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The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago
This study of the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing maps out a “sonorous archipelago”—a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse.
Profoundly intimate yet immediately giving onto distant spaces, both an “organ of fear” and an echo chamber of anticipated pleasures, an uncontrollable flow subject to unconscious selection and augmentation, the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing has meant that sound has rarely received the same philosophical attention as the visual.
In The Order of Sounds, François J. Bonnet makes a compelling case for the irreducible heterogeneity of “sound,” navigating between the physical models constructed by psychophysics and refined through recording technologies, and the synthetic production of what is heard. From primitive vigilance and sonic mythologies to digital sampling and sound installations, he examines the ways in which we make sound speak to us, in an analysis of listening as a plurivocal phenomenon drawing on Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes, Nancy, Adorno, and de Certeau, and experimental pioneers such as Tesla, Bell, and Raudive. Stringent critiques of the “soundscape” and “reduced listening” demonstrate that univocal ontologies of sound are always partial and politicized; for listening is always a selective fetishism, a hallucination of sound filtered by desire and convention, territorialized by discourse and its authorities.
Bonnet proposes neither a disciplined listening that targets sound “itself,” nor an “ocean of sound” in which we might lose ourselves, but instead maps out a sonorous archipelago—a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped and aggregated by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse.
Profoundly intimate yet immediately giving onto distant spaces, both an “organ of fear” and an echo chamber of anticipated pleasures, an uncontrollable flow subject to unconscious selection and augmentation, the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing has meant that sound has rarely received the same philosophical attention as the visual.
In The Order of Sounds, François J. Bonnet makes a compelling case for the irreducible heterogeneity of “sound,” navigating between the physical models constructed by psychophysics and refined through recording technologies, and the synthetic production of what is heard. From primitive vigilance and sonic mythologies to digital sampling and sound installations, he examines the ways in which we make sound speak to us, in an analysis of listening as a plurivocal phenomenon drawing on Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes, Nancy, Adorno, and de Certeau, and experimental pioneers such as Tesla, Bell, and Raudive. Stringent critiques of the “soundscape” and “reduced listening” demonstrate that univocal ontologies of sound are always partial and politicized; for listening is always a selective fetishism, a hallucination of sound filtered by desire and convention, territorialized by discourse and its authorities.
Bonnet proposes neither a disciplined listening that targets sound “itself,” nor an “ocean of sound” in which we might lose ourselves, but instead maps out a sonorous archipelago—a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped and aggregated by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse.
352 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2016
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About the author
François J. Bonnet
13 books12 followersFrançois J. Bonnet is a composer, visual artist, recording artist (as Kassel Jaeger), director of Groupe de Recherches Musicales of the National Audiovisual Institute (INA-GRM) in Paris, and part-time lecturer at the Université de Paris 1.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 30, 2019
As its title's reverberation of The Order of Things suggests, this is broadly speaking a critique of essentialism within the fugitive dimension of sound.
Throughout the history of music lies a perennial assumption of unfettered access to a pure phenomenality of sound; the ability to perceive the sonorous in all noumenal fullness and channel it into formalization, discretization, reproduction. The culmination of this trajectory is Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète, with its conception of the eidetic 'sound object', a formo-morphological syntagm apprehended qua indexical sonority and divested of all referential content. This claim to an objective taxonomy of sound presupposes, by its very capacity to individuate, a differential-signifying structure inherent to sound and deducible in non-psychologistic terms through sheer acoustic physiognomy alone. Yet, the presence of signification points outside of sound itself, towards the disposition through which one extracts from a supposedly neutral continuum the very object in question.
Bonnet's counter-thesis to a pure listening, then, is that the apprehension of sound is always-already invested with extra-sonic discursivity prior to and determining the audible as such. Any attempt to render normative a model of sonic phenomenality, as in contemporary 'soundscape' practices, ultimately is belied by the very impurity of its realization. There is no order of sound, only fleeting territories.
Throughout the history of music lies a perennial assumption of unfettered access to a pure phenomenality of sound; the ability to perceive the sonorous in all noumenal fullness and channel it into formalization, discretization, reproduction. The culmination of this trajectory is Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète, with its conception of the eidetic 'sound object', a formo-morphological syntagm apprehended qua indexical sonority and divested of all referential content. This claim to an objective taxonomy of sound presupposes, by its very capacity to individuate, a differential-signifying structure inherent to sound and deducible in non-psychologistic terms through sheer acoustic physiognomy alone. Yet, the presence of signification points outside of sound itself, towards the disposition through which one extracts from a supposedly neutral continuum the very object in question.
Bonnet's counter-thesis to a pure listening, then, is that the apprehension of sound is always-already invested with extra-sonic discursivity prior to and determining the audible as such. Any attempt to render normative a model of sonic phenomenality, as in contemporary 'soundscape' practices, ultimately is belied by the very impurity of its realization. There is no order of sound, only fleeting territories.
January 3, 2023
to bring a seashell to one's ear is to give oneself to hear a whole ocean, the colored sound ebbs and flows in interminable waves immured in the confined nacreous space and yet what we perceive is an outside, an open space, the ear carries the listener far afield.
dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss, and now too distant ever to be recaptured.
the trace is therefore an auxiliary of sound which takes its place and is indispensable for its existence or at least for its existence to last, to be perpetuated. Moreover, there is no perceived sound that does not leave a trace, For sound is not simply that which we hear; as soon as it exists, as soon as it leaves a trace, it is already somewhat more than that, it has functions to perform, expectations to meet, things to say.
a trace is always the trace of something, and it is always threatened with disappearance.
- there is no such thing as silence - but silence precisely does exist, standing outside of our field of experience, Absolute silence does well and truly exist. In a space where there is no medium for the transmission of sound, in the void, silence reigns, silence exists, but not for anyone, no hearing can attain it.
resonance and reverberation have always fascinated listeners, taking on a character as sacred as the inexplicable noises of the forces of nature, caves were doubtless the first theatres within which the perception of resonance came into dialogue with religious belief. Indeed, the young discipline of acoustic archaeology studies the links between cave art and the echoes of caves.
Always, already, the fleeting character of sound, its intangibility and the spectral range of its appearing, from the hyperintimacy of the internal voice to the gigantic, frightful alterity of thunder, have indicated its excessive character, excessive it is, in so far as there is no sonorous equivalent of total darkness but only a penumbra. For as fleeting as it may be, sound is always present to our ear and through its marks, its traces, its history, always a power of evocation.
the ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night of twilight of obscure caves and woods.
- what does to be listening, to be all ears, as one would say to be in the world mean? - to be listening will always be to be straining toward or in an approach to the self.
if listening speaks, it is because it is made to speak, because it is always transpierced, through and through, by the discursive traits that are continually soliciting it.
the enchainment of forms is the power of language, which reconfigures itself endlessly, the becoming-discourse that specifies itself. If territory is that magma wherein form and signs are forged, it is also the unitary space, the individuated locality on whose basis a superstructure, a territorial metastructure, are fabricated. Sound territories are encapsulated one within the other, they supplement each other, contest each another, join with or cover over one another, a whole territorial combinatorics.
Archipelagos are abodes of the winds, writes Victor Hugo, between the various islands there is a corridor that acts as a bellows, a law that is bad for the sea and good for the land. The wind carries away miasmas and brings about shipwrecks.
- white coral islands in a blue sea, their seeming of distinctness: the seeming of individuality or of positive difference one from another but all are projections from the same sea bottom, the difference between sea and land is not positive, in all water there is some earth, in all earth there is some water, so then all seeming things are not things at all, if all are inter-continuous -
sounds are never isolated, since there is no absolute silence, they are always mixed with other sounds, always already linked, fusing into one gigantic, infinite, and immortal sonorous continuum, gradually expanding throughout space and time, at the limit, just as oceans are only arbitrarily separated, it can be said that sound is one, one vast oscillating ocean from which emerge particularities, expressive localities, so that all of the noises on earth can be considered as decomposites and partials of one great global sound, one single complex vibration midway between the terrestrial electric carrier wave of which Tesla dreamed and the ocean of information that inspires Toop as he sets forth his own intuition of an ocean of sound.
Sound has no nature, sound is a becoming, there is therefore no essence to be sought, but only interstices within which sound is unmarked or evades its mark, it is and always will be unattainable, in the end, if everything that is attained is destroyed then sound, qua always-other, promises to remain indestructible and the listening that targets it, inexhaustible.
like language, the archipelago is always already there, always inscribed within a double movement of aggregation and disaggregation, filled with phantom islands, vulnerable to the shifting of the terrain, shrouded in a fog that clings to its contours, the sonorous archipelago, stretching out into the far distance, is an archipelago world.
dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss, and now too distant ever to be recaptured.
the trace is therefore an auxiliary of sound which takes its place and is indispensable for its existence or at least for its existence to last, to be perpetuated. Moreover, there is no perceived sound that does not leave a trace, For sound is not simply that which we hear; as soon as it exists, as soon as it leaves a trace, it is already somewhat more than that, it has functions to perform, expectations to meet, things to say.
a trace is always the trace of something, and it is always threatened with disappearance.
- there is no such thing as silence - but silence precisely does exist, standing outside of our field of experience, Absolute silence does well and truly exist. In a space where there is no medium for the transmission of sound, in the void, silence reigns, silence exists, but not for anyone, no hearing can attain it.
resonance and reverberation have always fascinated listeners, taking on a character as sacred as the inexplicable noises of the forces of nature, caves were doubtless the first theatres within which the perception of resonance came into dialogue with religious belief. Indeed, the young discipline of acoustic archaeology studies the links between cave art and the echoes of caves.
Always, already, the fleeting character of sound, its intangibility and the spectral range of its appearing, from the hyperintimacy of the internal voice to the gigantic, frightful alterity of thunder, have indicated its excessive character, excessive it is, in so far as there is no sonorous equivalent of total darkness but only a penumbra. For as fleeting as it may be, sound is always present to our ear and through its marks, its traces, its history, always a power of evocation.
the ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night of twilight of obscure caves and woods.
- what does to be listening, to be all ears, as one would say to be in the world mean? - to be listening will always be to be straining toward or in an approach to the self.
if listening speaks, it is because it is made to speak, because it is always transpierced, through and through, by the discursive traits that are continually soliciting it.
the enchainment of forms is the power of language, which reconfigures itself endlessly, the becoming-discourse that specifies itself. If territory is that magma wherein form and signs are forged, it is also the unitary space, the individuated locality on whose basis a superstructure, a territorial metastructure, are fabricated. Sound territories are encapsulated one within the other, they supplement each other, contest each another, join with or cover over one another, a whole territorial combinatorics.
Archipelagos are abodes of the winds, writes Victor Hugo, between the various islands there is a corridor that acts as a bellows, a law that is bad for the sea and good for the land. The wind carries away miasmas and brings about shipwrecks.
- white coral islands in a blue sea, their seeming of distinctness: the seeming of individuality or of positive difference one from another but all are projections from the same sea bottom, the difference between sea and land is not positive, in all water there is some earth, in all earth there is some water, so then all seeming things are not things at all, if all are inter-continuous -
sounds are never isolated, since there is no absolute silence, they are always mixed with other sounds, always already linked, fusing into one gigantic, infinite, and immortal sonorous continuum, gradually expanding throughout space and time, at the limit, just as oceans are only arbitrarily separated, it can be said that sound is one, one vast oscillating ocean from which emerge particularities, expressive localities, so that all of the noises on earth can be considered as decomposites and partials of one great global sound, one single complex vibration midway between the terrestrial electric carrier wave of which Tesla dreamed and the ocean of information that inspires Toop as he sets forth his own intuition of an ocean of sound.
Sound has no nature, sound is a becoming, there is therefore no essence to be sought, but only interstices within which sound is unmarked or evades its mark, it is and always will be unattainable, in the end, if everything that is attained is destroyed then sound, qua always-other, promises to remain indestructible and the listening that targets it, inexhaustible.
like language, the archipelago is always already there, always inscribed within a double movement of aggregation and disaggregation, filled with phantom islands, vulnerable to the shifting of the terrain, shrouded in a fog that clings to its contours, the sonorous archipelago, stretching out into the far distance, is an archipelago world.
Read
May 29, 2018It wouldn’t be fair for me to rate this book. I feel I lack the required background in French philosophy in order to be able to appreciate the book. To my mind, many French philosophers read like failed poets. Trying to write in a way that is both informative and poetic is a difficult task. But, perhaps, all useful ways of writing about music is necessarily poetic. While at times I find this way of writing maddeningly vague, I acknowledge that thinking, to some extent, operates by distinguishing novel concepts and giving them names. Ever more finer conceptual distinctions then lead to more nuanced thinking. François Bonnet delivers such distinctions in spades, and we can take them to think about sound and music.
February 17, 2022
The best book on listening I've ever read. So, so, so much more rigorous than Schaefer's Soundscape. The thing is that in order for it to hit as hard as it did for me, you have to be already pretty engaged with theory, somewhat familiar with Deleuze, Lyotard, Adorno, etc, as well as the post-war avant-garde. Probably. Maybe it would hit as hard to someone else. But this is it. This is it.
Invaluable reading for anyone working their way out of composition school constructivist ennui - and also other artists, musicians, filmmakers, listeners.
Invaluable reading for anyone working their way out of composition school constructivist ennui - and also other artists, musicians, filmmakers, listeners.
Read
May 8, 2023really a dense read, but monumentally comprehensive, and ultimately rewarding. it feels like the culmination of Bonnet's work; the guy did us the favor of summing up centuries worth of conversations around sound. Bonnet's exposition on the fugitive nature of sound, and listening as the implication of its entire range of noumenal entanglements kinda reminds me of Nancy's ideas on "À l'écoute." He also provides a lengthy polemic against R. Murray Schafer's notion of the soundscape and an intriguing theory of "archipelagic listening"
one good quote, among the many:
"To bring a seashell to one's ear is to give oneself to hear a whole ocean, the colored sound ebbs and flows in interminable waves immured in the confined nacreous space and yet what we perceive is an outside, an open space, the ear carries the listener far afield."
one good quote, among the many:
"To bring a seashell to one's ear is to give oneself to hear a whole ocean, the colored sound ebbs and flows in interminable waves immured in the confined nacreous space and yet what we perceive is an outside, an open space, the ear carries the listener far afield."
August 28, 2023
A knockout book on sound. The scope is vast and the argumentative structure flows beautifully.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews