What is Sonic Narrative?

Abstract The active human mind imbues perceptual experiences with meaning: what we see and hear signifies or represents something. Even abstract sounds can articulate structural functions and evoke moods. This means that they can be used to design a narrative structure. A compelling sonic narrative is the backbone of an effective piece of music. This paper examines the important concepts of sonic narrative, including narrative function, sonic causality, nonlinear narrative, antinarrative strategies, narrative context, humor/irony/provocation, narrative repose, and hearing narrative structure.
Keywords Narrative in computer music, Musical narrative, Structure of electroacoustic music.

 Introduction

A composition can be likened to a being that is born out of nothing. Like all of us, it is a function of time. It grows and ambles, exploring a space of possibilities before it ultimately expires. This birth, development, and death make up a sonic narrative. Every level of structure, from sections to phrases, individual sounds, and even grain patterns follows its own narrative. Individual sounds come into being and then form complementary or opposing relationships with other sounds. These relationships evolve in many ways. Sounds clash, fuse, harmonize, or split into multiple parts. The relationship can break off suddenly or fizzle out slowly. Eventually, all the sounds expire, like characters in a sonic play. As Bernard observed (Gayou 2002):

If I have to define what you call the “Parmegiani sound,” it is a certain mobility, a certain color, a manner of beginning and ebbing away, making it living. Because I consider sound like a living being.

Or as Luc Ferrari (quoted in Caux 2002) said:

[My composition] Visage (1956) should be discussed in terms of cycles, rather than repetitions...I imagined the cycles as if they were individuals, living at different speeds. When they didn’t meet, they were independent. When they met...they were transformed by influence or by confrontation. In this way a sort of sentimental or narrative mechanism could be articulated.

A compelling sonic narrative is the backbone of an effective piece of music. This paper examines the important concepts of sonic narrative, including narrative function, sonic causality, nonlinear narrative, antinarrative strategies, narrative context, humor/irony/provocation, narrative repose, and hearing narrative structure. The text is adapted from chapter 10 of my book Composing Elec- tronic Music: A New Aesthetic (Roads 2015).

  Music is Representational

The active human mind imbues perceptual experiences with meaning: what we see and hear signifies or represents something. Thus sound, like other sensory stimuli, is representational. Even abstract sounds (i.e., music) can establish a mood or atmosphere within seconds, setting the stage for narrative. Consider the pensive tone of Daphne Oram’s Pulse Persephone (1965).

Sound 1. Excerpt of Pulse Persephone (1965) by Daphne Oram.

Individual sounds also articulate structural functions. They signify beginnings, developments, transformations, and endings of larger structures. The fact sounds can articulate structural functions and evoke moods means that they can be used to design a narrative structure. As the theorist Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1990) observed:

For music to elicit narrative behavior, it need only fulfill two necessary and sufficient conditions: we must be given a minimum of two sounds of any kind, and these two sounds must be inscribed in a linear temporal dimension, so that a relationship will be established between the two objects. Why does this happen? Human beings are symbolic animals; con-fronted with a trace they will seek to interpret it to give it meaning.

I would go even further to say that a single sound can tell a narrative. A drone invites internal reflection and meditation. A doorbell alerts a household. An obnoxious noise provokes an immediate emotional reaction. Silence invites self reflection. An intense sustained sound commands attention (Figure 1, Sound 2).

Figure 1. Setup for Xopher Davidson and Zbigniev Karkowski’s album Processor (2010). The Wavetek waveform generators (left) are controlled by a Comdyna GP6 analog computer (right). Photograph by Curtis Roads in Studio Varèse at UCSB.

Sound 2. Excerpt of Process 5 (2010) by Xopher Davidson and Zbigniev Karkowski.

The conundrum of musical meaning has been analyzed at length in the broad context of music cognition and music semantics. Library shelves are filled with books on musical meaning and the psychology of music.

As Elizabeth Hoffman (2012) observed, composers of electronic music often use recognizable or referential sound samples. Such works project listeners into encounters with places, people, and things–the stuff of narrative. The composer places these referential elements in a deliberate order. In works that use sampled sound to present a sound portrait, the connection to narrative discourse is direct. In many acousmatic pieces, we eavesdrop on people talking to themselves, to others, or to us. Taken to a dramatic extreme, some works tend towards the literal story lines of audio plays.

While the connection to narrative is obvious in these cases, what about narrative articulated by abstract sounds, that is, electronic sounds that are not sampled or not directly referential to events in the real world? First we must recognize that a distinction between abstract and referential sounds is clear only in extreme cases. An example of an abstract sound would be a sine tone lasting one second. An example of a referential sound would be a recording of a conversation. As we will see however, abstract sounds can serve structural functions in a composition. Thus they play a role in its narrative structure.

Many compositions propose no explicit social, cultural, or religious agenda. Like an abstract painting, they convey a pattern of rhythm, tone, and texture, i.e., what Denis Smalley (1986, 1997) called a spectromorphology. Spectromorphology describes patterns of sonic motion and growth according to acoustic properties. Abstract sound objects serve structural functions within these processes, such as beginning, transitional ascending element, climax, transitional descending element, pause (weak cadence), ending (strong cadence), juxtaposition, harmonizing element, contrasting element, and so on.

Sound 3. Pictor alpha (2003) by Curtis Roads

Notice how the strong cadence of Pictor alpha is articulated simply by the repetition of a pulsar 6 dB greater than the previous pulsar, which clearly states: The End.

Inevitably, many sounds are charged with meaning beyond their purely spectromorphological function, for ex-ample, the spoken voice. We hear a spoken utterance not just as an abstract stream of phonemes but as human speech, full of expressive, linguistic, poetic, and conceptual ramifications. In music that relies on speech, the narrative often tends toward the literal, spilling outside the boundaries of “absolute” music, per se. An example is a scripted hörspeil or audio drama. Music based on spoken or sung text can recite a literal narrative, for example Ilhan Mimaroglu’s classic Prelude 12 for Magnetic tape (1967), featuring the evocative poetry by Orhan Veli Kanik.

Sound 4. Excerpt of Prelude 12 for Magnetic tape (1967) by Ilhan Mimaroglu. (1)

Consider also soundscape compositions based on recordings of sonic environments. These run the gamut from pure audio documentaries to combinations of pure and processed recordings. Luc Ferrari’s Presque rien avec filles (1989) is an example of “cinema for the ear.” We recognize the sound sources so the signification is direct: we are transported to an artificial soundscape in the composer superimposes several recordings made at different times and places.

A primary strategy of self-described acousmatic music is precisely to play with reference. Acousmatic works en-gage in games of recognition, mimesis, and semantic allusion. The music of Natasha Barrett is a prime example.

The music of films often mirror the scripted plot and its associated emotions (fear, happiness, anger, amusement, grief, triumph, etc.) in more-or-less direct musical form. Of course, in more sophisticated productions, the music can function independently or even as ironic commentary, such as a light song dubbed over a tragic scene.

In contrast to these directly referential materials and strategies, representation is more abstract in much music (both instrumental and electronic). Consider a one-second sine tone at 261.62 Hz. It signifies “middle C” to someone with perfect pitch. It might also allude to the general con-text of electronic music, but other than this it represents a structural function that varies depending on the musical context in which it is heard. It might harmonize or clash with another sound, for example, or start or stop a phrase.

In works like my Now (2003), for example, a sonic narrative unfolds as a pattern of energetic flux in an abstract sonic realm. We hear a story of energy swells and collisions, of sonic coalescence, disintegration, mutation, granular agglomerations, and sudden transformation, told by means of spectromorphological processes.

Sound 5. Now (2003) Curtis Roads

In such music, sounds articulate structural functions of the composition. Structural functions in traditional music begin with basic roles such as the articulation of scales, meters, tempi, keys, etc. and lead all the way up to the top layers of form: beginnings, endings, climaxes, developments, ritornelli, and so on. Analytical terms such as cadence, coda, and resolution directly imply scenarios. In a piece such as J. S. Bach’s Art of Fugue (1749), the narrative has been described as an exposition of “the whole art of Fugue and Counterpoint” as a process (Terry 1963). As Stockhausen (1972) observed:

Whereas it is true that traditionally in music, and in art in general, the context, or ideas and themes, were more or less descriptive, either psychologically descriptive of inter-human relationships, or descriptions of certain phenomena in the world, we now have a situation where the composition or decomposition of a sound, or the passing of a sound through several time layers may be the theme itself, granted that by theme we mean the behavior or life of the sound.

That music can teach us about processes leads to the ambiguity between “musical” and “extramusical” references. Music can articulate many types of processes; some grew out of musical tradition while others did not. Some com-posers of algorithmically composed music consider the narrative of their works (i.e., its meaning or what it articulates) to be the unfolding of a mathematical process. Se-rial music, for example, derives from set theory and modulo arithmetic, originally imported from mathematics. After decades of compositional practice, are these still “extramusical” references? The distinction is not clear.

  Abstract Sonic Narrative

What is narrative? In a general sense, it is a story that the human brain constructs out of our experience of the world, by anticipating the future and relating current perceptions to the past. We are constantly building stories out of sensory experiences:

I am sitting. The walls are wooden. I see a red and white checkered pattern. I see green colors. I hear broadband noises. I see a person sitting across from me. Out of these unconnected sensations I construct a narrative. The red and white checkered pattern is a window shade. The green colors are foliage outside the window. The noise is the burning wood in the fireplace. The wooden beams tell me I am in Cold Spring Tavern in the mountains above Santa Barbara. The person sitting across from me is a composer from Germany.

Our sensory experiences are continuously and immediately analyzed and categorized within a cognitive context. This musical narrative builder is our “listening grammar” in operation, as Lerdahl (1988) called it. Our listening grammar is how we make sense of the sonic world.

Part of how we make sense of the world is that we anticipate the future. Indeed, the psychological foundation of music cognition is anticipation. As Meyer (1956) observed:

One musical event has meaning because it points to or makes us expect another event. Musical meaning is, in short, a product of expectation.

Thus a narrative chain can function because we inevitably anticipate the future. In a detailed study of musical anticipation, Huron (2006) described five stages of psychological reaction. They apply to music listening but also to any situation in which we are paying attention. These reactions occur very quickly–moment to moment–as we listen; they inform a narrative understanding of our experiences.

In electronic music especially, musical narrative often revolves around processes of sonic transformation. Consider, for example, the famous transformation seventeen minutes into Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1960) in which a tone descends in frequency in a flowing down and up-down manner until it dissolves into individual impulses, which then elongate to reform a continuous tone. Like a story from Ovid’s fantastic Metamorphosis (8 CE), in which nymphs transform into islands, we are fascinated by the strange fortunes of this sound.

Metaphorically, we can think of sounds as abstract characters that enter a stage, act out some behavior, and eventually leave the stage and our awareness. This sonic play is a multiscale process; it can describe one sound, a phrase, a section, or a whole piece. For example, if a unique sequence of events occurs over one minute at the start of a ten-minute piece, we call it a beginning. At the close of a piece, we call it the ending. Within the acting phase are a limitless realm of possible behaviors and interactions with other sounds.

How we interpret a sequence of musical events depends on our anticipation and our psychological reaction as to whether or not our expectations are met. As Huron (2006) noted:

Minds are “wired” for expectation…What happens in the future matters to us, so it should not be surprising that how the future unfolds has a direct effect on how we feel.

Sonic narrative is constructed by a succession of events in time, but also by the interaction of simultaneous sounds. This is the realm of generalized counterpoint. Do the sounds form a kind of “consonance” (resolution) or “dissonance” (opposition)? Is one sound a foil to the other? Does one serve as background while the other operates in the foreground? Does one sound block out another sound? Do the sounds move with one another (at the same time and in the same way) or are they independent? These contrapuntal interactions lead to moments of tension and resolution. As Varèse (quoted in Risset 2004) observed:

One should compose in terms of energy and fluxes. There are interplays and struggle between the different states of matter, like confrontations between characters in a play. Form is the result of these confrontations.

Figure 2. A frame from Andy Warhol’s film Empire (1964).

Even static structures can elicit the experience of narrative. I vividly recall the wide range of emotions I experienced watching Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) for 45 minutes (Figure 2). This silent film consists of eight hours and five minutes of continuous footage of a single shot of the Empire State Building in New York City.

  Morphology, Function, Narrative

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it is really how it works. – Steve Jobs

What is the relationship between morphology, structural function, and narrativity in music? Let us start with a simple example. The morphology of a table is its shape–how it looks. Let us define its structure or organization as the way that the component parts are interconnected, how the legs attach to the top. As the biologist Thompson (1942) observed:

A bridge was once upon a time a loose heap of pillars and rods and rivets of steel. But the identity of these is lost, just as if they had fused into a solid mass once the bridge is built. …The biologist as well as the philosopher learns to recognize that the whole is not merely the sum of its part… For it is not a bundle of parts but an organization of parts.

Figure 3. Functional representation of a table.

Figure 3 shows a simple diagram of the structure of a table. The oval elements connect and describe a functional relationship between the component parts. The basic function of the entire table is to support things placed on its top, but it can have other functions such as serving as a portable table, extendable table, or visual accent, etc. Thus there can be more than one functional relationship between two parts. For example, a table leg in steel might serve an aesthetic function of being a visual/material contrast to a marble tabletop.

Morphology in music is a pattern of time-frequency energy. Music articulates myriad structural functions: temporal, spatial, timbral, melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, etc. It can also serve and articulate social and cultural functions in all manner of rites and rituals, from the street to the palace.

Structural function refers to the role that an element (on any time scale) serves in relation to a composition’s narrative structure. It was defined abstractly by music theorist Wallace Berry (1987) as follows:

To see structural function in music…is to see, in general, three possibilities: increasing intensity (progression), subsiding intensity (recession), and unchanging event succession (stasis).

Structural functions play out not just in pitch and rhythm but in all of music’s features, as Berry (1987) observed:

There are “dissonances” and resolutions in all of music’s parameters.

Accordingly, to serve a structural function, an element either increases intensity, decreases intensity, or stays the same. Processes such as increasing intensity (heightening tension) and decreasing intensity (diminishing tension) are narrative functions. To give an example, an explosion at the close of part one of my composition Never (2010) releases energy and fulfills a narrative function as: The End.

Changes in intensity imply trends, and therefore imbue directionality. Of course, reducing all musical functionality to its effect on “intensity” begs the question of how this translates to specific musical parameters in actual works. Berry’s book explores this question through analytic examples. The analysis can be quite complicated. Real music plays out through the interplay of multiple parameters operating simultaneously and sometimes independently. Stasis in one dimension, such as a steady rhythmic pattern that serves a structural function of articulating a meter, can serve as a support for a process of increasing intensity in another dimension, such as the structural function of a crescendo, while another dimension undergoes a process of decreasing intensity.

Ultimately, structural functionality concerns the role and thereby the purpose of an element within a specific musical context. The context is extremely important. As Herbert Brün (1986) observed:

Composition generates whole systems so that there can be a context which can endow trivial “items” and meaningless “materials” with a sense and a meaning never before associated with either items or materials.

To use an architectural analogy, a wooden beam that supports the roof of a traditional house would serve only a decorative function in the context of a steel skyscraper. Context is the key to meaning.

  Sonic Causality

A sonic narrative consists of chains of events. These chains can create an illusion of cause and effect, as if a subsequent event was the inevitable consequence of an antecedent event. One way teleology can emerge in a musical narrative is by the design of chains of causal relationships.

Let us distinguish two distinct uses of the term “causality” in the context of electronic music. In the acousmatic discourse, causality is concerned with identifying the source that generated a given sound, i.e., what is its origin? By contrast, our interest concerns a different issue, the idea that one sound appears to cause or give rise to another in a narrative sense, what Lars Gunnar Bodin (2004) called causal logic. What if one sound was the necessary antecedent that appears to cause a consequent sound? We see this effect in the cinema, where a succession of sounds–spliced and layered together–lend continuity to a visual montage (e.g., footsteps + yell + gunshot + scream + person falls to the ground). “Appears to cause” is the operative phrase; my use of the term “causality” is metaphorical. As in the cinema, we seek only an illusion of causality, suggested by a progression of events that indicate a direction leading to some inevitable result. As I wrote about Half-life, composed in 1999:

As emerging sounds unfold, they remain stable or mutate before expiring. Interactions between different sounds suggest causalities, as if one sound spawned, triggered, crashed into, bonded with, or dissolved into another sound. Thus the introduction of every new sound contributes to the unfolding of a musical narrative. (Roads 2004)

As a sonic process emerges out of nothing, it may spawn additional musical events. These events, be they individual particles or agglomerations, interact with existing events, setting up a chain of implied causalities. Two sounds can converge or coincide at a point of attraction or scatter at a point of repulsion, leading to a number of con-sequences:

Fusion - multiple components fuse into a single sound
Fission - sounds split into multiple independent components
Arborescence - new branches split off from an ongoing sound structure
Chain reaction - sequences of events caused by a triggering event

An impression of causality implies predictability. If listeners are not able to correlate sonic events with any logic, the piece is an inscrutable cipher.

  Nonlinear or Variable Narrative

A film should have a beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order. – Jean-Luc Godard (1966)

The term linear narrative has often been applied to a story with a beginning that introduces characters or themes, followed by tension/conflict resulting in a climax/resolution and final act. A linear narrative presents a logical chain of events; events progress and develop, they do not just succeed one another haphazardly.

Contrast this with so-called nonlinear interactive media, where each participant can choose their own path through a network. A classic example is a gallery exhibit, where each person can view artworks in any order. Notice, however, the linearity within the nonlinearity. Each person in a gallery views a “linear” sequence of images. It is merely different from what another viewer sees. Moreover, these experiences are taking place in time, which according to the metaphor timeline, is a linear medium. What makes a medium “nonlinear” is its variability–everyone can do it a different way–whether by chance or choice. Variable multipath narrative is perhaps a more descriptive term than “nonlinear narrative.”

Some would say that the experience of music is linear, in that it unfolds in time and different audience members have no choice in what they hear. Similarly, a book is read from the beginning to the end.

Yet filmmakers, composers, and novelists often speak of nonlinearity in the organization of their works, even if they are ultimately presented in the form of an unvarying single-path narrative. It is not necessary for a musical narrative to unfold in a linear chain. Artists use many techniques to break up or rearrange sequential narrative: ellipses, summaries, collage, flashback, flashforward, jump cut, montage, cut-up, and juxtaposition. Narrative emerges out of nothing other than adjacencies, as Claude Vivier (1985) observed:

My music is a paradox. Usually in music, you have some development, some direction, or some aim. . . I just have statements, musical statements, which somehow lead no-where. On the other hand, they lead somewhere but it's on a much more subtle basis.

Using digital media, sounds and images can play in any order, including backwards, sped up, slowed down, or frozen. Granulation can pulverize a speaking voice into a cloud of phonemes, transforming a story into an abstract sonic narrative.

Moreover, music is polyphonic: why not launch multiple narratives in parallel? Let them take turns, interrupt each other, unfold simultaneously, or twist in reverse. The possibilities are endless. As music psychologist Eric Clarke (2011) observed:

Music’s own multiplicity and temporal dynamism engage with the general character of consciousness itself.

Narrative design can be labyrinthine or kaleidoscopic, reflecting the true nature of consciousness and dreams.

Consider Luc Ferrari’s comments on the construction of his Saliceburry Cocktail (2002)

The Cocktail idea suggested that I hide things under one another. I took old elements, and since I didn’t want to hear some of them, I hid them under some elements that I also didn’t want to hear. And since I remembered some of the sounds, I also had no choice but to hide the images they evoked, and I had to hide some other realistic elements un-der synthetic sounds, and I had to dissimulate some of the synthetic sounds under some drastic transformations. Finally, I hid the structure under a non-structure or the other way around.

Sound Example 6. Excerpt of Saliceburry Cocktail (2002) by Luc Ferrari.

Surprise is essential to a compelling narrative. Surprises are singularities that break the flow of continuous progression. The appearance of singularities implies that, like a volcano, the surface structure is balanced on top of a deeper layer that can erupt at any moment. If we look at what caused it, it is the will of the composer at the helm of a sonic vessel. The voyage of this vessel, as communicated by the sound pattern it emits, traces its narrative.

  Antinarrative Strategies

Certain composers, most notably John Cage, reject narrative as an organizing principle. Yet a narrative impression is not so easily disposed. In this sense, narrative is like form, something rather hard to extinguish. As Earle Brown (1967) wrote:

If something were really formless, we would not know if its existence in the first place. It is the same way with “no con-tinuity” and “no relationship.” All the negatives are pointing at what they are claiming does not exist.

The mind is –searching for patterns even in pure noise. Anyone who listens Stockhausen’s moment form works such as Kontakte (1960) or Momente (1964) hears teleological processes, patterns of increasing and decreasing intensity, convergence/divergence, coales-cence/distintegration, and causal illusions, all elements of narrative. While the macro form is nondirectional, on other time scales we hear many familiar narrative elements: openings, development, cadences, counterpoint, transitions, etc. In any case, perceived randomness takes on well-known narrative identities: a series of unrelated juxtapositions is predictably chaotic, and white noise is predictably unchanging.

  Synthesizing Narrative Context

Intimately related to the concept of narrative is the prin-ciple of context. Narrative context–on whatever time scale–determines the structural function and appropriateness of sound material. Only a contextually appropriate sound serves narrative structure. We see here the deep relationship between materials at lower levels of structure and the morphology of the higher-level context. Inappropriate sound objects and dangling phrases inserted into a structure from another context work against their surroundings. If they are not pruned out of the composition, their presence weakens the structural integrity of the piece. Even a small anomaly of this kind can loom large in the mind of listeners. An inappropriate sound object or phrase can cancel out the effect of surrounding phrases, or call into question the effectiveness of an entire composition.

What determines the “inappropriateness” of a sound or phrase? This is impossible to generalize, as it depends entirely on the musical context. It is not necessarily a sharp juxtaposition–juxtapositions can be appropriate. It could be a sound that is unrelated to the material in the rest of the piece or an aimless section that drains energy rather than building suspense.

For fear of inserting an inappropriate element into a piece, one can fall into the opposite trap: overly consistent organization. This condition is characterized by a limited palette of sounds and a restricted range of operations on these sounds. A hallmark of the “in the box” mindset, an overly consistent composition can be shown to be “coherent” in a logical sense even as it bores the audience.

In certain works, the synthesis of context is the narrative. For example, in Luc Ferrari’s brilliant Cycle des souvenirs (2000), the composer is a master of fabricating context from unrelated sources: synthesizers, women speaking softly, bird and environmental sounds, a drum machine, and auditory scenes of human interaction around the world. In Ferrari’s hands, these disparate elements magi-cally cohere. Why is this? First, the sounds themselves are exceptional on a surface level and their mixture is refined. On a higher structural level, we realize that the various elements each have a specific function in inducing a sensibility and mood. The combination serves to induce a kind of trance–made with everyday sounds that contextualize each other. When new sounds are introduced they are often functional substitutions for sounds that have died out, thus maintaining the context. For example, the work is full of repeating pulses, but from a wide variety of sound sources. When one pulse dies out, another eventually enters, different in its spectromorphology, but retaining the structural function of pulsation.

  Humor, Irony, Provocation as Narrative

Narrative context can be driven by humor, irony, and provocation. These need not be omnipresent–many seri-ous works have humorous moments.

What is the psychology of humor in music? Huron (2006) describes it as a reaction to fear:

When musicians create sounds that evoke laughter… they are, I believe, exploiting the biology of pessimism. The fast-track brain always interprets surprise as bad. The uncer-tainty attending surprise is sufficient cause to be fear-ful…But this fear appears and disappears with great rapidity and does not involve conscious awareness. The appraisal response follows quickly on the heels of these reaction re-sponses, and the neutral or positive appraisal quickly extin-guishes the initial negative reaction…In effect, when music evokes one of these strong emotions, the brain is simply realizing that the situation is very much better than first impressions might suggest.

Huron (2006) enumerates nine devices that have been used in music to invoke a humorous reaction, including material that is incongruous, oddly mixed, drifting, dis-ruptive, implausible, excessive, incompetent, inappropri-ate, and misquoted. Humor can be derisive. As Luc Ferrari (quoted in Caux 2002) observed:

To be serious in always working in derision is a permanent condition of my work. I am always preciously outside of an-ything resembling the idea of reason. Derision lets me dis-turb reason: who is right, who is wrong? It is also a question of power.

Dry humor is omnipresent in Ferrari’s music, for example in the incessantly repeating “Numéro quatro?” in Les anecdotiques (2002), or the changing of the guard se-quence in Musique promenade (1969) with its absurdly contrasting sound layers.

Sound 7. Excerpt of "Numéro quatro" from Les anecdotiques (2002) by Luc Ferrari.

Charles Dodge’s humorous Speech Songs (1973) featured surreal poems by Mark Strand as sung by a computer. As the composer (2000) observed:

I have always liked humor and had an attraction to the bi-zarre, the surreal. These poems were almost dream-like in their take on reality. So that made me feel very at home somehow. This unreal voice taking about unreal life situa-tions was very congruent. The voices are … cartoon-like and that pleased me.

Dodge’s Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental (1980) warps the voice of Enrico Caruso to both humorous and tragic effect.

Sound 8. Excerpt of Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental (1980) by Charles Dodge.

A camp sense of humor prevails in the electronic pop music of Jean-Jacques Perrey, such as his rendition of Flight of the Bumblebee (1975) featuring the sampled and transposed sounds of real bees.

Irony is a related narrative strategy, letting music comment on itself and the world around it, often with humorous effect. Many techniques communicate irony: absurd juxtapositions, quotations of light music, and ex-aggerations, for example. Irony can also be conveyed in extrinsic ways such as in titles and program notes. An example is Stockhausen’s 1970 program notes to the CBS vinyl edition of the Klavierstücken (CBS 32 21 0007). In the guise of documentation, the composer meticulously detailed all aspects of the recording, including the con-sumption habits of the pianist Aloys Kontarsky in the period of the recording sessions.

...[The pianist] dined on a marrow consommé (which was incomparably better than the one previously mentioned) 6 Saltimbocca Romana, lettuce; he drank 1/2 liter of Johan-nisberg Riesling wine; a Crêpe Suzette with a cup of Mocca coffee followed; he chose a Monte-Cristo Havana cigar to accompany 3 glasses of Williams-Birnengeist, with an ex-tended commentary on European import duties for cigars (praising Switzerland because of duty by weight) and on the preparation and packing of Havana cigars.

Another example of absurdist irony appears in John Cage’s Variations IV (1964) “For any number of players, any sounds or combinations of sounds produced by any means, with or without other activities.” The recording of the work unfolds as a Dadaesque collage that juxtaposes excerpts of banal radio broadcasts. These form a sarcastic commentary on American popular culture. Ironic re-sampling is a recurrent theme of artists influenced by the aesthetics of cut-up or plunderphonics (Cutler 2000).

Closely related to humorous and ironic strategies is provocation. Provocative pieces tend to divide the audi-ence into fans versus foes. As Herbert Brün (1985) noted:

We often sit in a concert and listen to a piece to which we do not yet have a “liking” relationship but of which we know already that it annoys the people in the row behind us–and then we are very much for that piece. I would sug-gest that my piece is just on a level where it invites you to a conspiracy with me and you like that. Yes, it annoys a few people in your imagination or your presence that you would like annoyed, and I am doing you this little favor.

Notice the two sides of the effect: some people enjoy the piece at least in part because they think others are an-noyed. Some artists are deliberately provocative; they seek to shock the audience. Shock is a well-worn strategy. Consider Erik Satie’s Vexations for piano (1893), in which a motive is repeated 840 times, taking over 18 hours. At the first full performance, which did not occur until 1963, only one audience member remained present through the entire event (Schonberg 1963).

Strategies for deliberate provocation follow known for-mulae. Certain artistic conceptions function as “audience trials” to see who can stand to remain. An exceptionally long, loud, noisy, quiet, or static piece tests the audience.

The line between provocation and free artistic expression is blurry, since what is considered provocative is context dependent, or more specifically culturally dependent. To some extent, provocation is in the eye of the beholder. For example, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) was considered shocking at its Paris premiere but was celebrated as an artistic triumph in the same city a year later (Stravinsky 1936).

In some music, provocation occurs as a natural side-effect of a disparity between a composer’s unconventional vision and the conventional mindset of an audience. For example, the music of Varèse was long considered provocative by many critics and labeled as “a challenge to music as we know it.” The management of Philips went so far as to attempt to have Varèse’s Poème Électronique (1958) removed from the Philips Pavilion project (Trieb 1996). Similarly, Xenakis was a musical radical of an uncompromising nature. Many of his pieces, both electronic and instrumental, challenged accepted limits.

A tremendous furor was aroused in Paris in October 1968 at a performance of Bohor during the Xenakis Day at the city’s International Contemporary Music Week. By the end of the piece, some were affected by the high sound level to the point of screaming; others were standing and cheering. “Seventy percent of the people loved it and thirty percent hated it” estimated the composer from his own private sur-vey following the performance. (Brody 1971)

I recall being present at the Paris premiere of Xenakis’s composition S.709 (1994), a raw and obsessive electronic sonority that dared the audience to like it.

  Narrative Repose

Compositional processes need a balance between sparsity, relaxation, and repose as well as density, tension, and action. As in the cinema, slowing down the action and allowing the direction to meander provides an opportunity to build up suspense–underlying tension. As Herbert Brün (1984) observed:

Boredom is a compositional parameter.

Composers sometimes deliberately insert sections that stall or freeze the narrative, as a preparation for intense fireworks to come. Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) comes to mind, with its sparse and frozen middle section between 3:17 and 8:50 preceding a colorful finale (8:51-13:15).

Likewise, the long reposing phrases that characterize the style of Ludger Brümmer induce a sense of expectation for brief dramatic flourishes, as in works such as The gates of H (1993), CRI (1995), La cloche sans vallées (1998), and Glassharfe (2006).

Sound 9. Excerpt of Glassharfe (2006) by Ludger Brümmer.

  Conclusion: Hearing Narrative Structure

A composer can design narrative structure, but will listeners hear it? Part of the pleasure of listening to music is decoding the syntactic structure as it unfolds. A clear and simple narrative design is decipherable to most listeners. If a listener cannot hear any patterns or organization in a piece of music they will likely dismiss it as boring chaos.

At the same time, in a piece of new electronic music of sufficient complexity, it is unlikely that a listener will hear every detail that the composer designs. Like any crafts-person, composers of all stripes embroider patterns for their own amusement without expectation that audiences will decipher them. A communication model of music–in which the composer transmits a message that is received and unambiguously decoded by listeners–is not realistic. “Imperfect” communication, in which the message perceived by each listener is unique, is part of the fascination of music.

Even if a listener was able to somehow perfectly track the narrative structure–to parse the syntax on all time scales–this does not account for the ineffable factor of taste in listening. Just because I understand how a work is organized does not mean that I will like it. Inversely, I do not need to understand how a work is constructed in order to marvel at it. As in all other aspects of life, there is no accounting for taste; the appreciation of beauty is subjective; nothing has universal appeal.

Recent research shows that our brains experience music not only as emotional stimulus but also as an analog of active physical motion (Echoes 2011). In effect, the composer sails the listener on a fantastic voyage. Let each person make up their own mind about what they experience.

  References

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Brün, H. (1984). Personal communication.

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Godard, J. L. (1966). Quoted in the commentary to Masculin-Feminin. DVD. New York: Criterion Collection.

Hoffman, E. (2012). “Itunes: multiple subjectivities and narrative method in computer music.” Computer Music Journal 36/4: 40-58.

Huron, D. (2006). Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Lerdahl, F. (1988). “Cognitive constraints on compositional systems.” In Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition: 231-259. Sloboda, J. [Ed.] Oxford: Oxford University Press.