R. Murray Schafer and Pierre Schaeffer are both deeply passionate about sound and how they shape the word around them. However, as mentioned in class, their opinions on what makes a sound desirable are fundamentally different. While reading Brian Kane’s Pierre Schaeffer, the Sound Object, and the Acousmatic Reduction, I began to understand what Schaeffer was aiming to accomplish with his “musique concrete” (Kane 15). To understand why he was creating this music, his ideas on the “sound object” (Kane 15) must be considered. An interesting quote from the chapter is “Repeat the same sound fragment twice: there is no longer event, but music” (Kane 16). I think that this is an important statement for understanding Michel Chion’s “Reduced Listening” (Chion 29). By taking away the original context of where the sound came from, the listener can now appreciate the sound for what it is composed of, the presence and lack of presence of audible frequencies, a skill that would require training to be done properly according to Kane (Kane 17).
R. Murray Schafer on the other hand believes that the sound of industry and transportation, essentially what makes up Pierre Schaeffer’s music is noise that must be removed in order to appreciate the sound of the world. Schafer says: “Ultimately the throb of the machine began to intoxicate man everywhere with its incessant vibrations” (Schafer 74). The way Schafer talks about man made sounds definitely gives the impression they bother him a lot and that he doesn’t think that beauty can be found in what some might consider noise. Francisco López has this to say on the topic: “The ‘tuning’ is basically a ‘silencing’, as if ‘noisy’ were an evil condition in itself” (López).
I think that there is value in both ideas. I believe that an oversaturation of noise can cause people to ignore its existence; for example, when someone stops hearing a clock tick after sitting in a room with it for a while. Not only that but an over exposure to noise can cause permanent hearing damage, impairing our ability to appreciate the finer details of sound (Beckstead, Week 2). That being said, as Schaeffer would believe, there are qualities of “noise” that are very interesting and in some ways are pleasing to the ear (Kane 15). In conclusion I agree more with Pierre Schaeffer because I do not think that the solution to noise is simply to silence it but find ways to adapt and create something meaningful, the way an artist would when creating a mural.
Works Cited
Beckstead, Lori. (2020). RTA907 Week 2. Presentation, Ryerson University.
Chion, Michel. Audio Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press. Pp. 25-30
Kane, Brian. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. New York: Oxford University Press.
López, Francisco. “Schizophonia vs l’Objet Sonore: Soundscapes and Artistic Freedom.” Franciscolopez.net, http://www.franciscolopez.net/schizo.html
Schafer, R. Murray (1977, 1994) The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. New York: Alfred Knopf/Randan House. Pp. 71-99
Sound Media 