Aural Listening

The first generation of music lovers born in the presence of Hi Fi devices mostly got to know with music via these devices, witnessing theirs first musical concerts much after already coming in touch with music through electronic technology. I remember my own experiences with records and gramophones from childhood, when I would search through record collection of my father like I would search the books in the library, and then run them just as I would read a book. I have this aural experience of music so imbibed, that I found it strange when, much older, realizing that many people – and even of my generation – don't have such notions and still tie music for live performances. Similarly as Hesse, they refused to experience music just as pure sound.

And it seems that traditional viewpoints heavily dominate especially amongst music professional. A telling recent example is a reaction of the general manager of the BBC Symphonic Orchestra, Paul Hughes, on a computer-performed (VSL software) extract of Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, for “The Observer” newspaper from 2006:

“It's very good and beautiful, but incredibly bland. I've spent a lifetime listening to orchestras and you can hear when someone is taking a breath before playing a woodwind, even if you can't hear the breath itself. With this, you get no sense of that at all.”

Obviously, for Paul Hughes the means that produce sounds are a part of musical experience. Certainly, such an opinion caused a rebellion of everything in me that loves music -- I never seen an instrument in my life when I first became impressed with music, and I don’t think I will ever be that impressed again. For me, a piece is its sound, and a composer a spiritus movens behind these sounds, only afterwards eventually a player. It’s the sound I hear that makes me feel all the splendor of music -- I need no company of performers, imagined or real. So I wouldn’t even notice or care if a computer would reproduce the music. An example: I deeply liked from the first hearing a piece “Behind The Gardens” of Andreas Vollenweider, and I thought for a time it is done on a keyboard synthesizer. Only later I realized that Vollenweider actually plays electro-acoustic harp. But my experience of the piece didn’t change.

Of course, it can be interesting to know how music is actually produced, but such thoughts come post scriptum. They are a separate issue, and not a part of a listening experience. We don’t know how sound is created and don’t need to know – after all, we can on the same way wonder how a composition is composed in the first place. Shortly put, means that are used to produce music are a concern solely of musicians and music makers, while listeners hear only the result, without being aware of what produces the sound. It’s like with tasting food - you don’t think about a cook while you are eating.

Certainly, many traditional pieces will be experienced somewhat differently when listened auraly. When listening to the music performed live, the very way of producing the sound imbibes itself into the experience of sound and its meaning; listener interprets what he hears as produced by certain instruments and performers motions, that make a part of the message. In his book "Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception of Musical Sounds: The Sound of Music", James W. Beauchamp describes an experiment carried out by Saldana and Rosenblum in 1993:

In their first experiment, they presented each sound along a continuum between a plucked and a bowed string. At each presentation of a sound, the subject had to estimate whether the sound was lucked or bowed on a continuous scale. The instructions were to use the middle of this scale if the sound was ambiguous. In one condition, the sound was presented simultaneously with a video tape showing a player plucking or bowing a string. Results showed that subjects' responses were greatly influenced by the visual information. Indeed, the identification function for judgments based only on the auditory presentation of the sound was significantly different from that based on the audiovisual presentation. In fact, the authors observer that the identification function corresponding to the audiovisual condition shifted to the plucked response scale and inversely for the condition where the video tape presented a bowed string.

From this experiment we can infer that the consciousness of the physical source of the sound greatly influences our expirirence of that sound. Thus, if listened to auraticaly, many pieces, especially virtuoso pieces, will come out sounding more bland. In classical times, performance was often more highly regarded than composing. Large part of classical music composers were expected to be top performers before being composers. Chopin's music was hailed among other because it “made the piano sing”, rather than being heard just as music. Vocal music is much about display of what can be done with a human voice, rather than being solely musical composition. A piece can be interesting as something that is played on an acoustic guitar; but solely listening to it, not knowing about a guitar, we could find it musically not so interesting. But thats what they compositionally really are. Virtuoso pieces while seeming impressive when we see them played, actually often don’t do much to us just as music. Great deal of classical repertoire will lose some of its impact due to this effect. The least will probably be lost with symphonic music, which was essentially always meant to be listened to aurally - even in classical times one would not even notice players. It is documented for example that Mozart preferred these big orchestras so he can get lost in sound and forget the players. But say Beethoven’s piano sonata functions differently.

Despite listening music on concerts is an ancient tradition, aural listening is actually the natural listening mode for humans. It is how humans initially perceive music – and I suppose anyone who got to know with music via Hi Fi systems can testify this. That music never before could be listened like this, does not alter that fact. Often what comes after is more natural than what was; only because some things are since always, doesn’t mean that they are the most natural. We can notice that many core inventions are not so much innovations, as much as the suspension of age-old limitations -- enabling us to continue dealing with the world around us more naturally. Sound reproducing systems are such an invention. Despite music as performance is an ancient tradition, we always listened music because of what we hear and not because of something else; we like to listen to music because of the sounds which stirs the soul, taking us somewhere spiritually, and not because of means of production. Beethoven's 9^th symphony has little to do with a concert hall in which, from technological reasons, it had to be produced until XX century. With Hi Fi devices, compositions are perceived as sound works of art and not an element of a concert performing ritual.

But often, adaptability of human nature becomes its own enemy. Limitations we could do nothing against, we accept, we bend ourselves so that we even start to like them. This is well known in psychology, maybe the most extreme case being the Swedish syndrome - where people get used to sadists they can do nothing against and start to in a way love them. I had an experience of my own of this kind: I had an old monitor and my eyes got so adjusted to it, that when I bought a better one, I thought it’s quite bad and that my yes are aching from it. Only when, years later, I had to, by chance, plug in the old one again, I realized how awful it actually was. In this similar way, most people already accustomed on live performances have troubles with aural presence. Especially tough nuts are the ones that went through formal training in classical music schools - theirs senses and minds are so much trained to receive music from live performance, that they lack the natural response when put in front of pure sound and find the experience “bland”.