Once you tire of the fascinating pictures Colin is talking about, you could have a look at

http://homepage.mac.com/misha_david/MishMusic/iMovieTheater75.html

which will give some idea, albeit a not very well synchronised one...

PS there used to be a rather nasty website called www.furt.com, which is why our site is called www.furtlogic.com, although the former seems not to exist any more.

Hey, I never said a word about the furtographic evidence - I only supplied one picture, which unlike RB's video is not at all fascinating (except insofar as I seem to be holding a human heart in my right hand).

Apologies to both Stuart and Colin!

... in order to make the relationship as fluent as possible, given the desired result (as Colin says, it's a compositional decision). Familiarity plays an important role too - don't forget that there's probably just as massive a gap between the physical and the aural on a piano if you've never seen a piano before, and the mechanical linkages between fingers and strings on a piano are (a) by no means direct, and (b) constructed exactly so as to make a certain kind of musical activity fluent.

Yes yes, you're right, of course.

And I should really clarify my earlier post to say that I dramatically prefer your approach to the typical, laptop-y, 'I might as well be checking my email' approach that still seems to be the norm even for live electronic/laptop music.

The real center of my difficulty w/ electronic music is w/ tape music, in which there's no direct link b/t sound and the physical method of sound-production.  What I miss is the very visceral sense of music-making.  And, interestingly, this also gets at an answer to Stuart's question from earlier about recordings vs. live performances -- I still hear/feel this 'gap' even when listening at home by myself, and that gap somehow doesn't exist when listening to recordings of acoustic music.

But that gets us well off track and into a much larger discussion of acoustmatic music that perhaps deserves its own thread ...



Anyhow ... this is something I'm working on and working through.  I realize it's a shortcoming in my abilities as a listener, so I've been working to expand my listening vocabulary as much as I can.  And, moreover, this whole action/sound gap is at the heart of my new electric guitar piece (wherein I decided to throughly embrace the separation b/t the physical and the aural by conceiving of the two on completely different planes) ... I figured the best thing I could do would be to address my concerns head-on.



(Btw, I think it's amusing that ol' CD prodded and prodded to get this discussion properly on track, and now that it is, he's stuck in his car somewhere b/t Urbana and Chicago, nowhere near a computer.  Ha!  Perhaps when he gets here I'll let him on the computer for a minute to catch up b/t he & I dash off for a beer.)

I understood your 'iconic' and 'coded', Colin - a bit like the difference in Peirce's theory of signification between smoke as a sign of fire (that's iconic: you see one thing and know it implies another thing) and the word 'fire' as a sign of fire (that's a code).

In terms of what you say about sound production on musical instruments, it strikes me there's a third category which slightly muddies your neat distinction. You talk about instruments where the sound-producing action is visible (trombone, piano, etc.) vs ones where changes in the sound can be effected more or less invisibly (voice, laptop). What about instruments where the action is highly visible but bears a particularly oblique relation to the result, e.g. cimbalom? These ought to fall into your 'iconic' category but they do so in a way that might be thought to cast doubt on the point of 'iconicity'?


Aaron: I think you need to do some more reading/thinking around the concept of 'the acousmatic'. Seriously, it's a very useful concept ... It means precisely 'sounds which are not attributed to a source'. Try taking it outside music into film theory - there's an article on Psycho, I'm sure, which I should try to retrieve from my memory banks for you ...

I don't know whether this is a useful thought-experiment or not in this context. But suppose you were listening to a recording of, well let's say Brahms Third Symphony, and you had never heard any orchestral music before and indeed had absolutely no idea that the sound you were hearing was made up of dozens of different people playing different types of instrment. You had been brought up entirely on electronically created music coming out of loudspeakers and had no reason to think there was any other kind available. Would the piece of sound, purely as sound, called 'Brahms Third Symphony' (or possibly 'Brahms Third Racket') make any sense to you?

Or, at least, would it make the same sense to you as it did to your twin brother who had been brought up in exactly the same way but who, as a special treat, had been in on the recording sessions and seen how the noise was produced? It wasn't done by one person twiddling dials etc as all other other music that you each knew up to now had been. It was done by a large number of people blowing down tubes, scraping things and hitting other things with sticks. The gestures involved and, probably even more importantly, the way that the sounds were built up from their constituent elements over time, were quite different.

The two of you would be hearing the same physical sounds coming out of the loudspeakers but would you really be "hearing the same piece of music"? Could you (as opposed to your twin brother) ever really hear "Brahms Third Symphony" without being let in on the secret.

And (depending on the answer to that )there's a sort of related secondary question. Can we (in our situation) as audience members ever 'really hear' a piece of electronically composed music just from "the sounds alone"? Or do we, similarly, need to be let in on something of how the "sounds alone" were built up in order to hear it properly: some very rough electronic equivalent of "those are oboe and clarinet lines in there amongst all that other noise"?

We seem to have sidestepped the issue of whether a sound has one morphological identity or several. "One" smacks of unnecessary reductionism to me.