Distinct Sound and the Possibility of the Sound Image
The expression a sound – as well as its plural form sounds – seems unproblematic at first glance. Its application to singular instances of what is heard can, nonetheless, be equivocal. How sound is distinguished – that is, how it is perceptually isolated and organized into singular events – is intrinsic to the singular form in which an engagement between a sensing agent and its milieu is enacted. Although this expression holds up in most everyday contexts, it fails to properly account for the variable way in which audible instances are materially produced. My postulate of a novel notion of sound image is aimed to offer an alternative tool to address this mutable condition.
In a broad range of everyday contexts, the term “a sound” is used to identify what is heard as a physical event producing a sonorous circumstance: “a slam,” “the cry of a baby” or “the sound of the air conditioning.” All of these examples perform a spatiotemporal identification: they consolidate a series of perceptual traces around an attributable source that presumes a location and a time span. But the actual character of the sonorous poses a problem to these spatial and temporal attributions. The sonorous circumstance habitually alluded to as “the sound of an airplane,” for example, as heard from the inside of an apartment, is the result of the coupling of material oscillations of the motor engines, the resonant structure of the flying vessel, the mass of air in between, the glass window, and other resonant components. Since sound is inherent to the coupled oscillation of multiple masses, attributing a sonorous circumstance exclusively to a single source belies the entangled material–spatial unfolding of sound.
The identification and projection of “subjective auditory sensation[s] onto a world of sources” has been shown to play a deeply-rooted role in the constitution of “perceptual schema” (Fales 2005: 165). This is certainly the case for most everyday, practical needs. Nevertheless, perceptual mechanisms adapt to a variety of conditions and patterns that organize sensorial attributes which are the result of diverse and changing contexts. Furthermore, the listener’s performance of perceptual integration articulates their diverse relationships to their milieu. I seek to emphasize how the coalescence and the distinction of different aspects of the sonorous inform an agent’s participation in a milieu.
The “sound of a locomotive engine” could be identified as a single sonorous event. Nevertheless, attention to different aspects of this sonorous circumstance transform that which is heard. An emphasis in a particular range of the frequency spectrum of this engine might prompt an awareness of the material of which the engine is composed, while attention to a different range of the spectrum might enable an awareness of its dimensions. On the other hand, attention to its regular hammering activity could induce an embodied synchronization with its rhythmic patterns. Alternatively, attention to the micro-temporal morphology of each individual discharge and its resonance could render the engine perceivable as an assemblage of coupled volumes of diverse resonant qualities.
The form in which aspects of the sonorous congeal in different perceptual patterns is malleable and integral to a process of adaptation. The scheme of the image as described by Simondon in Imagination and Invention provides a model to address the inherently temporal and metastable character of audible instances.
In the first stage of the cycle described by Simondon, anticipation, the image exists inherently to the capacity for movement that enables an organism to actively participate in its environment. Simondon refers to the image in this context as a “sheaf of motor tendencies” (Simondon 2022: 3).[4] The emphasis on movement in the evolutionary and embryonic development of the sensorial places the image in a broad context of metastable processes pertaining to vital relationships: “To say that motricity precedes sensoriality amounts to affirming that the stimulus-response schema is not absolutely primary” (Simondon 2022: 29).
Rather than premised as an act of reception, the image unfolds in this stage as a projection that informs participation in an environment. Movement is conceived of as a pattern of organization that in higher orders will inform visual, auditory, or other domains of the sensorial. As visual scholar Emanuel Alloa explains, Simondon’s model “implies not the possession of a milieu by a living being, nor the determination of a living being by a milieu, but the continuous individuation which happens in their relationship. It is necessary to conceive an intermediary zone where the schemes of future actualization can be formed virtually” (Alloa 2015: 366).
The “body schema acts as a selector in the imaginative anticipation of different movements” (Simondon 2022: 40). In applying this to the realm of sound, a schema of bodily engagement may articulate how an increase or decrease in the amplitude of sound or a change in frequency comes to affect the awareness of an agent. Reactions to changes in these different dimensions might entail a synchronization to the sonorous through the motile disposition of muscle tension or the attunement of vocal cords.
The realm of anticipation amplifies the productive nature of the image: Simondon claims that anticipation enables the sensing agent that “discovers the way in which he participates [in a milieu, to] prolong and continue his participation” (Simondon 2022: 60). The image is therefore already put forward as a node which takes part in the constitution of the real, and probes for a re-conceptualization of the way imagination as a whole is to be conceived: “imagination […] does not detach itself from reality and unfold[s]in the unreal or fictitious; it initiates an effective activity of realization” (Simondon 2022: 60). Imagination is then not defined as the faculty of an individual subject. Imagination is a force that wrenches one from the present; it alters the ways in which an agent’s involvement with an environment is produced.
The second stage in which the image unfolds, which Simondon terms reception or perception, concerns the adjustments that occur across the metastable relationship of agent and milieu. The image becomes “a mode of reception of information provided by a medium and a source of reaction schemes” (Simondon 2022: 60). Simondon explains this process by examining the behavior of organisms in which “positioning towards the milieu cannot wait for information to be complete.” The image takes on an “intra-perceptive” role, a pattern that enters into a process of mutation. Projections attributed through anticipation come to inform the adaptations that render the image into a “system of the compossibility of states” (Simondon 2020: 309). The image is then conceived of as a node that persists across a series of transformations.
Perception is modulated by different environmental conditions, altering how an agent becomes aware of its milieu and distinguishes between different stimuli. For example, when urban listeners encounter a recording of Weddell seals, as can be heard in field recordist Douglas Quinn’s 1998 Antarctica album, they tend to, at first hearing, identify the sonorous outcome as an electronic sound.[5] This attribution reflects a familiarity with widespread audio synthesis practices sharing similar qualitative characteristics. Once listeners become aware, though – by being shown an audiovisual clip or some other cue – that the agent producing this outcome is an animal, they are able to adjust their identification of the source of the sound. This in turn demonstrates a more fundamental adaptation, though, as they come to isolate, integrate, and organize spectral and micro-temporal aspects of this sonorous circumstance as characteristics corresponding to the seal’s body: the activity within its throat, the resonant character of its mass, or the fluid movements of its anatomy. As a consequence, listeners come to discriminate between sound characteristics belonging to a primary source and those that they ascribe to the environment in which that identified source is located.[6] Significantly, this shows how a primary assumption in the ubiquitous distinction of individual sounds – the capacity to distinguish a source from the space where it occurs – is actually contingent to a perceptual act.
Technical conditions also influence these adjustments, and are indeed intrinsic to the cycle Simondon puts forward. As he elaborates, the image “presupposes a code of transformation of the object, a formula of potentiality allowing the prediction of the transformation of received signals on the basis of surroundings and the ongoing action” (Simondon 2022: 76). A microscope, for example, affords different patterns by which the viewer can make sense of what is seen. Their relationship to perspective is recalibrated by the microscope's affordances; its detachment from a regular field of vision prompts a change in the variable actions that the viewer performs to stabilize perception. In the realm of sound, as audio signal–processing devices became increasingly ubiquitous, they have familiarized listeners with the results of particular technical procedures and created new patterns around which their perception is stabilized, to the point that procedures such as “amplitude modulation” or “granular synthesis” define singular perceptual patterns.
Sound scholar Douglas Kahn has alluded to “the surprise” that inventor Thomas Edison expressed upon hearing a recording of his speech for the first time: “‘I was never so taken aback in my life.’ His voice had moved from his throat to his ears” (Kahn 1990: 302). Kahn points at the transformation in the perceptual circuit that technology had set up, as it shifted the material configurations through which the voice was rendered audible. Up to that moment in history, the sound of the voice had been typically ascribed to the agency of the subject. Edison’s unprecedented technical procedure redistributed the agents in the perceptual circuit, comprehensively altering the hitherto conventional operation by which listeners perceptually organized a set of spatiotemporal characteristics in a particular way. A new sound image was produced, as the technical device altered the perceptual circuit. As it became dislodged from the motoric activity of the vocal tract, the sensorial operation came instead to be modulated by patterns beyond the human body. A frequency slide that might have been ascribed to a muscle dilation could now be parsed as a motor’s slowing wheel. A new pattern of technical behavior - the coupled system of microphone–and–vocal–apparatus - became the nucleus around which other perceptual nuances could be organized. The image operation should be appraised as inherently technical.
The third stage of the cycle of the image, recollection, entails the production of an “analog of the exterior milieu” (Simondon 2022: 19). Simondon describes this as a dynamic production rather than a mere prolongation of perception. The memory-image or image-symbol is informed by an energetic bind between living agent and milieu. The image becomes a symbol through an energetic exchange. It is not merely the product of a process of codification independently carried out by an agent: the symbol can “never be a flatus vocis; it presupposes an implicit realism” (Simondon 2022: 6). The image-symbol, as an analog of an external circumstance, “is a resultant, but it is also a seed” (Simondon 2022: 13); it is “no more than a pseudo-object, charged with the potential energy of a metastable system, ready to create a change in structure” (Simondon 2022: 135).
This change in structure takes place in the fourth stage, which Simondon conceives as the act of invention, in which a “shift in the organization” of the system of the image is enacted (Simondon 2022: 19). This stage re-ignites the cycle and informs the way new anticipations might be prompted. For Simondon, invention solves a problem within the system of action of agent and milieu. At this stage the image facilitates a re-organization in the “intrinsic compatibility” that affects the “extrinsic compatibility” in which a relationship takes place (Simondon 2022: 160). Across Imagination and Invention, Simondon formulates the image as a node in a temporal scheme, rather than as a material artefact or a mental content. Analogously, the sound image can also be comprehended as produced across a series of processes through which the audible is temporally constituted.
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