Prof. Dr.

Sabine Sanio
Leitung Theorie und Geschichte der auditiven Kultur

The Paradigm of Sonic Effects

A Study in Interdisciplinarity

Gabriel Santander

Sound Studies – Akustische Kommunikation

Universität der Künste Berlin 2011

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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects

Index

Introduction .............................................................................................................. 3

The Sonic Effect Paradigm....................................................................................... 5

The Origins ............................................................................................................... 5
Premises and Definition ........................................................................................... 8

4 Criteria in Interdisciplinarity .............................................................................. 11

Interdisciplinarity in the Sonic Effect Paradigm.................................................... 14

Afterword................................................................................................................ 17

Selected Bibliography............................................................................................. 19
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects

A Study in Interdisciplinarity

Gabriel Santander
Sound Studies – Akustische Kommunikation
Universität der Künste Berlin 2011

Abstract:

The present paper studies the origins and the paradigm of Sonic Effects, before going on to
propose different criteria for evaluating their incorporation into interdisciplinary studies. It concludes by
relating the two in a critical evaluation of the interdisciplinarity in the paradigm of Sonic Effects as it is
presented in the book Sonic Experience – A Guide to Everyday Sounds, edited by Jean-François
Augoyard and Henry Torgue.

Introduction

The strive to comprehend acoustic and psychoacoustic phenomena1 can be said

to be as ancient as our consciousness of hearing and perhaps even related to its
appearance, the significance of a sonic effect such as the echo effect, has been compared
to the importance of the mirror stage in psychogenetics2. On the other hand, regarding
our own potential for sound production, the structure of the vocal apparatus in Homo
Heidelbergensis already suggests the potential for producing (and reproducing) sounds
by means of sophisticated vocalizations 300-400,000 years ago3. But how did our
ancestors relate to the sounds they heard around them and the ones they themselves
produced? How much have we evolved in our understanding of sound? Have we not
developed sciences that are primarily visual and therefore cannot truly correspond to
our own aural experience? It seems that sound has always escaped our comprehension;
we are still at the dawn of an aural culture. But this is perhaps also due to the very

1
Throughout this paper, the term sonic effect will be exclusively reserved for the new interdisciplinary
concept we intend to analyze and explore, using italics when mentioning effects referring to this concept.
2
E. Lecourt, L’expérience musicale: résonances psychanalitiques.
3
Scarre, Chris, Sound, Place and Space: Towards Archaeology of Acoustics, Archaeoacoustics, Chapter
1, McDonald Institute Monographs, 2006, p 1.
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
nature of sound, its existence intertwined with another ungraspable phenomenon, time,
or better, time-space.

It is no coincidence that the greatest developments in the study of sound, which

has played a major role in all human cultures as far and wide as we know, were carried
out systematically for the first time by western culture in the 19th century, coinciding
with the scientific approach to other complex systems, such as biological evolution,
psychology, sociology, quantum physics, etc. But despite setting the fundamental
grounds for future studies in acoustics and psychoacoustics, a profound change in our
auditory culture would not come up until the middle of the 20th century.

The invention and development of electronic equipment in the 1950’s that

allowed the manipulation of sounds, whether recorded or synthesized, provided
scientists, technicians, musicians and listeners a direct contact with sounds undreamt of
before. It was the final achievement in a line of inventions that, since the first
phonograph and the radio, would change our understanding of sound, and therefore, our
hearing: “New means change the method; new methods change the experience, and new
experiences change man”4. These new electronic means were followed by the
elaboration of two fundamental concepts in western contemporary auditory culture,
l’objet sonore and the soundscape, coined by Pierre Schaeffer and Murray Schafer in
their books Traité des objets musicaux and The Soundscape, respectively. These were
the first treatises on sound based on the latest scientific facts of their time, proposing a
common language and understanding of the sonic phenomena from an interdisciplinary
perspective. Their new approach for studying sound was soon followed by other
interdisciplinary studies relating acoustics and other areas, such as architecture,
sociology or archaeology, enriching the repertoire of auditory culture and also
recognizing the importance of historical texts on acoustics, such as Vitruvius’ De
Architectura or Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis and Phonurgia Nova, and
leading back to a scientific approach in which knowledge and information were not
synonymous, but part of a whole system of cognition, interdisciplinarity.

4
Maconie, Robin (Editor), Stockhausen on Music, Marion Boyars Publishers, 1989, Four Criteria of
Electronic Music, page 88.
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
Interdisciplinarity proved to be in the past century a necessary approach for
unifying knowledge from different disciplines, traditionally taken to be independent
areas of research. Complex systems and phenomena cannot be reduced to our isolated
areas of expertise; we can no longer obtain an understanding of the world through the
different looking glasses of discrete specializations. The sonic phenomenon has so far
resisted being cut up into acoustics and psychoacoustics alone, it is the human
perception of a function of time in space, both in the strictly physical meaning of the
terms, as from the historical and geographical point of view. Not only are there
physical, physiological and psychological aspects involved in the perception of sound,
there are also cultural and sociological ones.

One of the most thorough researches in this interdisciplinary approach to the

sonic phenomenon has been carried out by the Centre de recherche sur l’espace sonore
et l’environnement urbain (CRESSON) for over thirty years. The results of their studies
have opened up the way for a new paradigm: The Sonic Effect, following and expanding
the already mentioned l’objet sonore and the soundscape concepts. We will now
concentrate on defining this new paradigm, as it is fully presented in the book Sonic
Experience – A Guide to Everyday Sounds, before studying the criteria for establishing
relationships between sonic effects and different human activities or products, and
relating the two in a critical revision of the text.

The Sonic Effect Paradigm

The Origins

The sonic effect paradigm must first be understood within its theoretical context,
it is at the same time based on the objet sonore and soundscape concepts and distanced
from them in its theoretical and practical approach by embracing the phenomenological
notion of effect.

On the one hand, l’objet sonore is a construct of Pierre Schaeffer’s

phenomenological approach to sounds, it strives to conceptualize through sound
analysis the relationship between the aural complex of sonic perception and the physical
signal of sound, ranging from a theoretical quest for the essence of sound per se,
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
through its psychoacoustic perception and the psychological states of listening, and
down to the minimal units of a new solfège of sounds. Schaeffer’s multidisciplinary
study was without doubt the first theoretical framework combining the results of
acoustic and psychoacoustic research into a new type of musicology, but its
deterministic approach was too elementary for complex and interdisciplinary contexts.
The concept of l’objet sonore can be said to be limited in three aspects: time,
complexity and space: its method of fragmenting sounds into elementary units, though
useful for simple sound sequences or recurring complex ones (such as in phonetics),
proves to be impractical when they are complex and spread over time, and, when
dealing with space, the acousmatic approach of l’objet sonore is clearly inappropriate
for studying the human experience of sonic phenomena.

On the other hand, Murray Schafer’s concept of the soundscape can be

understood as the complementary counterpart to l’objet sonore. The deterministic
approach concentrated on sound objects in l’objet sonore is expanded into a sonic
sphere in the soundscape, one may compare them to the study of quantum physics and
astronomy, the elementary particles and the surrounding universe as a whole, but unlike
in these scientific disciplines, in the interdisciplinary approach of l’objet sonore and the
soundscape, human perception is the measure of all things.

The term soundscape was introduced by Schafer to refer to the sonic

environment surrounding us constantly, it is related to the study of complex sonic
contexts and our perception of them, stressing on our conscious listening attitude. But
unlike Schaeffer’s systematic and complex method proposed for l’objet sonore, the only
systematic conceptual criteria provided by Schafer for the soundscape are those of hi-fi
and lo-fi soundscapes: “A hi-fi system is one possessing a favorable signal-to-noise
ratio. The hi-fi soundscape is one in which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because
of the low ambient noise level.”5 and “The lo-fi soundscape originates with sound
congestion. […] In the ultimate lo-fi soundscape the signal-to-noise ratio is one-to-one
and it is no longer possible to know what, if anything, is to be listened to.”6

5
Schafer, R. Murray, The soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world, Destiny
Books, 1977, p 43.
6
Ibid, p 71.
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
Murray Schafer’s study of sonic phenomena can be said to be more empirical
than Pierre Schaeffer’s phenomenology of sounds, it is abundant with case studies and
diverging examples which are left open to further research. It’s main achievement was
raising consciousness about the complexity of the sonic experience, as opposed to
Schaeffer’s relatively closed and reductionistic system, it raised the necessary questions
for incorporating more parameters into the complex sonic equation by dealing with
space and its acoustical effects, as well as the historical, sociological and cultural
conditioning in the perception of sounds, among other issues.

But how can these two conceptual worlds be brought together into a unified
system of representation of the sonic experience? First of all, by following their
achievements in approaching sonic phenomena. One of their major achievements was
establishing the need for qualitative criteria in studying the human experience of sound,
although in a limited or tentative way, this was provided by the categories of sound
objects and soundscape types. Traditional quantitative measurements tools were thus
complemented with quantitative tools for describing and explaining the perception of
acoustic phenomena. The other major achievement was the aforementioned
interdisciplinarity, which would be further systematized in the paradigm of sonic effects
through the notion of effect.

The notion of effect is fundamental to understanding how interdisciplinarity

functions within the paradigm of sonic effects. The term effect is not used here as related
to the dyad of “cause and effect” or in the sense of an “impression”, but rather to the
rediscovery and development of phenomenological thinking within different sciences in
the last two centuries, it should be understood as referring to a phenomenon or a
phenomenological law.

In physics, the study of complex systems in which context was a crucial aspect
of certain phenomena lead back to a logic that had existed for thousands of years but
had practically been banned from the natural sciences for centuries. For example, in the
butterfly effect, the flapping wings of a butterfly causing a hurricane miles away, cannot
be simply explained as a matter of “cause and effect”, the initial conditions are crucial
and the phenomenon cannot be reduced to the butterfly, the hurricane, nor to the initial
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
conditions alone, it is a complex system whose different parts interact with each other
and cannot be isolated from the whole.

In this meaning of the word effect, some sonic effects have been well known and
observed for thousands of years, such as the Echo, Resonance or Reverberation effects,
though not always clearly differentiated; others, like the Doppler effect or the Haas
effect, may be more related to specific observations that may have passed unnoticed for
centuries; some can be said to be strictly cultural, such as the Sharawadji effect and yet
others can be said to be common to all human aural perception, such as the Synecdoche
and the Asyndeton effects.

Premises and Definition

We have already mentioned some of the basic fundaments, both historical and
theoretical, for the sonic effect paradigm, now we must understand the premises
presented by their authors and the definition of the sonic effects.

Two fundamental principles are stated for the study of sonic phenomena within
the sonic effect paradigm:

“Firstly, no sound event, musical or otherwise, can be isolated from the spatial and temporal
conditions of its physical signal propagation. Secondly, sound is also shaped subjectively, depending on
the auditory capacity, the attitude, and the psychology and culture of the listener. There is no universal
approach to listening: every individual, every group, every culture listens in its own way.”7

The first premise is perfectly clear as regards to the object of study, the physical
context of a sonic event is part of the phenomenon as a whole and cannot be ignored, as
we have seen before in dealing with the phenomenology of effects in natural sciences,
but the second premise requires further explanation for elaborating a paradigm that is
not culturally biased or strictly limited to our western culture:

“An integrative process that would bring together distinct cultural sound experiences is possible,
[…] Such a process relies on two assumptions. The first assumption is generic: perceptive organization is
fundamentally the same in everyday and specialized listening. The second assumption is anagogical: the

7
Augoyard, Jean-François and Torgue, Henry (Eds.), Sonic Experience – A Guide to Everyday Sounds,
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005, p 4.
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
unification of sound phenomena must happen through a rediscovery of the pre-categorical approach to
listening. A listening practice that starts with a return to the consciousness of early listening (as Merleau-
Ponty would say)”8

Following these basic premises, the research carried out at CRESSON in the
fields of social sciences, urban studies and applied acoustics, lead the researchers in the
search for tools that would fulfil three criteria9:

• Interdisciplinarity.
• Suitability to the scale of the urban situations to be observed.
• Capacity to integrate dimensions beyond aesthetic design.

The sonic effect served as an operative concept in this research process, being
able to account for phenomena in psycho-sociological studies, in urban planning and in
applied acoustics, by describing the interaction between the different aspects of the
phenomena, explaining their processes and relating them to other areas. But the authors
are cautious as regards to its theoretical nature:

“The sonic effect should not be understood as a full “concept” in its strict sense. […] The survey
of objects it refers to remains open. […] The notion is only partly understood; the sonic effect is
paradigmatic. […] Rather than defining things in a closed way, it opens the field to a new class of
phenomena by giving some indication of their nature and their status.”10

It is thus a paradigm, a framework for understanding sonic phenomena in a

phenomenological and interdisciplinary manner, a concept open to further development
and revision. As such, and like the concepts of l’objet sonore and the soundscape, it
requires training, it requires attentive and conscious listening and experience: “Listening
to sonic effects and developing the capacity to identify them are part of a rehabilitation
of general auditory sensitivity.”11

This prerequisite for the use of sonic effects leads us to what Murray Schafer
considers to be the two fundaments of the sonic effect paradigm, the Asyndeton effect,
which he defines as “screening out”, and the Synecdoche effect, referred to as “selective
listening”:

8
Ibid, p 13.
9
Ibid, p 7.
10
Ibid, p 9.
11
Ibid, p 13.
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
“The extended essay on synecdoche/asyndeton shows how this pair of effects forms the basis of
the notion of sonic effect itself: hearing implies a state of preparedness to both ignore and listen to
sounds.”12

These concepts are fundamental not only to the sonic effect paradigm, but also
for selecting the sonic effects to be studied. When taking into consideration the open
guidelines and basic fundaments for defining sonic effects described above, their
number can be said to be as large as the number of possible sonic phenomena perceived,
that is, practically infinite. Therefore, the researchers at CRESSON carried out a
“selective listening” strategy guided by the following criteria13:

• The basic effect and its variations.

• Effects that always exist in concrete space or in the listening process.
• Effects that directly participate in the nature of the urban environment or in cultural
processes.

These criteria also served for determining a hierarchy between “major” and
“minor” effects, for example, firstly, the distortion effect being a variation of the
filtration effect, would make the latter a “major” effect, whereas the former would be a
“minor” effect; examples of the second criterion would be the reverberation effect,
which can be said to be present – albeit differently – in every acoustic situation, thus
making it a “major” effect, and also the synecdoche effect, which is at the base of every
selective perception; lastly, effects such as the metamorphosis or the imitation effect are
characteristic examples of urban environments and human production of sounds
respectively, thus raising them to the category of “major” effects.

The selected effects are then organized according to different categories

according to their content14:

• Elementary Effects.
• Compositional Effects.
• Mnemo-perceptive effects.
• Psychomotor effects
• Semantic effects.
• Electroacoustic effects.

12
Ibid, p xiv.
13
Ibid, p 15.
14
Ibid, p 17.
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
Although these categories are only theoretical classifications of the sonic effects,
they serve to frame the general system of sonic effects into different connections,
which, complemented with the previous criteria, establish a network of relationships
between them. Within the definition of each of the different sonic effects, there are
cross-references pointed out as15:

• Synonymous effects
• Complementary effects
• Related effects
o Related inductor effects
o Related induced effects
• Opposite effects

Lastly, the interdisciplinary references selected for describing and explaining the
different effects are the following16:

• Physical and applied acoustics

• Architecture and urbanism
• Psychology and physiology of perception
• Sociology and everyday culture
• Musical and electroacoustic aesthetics
• Textual and media expressions

We will now go on to study the different criteria that might be used for applying
the use of the sonic effect paradigm in interdisciplinary studies.

4 Criteria in Interdisciplinarity17

Having established the theoretical basis for understanding our sonic experience
of sounds through the use of the sonic effect paradigm, we are still at odds when
relating this paradigm to human activity. How can we analyze the relationship between
sonic effects and, for example, architectural design? How can we study the relationship
that our prehistoric ancestors had with sounds? How can we establish a connection
between room acoustics and musical styles? The following criteria derived from
different areas of expertise may help assist all these questions.

15
Ibid, pp 21-151.
16
Ibid, p 16.
17
These four criteria have been derived from different areas of study, such as acoustics, archaeoacoustics,
aural architecture, musical analysis, site-specific art or audiovisual studies, etc.
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
When analyzing or assessing the relationship between sonic effects and human
activities or their products, there are four general criteria that should be taken into
account:

• Phenomenological: Ontology – Perception

• Anthropological: Intentionality – Consciousness
• Synchronic: Exactitude – Closeness of fit
• Diachronic: Parallelisms – Statistics

The phenomenological criterion is the most elementary one, the existence and
possibility of perception of a sonic phenomenon is required in order to study it. This
may sound obvious, but until a phenomenon is discovered and we include it in our
understanding of the aural paradigm, establishing its possibility of being perceived, it
may pass by unnoticed, as the aural world has been largely ignored by anthropology
until archaeoacoustics has discovered its potentialities in explaining certain human
activities. It is closely related to the Asyndeton and Synecdoche effects referred to
before, in our case, the phenomenological approach is that of the sonic effects
paradigm, all the sonic phenomena not contemplated in this paradigm will be
systematically ignored and we must be conscious of this fact.

The anthropological criterion serves to assess whether humans, be it small or

large groups and societies or single individuals, throughout millennia or at a certain
moment in time, have deliberately intended establishing a connection between their
activity and certain sonic effects, or have consciously perceived this connection. This
may actually be the object of study, as in the case of archaeoacoustics, but it may also
be the basis for it, for example, Vitruvius’ description of (conscious and intentional) use
of resonant-vases for improving the acoustics of ancient theatres lead to their discovery
in later constructions; and it may also be a premise for the design of site-specific art or
acoustic spaces yet to be carried out.

The synchronic criterion is mostly quantitative; it measures the degree of

observable relationship between the different aspects of the object studied, serving to
establish the closeness of fit between them. This criterion is extremely important
because, even isolated from or in contradiction with the other criteria, it can prove an
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
objective relationship between different aspects of a complex system. For example18,
the case of a single red dot painted in the 10meter tunnel at the prehistoric cave of Le
Portel, having no pictorial meaning and being placed at the exact location of the
maximum peak of resonance of the tunnel, proves that there is a relationship between –
at least – this particular dot and the resonance effect produced at this specific location,
even if there were no other such examples to corroborate this.

The diachronic criterion studies the parallelisms between the object of study and
similar phenomena from a statistical perspective. The probability of a relationship
between observable aspects of a phenomenon is assessed by this criterion through
studying a general tendency among similar phenomena separated in time or space. This
criterion has several difficulties: there might be no known similar observable
phenomenon to carry out a statistical study, in this case it would be synonymous with
the phenomenological criterion, and, like the “anthropic principle”, it only says that
there is at least one such phenomenon having a relationship between its different
aspects; another difficulty is establishing and proving coherent parallelisms between
similar phenomena, this can lead to speculation and discredit the statistical approach as
coincidental; and, lastly, sonic effects are ubiquitous to human experience and their
activities, just as every space has its own acoustic characteristics, sonic effects can be
found in every situation imaginable, therefore, narrowing the band of possible
relationships between sonic effects and human activities or products is a prerequisite in
the statistical approach.

The last two criteria, synchronism and diachronism, can be said to be paired up
into a system of complementary axis, providing a quantitative degree of probability of
interdisciplinary relationships in a given object of study. As we have said, perfect
synchronism cannot be disproved by lack of similar phenomena, but it may also provide
no information as to its connection to human activity or its interpretation. Similarly,
establishing the intention of interdisciplinarity in a certain work may be contradicted by
the lack of observable relationships, as in many examples of so called site-specific art.
Lastly, the repetition of certain constant interdisciplinary relationships throughout time
and places, may lead us to establish connections between the peoples involved, but their

18
Reznikoff, Iegor, The Evidence of the Use of Sound Resonance from Palaeolithic to Medieval Times,
Archaeoacoustics, Chapter 8, McDonald Institute Monographs, 2006, pp 79-80.
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
consciousness or intentionality may be utterly misunderstood. Nonetheless, combining
these criteria in the study of a clearly defined phenomenological field, can lead to
establishing, analyzing and creating interdisciplinary connections in a systematic way.

Interdisciplinarity in the Sonic Effect Paradigm19

After having studied the 4 criteria in interdisciplinarity, one may wonder

whether the sonic effects paradigm, as it is formulated in the book Sonic Experience – A
Guide to Everyday Sounds, edited by Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue, can
resist an analysis of its interdisciplinary approach. But, furthermore, one may wonder if
it can resists other forms of criticism, applicable to all theoretical constructs.

The first major criticism is the incongruent use of the term effect within the
repertoire of sonic effects. Effects such as the chorus effect or the rumble effect seem to
have no place in a book dealing in depth with the resonance effect or the Doppler effect.
The chorus effect is almost described as being a sound effect, as those we can find in
sci-fi movies or video games, and the rumble effect refers exclusively to the
malfunctioning of a phonograph’s motor, there is no reference to other areas that would
interconnect their meaning in a transversal manner, there is no phenomenology of
interdisciplinarity in these effects, unless we believe that the relationship between
electroacoustic media or phonographs and sounds is by itself interdisciplinary.

These common errors could be attributed to the arbitrary disproportion between

the descriptions of individual effects. For example, one of the most influential and
oldest recognized effects in acoustics such as the echo effect, is compressed into 6 lines
(9 if we add those of the related flutter echo effect) as compared to the extended 6 pages
of the “exotic” sharawadji effect. One may argue that the echo effect is somehow
included in the extensive dissertation on the reverberation effect, but this is contradicted
within the latter’s explanation: “people often substitute the word “echo” for
reverberation, but acoustics clearly distinguishes between the two effects through the

19
The present criticism is mainly based on the book: Augoyard, Jean-François and Torgue, Henry (Eds.),
Sonic Experience – A Guide to Everyday Sounds, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005
 15
The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
criterion of onset.”20 This disproportion between individual effects should not be seen
as a mere question of form, it is intrinsic to the division of effects into “major” and
“minor” effects. This hierarchical thinking strategy, which is used for practical reasons,
is contradictory with phenomenology, the whole idea of the notion of effect is that each
phenomenon is unique and cannot be reduced, especially when dealing with effects that
involve human perception, it does not require expert listening to distinguish between a
chirp, flutter or single echo, much less between any echo and reverberation.

This leads us to two other major criticisms that are somehow related, first, the
question of denomination. An interdisciplinary system seeking to comprehend and
include sonic phenomena that have been perceived, studied and, denominated, for
hundreds if not thousands of years, cannot start from zero. No matter how close one
might get to the “early listening” experience, the system of symbols, words and signs
referring to the sonic phenomena, although arbitrary as in any language, cannot be
simply picked up from an old book in rhetoric. This is subtly pointed out by Murray
Schafer in the foreword, when referring to the Asyndeton effect as “screening out” and
to the Synecdoche effect as “selective listening”21. Another great danger in this arbitrary
choice of terms is the incorporation of musical terms that have a definite meaning in
music and are by no means enriched by their use in the sonic effects, such is the case of
crescendo. This leads to misconceptions such as thinking that it: “can be found in the
most diverse contexts: in the approach of a sound source, the acceleration of a vehicle,
the start-up of a machine, the rise of a murmur, etc.”22 The “approach of a sound
source” is by no means a crescendo, a sound source can approach while carrying out a
diminuendo, thus creating a totally different effect and proving the importance of the
parameter of space in music; the “acceleration of a vehicle” may be described, if at all
in these terms, as a pitch rising and not as an increase in volume or crescendo, etc.

This is directly connected to the idea of historical continuity. Terms cannot be

taken out of their historical contexts, nor can they be brought in from other areas
ignoring their current meaning. There are parallelisms, both diachronic and synchronic,
which must be observed. And, in the same way terms are not carefully observed,

20
Ibid, p 113.
21
Ibid, p xiv.
22
Ibid, crescendo, p 29.
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
concepts are not historically explored in Sonic Experience. The aforementioned echo
effect would not have been so poorly reduced if the researchers at CRESSON had
thoroughly studied the texts of Athanasius Kircher. Other historical theoretical texts that
could have provided invaluable information and fundament to the sonic effect paradigm
would have been the Problems of pseudo-Aristotle, Vitruvius’ aforementioned De
Architectura or the Natural History of the Roman writer Pliny, among many others
ancient texts, and hundreds of years of recent literature on musical theory and analysis.
Scientific research cannot dispense with theoretical work, most specially when
attempting to construct new theories from their results.

The last criticisms that we will mention are, like the first, within the presentation
of the sonic effect paradigm itself. They are the questions of organization and
representation. Effects such as phase, flange, chorus and delay, are only – and, in the
last case, not even – related by the category of electroacoustic effects. There is no
explanation as to a “scale” or quantitative relationship between them, and the relation
between them is sometimes even omitted in the individual entries. In electroacoustics
they are ordered as they are presented here, from shorter to longer lag between the
original signal and the delayed superposition of the same signal. There is a lack of
consistent relationship between the concepts, the fact that the sonic effects are presented
in alphabetical order is not arbitrary for practical reasons, it is symptomatic of a narrow
view of the possible network linking all the sonic effects.

The last question is how to deal with interdisciplinarity in terms of its

representation? An interdisciplinary approach should take into account the necessary
parameters that it needs to incorporate from different areas of expertise for each
individual phenomenon. This means calling up maps, graphs, symbolic, musical and
mathematical notations, even – god forbid – recorded sounds or samples, etc., for giving
a full account of the different aspects of sonic phenomena. In this respect, Sonic
Experience is a very poor experience, especially when compared to Kircher’s
Phonurgia Nova or his Musurgia Universalis, and it seems to ignore hundreds of years
of development in musical and phonetic notation as well as the latest technological
advances.
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The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
Afterword

We have explored the origins of the sonic effect paradigm, explaining its
fundaments and defining its theoretical framework in order to relate it to the 4 criteria in
interdisciplinarity and point out its main deficiencies as a theoretical construct. This
does not argue the operability of the concept of sonic effects as such, it merely attempts
to show the areas in which in can still be further developed.

The sonic effect paradigm, as an open concept and interdisciplinary framework,

seems to closely correspond and relate to the human experience of sound, since the most
ancient known pre-historical records until our very day. The recent research carried out
in archaeoacoustics would greatly benefit from its development into a systematic
repertoire used for interdisciplinary purposes, within this interdisciplinary research, we
find all sorts of different terms referring to the same thing and, conversely, the same
term applied to a wide range of different phenomena. The same can be said for the arts,
especially site-specific arts, architecture, urban-planning, and many other areas of
expertise intimately related with sound. As an example of how necessary this is,
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s account in the problematic of dealing with indefinable sounds
in his composition MIKROPHONIE I for Tam-tam, microphones and loudspeakers is
highly illustrative:

I made a scale. This scale went right back to the dawn of music, so to speak, to the kind of
language the technician and I used when we were talking about the kinds of sounds we produced […] I
made a scale of 36 steps from the darkest and lowest sounds to the brightest to the highest, and I used
words to describe them […] onomatopoeic words for sounds […] You have to be as precise as possible,
and not give two or three words which might be mistaken for almost the same sound […] once you have
the scale then you have something that is certainly more precise than our traditional vocabulary for
describing instrumental timbres in music, which simply identifies the object making the sound with the
sound itself […] That is the whole problem here, because we are trying to identify sounds directly,
because we don’t know the objects that might produce them. So we are looking for a language to describe
sounds in themselves, and this kind of scale for sounds is badly needed […] There are suggestions to do it
with numbers, and other suggestions to do it with words: I think ultimately it will be a mixture of
technical description, in terms of frequency bands, attacks and decays, together with words.23

23
Maconie, Robin, Stockhausen on Music, Marion Boyars Publishers, 1989, Microphony, pages 82-84.
 18
The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
But forging this new language is an arduous and timely process; it will require
many generations of scientists and artists concentrated on this interdisciplinary quest.
The synthetic thinking in interdisciplinarity has still to become truly complementary to
analytical specialization in the field of science, only then will paradigms like the sonic
effect truly flourish and, as in Goethe’s thinking, equate analysis and synthesis into a
proportionate breathing system. In the mean time, we can only strive to comprehend
sonic phenomena as all our ancestors have done before, in the hope that the experience
will change us.
 19
The Paradigm of Sonic Effects
Selected Bibliography

- Anderton, Craig, The Electronic Musician’s Dictionary, Amsco Publications, New York, 1988.
- [pseudo-]Aristotle [Hett, W. S.], Aristotle, Problems, Heinemann, London, 1969.
- Augoyard, Jean-François and Torgue, Henry (Eds.), Sonic Experience – A Guide to Everyday
Sounds, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.
- Augoyard, Jean-François, Contribution à une théorie générale de l’expérience sonore: le
concept d’effet sonore, 1989.
- Berry, Wallace, Structural Functions in Music, Dover Publications, 1976
- Blesser, Barry and Salter, Linda-Ruth, Spaces speak, are you listening?, The Massachusettes
Institute of Technology Press, London, 2007.
- Conrado, Adolfo and Barbieri, Stefania, Augoyard, Effetti sonori nella composizione e
nell’ascolto della musica: Guida al Repertorio degli effetti sonori di J. F. Augoyard, Henry
Torgue, 2004.
- Chion, Michel, La Audiovisión, Paidós Comunicación, 1990.
- Fisher, Margaret, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas, The MIT Press, London, 2002.
- Fonagy, Ivan, La vive voix: essais de psycho-phonétique, 1983.
- International Phonetic Association, Handbook of the IPA, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- Kiefer, Peter (Ed), Klangräume der Kunst, Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2010.
- Kircher, Athanasius, Phonurgia Nova [Neue Hall- und Ton-Kunst], Nördlinger, 1684.
- Kircher, Athanasius, Musurgia Universalis, Rome, 1650.
- Lecourt, E., L’expérience musicale: résonances psychanalitiques.
- Lucier, Alvin, Reflections / Reflexionen, Edition MusikTexte, 1995.
- Maconie, Robin (Editor), Stockhausen on Music, Marion Boyars Publishers, 1989.
- Meyer, Jürgen, Acoustics and the Performance of Music, Verlag Das Musikinstrument
Frankfurt/Main.
- Pliny [Rackham, H.], Natural History, Heinemann, London, 1969.
- Roederer, Juan G., Introduction to the Physiscs and Psychophysics of Music,The English
Universities Press Ltd. London, 1974.
- Scarre, Chris, and Lawson, Graeme, Archaeoacoustics, McDonald Institute Monographs, 2006.
- Schaeffer, Pierre, Tratado de los objetos musicales [Traité des objets musicaux], Alianza
Música, 1988.
- Schafer, R. Murray, The soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world,
Destiny Books, 1977.
- Schulze, Holger, Sound Studies: Traditionen – Methoden – Desiderate, transcript Verlag,
Bielefeld, 2008.
- Supper, Martin, Música electrónica y música con ordenador, Alianza Música, 2004.
- Tadday, Ulrich, Klangkunst, Musik-Konzepte Sonderband, Edition text+kritik, 2008.
- Vitruvius [Granger, F.], Vitruvius, On Architecture [De Architectura], Heinemann, 1969.
- Xenakis, Iannis, Formalized Music, Pendragon Press, Hillsdale, New York, 1992.