3.3 Outlining Echo Materialism
The new materialist approach to sound and music offers new insights into the study of acoustics and echoes. By focusing on vibration and the concept of vibrant matter, the new materialist approach places reflected sounds on an equal footing with direct sounds: both types of sound are essentially vibration. Although the reflecting material bodies and entities do not vibrate themselves, they appear to vibrate due to the illusion created by specular reflection. According to the law of reflection, the echo appears to emerge from a virtual source located behind the reflecting surface, that is, somewhere inside the reflecting body (Everest 2001: 235–236). More specifically, the location of the virtual source is mobile: the source can appear either deep inside the body or closer to the surface, depending on the listener’s position. Thus, from a materialist perspective, echoes are not sounds without sources; rather, their sources are the reflecting bodies, or more precisely, mobile, invisible points or elements behind the surfaces.
The ability to produce sound renders reflecting material bodies and entities energetic agents – living beings that exhibit vitality in the same way that organic sound sources do. In terms of their general characteristics, the sounds emanating from the reflecting bodies are similar to other environmental sounds, always “speaking the same language" as the listeners and thus establishing a sympathetic connection with them. Since the delay, magnitude, angle of arrival, and temporal structure of the echoes are strictly determined by the law of reflection, reflecting bodies also exhibit a considerable degree of autonomy and resistance: listeners cannot adjust these special characteristics to their liking – they can only attempt to understand the logic of echoing by altering their own voice or position. Therefore, while humans or other sound producers are needed to initiate the echoes, it is actually the reflecting bodies that govern the rules of operation.
Observing and tracking such vibrant virtual sound sources that lie behind the surfaces comes close to the concept of enchanted listening, coined by art historian Victor Stoichita and ethnomusicologist Bernd Brabec de Mori (2017). In this listening mode, the listener’s attention is focused on the autonomous agency of the sonic object: moving entities, initiating forces, or interactive motives within the vibration. According to the concept's developers, enchanted listening is triggered, for example, in acousmatic situations, where the sound sources are hidden and beyond the reach of sight. In the context of traditional music, such listening often leads to the emergence of new beings and things in the social reality, resulting in its augmentation. This conceptualization of enchanted listening deviates from what was proposed by Schaeffer in regards to reduced listening. Perhaps the concept of enchanted listening should be better understood as a further development of the concept of reduced listening, particularly in relation to sounds with strong agential capacities. Similarly, in the case of echoes, where hidden sound sources mimic visible sound sources, enchanted listening would also likely involve some of the perceptual ambiguity associated with composer R. Murray Schafer's (1969: 43–47) schizophonic sounds. Thus, the material and immaterial understandings presented above do not cancel each other out, but complement each other by highlighting different dimensions of agential relationships within sonic experiences.