Schaeffer reconsidered: a typological space and its analytic applications

Abstract

The description of the sonic level is indeed crucial in the analysis of music. Even if this can be seen as a plain assumption in the scholar debate, it is still not clear which categories could be considered relevant for analitic purposes. Acoustics provides a set of theoretical notions that, while strongly based on physics, cannot be directly imported in music analysis in relation to sound description. In fact, in the latter case, the perceptual level comes into play, rather than the acoustic one. In relation to perceptual categories, and from a phenomenological perspective, a fundamental contribution is still Schaeffer's Traité des objets musicaux. The paper proposes a reformulation of some of Schaeffer's categories that can be arranged in a consistent typological space. The resulting space is aimed at providing a multifaceted description of the sonic level that is suited both for music and, more generally, for sound-based texts and practices. This description results in an annotation of sound materials in relation to their position in the typological space. A methodology for such an annotation is proposed, and, finally, an application to E. Varèse's Poème électronique is presented.