Different cultures and subcultures establish and develop different patterns and norms for what course the process from baby via child to adult should run. The ultimate goal — being an ideal male or female adult — depends on whatever the society in question, on account of its material basis and cultural heritage, sees as desirable, useful and good. Assuming we have all been babies and if, as I suggest here, baby's power over the domestic soundscape is a biological necessity in the early development of every human and if this state of sonic domination must largely be relinquished for that individual to survive, then we ought to gain important insights into how any culture works by studying patterns of socialisation that relate directly to nonverbal sound. Assuming that one of music's main functions is to vehiculate socially relevant images of affective behaviour, states and processes in the form of nonverbal sound, this means studying music in that society. In our culture the only trouble is that music usually gets studied either as a set of motoric performing skills or as a quasi-mathematical idealised and imaginary system of suprasocial sound structures. Neither of these approaches can tell us much about how music socialises different people from different backgrounds and cultures in different ways. New models and approaches combining anthropological and semiotic method with more traditional forms of structural analysis are needed to free music and the humans using it from the conceptual prisons of 'autonomous' aesthetics and Fame school broilerism. What I want to suggest here is that music plays an essential part in socialising us as subjects in whatever culture we belong to and that our changing relationship as subjects to the soundscape (from egocentric sound dominating individual to one of cooperative interaction) can be traced in the way foreground and background are vehiculated in the music of different cultures. After all, we all carry a small, vulnerable but omnipotent little version of ourselves inside us until the day we die and, like it or not, each of us will have to find forms of containing, training and socialising that little idiot throughout our lives. Since nonverbal sound is so important to the construction of our emotional personality, music, perhaps more than any other symbolic system, is probably where we can best study how different cultures and subcultures at different stages of their development contain, train and systematise our subjectivity.
In what follows I would therefore like to present and illustrate two sets of ideas that can help make some sense out of the relationship between subjectivity, the soundscape, music and society. The first set of ideas — a sign typology of music — comes from recent empirical research in musical imaging; the second — notions of musical figure and ground — I have appropriated and developed from concepts presented independently by both Maróthy (1974) and Goldschmidt (1970).
Sonic anaphones
Sign typology overview
Anaphone
sonic anaphone
perceived similarity to paramusical sound
kinetic anaphone
perceived similarity to paramusical movement
tactile anaphone
perceived similarity to paramusical sense of touch
Genre synecdoche
pars pro toto reference to 'foreign' musical style, thence to complete cultural context of that style
Episodic marker
short, one-way process highlighting the order or relative importance of musical events
Style indicator
unvaried aspects of musical structuration for the style in question
From Philip Tagg, 'Subjectivity and Soundscape, Motorbikes and Music' -
http://www.tagg.org/articles/virrat.html
