Cognitive dynamics and semantic spreading in This is Not a Model

The sounds used in This is Not a Model are samples of various metals of different shape and mass, radiating heat into, or cold out from, fifteen pounds of dry ice. The temperature differential is about two hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

This work was composed in a studio which traditionally uses digital and analog processing techniques to effect the internal structure of a sound; the spectromorphology. Types of processes can range from random and quasi-random (digital) to determinant algorithms at nearly infinite scale, limited only by sample rate, drive space and the user (composer). Studio processes can provide a level of malleability that make sound as much a plastic material as paint or clay.

In This is Not a Model, analog and digital processing (for the most part) were purposely avoided. The source material was so rich, the addition of new sounds by additional processing would have risked far too many sound objects for me to keep track, but primarily, because I liked the sounds as they were. Conceptual strategies, informed by the source object, the material filters and the sounds themselves, needed to be developed as a unifying field to avoid this becoming a mere bricolage of jittering metals. The search for constraints was triggered by an awareness of the sound object and its sound source. We will take spectromorphological constraints as givens, as they determined the viability of any Analytical Methodology (Chion, 199x). The result brought a unique (or subverted) view of the ideas of source object and process.

(re)Defining Terms (subverting the object)

So what is a process and what is an object? My first conscious engagement with 'semantic links' began with this inquiry. All the sound in This is Not a Model has one thing in common: the 200û temperature differential between frozen carbon dioxide, (-109û) which is a solidified gas, and an Alabama summer ((90û) a seemingly liquefied air at 95% humidity). So my source object was heat. Normal studio processes, the primary tool in these studios, can create complex (or simple) compositions for days, months and years or manipulate audio data at levels far too small and fast for the human ear to discriminate individually. Some can be directed by real-time physical interaction from the composer. But what were the non-digital, non-analog processes that make the approach to this work unique? "The mechanical actions or relations of heat" are called thermodynamics (Merriam-Webster). Each of the objects that came in contact with the dry ice started with a temperature matching the outdoors' and concentrated the difference between dry ice and a summer's day in a dynamic demonstration of thermal radiance expressed as sound.

The dynamics were driven by heat in an interaction of material deformation and sublimation. Deformation was caused by the materials' complex reactions to extreme temperatures. Sublimation, a property of carbon dioxide, goes directly from a solid to a gas without a liquid stage. When something conductive lays against the ice it increases heat exchange, the escaping gas lifts the object. Sublimation slows, the object falls back down; repeat quickly, speedy vibrations ensue, and sound is perceived. As the radiators approached thermal equilibrium with the ice, three types of action, deformation, sublimation and their interaction, decreased. The heat was focused through various elemental and architectural configurations of scrap metal and industrial tools. There were sledgehammers, copper pipes of different sizes, wrenches, guitar strings, socket sets, coins and a pair of cymbals, one of them considerably cracked and bent. One of the really beautiful ones was a welded wire cage.

Several 30sec samples

Sound object versus the idea of the sound source

While it is useful, and somewhat traditional, to glean what information a source object can relate or lend to the formation of what Nattiez calls the "total musical fact," (Nattiez, J., Discourse on Music) it is also important to remember that musical listening and lexical thought are not the same thing. Music and language have many similarities but they are different ways of thinking. Also, and possibly most important, is that if the source object itself becomes the subject and the focus of the mix then "... it is literature and not music." (Schaeffer, 1952:21) The deference to aural and musical thinking1, using a technique of reduced listening (more on this as tools are discussed) becomes a discipline as important as any instrumental practice or adherence to functional harmony.

Traditional European compositional procedures, where instrumental properties are givens, enable a composition to be approached as a written form, using a system that has evolved within the culture, or even an intellectual extrapolation of that code from within that culture like tone rows or set theory. European classical music's primary combinatorial unit, the note, has knowable, relatively discrete properties, pitch and duration. In the written situation, aural imagination can guide musical choices without the necessity to listen first. Often the idea of the music comes first, to be tested in a concrte situation later. The concrte (listening) stage enters the compositional feedback loop as a reaction to aural imagination, or internal auditory stimuli. Adjustments are then made to the written score (the model) by which the performance will be wrought.

This thermodynamic fantasy is more typical of studio-oriented approaches. Aural imagination enters the compositional environment as a reaction to external auditory stimuli. The sound from which the composition develops instigates the initial conditions, in which the composer interacts with the compositional environment. The algedonic loop (Beers, S.) is the feedback the composer receives as he manipulates sound within the composition. The result is a record (or physical trace) of the composer's creation of the composition itself. It is not a model.

The removal of the presence of the source object (remember, the object is heat) and it's subsequent obscuring by context and transformation should cause two complimentary reactions. First, and I think the most directly effective, is that the sound's disengagement from the source increases the observer's attention to causality, and attention to auditory detail is magnified. (196x, Schaeffer) In fact, as we have seen with sight deprived individuals, neural mass normally allotted for a defective organ can be appropriated by another thereby enhancing discrimination in the rest of the perceptual system. (Kujala, Huotilainen, Sinkkonen, 1994) (Rauschecker, 1995)

Secondly, semantic satiation occurs. This means, that the sound of the word ceases to link with its meaning. Pierre Schaeffer's initial experience with this came while listening to a closed loop on a record (making it skip by putting a piece of tape on the groove). He noticed that after hearing the sound repeatedly, he could concentrate on the details of the sound exploring its possibilities instead of where the sound came from. He called this purposeful attention to aural detail 'Žcoute reduite' (reduced hearing). "Reduced listening" as it has come to be known, is defined as the process in which perception is consciously limited to the structure of the sound itself. In word oriented experiments it has been proposed that this is merely an habituation/adaptation response at the sensory level. But one study in particular "On the locus of the semantic satiation effect" (1996, Kounios, J.) has found that not only is the repeated word cut loose from its semantic moorings, but its repetition weakens related words' semantic networks. This effect is called semantic spreading and shows the semantic network to be traceable and malleable. Although I have not found any studies with non-word objects, the clinical studies for words are exhaustive. The subsequent phenomenon results from the spreading of the input signal and leads to semantic generation. At this level the process is thought to be guided by the agent's intentions. Cognitive scientists' investigations into semantic spreading and generation concur with Schaeffer's discovery. There seems to be a demonstrable neurological model for the effect (Kounios, 1996). This music assumes that reduced listening and semantic satiation are related processes and at least some of what is true for one, can for now, be treated as true for the other.

This composition navigates the space between the direct experience of the sound and the associations that sound carries with it. Priority is always given to the sound object. Otherwise the work might only deal with the source object and its meanings, reducing the piece to mimicry, an analogy, or an idealization of the sources' processes and implications. If the sounds of bolt and a wrench channeling heat or being shaken by sublimation have complimentary morphologies, then the semantic link between the two can be exploited. But if in the course of the realization of the piece it becomes obvious that one or both can no longer be used because it does not sound 'right' then lexical coupling will have to be set aside. As music, the final sound must take precedence over other considerations. And this is the technique and criterion used in this work.

The ecology of a composition and the perception of a sound world

Perceiving is an achievement of the individual, not an appearance in the theater of consciousness. It is a keeping-in-touch with the world, an experiencing of things rather than a having of experiences. It involves awareness-of instead of just awareness. It may be awareness of something in the environment or something in the observer or both at once, but there is no content of awareness independent of that of which one is aware." (1979, p. 239 Gibson, J)

Gibson's statement "...or something in the observer or both at once..." implies that the environment, the ecology of perception, includes internal precepts and tacit knowledge. He includes language as tacit, and that "perceiving precedes predicating." (1979, Gibson, J) I take this to mean that language, or any tacit knowledge is applied to a percept as it is recognized and that the tacit knowledge is part of the ecology of perception. Perception arrives at what he calls "affordances" (Gibson, 1986) that are identifications of invariance (stability) that could be useful to the organism in its environment. In this case the organism is the composer and the environment the composition.

So the environment does not stop at the composer's outer ear, not out, in the studio. The ecology of that particular environment, the composition, includes the perception of spectromorphology, the composer's language and understanding of the tools, cultural baggage, (and vehicles) and, to varying degrees of choice, the magnitude of influence the conception of the source object will have on his perception of the sound object. Word objects have a very strong relational network. It is unlikely that the composer's perception of an object's spectromorphology can be completely isolated from the implications of the source object to which it is linked. In fact, the semantic network can be seen to hijack a verbal response to an idea if word and percept are put in direct conflict with one another. Anyone who has taken the Stroop test knows that the perception of color and the words for it can be separated easily (Stroop, 1935).

This compositional environment of This is Not a Model was an ecosystem made of the sounds of escaping gas, shaking metals, and the host of items previously mentioned (our processors) used to elicit sound from the thermal transfers. There was also the computer acting as an audio mixer, and the composer, me, with my semantic links for all of the aforementioned within a resonant model of perception all acting together to create the composition.

Compositional ecology

This is Not a Model began, for this composer, to be an investigation into raw energy. It is, instead becoming (for the post-compositional analysis) an exploration of the primitives of understanding. It takes advantage of a biological model of "resonance" (Gibson, 1966) and uses it for methodological approach. Biology is necessarily part of the solution to the question of form, using the form of questioning (a search for affordances) as the model. It has been said that "psychology can no longer declare its autonomy from biology, and it must always yield to biology's findings" (Edelman, 1992:177) But we can also use biology's findings to guide enquiry into our understanding of the actions we take and apply that to the understanding and development of form.

We know that direct perception is faster than inferential processing, and capable of autonomous action in the engagement of the environment. In visual processing it has been found that ventral areas near primary visual cortex are monitoring incoming information with constructivist-like behaviors. (Norman, 2000) The ideas of process and object in contrast to the direct experience of the sound object can be used as a source of compositional tension during the construction of the work. They "...act as 'reflecting walls' inside which a tissue of specific relationships is spun." (Vaggione, 1997) They are, in effect, pitted against one another as spokes to a rim on a wheel, adding tension and increasing structural integrity resembling what Buckminster Fuller called "tensegrity."

Just as we heard the metals reaching equilibrium as the 'noise' was assimilated and a stable (or more stable) state approached, there is a mental equilibrium that I tried to achieve in order to deal effectively with the disparate influences of spectromorphology and the semantic network. Processing, whether by standard studio technology or physical manipulation of the source object, can usually help minimize the source object's non-sonic or extra-musical influence.

Spectromorphological transforms can render the source object unrecognizable, or possibly just continuing to work with the source sounds long enough while their associative networks fade. (We forget what it was) The studio's tools of spectral manipulation are source neutral. A granular filter will shred a voice the same way it shreds rainfall. My processing agents' affects are through their materials and architectures. By using multiple manipulations to achieve spectral change, we would normally add source neutral language to the process (grain, mutation, convolution, etc...) add new sounds (and interpret them) encourage the chances of semantic spreading and maybe semantic and spectral generation ion a sonic domain. This is where we would look (introspectively) for additional hints descriptions of form.

Analogical methodology" according to Chion's "Guide to Sound Objects", is used to help elevate the analysis of material in order that it can be discussed and reach a higher level of organization. The problem with my processors, is that they had only one object to process, heat, and they were not as neutral as the standard array of studio tools in their lexical implications. Not only that and this may be the crux of the problem, thermodynamics is a process that is basic to life, intrinsic to our understanding of the world and the precursor to our theories on information itself. Any kind of deep neutrality towards the sound and the source became more difficult to achieve without the digital intermediary. Except for listening to it I have arrived at a null point in attempting to describe or enhance the structure of This is Not a Model as related to the processes and objects used to build it.

Confused borders

Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates" (Hayles, pg. 8)

From entropy and thermodynamics, through information theory and cognitive dynamics, is a single language for a general theory of systems that can be applied to all of these at their most basic levels. Explaining the sounds within the context of the sound itself, or at least comparing them, gave away nothing of the semantic generation I would normally expect of a piece of acousmatic work. At each level of analysis, the language as I understood it, was turned back on itself. They are both loaded with terminology like "feedback, noise, and assimilation." Deference to the sound object became easy since the sound object; the source object and the processes were identical for the listener save for the auditory level. In some ways there was no "analogical methodology" available because there was no way to step outside the language. There was no route to analogy. The result might be explained as an implosion of self-reference and quite possibly a vortex from which a textual extrapolation of form is quite impossible. In theory, ideas about a composition's structure are eventually gleaned from listening to the work and seeing, or hearing in it, suggestions for planning structures or explaining them. Instead, this work became for me an irreducible trace of the "action/perception feedback loop" (Vaggione, 1997).

Divergent behavior

I am not done with the sounds collected for This is Not a Model." To continue, I intend to use this "irreducible trace" as the center point, or hub, or attractor, for more music. I intend to continue subverting the idea of processing. In the first instance, the cellist will accompany a tape made primarily of samples from his own improvisations. His score, however, will be not written on paper, but built, in studio, as fixed sounds. I will not use cello, but instead the same set of samples for which This is Not a Model was chosen. He will interpret the tape playing in his headphones instead of following a written score. I hope that by removing the written score, I can increase the aural primacy of the performer's interpretive process, increase the strength of the aural relationship to the work, and by using non-cello sounds encourage imagination. The instrumentalist, is now an acousmatic agent and simultaneously the input processor. He is also fully engaged in the compositional process in much the same way as an acousmatic composer. The working title is The Analogy of Control.

Continuing this network of relations, I'm exploring a work for trumpet and tape. Presently I'm using a slide trumpet to play along with some of the thermodynamic samples in the studio, using much the same approach as I intend the cellist to use in "The Analogy of Control." I have considered several approaches to gathering samples. I expect those to change as the series develops. The important part so far is to train my ear, with the horn, in the environment of the coming piece.

The last link is to an instrumental work, I thought to introduce classical guitar. It may be the closure for this line of thought. I'd like to use a culturally recognizable artifact that I am physically familiar with. Possibly a Bach prelude would suit. I have several from which to choose that I've played for many years.

Summary

Karl Lashley speculated that, "The learning process must consist of the attunement of the elements in a complex system in such a way that a particular combination or pattern of cells responds more readily than before the experience." (Lashley, 1942) If Gibson's extrapolations on "resonance" are viable, and Lashley's remark to which Gibson refers is valid, then adding conceptual and physical familiarity should add to the capability of the perceptual system's capacity to respond more readily toward compositional affordances. Simply, I think that the more neural mass that is involved, the more symbolic and auditory relationships can be found. This is Not a Model ostensibly attempts to use a basic function of life, thermodynamics, and a supposed natural understanding of that as a path to an analogical methodology. I purport that increasing the commitment of neural mass towards the act of hearing, through reduced listening and attention to semantic generation, results in an increase in the resonant capability of the perceptual system. That is the underlying mechanism by which "Analogical methodology" is supported. By including source objects of which I have a physical familiarity, I think I can engage "resonance" at a deeper level simply by engaging kinesthetic processes and its behavioral mechanisms. By including a biological model of cognition, I hope to learn something about the mechanisms of understanding and discover alternative approaches to the development of form. Maybe it will be possible to hear how that is expressed through the work.

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Donald Brook discusses the manners in which artists approach thinking about their work within their chosen mediums