If we acknowledge that sound is not organised and conceptualised (that is, made to form music) merely by its producer, but by the mind that perceives it, then music is uniquely human (Nattiez 1990: 58).

This will be an analysis of Baudrillard’s four processual stages of simulacra aligned with music production practices in Middleton’s processual continuum. By conducting a comparative analysis of the four stages of simulacra progression and the four categories of sound located in electronic music I aim to reveal various theoretical discourses concluding with the creation of an alternative reality space during electronic production. In order to do this I shall be conducting analysis through the prism of Middleton’s (1990) processual continuum and the four stages of mediation found in studio practices as described by Brovig-Hanssen (2010). I will address the ways in which music is utilised as a tool of extension for alternate states of perceptual hearing by enabling absorption in creation. This affords the musical agent an alternative reality space with mutable parameters that are controlled by sound. What follows will be a discussion of the forms and abstractions of this process, alongside issues over control of sound. These comparisons operate on a processual continuum, one that occurs at the interaction of models and simulation. The form of composition enables concretization of content, which can be viewed in a framing device of musical/extramusical markers in opaque mediation[1] analysis. A tertiary level approach will be adopted in an enquiry into the interaction between computer and agent, auditory imagination and reality in light of Baudrillard’s essay on simulacra and simulation.

ABSTRACTING MECHANISMS AND AUDITORY MALLEABILITY

In this section I will explore perceptual forms and abstracting mechanisms as they correlate to musical experience and auditory locations. The role of music in this paper is that music, its practice and creation, is utilised as a lens for analysis in abstraction. Feld states that two processes married together form the event, or experience of music: ‘One dialectically arranges a sound object between musical and extramusical markers, engaging it in space, history, attention, and memory’. The other demands a sequence of interpretive moves through which listeners realise the ‘dialectic of their musical/extramusical realities while shaping a particular musical experience according to the dimensions of their social and historical environments’ (Feld 1998: 131). The interaction of human and machine[2] in an agent’s creative role utilises sound technologies to execute somatic simulations in the form of ‘technologically constructed or technologically inflected spaces, bodies, and voices’ (see Lacasse 2000). These are also sound technology’s animating moments, when perceptually persuasive sound products mimic or evoke physical environments (Greene 2004: 14). These numerous collisions with sonic materials and perceptual activity between musical and extramusical markers replicate artefact interaction in the weaves of the composition itself. In discussions of tonal relationships in musical content, Hegel posited the view that these dialectical processes interlocked ‘abstraction of form with concretisation of content’ (Hegel 1970: 58). Selfridge-Field elaborates: ‘a concrete universal is entirely possible in music. The composer’s role is to shape this dialectic. The dialectic could best be achieved in instrumental music, which, to Hegel’s mind, was a purer form of expression than the texted works of earlier centuries. The text was an impediment to abstraction; it distracted the listener from perceiving the universal ideal of form’ (Hegel 1970; Selfridge-Field 2000: 193).

If music and sound creation and their technologies enable mechanical reproduction, then they also enable agents to control repetition of sound. ‘Technology has been adapted to the needs and desires of the human beings in charge of the circulation of sound; “technology” itself is not determining those needs and desires. In both cases, what is at issue is control over sound’ (Moehn 2004: 74). Indeed, by evoking types of spaces and creating places through synthesisation, processing, and spatial positioning, musical agents ‘create virtual-cum-real cultural spaces audible in musical design’ (Greene 2004: 14). Baudrillard states that ‘today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal’ (Baudrillard 1994: 1). This ‘hyperreal’ shapes the musical event in a framing device that enables agents to grasp a temporally static experience inscribed in composition. In this way it operates as more than a tool of extension for the creation of alternate reality spaces and in fact affords the individual listener a brief grasp or view of the opaque mediation methods involved in the construction of self and reality. In realising this fantasy of permanence, music is employed due to its evocative nature, as it promotes mental malleability in listeners, allowing agents to resolve desire and adjust perceptual systems. The hyperrealism[3] of certain electronic music production facilitates perceptual flux in the consciousness of the listener. Fales explains, ‘the auditory system works to promote the perceptual confidence that signals form the acoustic world literally are the percepts they provoke, thereby concealing the fact of an acoustic world of which listeners’ perceptual worlds are only “best guess” versions’ (Fales 2004: 164). In this imaginary event, musical soundscapes as opposed to environmental soundscapes facilitate more malleable auditory processing. Fales continues, ‘since listeners cannot form a sensation without some organizing system, part of their motivation must include an alternate perceptual schema for exchange with the default schema they have renounced’ (Fales 2004: 165). The perceptual cognitive flexibility or plasticity can only be realised through musical interaction. Middleton states, ‘in music, the perceptible…can only be musical (acoustic) – not visual or verbal; and its meaning is called the “sensorial”, its physical immediacy. In music, fantasy can be realised, the distance between desire and object of desire closed’ (Middleton 1990: 240).

This auditory reality is achieved through a substitution and dialectic between cause and effect, at the intersection of perceptual models. Deleuze has described the outcome of this effect; ‘the schizophrenic delirium lays bare the material processes of the unconscious’ (Deleuze 2004b: 67). This type of mental auditory state reveals mediation processes undertaken by the consciousness of an individual and their perceptual schema mechanisms. It is realized by the manipulation of sonic artefacts by processing sound technologies. The disorientation resulting from these manipulations has been conceptualized by Reynolds as a ‘schizophrenic consciousness’ that affords a ‘deconstruction of subjectivity’, which inevitably leads to the ‘delocalisation of the perceptual apparatus’. What is most significant about the fractured consciousness is that it allows ‘forms of perception to emerge that one had previously attributed to lunatics or schizophrenics’ (Reynolds 1996: 46; see also Schafer 1994 on schizophonia). These forms of perception arise from the interaction of simulation and reality, through the flux of information between human and machine. ‘Before being a mental state of the schizophrenic who has made himself into an artificial person through autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines’ (Deleuze 2004a: 8). In this internal narrative individuals do not conform to logics of rational reality, it is perhaps at this point musical-agents transfer through the ether to a logic of simulation.

MEDIATION, METAPHYSICAL METAPHOR, AND MODELS

The metamedial awareness feeds back to an “interfacing” property of the imagination that would secure discursive coherence. Mediating an inner stage is perhaps the key to unlocking the door to an outside of the stage (Verstraete 2008: 256)

Baudrillard has stated that ‘we are in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason’. This logic of simulation can be conceptualized by its processual nature, captured temporarily in a musical event by framing devices in compositional movement. ‘Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all the models based on the merest fact – the models come first, their circulation, orbital like that of the bomb, constitutes the genuine magnetic field of the event. The facts no longer have a specific trajectory, they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be engendered by all the models at once’ (Baudrillard 1994: 16). The development of a ‘schizophrenic consciousness’ by replicated perceptual schema and substitution allows for individuals to create meaning through temporally static frames of reality. A possible bastion against constant, never ending flux. ‘The imagination is not only consciously produced in order to channel and create meaning through the coherence of a narrative structure, but it also demonstrates that meaning has foremost a constitutive bodily basis in instances of sensory distress. Imagination is fed by these disruptions, which draw attention to their mediating properties’ (Verstraete 2008: 256).

Somatic ruptures reveal mediating technologies; Brovig-Hanssen developed the concept of opaque mediation to ‘frame the processes in which mediating technologies are exposed’ (Brovig-Hanssen 2010: 123). In the case of frames working to mould the interior of a musical event, Fales has posited that frames ‘may endure beyond the singular object that provoked their construction, as abstracting mechanisms to be used to reflect on the experience just passed, to interpret a future experience, or to think generally about musical engagement’ (Fales 2004: 158). Framed mediation exists as separate to reality and simulation, a snapshot of frozen timelessness. As Baudrillard describes, it is ‘a hyperreal henceforth sheltered form the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences’ (Baudrillard 1994: 2-3). What remains is the processual interaction, moving in a cyclical nature from the intersection of collaborative properties. These subtle nuances can be teased out when music is utilised as a lens for mediation analysis. This can be structured as a tertiary level approach, wherein the categories of sound in electronic music are mediated by technology in the creative process to simulate an alternative reality space for the generation of meaning and models.

Mediating technology in musical creation facilitates the manipulation of process; therefore, mediation forms the processual interplay between sound and simulation. Brovig-Hanssen delimits the term further: ‘the term is broadly used to signify the process behind conveying sounds from the source to the receiver, or from one place to another’. He continues by categorising the ‘mediating process used in sound recording into four stages:

1. The initial mediation of aural raw material (the voice/human body, traditional instruments, samplers, software instruments, drum machines, etc.);
2. The mediation used to record and edit or process sounds (microphones, amplifiers, mixing console, editing tools, processing effects, etc.);
3. The mediation required in building compositional work (programming, synthesizing etc.);
4. Mediation of spatial placement (panning etc.)

Opaque mediation in this context falls within the second category above’ (Brovig-Hanssen 2010: 160). Baudrillard states that representational symbols will subsume the symbolised, transforming them in four stages to pure simulacrum. This transformation proceeds as follows:

1. ‘It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum’. (Baudrillard 1994: 170) (Fales 2004: 176).

The simulacrum is the final stage of simulated reality, to unpack this further Fales describes the categories of sound typically originating in ambient and electronic music, which I will parallel with Baudrillard’s transformational stages utilising Brovig-Hanssen’s mediation process: ‘the first category of sound in ambient music reflects precisely its acoustic referent’. This is the reflection of a basic reality, mirrored from the initial mediation of raw auditory material. The second category is where opaque mediation is contextualized to pervert or process an imaginary reality of sound, it ‘follows canonical rules of sound to distort or lie about a nonexistent source’. When the mediation process adjusts to its tertiary stage, it subsumes sonic artefacts, fractured pieces of perception, in a juxtaposed display that masks the absence of a basic reality by ‘transgressing the same rules, deceives by showing itself to be the exception that proves the rule – that is, since it is a sound that defies the rules of source-emitted sound, then there must be sounds that obey these rules’. The fourth and final category is concerned with sounds ‘autonomous from a world of acoustic referents altogether’ (Fales 2004: 177). Without acoustic or source referents, this sonic frame bears no relation to reality whatever.

These representational stages, mirroring most sonic phenomena, form a continuum. One that Fales describes in relation to her sound categories as ‘defined by decreasing contextualisation. The first category, at one end of the continuum, consists of exact copies of real-world sounds, derived perhaps from unaltered sampled sounds’ (Fales 2004: 169). In the processing domain of sound technology, artefacts ‘maintain their metaphoric quality but diverge by increments from a known acoustic referent, until by category two, sounds are unfamiliar but possible or imaginable in some musical universe’ (Fales 2004: 169). In an assemblage, in the third category, sonic material sheds it metaphoric linkages evoking schizophrenic consciousness until it achieves pure simulacrum at the end of the continuum. The significance of this processual continuum evoked by musical perception is not to be found in the machine, nor in the final alternative sonic simulacrum, but in the listeners[4] themselves. It is the musical-agent that addresses and resolves issues of control over sound and self in this simulation, where every parameter of this reflected reality is mutable and controllable. As Fales concludes, ‘each of these four categories provokes a realisation on the part of listeners about the nature of the auditory world and of perception in general’ (Fales 2004: 177).

ALLUSION AND DIFFUSION: PROCESSUAL CONTINUUM AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF TIME

Sound is an irreducible given of music. Even in the marginal cases which it is absent, it is nonetheless present by allusion (Nattiez 1990: 67)

‘We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end’ (Baudrillard 1994: 10). Thus, the stages of representation of simulation portrayed so far must also be contextualized in a frame for analysis that unveils its mediations in transference to simulacrum; the dialectically fluxing states form the processual continuum. As Middleton states, ‘all musical events relate forward (through expectation and implication) and back (through memory), and their function and meaning change as the processual dynamic unfolds’ (Middleton 1990: 219). In any duality, it is the exchange of information that must be prioritized, rather than any concept of classification. The metaphysical reality evoked by sonic metaphor and its ruptures discussed in the previous chapter are based on choices undertaken by the mind that perceives them. ‘For a genuine poet, metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a vicarious image that he actually beholds in place of a concept’ (Nietzsche 1999: 34). The delirium evoked can induce the hyperreal, as Baudrillard describes: It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere (Baudrillard 1994: 2). At the intersection of processes in the vacuum of the DAW[5] the mnemonic devices are employed in a silent space whose ether is achievable through submersion in work, conceptualised as an absorption in the present. Rouget explains, ‘in the dimension of time, music modifies our consciousness of being to an even greater extent. It is an architecture in time. It gives time a density different from its everyday density. It lends a materiality it does not ordinarily have and that is of another order. It indicates that time is being occupied by an action being performed, or that a certain state rules over the beings present’ (Rouget 1985: 121).

This immersion in the present paradoxically afford the agent an opportunity to temporally suspend reality and in some cases the perceptual schema that replaces the one renounced will facilitate the creation of a frame, allowing a static moment of clarity. Steve Goodman, himself an electronic music producer as well as an academic, posits that these events are based on conceptual prehensions. ‘Conceptual prehensions indicate not that the past predicts the future, but that the future is anticipated in the present…Prehensions establish a causal relation between the subject prehending and the external world at the moment of perception. Yet causality here enters a multilayered architecture of durations, where past, present and future are temporal intricacies of the perishing and onset of actual individual occasions’ (Goodman 2008: 39).

This flux of time and reality when contextualised in sound practice and creation affords an event space in which the individual can diffuse perceptual systems in their auditory world. LaBelle continues, ‘following such divergent and imaginary productions, the construction of the self, as a modern subject, was redrawn through the particular “rapture and capture” of sound’ (LaBelle 2010: xx). This conceptualisation of the self is one that is in sync with its constant flux, one that can fracture and recreate new realities for transformatory mediation. As Steven Connor proposes, ‘the self defined in terms of hearing rather than sight is a self imaged not as a point, but as a membrane; not as a picture, but as a channel through which voices, noises and music’s travel’ (Connor 1996: 209). The concept that an agent can absorb and project through music and alternate reality spaces for the construction of self is a manifestation through opaque mediation of a fundamental will present in the individual. Bachelard continues; ‘here is a transformatory ability to take worlds to pieces and recreate them: an immensity within the self, a transcendental inventiveness free from normative or ideological constraints, a potentially limitless, expansion of being. This, in part, is what Nietzsche referred to as conceiving of the world as “a work of art that gives birth to itself”’ (Bachelard 1968: 196). If the structures of thought that dictate creative procedure are placed on a processual continuum in a musical nexus, the sounds may evoke a schizophrenic consciousness that resonates back and forth in the ether and facilitates an extension of self wherein the agent can project themselves in order to create an assemblage of self and of art. ‘So this diffusion and decentring, this in-betweenness, isn’t merely a formal strategy; it’s also an experience, the way the music is received and felt. There’s no longer a clear distinction between inside and outside, or between subject and object. The music has become an extension of your flesh; or better, your flesh is now an extension of the music’ (Shaviro 1997: 122).

Music has a timeless metaphorical dimension. It occupies a space of its own creation and a reality of its own choosing. From the movement at one end of the continuum with the acoustic or source sound through the four stages of representation and mediation to, at the other end, a simulated sound that has no resemblance to its predecessor. The event is a metaphor and mirror that’s significance lies in the opaque procession through the processual continuum, revealing an image of resolution. ‘Music is a credible metaphor of the real. It is a herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society. Undoubtedly, music is a play of mirrors in which every activity is reflected, defined, recorded and distorted. If we look at one mirror, we see only an image of another. But at times a complex mirror game yields a vision that is rich, because unexpected and prophetic. At times it yields nothing but the swirl of the void’ (Attali 1985: 92).

CONCLUSION

By proposing theoretical frameworks between the four stages proposed by Baudrillard to constitute the progress of a representational image toward full simulacrum and the sonic events that occur in electronic music creation, I aimed to illustrate how interaction between agent and machine can construct an alternative auditory reality space by interaction with a DAW and how this enables an individual to utilise technology as a tool of extension by mapping out the contents of their auditory imagination. Mutable parameters afford an agent unprecedented levels of control of the auditory space, constructing their own interior life on the silence of the sequencer. When producers, engineers, artists and sound designers find the contents of their auditory imaginations turned out into the external world, they are faced with something like Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum that imitates a nonexistent original (1988). Isolated and released from social milieu, the agent controls the parameters of this reality, each sound resonating a fixed point of selfhood alerting the agent to its counterpoint. This processual continuum echoes out via the assimilation of an existential prism of affected factors grounded in the foundations of Baudrillard’s simulacrum, wherein the alternate reality space invoked by flow[6] states and sound mediations imagined by auditory manipulation becomes a space in which agents can shatter and mould their perceptual schema to view the affects of the processual continuum in the construction of self and exterior reflection. It is only electronically created music that can externalise the subjective consciousness of sound on the part of listeners that they begin to ‘suspect that their collected percepts and reactions to auditory experience are nothing more than their ears listening to their minds’ (Fales 2004: 174) – in the works of Baudrillard, ‘perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination’ (Baudrillard 1994: 5).

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[1] Ragnhild Brovig-Hanssen has defined the process of ‘opaque mediation,’ which includes ‘direct exposure of editing tools or processing effects, the musical use of technological glitches or side effects and the obvious deployment of samples.’ (2010: 159)

[2] Cyborg metaphors have been invoked to model contemporary interfacings between human and machine, in both fiction and lived social reality (for example, Marsh and West 2003: 195-197; Haraway 1991; Greene 2004: 13).

[3] Hyperrealism is a term defined by composer Noah Creshevsky as: ‘an electroacoustic musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment (“realism”), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive (“hyper”)’ (Creshevsky 2007)

[4] The loop playback and similar functions available on DAWs (digital audio workstations) encourage the user to repeatedly listen to short sections of audio which can make discrepancies more apparent than when considering the performance as a whole. This further amplifies the notion that repeatability leads to more analytical listening and could be called micro repeatability – the idea that extremely short elements of a recording can be repeated indefinitely and therefore considered by the recordists in a way that would not be possible to the vast majority of listeners (Proctor 2010: 19).

[5] Digital audio workstation (for example: Logic Pro, Pro Tools, Ableton Live).

[6] Suspended time invoked by total absorption in the present task.