#Soundobject software#

The sound object, then, would appear for the most part to have been abandoned within musical practice, potentially leaving it open for use by another discipline.

While Daniel may still find relevance for identifying sounds as objects, it is critiques like Kane’s which appear to be most relevant within contemporary musical thinking.

#Soundobject software#

The notion of the sound object in a musical composition context continues into the digital age as well, with practitioners such as Drew Daniel of Matmos who, in an instance that could be described as conceptual punning, has conflated object-oriented computer programming and object-oriented ontology to make a claim for the existence of ‘digital sound objects’: he finds an analogy between the obscure ‘inner reality’ of Max/MSP audio composition software patches and the ‘dark reality’ within traditional objects that also remains undisclosed with their use, as discussed by theorist Graham Harman ( Daniel, 2014, pp 87–92). However, reduced listening requires a belief that modes or hierarchies of listening exist, which is also considered problematic by contemporary sound theorists like Tom Rice ( 2015, p 104).Īccording to Brian Kane, Schaeffer conceptualised his ‘sound object’ through a close reading of the phenomenology practiced by Edmund Husserl however, Schaeffer’s methods in conceptualising the sound object have recently come under attack for their inconsistencies, creating an ontological problem that, for Kane, ‘…emerges when sounds are conceptualised as sound objects that reify sonic effects, rather than events that bind source, cause, and effect together’ ( 2014, p 37).Īlthough Schaeffer’s ‘improvised ontology’ may or may not be inherently flawed, contemporary sound studies invokes the ‘sound object’ as a primary point of reference, often naming it as a conceptual forerunner to the sampling culture of DJs and other methods of composition that use pre-recorded non-musical sounds as their source material, to the point where the concept of sound as a malleable, manipulated object has become generally accepted ( McLeod, 2005 Smith, 2007 Saiber, 2007). Schaefer suggested that sound objects were possible through what he called reduced listening, a process described by Michel Chion as ‘tak a sound…as an object of observation in itself, instead of cutting across it with the aim of getting at something else’ ( Chion, 2016, p 170). Enmeshed with Schaeffer’s creation of the compositional form using pre-recorded sound known as musique concrète, Schaeffer’s ‘sound object’ was a perceptual object reliant upon the listener’s inability to identify the original source of the sound captured and subsequently manipulated on tape. In his work Traité des objets musicaux, composer Pierre Schaeffer first defined the ‘sound object’ ( l’objet sonore), a term he proposed for referring to non-musical sounds recorded onto magnetic tape that could then be manipulated into musical compositions (Schaeffer, in Cox and Warner, 2004, p 76–81). Towards a more sonically inclusive museum practice: a new definition of the ‘sound object’ Problems with the original notion of the ‘sound object’