salom. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Bloomsbury Academic,
2010. xiv, emphasis added
8
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phenomenological doubt immanent to hearing is, obviously, a critical creative force behind
electroacoustic music, be it abstract or descriptive. But if the visual aspects of the filmic
experience strangle this phenomenological doubt, then how can film possibly be used to define this
music? Clearly sound in film must lack its own agency:
[sound] is left to describe and enhance but never to do and become. It is a small adjective
to the mighty visual noun, furnishing its objects and enhancing its perspective without being
acknowledged in that positionListening emancipated from the expectation to enhance
does something else. It produces, it invents, it generates. It demands that the heard be more
than a ghost of the visual, a flimsy figment of the imagination, soon dispelled.9
Voegelin asks for an understanding of sound that eschews the visual, and clearly a filmic context
would drastically undermine this understanding. It would obstruct the potential creative
development of an autonomous sound that jettisons visual definition. But while the
phenomenologies she defines are very relevant to my case for blind cinema, she is overly
categorical in her argument. Gilles Deleuze grants more agency to sound in film than Voegelin by
reversing the direction of the argument. He contends that sound is a fourth dimension of the
visual image, and that the visual can bind sound components together into a continuum:
And so far as they rival, overlap, cross and cut into each other, they trace a path full of
obstacles in visual space, and they do not make themselves heard without also being seen,
for themselves, independently of their sources, at the same time as they make the image readable,
a little like a musical score.10
Deleuze is careful not to parse abstract from descriptive sound here. But is he simply referring to
Voegelins acts of describ[ing] and enhanc[ing]? Clearly not, as sound carries enough rhetorical
weight to make the image readable. He also describes quite accurately the interplay that is
characteristic of musique concrte (sound objects interacting in space), and therefore images can provide
insight into the structures of this music.
ibid, 13.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: The Athlone Press,
1989. 235, emphasis added
10
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The potential contradictions that arise from these phenomenological issues can and do
persist, and I have not introduced them simply to declare them irrelevant. While they do largely arise
from moment-to-moment sound-image pairings too narrow for any understanding of film sound,
they are legitimate complicating factors to my definition of blind cinema. Below I will focus
primarily on what the filmic diegesis has to say about electroacoustic sound. I will examine examples
from five films: Spellbound, Pi, Clean, Shaven, Solaris and Noise. First, however, I will review some of
the methods that currently exist for analytical understandings of electroacoustic music. I must also
address issues that arise from the role of noise and its aesthetics.
II. Existing tools for the analysis of electroacoustic music

It has long been difficult to analyze electroacoustic music, because it usually lacks a codified
method of external documentation, such as a notated score that meaningfully captures its content.
The analyst, therefore, is left with the tools of listening and perception. In his analysis of Denis
Smalleys work Wind Chimes, David Hirst puts forth methodologies derived from music psychology
and perception, largely derived from Smalleys own writings on sound organization. These include
the following:
1. Establishing the identities by looking at coherence, integration and disintegration.
2. Establishing functional relationships between the identities.
3. Identifying transformational, typological, and source-cause discourses.
4. Identifying behavioral and motion discourses.
5. Discussing the tensile ebb and flow.11
Hirsts identities include pitch level and various parameters of timbre, texture and register, and
functional relationships are synonymous with Schaeffers dialectic, which is generated and
sustained by Hirsts transformational, typological and source-cause discourses. The set of
structural ideas in the first three categories provides a solid, basic framework for an analysis of this
Hirst, David. A Cognitive Framework for the Analysis of Acousmatic Music: Analysing Wind Chimes by Denis Smalley.
Sarbrucken: VDM Verlag, 2008. 25
11
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music. But as I explain below, music that engages with the fourth (behavioral and motion
discourses) and fifth (tensile ebb and flow) categories can require a shift in analytical approach,
one that is informed by ideas derived from blind cinema. The sounds most likely to engage with
those last two categories are those with concrete associations, in particular visual ones. I will
therefore turn to more abstract idioms - the realm of noise music - to demonstrate the first three
categories.
III. Noise, Glitch, Right and Wrong Sounds

I do not intend to exclude noise from the last two categories, because noise as a whole is far
from semantically inert, and not simply for purely musical reasons. In Noise, Water, Meat, Douglas
Kahn writes that, in the context of history, noise has performed admirably. Where better to set the
ear loose to hear and feel unexpected licks than on the complexity and unpredictability called noise?
Where better to imagine ontological riches in the raw?12 Noise in filmic contexts, therefore, could
actually be rife with significance for the relationship between sound and image, and noisy
electroacoustic music more relevant still. Deleuze parses the aural component of film into five
categories, and carefully delineates noises (which isolate an object and are isolated from each
other) from sounds (which indicate relationships and are themselves in mutual relation).13
Voegelins definition is as follows:
Noise does not have to be loud, but it has to be exclusive: excluding other sounds
destroying sonic signifiers and divorcing listening from sense material external to its noise.
This can be achieved through tiny sounds that grab my ear and make my listening obsessive
and exclusivesound is noisy when it deafens my ears to anything but itself.14
12
Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. 21
13
Deleuze, 234.
14
Voegelin, 44.
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Noise, therefore, disrupts the interpretation of the semantics of sound by forcibly excising it from a
continuum of context. It is a wrong sound, but not for reasons of quality: high volumes and
intrusive timbres do not excise themselves from this continuum simply because they are loud or
harsh. Both Voegelin and Deleuze explicitly exclude judgments based on the quality of noisy
sounds. But Voegelin defines musical listening as based on a dialectic of right and wrong
sound events:
[it] establishes the idea of a right sound and proposes notions of beauty and meaning in
relation to a pre-existing vocabulary. A musical aesthetic depends on these conventions to
propose its valuations. In this sense musical listening is an absolute listening that evokes value
and authenticitythis kind of listening avoids the contingent and fleeting nature of sound
by leading any stray tones back to the object of the score: integrating them into the system
or rejecting them as their dialectical opposite.15
In the realms of electroacoustic music and film sound, this integration-rejection dialectic spans
many more than two dimensions. To provide a foundation for what it means to listen to noises
musically, I will turn to a genre of contemporary electronic sound art that defines itself as music
created from sonic garbage. Glitch takes the putative mistakes of electronic synthesis and sound
processing as its source material, which I will summarize in two categories. The undesirable products
of errors in sound processing or synthesis comprise the first category; these often resemble tactile
pops, clicks and bursts of static. The second describes mechanical errors, like feedback or the
visceral jolt from a faulty connection in a speaker system. The language of glitch often resembles
aspects of unpitched percussion music, in which the discourse is primarily driven by rhythm, and the
number of sound objects - instruments largely fixed in timbre and pitch - is relatively limited.
Ryoji Ikedas 2005 album Dataplex provides a representative example of this musical world. The
album is quite minimalist in its treatment of musical material - sounds are introduced and developed
very gradually across its twenty tracks. The opening, data.index, assembles a finite set of objects
15
Voegelin, 53.
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from sonic chaos. It begins with erratic beeps and an extremely rapid clicking noise so high that it is
initially difficult to perceive. Over the course of the track this rapid-fire clicking descends in pitch,
increases slightly in volume and becomes more articulate, setting up a syncopated, percussive
perpetual motion. This syncopated moto perpetuo provides an important motivic framework for the
entire album. data.index also introduces erratic interjections like beeps and bursts of static. But
these sounds never reappear in this chaotic context; instead they are subsumed into the perpetual
motion texture or are used to gently articulate its entrances. Thus data.index provides an index of
materials for the rest of the album. Other sound objects include a gentle pedal tone of low, soft
speaker feedback that first appears in data.duplex (track 3). It serves as important expository
material for the more pitch-based discourse of tracks like data.superhelix (track 10).
These methods of gradual selection, assembly and protracted transformation are what allow
Ikeda to turn these noises into right sounds, providing the listener with the necessary
framework for integration-rejection dialectical (musical) listening. It also easily maps onto Hirsts
first three analytical methodologies referenced above. But the fourth (behavioral motion
discourses) and fifth (tensile ebb and flow) are issues in electroacoustic music less easily
explained by the aesthetics of noise, because the specific, relatively narrow palate of sounds in
glitch renders them less relevant. Dataplex is rigorously abstract in its content; it lacks ambiguities
of sound source and does not attempt to describe, let alone invoke visual images. But this
integration-rejection dialectic - a theory of noise - still applies to electroacoustic music that does
attempt to describe, and whose objects we may not immediately consider noisy. A broader view
of electroacoustic music therefore must also engage with the issues of psychology and narrative.
This gap in analytical understanding, I believe, can be bridged by the notion of blind cinema I
describe above, because psychologies of film sound can explain behavioral motion discourses and
filmic narratives provide insight into tensile ebb and flow. I will return to electroacoustic music
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itself later in my analysis of audio excerpts from the film Clean, Shaven. First, however, I must return
to the contexts that a filmic diegesis can provide for acousmatic sound.
IV. Artificial Sound and the Diegesis: Two Examples

Surely it need not always be a problem that the visual provides the listener with illusions of
objectivity in sound, as Voegelin argues. While the visual may undermine some of the creative
potential of sound for its own sake, the increased objectivity it affords the listener aids in the
creation of hierarchies that have long defined our understanding of the filmic medium. We see this,
for instance, in the functions of non-diegetic music and sound. One could argue that the tradition
of live instrumental accompaniment to silent films forged a permanent technical separation between
acoustic instrumental scoring and the cinematic image. Viewer-listeners have thus been conditioned
to automatically distinguish, at some level of perception and understanding, scored music from the
diegesis of a film unless there is explicit evidence that the instrumental music is in fact diegetic. Such
a delineation does not necessarily exist for most synthetic sounds. As DEscrivn contends, while
they may lack evidence of human effort or corporeality,16 simple recognition of their artificial
nature does not immediately place them outside the diegesis. Firmly locating them inside the
diegesis, however, is a difficult task that requires visual evidence of source for sounds whose source
may not have a physical manifestation to begin with. True objective listening is most difficult even
for purely artificial music, such as purely synthetic electronic music (reine elektronische Musik), as many
of these sounds (in particular the most technologically rudimentary) have become inextricably linked
to their mechanical sources. Early sci-fi films demonstrate come of the issues that arise from using
these sounds in filmic contexts. In Kurt Mtzigs Der Schweigende Stern (Silent Star, 1960) the
mechanical sources for the all-electronic soundtrack force these sounds into an ambiguous location
16
DEscrivn, 162.
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within the diegesis. In at least one scene, bleeps and bloops accompany the blinking lights of an
obviously active machine on a spaceship, where most of the film takes place. But it is difficult to
develop a one-to-one correspondence between these sounds and the actions of the machines;
frequently the changing lights simply dont coincide with any particular electronic sound. In other
scenes these types of electronic sounds are clearly non-diegetic, but the impulse to locate them
within the diegesis persists.
Can electronic sounds can be severed from their synthetic sources such that they can ever
truly occupy the same conclusively non-diegetic space as an instrumental soundtrack? Alfred
Hitchcocks Spellbound (1945) provides an important contrast by doing exactly this, albeit in an
instrumental context. It weaves a theremin into the fabric of an otherwise quite traditionally
constructed, empathetic, non-diegetic orchestral underscore. Each time that John Ballantyne
(Gregory Peck) encounters a trigger for his traumatic memory of the murder he witnessed (example
1), the theremin overlays the primary melodic line of the underscore. While the acoustic orchestral
music is clearly empathetic to Johns paralyzing breaks with reality, it lacks any drastic disjunctions of
harmony, rhythm, style or overall structure. The theremin enters as a supplement to an otherwise
consistent musical discourse, and this allows Hitchcock to distance it from its artificial source. Even
the elaborate dream sequence (1:28:51, example 1) retains this subtle, integrated use of the theremin,
where it mixes with the most unusual instrumental timbres of the entire film. While subsequent
films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) have made the theremin - and sounds that resemble
it - an iconic clich for diegetic sounds from alien spaceships, here it is embedded within the nondiegetic orchestra, used only to represent the strangeness of Johns hallucinations and psychological
instability.
Spellbound would suggest that musical discourse is of primary importance in locating artificial
sounds within the sonic realm of a film. An extrapolation on the theremins role as a melodic
ornament should reveal that, were this musical content played entirely by synthetic instruments,
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viewer-listeners would still be disinclined to search the diegesis of the film for its source. Assembling
electronic sound according to structures of a performed music therefore dulls the listeners ability
to immediately classify and contextualize. A performed discourse can also blunt - but not negate any pre-existing meanings attached to a sound object. But while discourse may clarify musics
location within the diegesis of a film, it does not restrict the musics overall agency in the realm of
character psychology; nor does it categorically exclude the music from diegetic or meta-diegetic
space. Darren Aronofskys Pi (1998) demonstrates how these issues of discourse and pre-existing
meanings can intersect.
V. Aronofskys Pi: discourses of artificial and manipulated sound

In Pi, the unity of electronic sound and a discourse of performed music functions in two
ways. The first is a sonification of what Paul Eisenstein calls rampant cultural psychosis.17 Pi
follows young New York mathematician Max Cohen (Sean Gulette) as his attempts to crack the
stock market with number theory drive him into full-blown psychosis. The artificial sounds
composer Clint Mansell uses for this music do not simply refer to mathematics, computers,
machines and technology, but to their effects on and place in the explicitly urban capitalist culture
that surrounds Max (visually represented in shots like example 2.X). Like the culture it describes, this
non-diegetic music is anempathetic to Maxs psychological turmoil, largely appearing as the
accompaniment to his explanatory voice-over montages about mathematics, science and technology.
Precise synchresis is usually less relevant in acoustic music employed in this manner, but this music
further alienates Max through its uniform and repetitive musical structures, which provide few if any
significant opportunities for synchresis.
Eisenstein, Paul. Visions and Numbers: Aronofskys and the Primordial Signifier. Lacan and Contemporary Film,
Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle, eds. New York: Other Press, 2004. 20
17
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Broader correspondences do exist between images, Maxs voice and this musical discourse,
but they are not as intertwined as the acousmatic sound world of other scenes in the film. These
employ the second function of electroacoustic sound: to both represent and literally transcribe
Maxs hallucinations. These hallucinations, however, are never entirely severed from either sonic or
visual reality. Their visual settings remain real (his apartment, the subway station) but are invaded by
unreal images (his brain, his door bursting open), some of which happen to be plausible (the Hasidic
man). Clint Mansells scoring provides a sonic analogue for this bridge between real and imagined;
much of the music for these scenes retains some aspects of the non-diegetic electronica of the
voice-overs. These include structured pulses (like those at 0:07:19) that use sounds not dissimilar in
timbre to those of the voice-over music. This music, therefore, is not exclusively a dialogue among
strangely juxtaposed sound objects. Furthermore, some sounds retain actual connections to the
diegesis. In one of his episodes (0:51:55) the sound mix does not emphatically separate Maxs
screams from the surreal sounds, and thus they seem to be fully integrated into this meta-diegetic
acousmatic mashup. It is clear that Max is screaming in objective diegetic reality, but the sound mix
obliterates any frame of reference for the volume of his screams. This leaves the listener as
discombobulated as Max when his neighbor testifies to hearing them (0:55:19).
This overwhelming mix of diegetic, non-diegetic and meta-diegetic sound demonstrates how
Maxs psychosis is characterized by a perpetually threatening, suffocating overproximity.18 As Paul
Eisenstein contends, what invades Maxs experience is a Lacanian Other that manifests itself in three
forms during his psychotic episodes. The first is the bright light behind his quaking apartment door
(0:09:10) that explosively bursts open, causing him to black out. The second is a Hasidic man he
believes is stalking him; he notices the man a few times early in the film, and his paranoia comes to a
head when he sees the man lurking on a subway platform (0:34:15). (It is unclear if the man is real at
Eisenstein, Paul. Visions and Numbers: Aronofskys and the Primordial Signifier. Lacan and Contemporary Film,
Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle, eds. New York: Other Press, 2004. 20
18
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all, as Max hallucinates his own brain lying on the platform not long after spotting the man.) The
third form is manifest in the intrusive sounds and rhythms of his neighbors having sex (0:51:49).19
While Eisensteins psychoanalytic viewpoint is certainly a valid one, the soundscape by itself
can support it only in part. While I dont wish to imply that something is truly lost without the
visual here, it is worth noting that certain subtleties do fall away. This is because the soundscape of
Maxs psychotic episodes is not an entirely literal transcription of his subjective experience. The
pulsing electronica, defined as non-diegetic by other scenes, provides the clearest indication of this.
The painfully incisive bursts of static could plausibly be from Maxs point of audition, but they are
clearly synthetic and bear a significant timbral connection to the electronica. They are also of regular
length and coincide meaningfully with the pulsing backbeat; thus they could plausibly occupy the
same non-diegetic space, even though Maxs behavior indicates that he is internally (metadiegetically) enduring an agonizing sonic experience. The overall result is a less specific
representation of suffocating overproximity, but the listener nonetheless experiences musical
representations of a faceless threat that is certainly no less overwhelming. Even without the visual,
we still hear evidence of both the oppressive urban technological experience and Maxs crippling
internal psychosis, all combining into an increasingly unbearable maelstrom of sound.
None of this should imply, of course, that a correct sonic understanding, psychological or
otherwise, of Maxs experience requires the visual component. In fact, sound can possess its own
autonomy because its rhetorical elements - rooted in the discourse of acoustic music - cause it to
routinely gravitate towards a non-diegetic space. The Western musical tradition itself plays no small
role in this. As Brian Kane argues, the autonomy of music is a longstanding, perhaps even
immutable concept, a methodological given in musical thinkers from Eduard Hanslick and
19
ibid, 21-23.
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Heinrich Schenker to Milton Babbitt and Allen Forte.20 And unlike the rest of the arts, [music] has
a specific claim to autonomy, because it exploits the essential separability of the sound itself from its
source[its] autonomyis grounded in sounds essential separability from its conditions of
production and external sources.21 The rhetorical elements I describe are, of course, rooted in
Western musical formalism. The autonomy these formal structures create, Kane notes, arises from
the ability to separate sound from source. Hanslick and Schenker certainly never envisioned the
synthesizer that accompanies Maxs voiceovers, but clearly they recognized the separability of sound
from its source in the acoustic instruments of their day. This laid the groundwork for the formalism
that makes the sound world of Pi make musical sense as a blinded entity.
VI. Clean, Shaven: noise, subjectivity and perspective

But what happens when the rhetorical elements of Western acoustic music are abandoned
altogether? A more literal transcription of a maelstrom of psychosis is found in Lodge Kerrigans
Clean, Shaven (1993). The 2006 Criterion Collection release of Clean, Shaven explicitly defines the
premise of its soundscape: as Michael Atkinson contends in his video essay, the film dares to
guess at aspects of the experience of schizophrenia. These aspects include overwhelmingly
numerous intrusive, disruptive and confusing sounds and images, and non-linear experiences of
memory and the passage of time. Clean, Shaven follows Peter Winter (Peter Greene) as he struggles
with schizophrenia following his release from a mental institution. He attempts to focus on finding
his daughter, but his condition repeatedly thwarts his efforts. Unlike Clint Mansells music in Pi,
there is no attempt to connect most of the sounds of Clean, Shaven to an instrumental discourse.
And aside from the diegetic sound of the conventional narrative scenes, nearly all sounds are meant
20
Kane, Brian. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 137
21
Ibid, 136.
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to be implicated as a transcription of Peters subjective schizophrenic experience. In the film, we
experience these sounds as deliberate disruptions that foil his (and our) attempts to linearly
experience time and narrative. While cinematic images are nearly always more explicit than sounds,
those that disrupt time are unusually so here: examples include a shot of an almost-motionless clock
and the abrupt and conspicuous absence of self-inflicted cuts to Peters face and scalp. Most
shocking, perhaps, is our inability to place in linear time the gruesome scene where Peter cuts off his
fingernail. Late in the film, in perhaps its most calm and lucid episode, Peter explains to his daughter
(example 3.4) that he cut off his fingernail to remove the transmitter (1:05:50). But he does not
move to show her his hand. How would you do that? she calmly asks, (1:06:25) giving the viewer
no confirmation that she notices what should be a quite conspicuous, gruesome injury to his hand.
Thus there is no visual evidence that Peter has, in fact, removed his fingernail.
In general, visual perspectives change conspicuously in the film, moving between three
categories. First are the surreal montages we assume are Peters internal observations. Next are the
uncomfortable closeups that cannot be point-of-view but are clearly intertwined with his subjective
experience, such as the closeup of Peters bloody scalp as he clumsily attempts to cut his own hair
(0:13:39). The last are those of an observer of conventional narrative action. It should follow that
acousmatic sound assembled in time could shift perspective in a way similar to images, but this is,
unsurprisingly, far more difficult to conclude. It is a distinct issue for listeners from that of sound
source, because in the broadest sense, listening to film involves placing each non-instrumental sound
inside or outside of the diegesis. When the diegesis does not indicate a source, and musical discourse
does not immediately define sounds as a non-diegetic backdrop (as in Pi or Spellbound ), we are left to
assume that these sounds are acousmatic, and therefore meta-diegetic. But is electroacoustic sound
necessarily part of a single subjective experience? Fundamentally, do we listen to these extracts in
the same way that we experience them in the film? Can sound alone have perspective?
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It is clear that we do not hear every single sound that Peter experiences. Moments like the
opening demonstrate this: at 0:02:30 we observe Peter clutching his head in frantic agony and rapidly
moving his eyes. The realm of sound here, however, seems incongruous; we hear sustained electrical
buzzing sounds. We are privy to his sensory experience for most of the film, but this opening does
not immediately make this clear. Sound throughout the film, therefore, could easily be shifting
among categories of perspective in ways similar to those of the visual realm: sounds that are part of
his subjective experience are not necessarily from his point of audition. Furthermore, some of the
visual elements of Clean, Shaven underscore shifts of sonic perspective because they call to mind
established electroacoustic musical structures. As Schaeffer wrote, isolating a fragment and repeating
it may help negate its semantics; in Clean, Shaven, the repetitive nature of the power line clips (such as
at 0:04:15, see examples 3.1-3.2) negate both narrative time and place. While the passing power lines
are not actually spliced, duplicated and concatenated in the manner of the train sounds in Schaeffers
tude aux Chemins de Fer (1948), they are repetitive and lack visual evidence of linear motion in real
space or time. Aspects of the soundscape are complementary in their aimlessness, but possess a
different quality. The sonic background is a subtle outgrowth of the orchestral strings first
introduced during the films opening credits. Harmony, though quite dense, is relatively consonant,
even as it undergoes very small adjustments of pitch, dynamics and timbre. This comparatively static
backdrop places the radio interjections here into relief, rendering them all the more jarring. This
string backdrop is also among the most conclusively non-diegetic sounds in the film, and it may even
serve to ground the viewer-listener in cinematic space and time, as it offers a sonic reality separate
from that of Peters subjective experience. I examine this excerpt in more detail below.
While the passing power lines may be similarly linear - and aimless - in their motion, their
repetitive nature makes them much more disconcerting. So while the rhetorical similarities between
aural and visual allow them to blend into a coherent whole, there are clear delineations of
perspective; the power lines and radio are Peters, while the strings are not. The power lines and
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radio do blend real images and sounds with some of Peters experience. After appearing innocently
enough, both the male and female radio announcers start to relate details of a crime that could
plausibly have involved Peter. It becomes unclear whether Peter is projecting this content onto the
voices, as what they say makes little sense in the context of the otherwise quotidian radio broadcast
about the weather forecast. But as perspective freely fluctuates between Peters and that of an
external listener, there are no real changes to the overall sonic structure. This is analogous to subtle
shifts of visual perspective in the film, where the camera seamlessly moves between point-of-view
subjectivity and objective observation without altering the overall visual structure.
Could these shifts of perspective occur in the acousmatic realm without visual input? As I
have noted previously, Deleuze argues that sound is the fourth dimension of the image. And this
suggests an inextricable link, where sound is at the mercy of the other three dimensions. Voegelin
seconds this, arguing that sound is but an adjective to the mighty visual noun. The soundscapes of
Clean, Shaven, however, complicate this contention. The first two categories I describe (point-of-view
and uncomfortable closeups) do occupy more or less the same aesthetic space, but shifts between
them should be quite relevant in the realm of sound. It is telling that Peters point-of-audition
sounds are not confined to point-of-view shots. Narrative-observer shots, understandably, lack these
sounds. But the non-diegetic strings, intermittently present from the very opening shot of the water,
accompany both Peters internal psychosis and the conventional narrative scenes. On the most basic
level, this lack of a clear alignment makes sound a more separate entity with more agency than
Deleuze and Voegelin might suggest.
VII. Perspective in a blinded Clean, Shaven

Clean, Shaven therefore implies that acousmatic structures bearing a relationship to film can
retain their foundational relevance to the visual while adopting a separate, independently musical set
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of structures and meanings, even without drawing on longstanding Western formalism. I will return
to the issue of musical autonomy later in my analysis of Noise, a film that creates musical autonomy
over time, but first I will examine the issues raised by the audio excerpts that accompany the
Criterion release of Clean, Shaven. This list of 17 excerpts is, much like the entire realm of sound in
the film, is explicit in its premises. Excerpts 1-10 are composer Hahn Rowes soundtrack
contributions. Autonomous, non-diegetic music is generally the premise of any soundtrack album,
and these pieces are no exception. They are largely ambient, reverb-laden soundscapes that are
relatively unobtrusive and easily lend themselves to open-ended repetition. Their materials are
almost exclusively synthesized, unperformed sounds; among the few exceptions are the piano and
vibraphone featured in excerpt 6 (Theyre Killing People), and the electric guitar of excerpts 7
(Search/Reunion/Beach) and 9 (The Time Has Come). Most important, however, is that this
music clearly sets itself apart from the two other categories of sound in the film: environmental
sounds of the diegesis, and the subjective interjections of Peters schizophrenic mind. My analysis
of the actual soundtrack excerpts will take this non-diegetic music as its foundation and examine the
relationships it bears to other sounds in acousmatic space. In order to do this, I must postulate that
the autonomous nature of the album pieces does grant them a stable, grounded status. (This could
certainly be extended to the use of autonomous performed music as an objet sonore in general, but I
will avoid doing so here.) The very first pairing of excerpts - the Opening Credits (nos. 1 and 11) make use of this stable, grounded status to introduce the film. This may seem like a contradiction,
given that excerpt 1 (from the soundtrack album) is a disorienting complex of violent, metallic
sounds swimming in copious amounts of reverb, and listening to it is hardly a stable or grounding
experience. But it appears in the actual film excerpt (no. 11) as a backdrop to an even more
disorienting array of far less homogenous sounds: unintelligible voices, radio static, seagulls. And it
is not the first backdrop texture we hear; in fact, it appears sixty seconds in, eliding from and
replacing the sustained, consonant strings that have been present for the previous fifty seconds. The
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excerpt as a whole slowly walks the listener into the sonic world of the film; it begins with the
soothing, real sounds of water and seagulls before incrementally introducing more disturbing
sounds, which include the metallic chaos of the album excerpt.
This kind of relationship is maintained - albeit in an inverse way - between the two tracks
titled The Time Has Come (nos. 9 and 16). The soundtrack excerpt (no. 9) is a soothing, sustained
texture created from organ-like sounds, many of which are clearly synthetic, and an electric guitar.
The film extract (no. 16) again employs it as a faint but ever-present backdrop to a heterogeneous
collection of erratic sounds. But here it serves as a stabilizing anchor for the listener, offering a sonic
space separate from the transcriptions of a schizophrenic experience. It partitions acousmatic space
by clarifying issues of sound source. The sounds that do transcribe Peters experience - voices and
radio sounds, for instance - are easily understood as such, and they usually lack any kind of
electronic enhancement. The ambient backdrop, however, always contains synthetic or manipulated
sounds. I have examined these excerpts without referencing the visual in order to reverse the
perspective of my earlier argument, and to demonstrate that Kerrigan successfully creates diegetic
and non-diegetic spaces in the realm of sound alone. But the central question here remains: how
does the fact that Clean, Shaven is a film allow us to make musical sense of blinded excerpts from it?
The differences of source and timbre I describe can clearly partition themselves on their own. But
the visual and narrative contexts make the distinctions between them all the more clear.
What might the implications be for other films, and for other electroacoustic works? As
relevant as these aural perspectives are, their aesthetic scope is fundamentally limited by the
rigorously internal, subjective sonic experience of the film. The sonic experiences of Clean, Shaven
(and Pi ) are narrowly focused on the perspective of one character, and rely very heavily on point-ofaudition sound. With insight from these analyses in mind, I will now discuss two films in which
point-of-audition sound is only one of numerous perspectives present in the soundtrack. What again
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defines and mediates these new sonic perspectives for the listener are their varying locations within
and outside of the diegesis, and the musical connections between the sounds themselves. It is these
shifts of psychological viewpoint that can most effectively provide insight into acousmatic music.
VIII. Acoustic-electronic elisions in Solaris

Tropes for the use of electronic sound in film may be well-established (sci-fi, psychosis,
machines), but these sounds, no matter what their content, invariably add various layers of metadiegetic space to the overall sound mix. The films I have examined thus far clearly demonstrate this.
As mentioned previously, viewer-listeners are, in the absence of direct evidence to the contrary,
predisposed to exclude electronic sounds from the diegesis. And as argued above, it is the musical
discourse of the audio content that provides the primary evidence for the location of the sounds
inside or outside the diegesis. But sound objects derived from acoustic instruments - among the very
staples of musique concrte - can be critical in contextualizing electronic sound. Their presence
alongside electronic sound can define and partition space in the sonic diegesis for the listener. This
anchoring effect can form the basis for important relationships between acoustic and electronic
sound, and for defining crucial nuances within meta-diegetic space that inform understandings of a
films narrative.
One example of this occurs in Andrei Tarkovskys Solaris (1972). Tarkovskys sonically sparse
film has relatively few non-vocal sounds not directly connected to the diegesis. There are two
important recurring exceptions, however: the first is a non-diegetic excerpt of J.S. Bachs chorale
prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (BWV 639) for organ. The second is a low, synthetic
humming sound that enters, often imperceptibly, during scenes set on the Solaris space station. It
begins each time as a plausible diegetic transcription of the ambient sounds of the spaceship perhaps an engine or generator - but quickly increases in volume and becomes a meta-diegetic
representation of an external threat: the threatening ocean on the planet Solaris below. The
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relationship that develops between these two excerpts - acoustic and synthetic - is crucial to an
understanding of the nuances of reality and fantasy that Tarkovsky explores in Solaris. But these
nuances also have a great deal to say about elisions between acoustic music and electronic sound in
general.
Just over an hour into the film, scientist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is struggling to
understand suspicious activity he has witnessed on the Solaris space station. He has noticed haunting
apparitions of a woman, who routinely lurks just beyond his (and our) field of vision. And after
watching a video message left for him by his fellow scientist Gibarian (Sos Sargsyan), he finds
Gibarian dead in a freezer. Kris arrives in his room at 1:09:30 and attempts to relax on his bed in
unnerving silence, interrupted only by the crinkle of the beds plastic covering. At 1:09:50, the low,
ambient synthetic sound enters, accompanying Kris as nervously clutches his gun, listening for an
unseen threat. The sound stops at 1:11:06 as the camera cuts to a sleeping Kris. But it reenters
imperceptibly a few seconds later. A more pitched, organ-like hum enters not long after, and slowly
overtakes the unpitched sound. What eventually emerges out of the sonic haze is a minor chord
extremely close in timbre and register to the organ in the Bach recording. But this connection goes
even further: the pitches are those of an F minor chord, precisely the key of Ich ruf zu dir.
This deliberate, prolonged and seamless elision between acoustic and electronic worlds has
clear implications for the psychology of the film. During the sixty seconds that the camera focuses
on Kris as he sleeps, the F-minor chord begins to emerge. By 1:12:06, when it cuts to an extreme
closeup of Haris face, the minor chord has achieved primacy over the unpitched material. Hari
(Natalya Bondarchuk) was Kris wife before she committed suicide some years earlier. Here she is
fully revealed for the first time. The soft, hazy visual effects clearly suggest that Kris might be
dreaming. But here he awakes - perhaps still in a dream - and becomes mildly agitated and confused
by Haris appearance. But she remains calm, unfazed by his nervous responses. The soundtrack
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remains unfazed as well; the minor chord, unpitched hum and other brief electronic sounds
continue anempathetically. It is not until around 1:19:00 that all these sounds entirely exit the mix,
and the end of part 1 follows very shortly thereafter. Early in part 2, this sonic experience repeats
itself during a similar scene (1:27:45), where a sleeping Kris again awakes to a confused but
nonetheless subdued Hari. It is very telling that Tarkovsky has sonically linked her to the Bach in
such a prolonged and conspicuous manner, and this has important implications that I will explain
below.
From this point forward, Hari initially seems rooted in reality. Surreal visual effects no longer
accompany her, and she directly participates in the action rather than lurking outside of it. Kris may
have seen her in a dream, but now there is little visual evidence that casts doubt on her connection
to the real. But as Mark Riley explains, Hari is not actually a ghost, but rather an embodiment of the
visitor - a manifestation of the intensity of his memory[that] has no identity of its own.22
Furthermore, she exists in the realm of the eternal, capable of endless rejuvenation because she is
made of neutrinos.23 It would seem that, in the face of an increasingly deceptive visual world, the
organ serves a periodic, gentle reminder that a more surreal, transcendent sonic space exists where
Kris and Hari could exist together in peace for eternity. Even as he becomes increasingly ill, and
Haris apparitions engage in increasingly erratic and disturbing behavior (epitomized by the
harrowing, violent resurrection scene at 2:17:14), he does not waver in his ultimate goal of finding
this space, be it on the station or back on earth. The films increasingly complex soundtrack helps to
demonstrate just how difficult this is. At 2:08:25, Snaut informs Kris that there will be 30 seconds of
weightlessness as the spaceship shifts its orbit. Kris leaves in search of the apparition of Hari in the
library and is somewhat frantic when he arrives. He finds Hari staring intently at something off
Riley, Mark. Disorientation, Duration and Tarkovsky. Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema, Ian Buchanan and
Patricia MacCormack, ends. New York: Continuum Books, 2008. 55
22
23
Johnson, Vida T. The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. 276
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camera. An unnerving mix of soft, unintelligible female voices enters imperceptibly at 2:09:28. As
the camera cuts to an extreme closeup of the reproduction of Pieter Bruegel the Elders The Hunters
in the Snow (1565) hung on the walls of the library, unnerving, gong-like synthetic sounds begin to
enter (2:10:01), eventually overwhelming the voices. There is also a subtle overlay of bird and dog
sounds, clearly a reference to the animals in the painting. The camera further examines the painting
until 2:11:45, when the sounds cut away, and Kris tries to get Haris attention. Hari explains to Kris
that she was lost in thought, indicating that this entire sequence has been from both her point of
view, and also quite possibly from her point of audition. This internal focus on a single characters
experience - let alone a non-human one like Hari - is very rare in Solaris. But Tarkovsky is quick to
link it to the films overall audiovisual experience. The weightlessness begins at 2:12:15: a candelabra
slowly, silently and elegantly floats upward, gently touching a chandelier and causing its jewels to
shake. The sound of this is very similar some of the high, delicate synthetic sounds we have
sporadically heard throughout the film. Kris and Hari themselves then float upward, and as they
embrace the Bach enters again, but not from the very start of the excerpt, as if it could have been
playing beyond our point of audition for some time. The Bach continues as the camera re-examines
the same painting Hari scrutinized earlier (2:13:01). But there are no electronic sounds. Has the Bach
supplanted the disturbing sonic world of Haris point of audition? This is initially true, but synthetic
sounds begin to enter at 2:13:38. The sounds begin innocently enough, as pitched supplements to
the organ that fit within the existing harmonic structure. The first sound also plausibly resembles a
vibraphone played with a rapid motor; this resemblance to a physical instrument clearly links it to
the acoustic realm. After a cut to an earthly scene of a campfire (taken from the earlier film of Kris
childhood), the Solaris ocean appears (2:13:55). The ocean causes this sublime scene to slowly
unravel: a synthetic roar enters (2:14:01) and attempts to overtake the Bach and the synthetic
vibraphone sound. It does not quite accomplish this, but the scene abruptly cuts away at 2:14:40 to
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the sound of a shattered object. Gravity has returned, and we see a broken liquid oxygen container
on the floor next to Hari, who earlier committed suicide by drinking it.
This scene clearly argues that the Bach, in spite of the organs links to electronic sound, is
not a representation of the psychotic unreal, but of the emotional sublime, a realm quite foreign to
most acousmatic music. How, then, is their connection and coexistence not a paradox? Tobias
Pontara argues that the organ - and Bachs music - must be a separate entity, resolutely external to
both the setting of the spaceship and its electronic and mechanical sound world. Ich ruf' zu dir
appears just four times during the film, but easily establishes itself as a leitmotif representing the
earthly values of love, intimacy, authenticity, and subjective truth24 Its first appearance after the
opening credits is when Kris, with Hari by his side, watches a home movie of his childhood on earth
(1:39:45). This film-within-a-film moment is the only place where the non-diegetic status of the
Bach is truly called into question. Pontara rightly notes that there is no visual evidence that the Bach
is diegetic to the scene; Hari and Kris stare directly into the camera, and we are deprived of any shot
of a television, let alone speakers. So is Ich ruf zu dir a soundtrack to the video? Is it heard by
both Hari and Kris, in spite of their separate existences? The video seems anachronistic; there is no
visual evidence of it - or its characters - existing decades in the past. Tarkovsky presents the video in
color, removing any indications of pastness that black and white would provide (in the manner of
Gibarians video message, for instance). And furthermore, Hari herself appears near the videos end.
All of these ambiguities should complicate the realm of sound, but Pontara maintains that the organ
prelude remains sequestered in a place resolutely separate from the spectral atmosphere of the
space station.
Could both of these arguments be true? Does the established timbral and harmonic
connection between acoustic organ and electronic sound actually undermine the organs separate
Pontara, Tobias (2014) Bach at the Space Station: Hermeneutic Pliability and Multiplying Gaps in Andrei Tarkovskys
Solaris Music, Sound and the Moving Image, 8:1, Spring 2014. 8
24
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status? While it does provide a basic model for elisions between acoustic and electronic sound, such
connections, whether made in a filmic context or not, usually blur boundaries between real and
unreal, and exist to confound, not clarify, the psychological understanding of the listener. Solaris,
however, is a departure from the realm of malevolent psychosis, and demonstrates that surrealism
need not be a confounding force. This is not a film that uses electronic sound in the manner of Pi or
Clean, Shaven; even the sounds that accompany Haris examination of the Bruegel painting are far
less sinister. Instead it explores the realm of the surreal without trafficking in threatening
representations of insanity. The timbral link between Bach and the electronic hum is a gentle anchor
that grounds the organ within the overall, resolutely but gently surreal sound world of the film. It is
a separate object, clearly placed into relief from the synthetic sounds, but not one so external to the
filmic experience that it ruptures the films sonic fabric. And this is not actually a paradox. Andrea
Truppin notes that sonic ambiguity is endemic to Tarkovskys oeuvre:
[his] use of sound permits his films to travel smoothly through multiple and equally
weighted layers of existence. These layers flow simultaneously through one another without
the rigid hierarchy that separates most filmic worlds into reality and fantasy. 25
Solaris clearly embodies this characteristic. But could these multiple and equally weighted layers of
existence exist in the realm of sound alone? The visuals of Solaris, I would argue, are clearly
autonomous; often they do not shift among reality and fantasy in parallel with the soundtrack. Color
and black and white, for instance, have a highly nuanced and complex relationship in the film. Cuts
between them are used to complicate notions of reality, in particular that of time. Black and white,
for instance, should connote pastness, as it does in Gibarians prerecorded video message. Tarkovsky
exploits this connotation to cast doubt on what is memory and what is reality. But visual shifts like
these nearly always lack clear analogs in the realm of sound. As a result it acquires a largely separate
status. While sound outside the diegesis is only sparingly used throughout the film, its impact is very
Truppin, Andrea. And Then There Was Sound: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Sound Theory, Sound Practice, Rick
Altman, ed. New York: Routledge, 1992. 243
25
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clear, granting it a great deal of its own autonomy. The most crucial implication for electroacoustic
music that Solaris provides, therefore, is the psychological power of acoustic-electronic elisions.
IX. Meta-Diegetic Autonomy in Noise

In a general sense, bridges between acoustic and electronic sound pull the listener among
different psychological and experiential perspectives by linking different areas of the sonic diegesis.
The question, therefore, can be one of degree, especially in films that explicitly set up the realityfantasy hierarchy that Solaris avoids. Timbral liaisons govern the sound world of Matthew Savilles
Noise (2007). The multi-faceted network of connections in this Australian crime drama are largely
focused on representing sounds internal to the psychological experience of one or more characters.
The degree and extent of these shifts steadily increases over the course of the film. Chief among
the representations in Noise is that of tinnitus, a ringing in the ears that plagues Constable Graham
McGahan (Brendan Cowell) throughout the film. The film opens with Lavinia Smart (Maia Thomas)
as she unexpectedly stumbles on a mass murder in a Melbourne subway car. Graham is one of the
police officers assigned to the crime scene, and the film follows both of their narratives as the
investigation and the aftermath of the crime unfold. Lavinia, who encountered the murderer at the
crime scene, struggles with fears that the he will find and kill her. Graham, whose tinnitus is
diagnosed after he suffers a fainting spell early in the film, is placed on limited duty by his superior
and assigned to a trailer to conduct witness interviews. It is here that he meets Dean Stouritis (Luke
Eliot), a man whose fiance was killed in the subway attack, Lucky Phil (Simon Laherty), a young
man with Down syndrome, and Matty Rhodes (Damien Richardson), a belligerent convenience store
owner.
The first sonic representation of Grahams tinnitus appears at 0:06:24. It is an acoustic
imitation: very faint non-diegetic violins sustaining a single pitch with subtle microtonal inflections.
Here he explains to the nurse that a ringing in his ears began some time ago, well before his fainting
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spell on the escalator earlier that evening. As Grahams condition worsens over the course of the
film, these representations become increasingly frequent. The actual ringing, which uses synthetic
sound, enters almost imperceptibly at 0:06:50, but it is not until later in the film that it appears in
earnest. It is ironic that an accurate and literal point-of-audition transcription of Grahams tinnitus a natural phenomenon - requires the use of electronic sound, while acoustic, real sound can only
mimic his psychological experience. This fact reinforces the distance between our experience and
that of Graham, creating a more distinct barrier than that established by differences of timbre alone.
A clear dichotomy of acoustic and electronic spaces therefore emerges from this early scene,
but it is not long before the barriers begin to disintegrate. Numerous other concepts and
representations, both acoustic and electronic, subsequently float through meta-diegetic space as the
film moves forward. These, along with the tinnitus representations, cause boundaries between nondiegetic, meta-diegetic, internal and external points of audition to progressively dissolve. The first
apotheosis of this process occurs in an extended scene beginning at 1:05:36. As Graham, seated in
his dilapidated police trailer, finishes a philosophical statement about heaven and hell, the gentle
high piano sounds (coinciding with and thatd be heaven at 1:05:43) return as the scene cuts to
Lavinia buying cigarettes in a gas station convenience store. Non-diegetic strings slowly and
imperceptibly enter, and begin to swell as she crosses the street. A car pulls up beside her (1:06:23),
and she begins to run out of fear that the subway murderer has finally found her. The scene cuts to
Lucky Phil, who earlier stole from the convenience store, being pursued by an inebriated Matty
(1:06:37) eager for retribution. The strings continue their incremental swell, with the high piano still
present, reaching a climax (and primacy in the sound mix) at 1:07:03, where the shot cuts back to a
terrified Lavinia sprinting away from an approaching car. This car is driven not by the subway killer,
but by the innocent man Lavinia identified in the police lineup. As she ducks behind a parked car, he
abruptly stops and exits his car. The strings recede during their verbal confrontation. This
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soundtrack excerpt has finally revealed itself as a contiguous entity; only short excerpts
highlighting its individual components (piano, strings) have appeared previously. Such continuity,
along with its indifference to the visual cuts between scenes, should ground this music in the nondiegetic realm. But as the strings fade, they reveal noisy instrumental gestures (1:08:08); these
include a sustained violin trill, triangle strokes and pizzicato interjections. These are mildly intrusive
sounds not unlike the previous instrumental representations of tinnitus. Therefore this music,
despite its increasingly autonomous rhetoric, has not conclusively exited the realm of the metadiegetic; it is still connected to a heard experience, but clearly not that of Graham, as he is absent
from this entire scene. Nor is it Lavinias. While the strings are empathetic to her emotional
experience, there is no evidence that she hears any of the noisy components of the soundtrack, here
or elsewhere. This increasing lack of a direct link to particular characters should demonstrate that,
given the proper establishing context, these materials - the noisy gestures amid the lyrical strings coherently form an entity that can be autonomous without the visual. Noise, therefore, progressively
creates a blind cinema: it presents a wide variety of sound objects and, over the course of the film,
develops them into an autonomous musical entity.
The following scene continues this process by further exploring the reality of Grahams
point of audition. Can you hear that? asks Dean as he sits in the trailer with Graham (1:08:34).
They listen for a moment, but all we (and Graham) can perceive is the return of the non-diegetic
twinkling piano sounds. You cant hear that?, he asks again (1:08:40). He exits the trailer, followed
by Graham, but we still hear nothing but the piano sounds. As they pursue the source of the sounds
that we (and Graham) still cannot hear, the strings enter incrementally. It is not until 1:09:30 that we
actually perceive the sounds of Matty and another man beating Lucky Phil. Graham and Dean run
to break up the assault as the strings swell, reaching a climax as the two of them enter the scene
(1:09:45). Here the music becomes overdramatized, adding a soaring horn melody and numerous
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cymbal crashes to the effusive strings. But even this is not entirely decoupled from meta-diegetic
space, as Graham reveals at 1:10:12 when he fires his gun. The gunshot immediately aggravates
Grahams tinnitus, and we hear the explosive ringing from his point of audition. The gunshot,
however, bears a clear timbral relationship to the non-diegetic cymbal crashes. This overwhelming
simultaneity compromises the separate identities of instrumental music, external diegetic sound and
internal sonic experience. The soft piano sounds have already become a plausibly heard entity, and
this passage further exemplifies the increased autonomy granted to the realm of sound.
But new issues arise as all of these sounds, noisy or otherwise, adopt new significances. As I
have already noted, extended excerpts of acoustic music employing autonomously acoustic idioms
are difficult to hear as objets sonores. Conventional instrumental underscoring, therefore, actually
problematizes the notion of blinded cinema as electroacoustic music. So how could instrumental
music possibly exist as electroacoustic music? Regarding non-diegetic music as a whole, Steve
Wurtzler provides a Lacanian argument, noting that:
the non-diegetic scores work of suturing spectator-auditors back into the Imaginary
compensates for the fragmented subject positions posed by the co-presence of recording
practices that alternatively provide a continuous level sound track, match sound perspective
to image perspective, and/or include instances of point-of-audition sound.26
Non-diegetic discourses, therefore, can draw the viewer-listener into a surreal psychological space,
but do so in a binding or consolidating way. Diegetic and meta-diegetic sound objects can be acts of
transcription or documentation, but non-diegetic music posits no event prior to representation.27
These contrasting psychological effects, Wurtzler contends, are actually complementary. There is a
clear analogy to electroacoustic music here: the different discourses implied by non-diegetic music
and transcriptive diegetic sounds can be synthesized into a coherent whole. Noise begins as a
Wurtzler, Steve. She Sang Live, But the Microphone Was Turned Off : The Live, the Recorded and the Subject of
Representation. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. Rick Altman, ed. New York: Routledge, 1992. 100
26
27
Ibid, 101. Emphasis in original
!33
collection of relatively isolated objets sonores - brief non-diegetic commentary or point-of-audition
transcriptions - and slowly assembles an autonomous electroacoustic sound world from them. It
organizes sound objects by developing their meanings and tracing their connections over time such
that they become, in spite of their source material, autonomous music that can posit no event prior
to representation.
The very end of Noise maintains this conceptual basis while jarringly resetting the entire
experience of the film. Here we experience Grahams aural apocalypse through diegetic sound alone.
His tinnitus is catastrophically aggravated by the shotgun rounds the murderer (Henry Nixon) fires
at him (1:38:15). He screams in agony, but we still do not hear what must be the worst ringing he has
yet experienced. Extreme chaos unfolds around him as he returns fire and pursues the murderer.
The result for the listener is more diegetic noise: our ears are increasingly overloaded with the
Christmas carols on TV, the shotgun blasts, the sound of the driver caught in the crossfire slumped
against a car horn (1:39:42) and the cries of the baby in the car. As Graham moves towards the car
to attend to the baby, the Christmas carols rise in the mix. Originally on the TV in the trailer, they
have now clearly become non-diegetic. Even as a roaring helicopter approaches and hovers over
Graham, the anempathetic carols remain primary to the mix. All of these sounds, with their clearly
delineated statuses, combine into an overwhelming autonomous whole.
But as Graham abruptly dies while lying on the pavement, the sound mix cuts to what I will
term absolute filmic silence (1:43:24). The end credits follow, and continue with no sound
whatsoever. This is not the mere absence of content in the audio track; it is the equivalent of
entirely shutting off a speaker, an aural jolt that throws the listener into a void completely external to
the filmic experience. This absolute silence does simulate Grahams death in the manner of his
earlier philosophical statement (1:05:36), but more importantly it presses a reset button on the entire
aural experience of the film. And this catastrophically clean slate resets the acousmatic experience at
large for the listener. Salom Voegelin describes a similar tabula rasa for sound art:
!34
Silence even when inaudible affords me a sonic sensibility that is the starting point of any
listening and the basis of an auditory aesthetics of art and the everyday. It is the point from
which listening starts and the consciousness on which a philosophy of sound art can
evolve.28
Silence is not just an end, but a beginning as well. The absolute filmic silence at the conclusion of
Noise places the sonic experience of the entire film into relief, giving it a baseline from which the
entire acousmatic experience emerges. The highly diverse, chaotic collection of sounds and music in
Noise, and all of the complex meanings their interplay provides, emerge from and return to the very
same silence; Grahams overwhelming apotheosis returns to its polar opposite: a lack of sound.
Silence is therefore a leveling, consolidating force that binds together the sonic experience of the
film. And it seals the autonomy that the sonic and musical content of the film have created.
Electroacoustic music does not necessarily privilege silence; nor does it need to. But the end of Noise
reminds us that silence is one boundary that serves to consolidate the acousmatic experience.
X. Conclusions: composing a blind cinema

My central contention has been that electroacoustic music contains elements of a blind
cinema, and that the aesthetic and ontological status of hallucinations provides us with the greatest
insight into how these elements function in this music. Thus far I have focused on providing insight
for both listener and analyst. But what tools might cinema provide for the creative artist? Composer
Denis Smalley, whose writings David Hirst cites, writes the following of films relationship to the
acousmtre:
Film absorbs acousmatic sound and music, and did so before electroacoustic music was
developed. Acousmatic sound can be used to circumvent the physical frame of the screen
[and] acousmatic conventions have evolved in order to transcend the constraints of the
28
Voegelin, 117.
!35
silent visual image.29
I am not trying to supplant an understanding of these conventions, particularly in the realm of the
creative process. In fact, it is precisely these conventions that can allow, even cause, sound to
circumvent the physical frame of the screen. The visual image in general, including that of
cinema, has never been a primary governing structure to organized sound. But a listeners impulse
has always been to search for an accompanying visual image; this is precisely why Schaeffer rejected
his earliest ideas. Composers today can essentially treat this impulse as a foregone conclusion. But
need we see it as limiting? Smalley writes the following about this in the realm of radio:
In our aural imagination we construct mental images of people, scenarios, and places, and
programs that explore mixes of sounds, music and voices might be regarded as a genre of
acousmatic art.30
Is radio acousmatic art? It certainly can be art, but creators of radio programs usually do not
traffic in ambiguities of sound source, because their aims are usually direct communication and
description. To use acousmatic idioms requires a creator to intentionally introduce ambiguities, with
the goal of obscuring or outright confounding the understanding of the listener. Managing and
directing these ambiguities - and developing one or more systems or structures for doing so becomes the primary concern of the sound artist. The rhetoric and logic of film sound, and the
flexibility of meanings that the sonic diegesis provides, can serve as one of these systems or
structures. And the set of tools that film provides for the composer are firmly in the realm of
organization, because the logic of a blind cinema exists to manage and organize, not define. It exists
to enrich ambiguities, not resolve them. And it certainly does not provide composers with a way of
narrowly directing a listeners experience. This would imply that all film sound has to offer the artist
is a fleeting visual context, derived from pairing one sound object with one image. The films I
Smalley, Denis. Artist Statements I: the acousmatic The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, Nick Collins, Julio
DEscrivn, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 80
29
30
Ibid, 80.
!36
analyze above accomplish far more than this. Instead, using some form of a blind diegesis as a
governing structure allows sounds to acquire the agency that they do in film. They can acquire unique
psychological statuses and shift between locations and perspectives within a field of dramatic action.
Creators of acousmatic sound art can exploit the tools of a blind cinema by asking questions
like the following: where does this sound lie in the spectrum between Real and Surreal? How do its
rhetoric, timbre, and associations help to answer this question? A composer might also gain insight
from the following, more blunt question: were this sound in a film, how would it contribute to its
diegesis? And even more bluntly: would this sound be diegetic, non-diegetic or meta-diegetic? Of
course this simple question does not require a simple - let alone ham-fisted - answer. But one
advantage of using cinema as an analytical framework is its creative flexibility; it does not provide
prescriptive structures for the sound artist. Thus it can coexist with a more intuitive, poetic, even
vague conception of the creation of electroacoustic music, one that allows for multifaceted answers
to the questions above. Smalley writes of the transmodal perceptual nature imbedded in aural
perception itself, and the vast expressive range of the purely sonic acousmatic image.31 The
framework I describe should not constrict this expressive range. Acousmatic and audiovisual
experiences are everywhere, now familiar to most if not all listeners. The creative musical realm to
explore, therefore, lies beyond simple audiovisual associations, because film asks us to understand
sound based not on what a sound sounds like, but on who is hearing it, what is producing it, where
it is coming from, and whether we have heard it before. Electroacoustic music requires an
understanding derived from these very same questions.
31
Ibid, 81.
!37
FILMOGRAPHY
Clean, Shaven, dir. Lodge Kerrigan. Criterion Collection, 2006 (1993). DVD
Noise, dir. Matthew Saville. Film Movement, 2008. DVD
, dir. Darren Aronofsky. Protozoa Pictures, 1998. DVD
Solaris, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. Criterion Collection, 2002 (1973). DVD
Spellbound, dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Criterion Collection, 2002 (1945). DVD
DISCOGRAPHY
Ikeda, Ryoji. Dataplex. Raster Music, 2006. CD
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barrett, Natasha. Trends in Electroacoustic Music, The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, Nick
Collins and Julio DEscrivn, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 232-255
Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994.
Chion, Michel. Film, a Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press,
2003.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis:
The Athlone Press, 1989.
Demers, Joanna. Listening through the Noise: the Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010.
DEscrivn, Julio. Electronic music and the moving image, The Cambridge Companion to Electronic
Music., Nick Collins and Julio DEscrivn, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
156-170
Eisenstein, Paul. Visions and Numbers: Aronofskys and the Primordial Signifier. Lacan and
Contemporary Film, Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle, eds. New York: Other Press, 2004. 1-28
Hirst, David. A Cognitive Framework for the Analysis of Acousmatic Music: Analysing Wind Chimes by
Denis Smalley. Sarbrucken: VDM Verlag, 2008.
!38
Johnson, Vida T. The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1994.
Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Kane, Brian. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. New York: Oxford University Press,
2014.
Pontara, Tobias. Bach at the Space Station: Hermeneutic Pliability and Multiplying Gaps in Andrei
Tarkovskys Solaris. Music, Sound and the Moving Image, 8:1, Spring 2014. 1-23
Schaeffer, Pierre. In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. Christine North and John Dack. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012.
Smalley, Denis. The Acousmatic. The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, Nick Collins and Julio
DEscrivn, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 78-82
Voegelin, Salom. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2010.
Wurtzler, Steve. She Sang Live, But the Microphone Was Turned Off : The Live, the Recorded and
the Subject of Representation. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. Rick Altman, ed. New York: Routledge,
1992.

Noise Objets Sonores and Altered States

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Noise, Objets Sonores and Altered States: Listening to

Electroacoustic Music through Film

II. Existing tools for the analysis of electroacoustic music

III. Noise, Glitch, Right and Wrong Sounds

IV. Artificial Sound and the Diegesis: Two Examples

V. Aronofskys Pi: discourses of artificial and manipulated sound

VI. Clean, Shaven: noise, subjectivity and perspective

VII. Perspective in a blinded Clean, Shaven

VIII. Acoustic-electronic elisions in Solaris

IX. Meta-Diegetic Autonomy in Noise

Ibid, 101. Emphasis in original

X. Conclusions: composing a blind cinema

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