Makis Solomos

The Complexity of Xenakis's Notion of Space

The notion of space is crucial to Xenakis's music and thought. This chapter will offer a global approach, trying to show the complexity and inner richness of this notion. Indeed, there are at least four levels where we can found it. First, there is the ontological and philosophical level. On that level, space is a fundamental notion for Xenakis. In the 1960s he created the notion of »outside-time structures«, which minimizes the importance of time, and in the 1980s he stated that time could be viewed as an epiphenomenal notion, while space would be more fundamental. On a second level, we could view space as an operative category. The discourse will be about geometric space, and, for instance, the use of graphs for composing music. It is thanks to this kind of space that Xenakis imagined new types of sound morphologies (glissandi, for instance) or that he invented transfers from the microscopic level to the macroscopic. With the third level, we are in the domain of the physical space, where Xenakis was one of the main pioneers, introducing the idea of the »composability« of physical space. It is what happened in the Philips Pavilion of the Brussels World Fair (Expo 58) with the »sound routes«, or with the sound immersion produced with Bohor (1962), or with the metaphor of the »Sonotron« used in Terretektorh (1965-66), etc. With the fourth and final level we can define space as a place where an event occurs: this is the definition of the Xenakian notion of »polytope«.

INTRODUCTION

Xenakis is often described as a »space« composer. When saying that, we think of the three-dimensional quality of his music, which works with sound masses and juxtaposition of textures, and which has a quasi-tactile dimension -in a way, Xenakis is a »sound sculptor«. But we also think of the fact that he was one of the first composers to work with sound spatialization both in instrumental music and in electroacoustic music, putting the listener inside an orchestra (Terretektorh), realizing complex, automated spatializations of electroacoustic sounds (the Polytopes), etc. There are also other domains where the notion of space can be inferred from Xenakis's music and thought.

In fact, the notion of space itself, as it is used in music -as well as in many other fields -has many senses; as the French writer Georges Perec would say, there are »spaces of space« 1 . There is, for instance, an opposition between physical space and metaphorical space (or space as a tool for representation); there is also an opposition between virtual and real space; space can be used as »immersion« or, on the contrary, for constructing localizations; and so on. 2 Thus Xenakis's thought can help us to analyse the various aspects of space in music. In this chapter, we will see that we can define at least four different notions of space: the first notion concerns the philosophical level, in relationship to the ideas of time and energy; the second notion is rooted in the compositional level; the third is related to physical space; and finally, the fourth notion appears when physical space becomes place.

TIME, SPACE, AND ENERGY

First, there is a philosophical or ontological level, where space is, for Xenakis, a crucial notion. Let's start with Xenakis's philosophy of time. He acknowledges the centrality of unmeasured time, i.e. the pure time flow. He even thinks of it almost as an equivalent to music itself:

1 Georges Perec, Espèces d 'espaces, Paris 1974. 2 In my recent book (De la musique au son: L'émergence du son dans la musique des XXe-XXIe siècles, Rennes 2013), I explore some of the meanings of space in music, in particular in Chapters 3 (»Immersion«) and 6 (»Sound-Space«). That may explain why he focused more and more on measured time -time that can be ›constructed‹: »There is the temporal flow, which is an immediate given, and then there is metrics, which is a construction man makes upon time« 7 . He often defines time (time flow) as an empty blackboard: »Time could be considered as a blank blackboard, on which symbols and relation-ships, architectures and abstract organisms are inscribed«8 . There, time is an abstract dimension enabling one to ask the question of time in terms of construction. Therefore, when he says that time is the same as music, it would be ›measured time‹ that he means, not ›time flow‹. This contrasts sharply with the centrality of unmeasured time in the philosophy of Henri Bergson (although Bergson's word for unmeasured time was ›duration‹). Xenakis is more interested in the possibility of making, building, or constructing something within time (or, upon time). We might even say that he aims to ›con-struct‹ time. It is no surprise, then, that during the 1960s and 1970s he had a strong interest in Jean Piaget: »Piaget's book provided me with my first justification that I was right to do calculations with time. He proved that the perception of time stopped developing at the age of twelve.

Up until the age of six one can't see this process clearly, but between six and twelve I think there are three stages. He showed that time has an ordering structure and that time intervals can be added and permutated, and consequently that they have a group structure.

I concluded from all this that time is nothing but a kind of structure. And because it is a structure it can be counted, expressed with real numbers, and shown as points on a straight line.«9

In the 1960s, Xenakis spoke of ›amnesia‹. The chapter of Musiques Formelles devoted to »symbolic music« begins, »we shall begin by imagining that we are suffering from a sudden amnesia. 10 We shall thus be able to reascend to the fountain-head of the mental operations used in composition and attempt to extricate the general principles that are valid for all sorts of music.«11 In a sense, we may say that Xenakis ›fights‹ with time. And, anyway, we should not forget his notion that the temporal dimension also includes »outside-time« structures. »Whatever we think is by definition outside time because it is in our memory and doesn't disappear with the passage of time (unless we forget it). We have no power over the time-flow but we feel it passing: the notion of time is also outside time.«12

Elsewhere, Xenakis considers time as an epiphenomenon, and space as a more fundamental reality. On this, we should carefully look into Xenakis's only article explicitly devoted to the issue of time. 13 The beginning reads: »Isn't time simply an epiphenomenal notion of a deeper reality? Thus an illusion that we unconsciously have accepted since our earliest years and even since the earliest, ancient ages?«14 He then hypothesizes that ›displacement‹ is a more fundamental notion, adding that »if the notion of displacement were more fundamental than that of time, one could undoubtedly reduce all macro-and microcosmic transformations to extremely short chains of displacement.«15 Furthermore, referring to the experiment of »correlation of the movement of two photons emitted in opposite directions by a single atom«,16 he notes, »Now, this experiment could be a starting point for the investigation of more deeply seated properties of space, freed from the tutelage of time. In this case, could the ›nonlocality‹ of quantum mechanics be explained perhaps not by the hypothesis of ›hidden variables‹ in which time still intervenes, but rather by the unsuspected and extravagant properties of nontemporal space, such as ›spatial ubiquity‹, for example?«17 Yet, not even space seems to be the ultimate reality. Xenakis's preliminary conclusions, in fact, are as follows:

»As space is perceptible only across the infinity of chains of energy transformations, it could very well be nothing but an appearance of these chains. In fact, let us consider the movement of a photon. Movement means displacement. Now, could this displacement be considered an autogenesis of energy, an energetic parthenogenesis of the photon by itself at each step of its trajectory (continuous or quantized)? This continuous auto-creation of the photon, could it not, in fact, be space?«18

SPACE AS AN OPERATIVE CATEGORY

Let us now analyse a second level, where the question is about ›geometrical‹ space, and, for instance, the use of graphs for composing music. It is thanks to this kind of space that Xenakis invented new types of sound morphologies (for instance, the morphology of massive glissandi) or that he invented transfers from the microscopic to the macroscopic time level. More generally, we could say that, in this context, space is a tool for representing and composing music, and thus an operative category.

It is interesting to notice that, in one of his very few attempts to analyze music that was not composed by himself, Xenakis used algebraic space. I refer to his analysis of Ludwig van Beethoven's Appassionata in Musiques Formelles (see Figure 1). As for his own music, the most radical utilization of a geometrical space can be found in Nomos alpha (1965-66, for cello), where Xenakis uses the group model (in the mathematical sense) of a cube and its 23 rotations (see Figure 2). More generally, Xenakis used space in the geometrical sense as a way to understand music and to compose it, as shown by Peter Hoffmann. 19 Xenakis's use of graphs for composing is a special case. As is well known, it is due to these kinds of graphs that he invented the notion of massive glissandi -a totally new sound morphology in the mid-1950s -such as those found at the end of Metastaseis (see Figure 3). The graph tool allowed him to develop his own vision of global sound phenomena, of masses of microsounds, which, owing to their complex interlocking, form a new global sound. This is, of course, related to his experience in architecture. As Xenakis writes: »In music, you begin with a theme or a melody and then you have a whole arsenal at your disposal that is more or less given for developing elaborations, be they polyphonic or harmonic (this applies as much to a classical sonata as a piece of serial music). You start from the mini to attain the global. In architecture, however, you must simultaneously conceive the details and the ensemble, otherwise, it all falls apart. This approach, this experience at

PHYSICAL SPACE -SOUND SPATIALIZATION

The third level is the physical notion of space, which is related to sound spatialization. In this domain, Xenakis, after Edgard Varèse and around the same time as Karlheinz Stockhausen, is an important pioneer of this notion, which became increasingly important for music. Xenakis began very early to work with the idea that physical space can be composed. This can already be seen in his orchestral work Pithoprakta (1955-56): the ›grains‹ of the piece's beginning (string players striking the body of their instruments) move from one group to another; and at the end of the piece, the strings come to play a single note, which travels from one group to another. Of course, the composition of space is most important in the 1958 composition Concret PH, the »instrumental interlude« of musique concrète composed by Xenakis to be played with Poème électronique. Here Xenakis designed the complex »sound routes« that spatialized sound using the over 400 loudspeakers available. In the same year he published the article »Notes towards an ›Electronic Gesture‹« 22 , which reviews the experience of the performance given in the Philips Pavilion and puts forward new proposals for sound spatialization.

In 1962, Bohor is one of the first compositions to treat space in the sense of immersion. This electroacoustic work was composed for four two-track tape recorders, which, during the concert, were launched at the same time, inevitably became desynchronized. These desynchronizations were not ›er-rors‹ because the idea was not to realize ›travels‹ of sound from one loudspeaker to another, as in the Poème électronique, but to totally immerse the listener -it is also why Xenakis performed the piece extremely loudly. In 1963-1964, Eonta (for five brass instruments and piano) uses space, this time with a concern for staging: the instrumentalists (brass) are sometimes required to move and change their position in the concert hall.

Then, with the orchestral works Terretektorh (1965)(1966) and Nomos gamma (1967)(1968), the research into space became even more important and came to have a quasi-political meaning. Xenakis upsets the world of the orchestra and its audience by having the orchestra leave the stage; the musicians are distributed around the hall and the audience is placed inside the orchestra! Figure 5 shows the well-known layout of the orchestra in Terretektorh.

It is also important to quote Xenakis's note program:

»The scattering of the musicians brings in a radically new kinetic conception of music which no modern electro-acoustical means could match. For if it is not possible to imagine 90 magnetic tapes relaying to 90 loudspeakers disseminated all over the auditorium, on the contrary it is quite possible to achieve this with a classical orchestra of 90 musicians. The musical composition will thereby be entirely enriched throughout the hall both in spatial dimension and in movement. The speeds and accelerations of the movement of the sounds will be realized, and new and powerful functions will be able to be made use of, such as logarithmic or Archimedian spirals, in-time and geometrically. Ordered or disordered sonorous masses, rolling one against the other like waves. . . etc., will be possible.

Terrêtektorh is thus a ›Sonotron‹: an accelerator of sonorous particles, a disintegra- Figure 6 shows a transcription showing the spatial movement. Notice that this extract gives rise to an enormous accelerando and a giant crescendo (some high nuances that go beyond the overall crescendo are shown in boldface). As for the spatial movement, the six musicians (indicated by letters in the transcription) who have at their disposal six membrane instruments, siren, metal and wood Simantrons, cymbal, gong, tam-tam, and wood block, to which are added, towards the end of the piece, pebbles and affolants (thin steel sheets) transmit to each other a minim with a shift of a crotchet. The movement is twofold: one for the membrane instruments, the other for the remaining instruments (except the siren, which is not involved in this space game). The transcription (where a line indicates the continuation of the same figure ) shows that the spatial motion goes through two phases. In bars 352-420 each membrane instrument enters gradually. The spatial movement is circular: A-B-C-D-E-F for skins and for four other instruments, in reverse movement for the others. Bars 423-426, which follow after a general silence, constitute an area of disruption. After a ›cloud‹ (improvised dense sounds with pebbles, affolants, and sirens) framed by two silences, only the membrane instruments remain in the spatial movement. First the initial circle is rebuilt (bars 430-439), but the membrane instruments change with each percussionist at both ends and with two, three or four in the middle. A ›cloud‹ of gongs introduces a continual alternation of two circular directions and a sinusoidal path of (relative) pitches (bars 441-448). With a ›cloud‹ of cymbals, the unique and reverse movement is restored bars (450)(451)(452). Finally, between a ›cloud‹ of tam-tams and the long (15-second) conclusive ›cloud‹ on all instruments, all types of spatial movement are deconstructed (B-A-F-E-D-C-B) very briefly (bars 454-455), and give rise to a single circle in the initial direction.

tor
In Xenakis's subsequent instrumental production, space is far from absent (for example, in Retours-Windungen, 1976, for twelve cellos, or in Alax, 1985, for three instrumental groups), but it is not used in such a striking manner. In fact, the ›spectacular‹ aspect of space composition, which combines spatial trajectories and immersion, culminates with the Polytopes: Polytope de Montréal (1966Montréal ( -1967)), Polytope de Persépolis (1971), Polytope de Cluny (1972Cluny ( -1974)), Polytope de Mycènes (1978), and Diatope (Polytope de Beaubourg, 1978).25

SPACE AS PLACE: POLYTOPES

The last notion of space concerns the Polytopes. In these multimedia (or intermedia) productions, we can speak about ›place‹, i.e., a specific physical space and simply not any arbitrary physical space. Indeed, Xenakis realized each Polytope for a specific location, indicated in the Polytope's title. In a way, we could say that there is a single work, called »Polytope«, and that each precise polytope is a concretization of this work in a specific place. It is particular truth for the Polytope de Cluny and the Diatope: many aspects of the first (both in the visual spectacle and in the music) can be found in the second.

The most interesting feature of the idea of space as place is the position of the listening audience (Figure 7). We could compare this position with the position of the listeners in the wellknown painting »Beethoven and His Admirers« (Figure 8). More generally, Xenakis's idea that music and sound are deeply linked to space -and even more, to place -can be viewed as an antithesis to the idealistic aesthetics, which, if we follow Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, can be analysed as a negation of space: That does not mean that Xenakis's aesthetic is ›materialistic‹, nor that in his music or in his Polytopes there is no longer anything called »meaning«! In fact, his aesthetics represent a break with the idealistic idea that the meaning of a musical or artistic work lays »behind« the sounds or the other physical media. This idea considerably reduced the possible meanings through a parallelism between music and language. As Luigi Nono clearly shows in an important discussion with Massimo Cacciari, the interest in physical space, as well as for place, in contemporary music can be interpreted as the need to re-introduce the multiplicity of meaning through the indissolubility of meaning and physical media-sound and space, when it is question of music (see Nono, 1993). Going back to Xenakis, we could say that it is not a coincidence that he gave us his most beautiful definition of music in the Diatope's program notes, his most accomplished polytope: »Music is not a language. Every musical piece is like a complex rock formed with ridges and designs engraved within and without, that can be interpreted in a thousand different ways without a single one being the best or the most true. By virtue of this multiple exegesis, music inspires all sorts of fantastic imaginings, like a crystal catalyst. I, myself, wanted to deal with the abysses that surround us and among which we live. The most formidable are those of our own destiny, of life and death, of visible and invisible universes. The signs that convey these abysses to us are made up of lights and sounds that provoke our two predominate senses. This is why I have conceived the Diatope as a place for the condensation of these signs and signals from our various worlds. Rational knowledge blends with intuitive knowledge, or revelation. It is impossible to dissociate them. These abysses are unknowable; that is to say, knowledge of them is an eternal and desperate search, composed of milestones or hypotheses that have marked our various epochs.« 27 26 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, III: »Das System der einzelnen Künste: Die Musik: Allgemeiner Charakter der Musik« http://www.textlog.de/hegel_aesthetik.html 1835-1838. 27 Iannis Xenakis, Music and Architecture, op.cit, p. 261.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Analysis of Beethoven's Appassionata

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: The group model (a cube and its 23 rotations) used in »Nomos alpha«

  Le Corbusier's studio and side with him obviously influenced me (even though I sensed it all along), or at least helped me conceive my music like an architecture project: globally and in detail at the same time. What constitutes architecture's force is these proportions: the coherent relationship between details and the whole […].« 20

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Xenakis's graph for the first version of the end of »Metastaseis«

Figure 4 :

 4 Figure 4: Stochastic sound pressure

  Figure 5: Terretektorh's orchestra

Figure 6 :

 6 Figure 6: Transcription of »Persephassa« (bars 352-456)

Figure 7 :

 7 Figure 7: Listener-spectators during Polytope de Cluny's performance

Figure 8 :

 8 Figure 8: Albert Grafle, »Beethoven and His Admirers«

»

  Mit dem Ton nun verläßt die Musik das Element der äußeren Gestalt und deren anschauliche Sichtbarkeit und bedarf deshalb zur Auffassung ihrer Produktionen auch eines anderen subjektiven Organs, des Gehörs, das wie das Gesicht nicht den praktischen, sondern den theoretischen Sinnen zugehört und selbst noch ideeller ist als das Gesicht. Denn die ruhige, begierdelose Beschauung von Kunstwerken läßt zwar die Gegenstände, ohne sie irgend vernichten zu wollen, für sich, wie sie da sind, ruhig bestehen, aber das, was sie auffaßt, ist nicht das in sich selbst Ideellgesetzte, sondern im Gegenteil das in seiner sinnlichen Existenz Erhaltene. Das Ohr dagegen vernimmt, ohne sich selber praktisch gegen die Objekte hinauszuwenden, das Resultat jenes inneren Erzitterns des Körpers, durch welches nicht mehr die ruhig materielle Gestalt, sondern die erste ideellere Seelenhaftigkeit zum Vorschein kommt. Da nun ferner die Negativität, in die das schwingende Material hier eingeht, einerseits ein Aufheben des räumlichen Zustandes ist, das selbst wieder durch die Reaktion des Körpers aufgehoben wird, so ist die Äußerung dieser zwiefachen Negation, der Ton, eine Äußerlichkeit, welche sich in ihrem Entstehen durch ihr Dasein selbst wieder vernichtet und an sich selbst verschwindet. Durch diese gedoppelte Negation der Äußerlichkeit, welche im Prinzipe des Tons liegt, entspricht derselbe der inneren Subjektivität, indem das Klingen, das an und für sich schon etwas Ideelleres ist als die für sich real bestehende Körperlichkeit, auch diese ideellere Existenz aufgibt und dadurch eine dem Innerlichen gemäße Äußerungsweise wird.« 26

»

  When you use tools like paper while writing and conceiving musical forms, you can think in terms of spatial qualities, but that is less important during composition itself. Music develops in time. […] Musical time can't be reduced to a stopwatch. […] The exact measurement, in seconds, of musical time and durations is of little interest. […] It is the interior of time that counts, not its absolute duration. [...] Time is independently and simultaneously articulated by various musical events.« 3Xenakis makes a difference between ›flow‹ and ›duration‹, meaning unmeasured and measured time. Only the latter is reversible: »A duration is something that can be moved around within time, it is therefore reversible, commutative.[…] The difference between any two points is a concept which stems from comparisons and mysterious judgments I make about the reality of the temporal flow, which I accept a priori. The distance between the two points is what is then identified as a duration. I displace this duration anywhere; therefore, it is reversible. But the temporal flow itself is irreversible.«

4

In these lines, the phrase »mysterious judgments I make about the reality of the temporal flow, which I accept a priori« is crucial. Xenakis admits that he does not know what time is (time flow). In one of the latest interviews, he says: »I never understood what is time. Time remains something mysterious for me. Time is everywhere, it rains, it snows 5 , it is part of nature. This is why I cannot understand what time is.« 6

Iannis Xenakis interviewed by Anne-Maria Harley, »Musique, espace et spatialisation«, in: Circuits 5/2 (1994), pp. 9-20, here p. 13.

4 Iannis Xenakis, Arts/Sciences: Alloys, translated from French by Sharon Kanach, Hillsdale (N.Y.) 1985 (originally published as Arts/Sciences: Alliages, Tournai 1979), pp. 74-

75. 5 The French word temps means both ›time‹ and

›weather‹. 6 Omer Corlaix and Bastien Gallet, »Entretien avec Iannis Xenakis«, in: Musica Falsa No. 2, Paris

1998, p. 29. 7 Iannis Xenakis, Arts/Sciences, op.cit., p. 97.

Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music, edited by Sharon Kanach, Hillsdale (N.Y.) 1992, p. 192.

Bálint András Varga, Conversations with Iannis Xenakis, London 1996, pp. 82-83.

Original French: »Nous commencerons par nous considérer brusquement amnésiques.«

11 Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music, op.cit., p.

155. 12 Bálint András Varga, op.cit., p. 83.

Iannis Xenakis »Sur le temps« (1988), reprinted in: idem, Kéleütha, edited by Alain Galliari, preface and notes by Benoît Gibson, Paris 1994, p. 94; Chapter 10 of Formalized Music, op.cit, is closely related to this article.

14 Iannis Xenakis, »Sur le temps«, op.cit., p.

94. 15 ibidem; cf. Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music, op.cit., p

.256. 16 ibidem; cf. Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music, op.cit.

, p. 257. 17 ibidem; cf. Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music, op.

cit., p. 257. 18 ibidem; cf. Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music, op.cit., incomplete.

Iannis Xenakis, Music and Architecture, edited by Sharon Kanach, Hillsdale (N.Y.) 2008, p. 72.

Cf. Makis Solomos, »The Unity of Xenakis's Instrumental and Electroacoustic Music : The Case of ›Brownian Movements‹«, in: Perspectives of New Music 39(1) (2001), pp. 244-254.

Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music, op.cit.,

The bibliography on Xenakis's sound spatialization is becoming increasingly important. Here a sampling of some extensive works on this topic: Helena Maria Da Silva Santana, L'orchestration chez Iannis Xenakis: l'espace et le rythme fonctions du

* * *

In this article, I have tried to show four different notions of space that we find in Xenakis's thought and artistic production: the philosophical level, where, for him, space is a more deep reality than time (but lesser deep than energy); the compositional level, where geometrical space is an operative category (materialized, for instance, in the graphs used by Xenakis to compose music); the physical level, where we speak about sound spatialization; and finally, a level with a more concrete notion of physical space, the level of what we can call ›place‹, and which allows us to understand the need for space in terms of aesthetics as a way to rediscover the multiplicity of meaning.


Renaud Meric

Makis Solomos

Analysing Audible Ecosystems and Emergent Sound Structures in Di Scipio's Music

Keywords: Agostino Di Scipio, emergence, ecosystem, feedback, space

This paper discusses the possibility of analysing (in the musical meaning of the word) Agostino Di Scipio's "audible ecosystems". A first part is focused on the notion of audible ecosystem and its theoretical counterpart, the idea of emergent sound structures. With this last idea, high levels of a musical work (for instance, the macroform itself) appear as an emergence from lower levels. As for the notion of audible ecosystem -analyzed here through the live electronics solos named Audible Ecosystemics -it is achieved through interaction between the performer, the electronics and the environment. Then, the paper tries to define an analytic image of the resultant sounds of the audible ecosystems. To do so, we use the concept of imprint (empreinte in French) as it is analyzed by Georges Didi-Huberman. Then, we go back to musical analysis and argue that a musical analysis of Agostino Di Scipio's audible ecosystems involves an analysis of the relationships between what we have listened to, what we can only imagine and the compositional techniques. Before concluding, the article shows an example of this way of analyzing by taking a sample at random from the piece Audible Ecosystemics 3b.

Introduction

This paper focuses on Agostino Di Scipio's compositional and theoretical research on audible ecosystems and emergent sound structures [START_REF] Di Scipio | Sound is the interface": from interactive to ecosystemic signal processing[END_REF], 2005a[START_REF] Di Scipio | CD Hörbare Ökosysteme, live-elektronische Kompositionen 1993-2005[END_REF], 2008[START_REF] Di Scipio | Listening to Yourself through the Otherself. On Background Noise Study and other works[END_REF][START_REF] Solomos | Notes sur Agostino Di Scipio et sur la notion d'émergence[END_REF][START_REF] Meric | Le bruit de fond est-il un son? À propos d'Écosystèmes audibles 3a d'Agostino Di Scipio[END_REF][START_REF] Döbereiner | Resonances of Subjectivity: Hegel's Concept of Sound and Di Scipio's Audible Ecosystemics[END_REF][START_REF] Green | Audible Ecosystemics as Artefactual Assemblages: Thoughts on Making and Knowing Prompted by Practical Investigation of Di Scipio's Work[END_REF][START_REF] Schröder | Emergence and Emergency. Theoretical and Practical Considerations in Agostino Di Scipio's Works[END_REF] and poses the question "How can (musical) analysis deal with such research?" While composing with an ecosystemic approach, the composer creates an audio system that interacts with the environment (i.e. space). This space, in which and from which music emerges, is also the listener's space. Thus what emerges is the result of a confrontation between the listener's cognitive system and the audio system used in the musical work. The emergent sound is difficult to define: its general outline is unpredictable and unstable; it is dependent on a dynamic musical space, which is constructed by active listening and an active audio system simultaneously. This new musical paradigm, which is related to the notion of complexity, challenges musical analysis. How is it possible to analyse structures that have no independent existence, not only as musical material but also apart from the listener and the space in which they take place?

Analysing these structures means focussing on the ephemeral moment in which music emerges in the interaction between the listener and the product of the audio system inside a specific space. To develop the tools for such a musical analysis, we will call on phenomenology [START_REF] Merleau-Ponty | Le visible et l'invisible[END_REF], which, when related to music, asks the more general questions, "What emerges from listening?" "What phenomena does listening create?" A simple and short answer to these two relatively similar questions could be: (musical) sound.

But if we examine the birth of sound closely, in its emergence as a structure, then new questions arise: "What are the spatial and temporal limits of this emergence?" "From what is it constucted?" "How does it appear as a structure?" Phenomenology shows that musical analysis cannot limit itself to objective structures (sound, form, etc.), an idea that is helpful in comprehending the sound structures we have to deal with in Di Scipio's music. Furthermore, we will suggest that, in reality, we don't listen to sound but to its own "imprint" (empreinte), in the sense of the word developed by Georges [START_REF] Didi-Huberman | La ressemblance par contact[END_REF].

But let's first understand the notions of emergent sound structures and audible ecosystems.

Emergent sound structures and audible ecosystems

Emergent sound structures

Analysing Xenakis's hypothesis (Xenakis, 1992: 103) of an (auto-)creation of "higher order sonorities" in Analogique A et B (1958Analogique A et B ( -1959, for nine strings and tape), a composition that uses the granular paradigm, Di Scipio makes a small shift in Xenakis's concept: "Today cognitive scientists and epistemologists would probably describe the hypothesis of 2nd-order sonorities as a question of emergent properties of sound structure" (Di Scipio, 2001: 72). The question of emergent structures can be formulated as follows: "In this case [concerning Analogique B], the distinction can hardly be made between a model of musical articulation and a model of sound design, insofar as the composer's action is meant to let the musical (macro-level) structure emerge from sound itself and its internal organization (micro-level)" (Di Scipio, 1997: 165). Whereas the "failure" of Analogique to create second-order sonorities is probably viewed by Xenakis as a failure of the grain's fusion, Di Scipio views this failure as one of emergence and attributes it to the limits of Xenakis's mathematical tools: "One may ask whether the stochastic does really provide as good a means for higher-order sonorities to emerge from a ground-level pattern of minimal sonic units" (Di Scipio, 2001: 73, 79). And, in fact, in his own music, Di Scipio opted for complex dynamic systems: "Chaos and the dynamics of complex systems, as accessible with iterated numerical processes, represented for me a way to compose small sonic units such that a higher-level sonority would manifest itself in the process" (Di Scipio in [START_REF] Anderson | Dynamical Networks of Sonic Interactions. An Interview with Agostino Di Scipio[END_REF]. These systems enable him "[to] exploit [… a large] palette of grain arrangements, ranging from random to more patterned textures, across a variety of other behaviours" (Di Scipio in [START_REF] Anderson | Dynamical Networks of Sonic Interactions. An Interview with Agostino Di Scipio[END_REF]. Thus, unlike other composers who worked with the help of the granular paradigm, such as Xenakis and Horacio Vaggione (Solomos, 2013: 396-414), Di Scipio tends to get rid of everything that might have been composed as a macroform design. For instance, in his music, there are no dramatic gestures, no dramatic intentions. In one of his first articles [START_REF] Di Scipio | Formal Processes of Timbre Composition. Challenging the Dualistic Paradigm of Computer Music[END_REF], he elaborated a "theory of sonological emergence", whereby form (macroform) is viewed as "a process of timbre formation" (Di Scipio, 1994: 205).

The idea of emergent sound structures is related to the elaboration of a sub-symbolic theory. In the "theory of sonological emergence", the emergence of a higher level should happen through grains and samples, neither of which are symbols, as they are located on a low level (cf. Di Scipio, 1994: 207). With composed interactions (cf. infra), Di Scipio puts the interaction at the signal level: all the information exchanges have a sonic nature (cf. Di Scipio, 2003: 272). We can draw a parallel between this strategy and the model of emergence in cognitive science. To the question "What is cognition?" the "computationalist" model answers "Data processing: the manipulation of symbols from rules" (Varela, 1996: 42), while the emergence model answers "The emergence of global states in a network of simple components" (Varela, 1996: 77). Regarding music, the issue at stake here is as follows: if we want the higher level (the macroform) to appear as an emergence and not as an independent construction, we have to work only at the lower level, abandoning the intermediate level, which is the level of symbols.

Audible ecosystems

According to emergence theory, the emergence of sound structures is possible because of the fact that the composer develops systems (in the sense of cybernetics) close to living systems, which are characterized by their capacity for auto-organization:

The passage of a system or process from a given structural organization to a new state of order which is recognized as a function of the qualitative properties of the former, is what we call here a phenomenon of emergence […]. Similar phenomena can be described with rules of morphostasis (conservation of coherence, identity) and morphogenesis (dynamical behaviour, change), which together capture the main peculiarity of social and living systems: self-organization. (Di Scipio, 1994: 206) To make sure that the system is auto-organized, Di Scipio uses "circular causality" (Di Scipio in [START_REF] Anderson | Dynamical Networks of Sonic Interactions. An Interview with Agostino Di Scipio[END_REF], which extends the idea of feedback. For instance, in Due di Uno (2003, for violin, piccolo recorder and adaptive DSP), the instrumental sounds, which are electronically transformed, are also used as input for controlling these transformations (cf. Di Scipio, 2005a). As a result of this circular causality, Di Scipio redefines the usual notion in live electronics of "interaction" (cf. Di Scipio, 2003). According to the usual notion, interaction operates as an information flow: a sound source is transformed. The system is therefore not very interactive. For Di Scipio, the process of composing itself might be the action of composing interactions. Thus, a principal aim would be to create a dynamical system exhibiting an adaptive behaviour to the surrounding external conditions, and capable of interfering with the external conditions themselves.

[…] A kind of self-organization is thus achieved […]. Here, 'interaction' is a structural element for something like a 'system' to emerge […]. System interactions, then, would be only indirectly implemented, the by-products of carefully planned-out interdependencies among system components […]. This is a substantial move from interactive music composing to composing musical interactions, and perhaps more precisely it should be described as a shift from creating wanted sounds via interactive means, towards creating wanted interactions having audible traces. (Di Scipio, 2003: 271) We could say that for Di Scipio, the notion of process is decisive: the process is more important than the result--and also more important than its origin.

But interaction also happens with the acoustic environment: another important element in Di Scipio's approach is the idea of "ecosystem". In the set of pieces called Audible Ecosystemics (2002-2005, live electronics solos;[START_REF] Di Scipio | CD Hörbare Ökosysteme, live-elektronische Kompositionen 1993-2005[END_REF], which offers implementations of composed interactions (cf. figure 1), the ecosystem is a triangular interaction between the musician, the DSP computer and the sonic ambience (cf. Di Scipio, 2003: 272-275). This idea has noise play an important role. To simplify, we would say that in Di Scipio's music, noise is neither disturbance (as in traditional music), nor sonic material (as in modern music). It is one of the agents of the interaction since it is produced by the concrete place wherein the interaction occurs: it is part of the system. In Audible Ecosystemics, "the role of noise is crucial […]. Noise is the medium itself where a sound-generating system is situated, strictly speaking, its ambience. In addition, noise is the energy supply by which a self-organizing system can maintain itself and develop" (Di Scipio, 2003: 271).

An analytic image

Emergent sound structures, processes and composed interactions, sub-symbolic strategy, ecosystems: all these elements converge. What is music, asks Di Scipio? Is it a sonic result?

No, because what must be composed is the process and not the result. Is it a voluntary gesture enacted by one or more humans, the composer, the performer or the listener? Not only, because the environment is also a component. Is it a language (whereof the mediation of the symbol creates a dichotomy between matter and meaning)? No. "I am interested in composing desirable interactions among available elements or components, such that the music is heard as the empirical epiphenomenon of that network of interactions, not as an abstract discourse written by me and diligently spoken by others" (Di Scipio, 2005a: 385). For musical analysis, the question is "How should we analyze Agostino Di Scipio's music?" Indeed, if the process is more important than the result, then classical analysis, which searches for objective sound structures, is not possible. With Audible Ecosystemics, the only result we may have is subjective and ephemeral listening. What "I" have listened to cannot reappear. This assertion is not a purely solipsistic idea but stems from the fact that we take into consideration the emergent particularity of these musical works. In Audible Ecosystemics, the ecosystem is not only a triangular interaction between the musician, the DSP computer and the sonic ambience; it also includes a close interaction between the work and the listener. Both are components of the ecosystem:

Listeners are a very special kind of external observer or hearer, because their mere physical presence in the room acts as an element of acoustical absorption. Hence they are rather an internal component of the ecosystemic dynamics. As is well-known, audience-less rehearsals are far from replicating the real performance context, and even a relatively small audience can deeply modify the room response. In the AESI [audible eco-systemic interface] project, this is not considered as a problem, nor an element irrelevant to the music: changes in the ambience will reveal peculiar changes in the overall ecosystemic dynamics, and therefore in the audible results themselves. (Di Scipio, 2003: 274) The listener and the work are in the same space-and-time domain: it is not possible to delimit a special space domain and a special time domain for music (cf. [START_REF] Meric | Le bruit de fond est-il un son? À propos d'Écosystèmes audibles 3a d'Agostino Di Scipio[END_REF]. This point is crucial since making this kind of demarcation is usually the first step for musical analysis. In other words, the analyst begins by choosing a point of view and by delimiting what he considers to be objective from what he considers to be subjective. Thus the work obtains a specific space and a specific time, as if it were a specific world, an entity with its own structure.

From this viewpoint, the work is nothing but an image. Indeed, musical analysis of a work can be considered as image analysis. The analyst uses various tools to describe, to dissect, to simplify. He does not directly observe the musical work or what he is listening to but rather the image he has built. What does that mean? When the analyst translates the musical work into an image, he dreams up a static and universal entity. Anton Ehrenzweig's explanation of the opposition between "syncretistic vision" and "analytical vision" may account for this situation:

The undifferentiated structure of primary-process phantasy corresponds to the primitive still undifferentiated structure of the child's vision of the world. Piaget has given currency to the term 'syncretistic' vision as the distinctive quality of children's vision and of child art. Syncretism also involves the concept of undifferentiation. Around the eighth year of life a drastic change sets in children's art, at least in Western Civilization. While the infant experiments boldly with form and colour in representing all sorts of objects, the older child begins to analyse these shapes by matching them against the art of the adult which he finds in magazines, books and pictures. […] What has happened is that the child's vision has ceased to be total and syncretistic and has become analytic instead. The child's more primitive syncretistic vision does not, as the adult's does, differentiate abstract details. The child does not break down the shape of some concrete object into smaller abstract elements and then match the elements of his drawings one by one. His vision is still global and takes in the entire whole which remains undifferentiated as to its component details. (Ehrenzweig, 1967: 5-6) The analytical vision must be static. Each element, each detail must have a specific place in time and space, more precisely, in the time and the space of an image. There is no more room for movement or transformation. Conversely a syncretistic vision implies continuous movement, with no specific limits.

Imprint (empreinte)

It is difficult to have an analytic perception of Agostino Di Scipio's music. Nothing in his music can be considered as static. In Audible Ecosystemics, there are no specific sounds--no instruments, samples or recordings. For instance, Audible Ecosystemics 3a-Background noise study "starts with 'nothing' [we usually do not pay attention to barely audible sound events; unconsciously, we remove them from our auditory focus] and attempts to make 'something' with it" (Di Scipio, 2005b: 20). In Audible Ecosystemics 3b-Background noise study, with mouth performer1 , "the source is any small sound involuntarily produced in the mouth and throat" (Di Scipio, 2005b: 20). All these sounds are unpredictable and usually inaudible. They are picked up by two microphones in the room (only one in Background noise study 3b, with mouth performer, which is placed inside the mouth or close to the lips), and they are routed--having become numerical signals--in the DSP unit. Inside this DSP unit, there is no linearity or direct path: the input signals are routed in various ways. Some signals go through different audio signal processing blocks and others go through control signal blocks. Analyzing the DSP network for Audible Ecosystemics allows us to discover a multitude of loops: when it exits a block, a signal is routed many times through other blocks, which control or process the signal, and it can follow various paths. Sooner or later, the original signal, which was routed through different blocks, will return through the first block (figure 2). Every signal--and each part of the signal--can be considered simultaneously as sonic data and as processing data. In other words, the signal is both the material and the gesture that shapes it. The process takes place when a sound emerges from one of the eight loudspeakers: this sound intensifies the background noise (the loudspeakers are turned backward, facing the walls and close to them), which is immediately picked up by the two microphones. We thereby come back to the beginning, making a loop. In conclusion: there is neither and end nor a beginning. Each element is both the end and the beginning of the ecosystem:

Eco-systems are systems whose structure and development cannot exist (let alone be observed or modelled) except in its permanent contact with a medium. There are autonomous (i.e., literally, selfregulating) as their process reflects their own particular internal structure. Yet they cannot be isolated from the external word, and cannot achieve their own autonomous function except in close conjunction with a source of information (or energy). To isolate them from the medium is to kill them. (Di Scipio, 2003: 271; italics from the author) Every part of the ecosystem--inside or outside the DSP--is always a source of energy for the other parts, and always uses the energy that the other parts have processed. In this closed structure, the listener can be considered as an element of the structure too, just like a block in the DSP schema, with an input (the background noise being listening to and that emerges from the loudspeaker) and an output (the modification the listener makes to this background before it is picked up by the microphones).

This description of the situation of the listener might seem simplistic and something of a caricature. However, the "input" of the "listener block" is simply the ordinary answer to the question "What are we listening to?" It is what comes out of the loudspeakers. The traditional identification of "music" with the loudspeaker sound seems inappropriate. Why? A music analyst who begins his investigation with the question "What are we listening to?" is looking for a static image, an image with its own structure (its own space and time). While doing so, the analyst isolates the listener from the ecosystem and considers "sound" merely as musical material, the only "heard" material. However, we have observed that in every step of the ecosystem, sound--more precisely the sonic signal--is both the material and the gesture that shapes it. In Audible Ecosystemics, what we are listening to is not a sound. It is its own "imprint" (empreinte).

To understand the idea of the French word empreinte that we translate here with "imprint", we cite the philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman. In his book La ressemblance par contact, Didi-Huberman explains the importance of the ichnologist's (the paleolontologist specialized in the study of fossil tracks) work for the art theorist. We could say the same for music and especially for understanding the notion of musical structure, particularly in the case of Di Scipio's ecosystemics structures:

[The ichnologist] has to recognize the complexity of forms; he has to know that shapes are processes, and not only processes' results, that these processes do not have an end, that the image, which is seen, is only the 'anachronistic present' of an uninterrupted play of deformations, alterations, deletions, and 'feedbacks' [revenances] of different kinds. The ichnologist does not have to question what he is looking at as the content iconography or the expression of a mimetic desire. The likeness in every imprint [empreinte] is of another order; in it, nothing can be disentangled; for instance, we cannot separate forms from matter. Here, shapes are substrates; they are dialectical processes of the substrate's modifications caused by an ordinary gesture. The ichnologist knows that what he sees is not a history's single, intangible, point. […] He knows that shapes are times at work, contradictory times entangled in the same image: time of the earth, time of the foot, which in one instant has left its imprint forever" 2 . (Didi-Huberman, 2008: 324-325; our translation)

Back to musical analysis: What is moving…

If we analyze a musical work as a static image with its own structure, we do not take into consideration what Didi-Huberman says about shapes: "shapes are processes" (and not only the result of processes); "shapes are substrates"; "shapes are times at work, contradictory times entangled in the same image". When we find a structure in a musical work, we must bear in mind that it is merely a fragment of space and time. In Audible Ecosystemics, this assertion is even more obvious: we are listening at the same time to the process and to the sound. The sound (that we are listening to) is a single step of this overall process and, consequently, of the overall structure.

The fundamental question of musical analysis--what are we listening to?--reveals its own limits, as it is looking for a static image with separate space and time. Because the listener is a part of an ecosystemic work, he belongs to the same time, the same space as the work; as the sound. We have to set up the question in another way: "What is moving inside what we are listening to?" When we search for what is moving inside what we are listening to, we are not looking for a result but for a structural process. The listener thus remains inside the ecosystem. The movements or the processes we are listening to are an ephemeral emergence of the entire ecosystem. What emerges can be considered as both objective and subjective: it is not an end of the circular interactions. The movements that we can hear, describe and analyze constitute a small part of the various other movements we can only imagine. For instance, a little click that we hear in Audible Ecosystemics cannot be considered as an object among others or as a detail of a structured image (which would make up the entire work). It is the emergent tip of interweaving, of matching and clashing movements, which are not emerging and which are not audible. Only our imaginations can reach this part of the ecosystemic structure. The click is of no interest without this imaginary and inaudible 2 "[L'ichnologue] est obligé de reconnaître la complexité des formes, il est obligé de savoir que les formes sont des processus, et pas seulement le résultat de processus ; que ces processus, à proprement parler, n'ont pas de fin, que l'image actuellement vue n'est que le 'présent anachronique' d'un jeu ininterrompu de déformations, d'altérations, d'effacements et de 'revenances' de toutes sortes. D'autre part, l'ichnologue n'a nul besoin de questionner ce qu'il regarde comme l'iconographie d'un contenu ou l'expression d'un désir mimétique. La ressemblance offerte dans chaque empreinte est d'un tout autre ordre ; en elle rien ne peut être désintriqué, les formes de la matière par exemple. Car ici, les formes sont des substrats, ou plutôt le processus dialectique des modifications du substrat par un geste quelconque. L'ichnologue, enfin, n'a pas la naïveté de situer ce qu'il voit comme un point unique, intangible de l'histoire. […]. Il sait donc que les formes sont des temps à l'oeuvre, des temps contradictoires intriqués dans la même image : temps de la terre et temps du pied qui, un instant s'y est posé pour toujours". history. Every sound constitutes a moving empreinte of an underlying moving structure. If we start an analysis with the question "What is moving inside what I am listening to?" instead of "What am I listening to?" we aim to be fully immersed in the genesis of the click. In this way, we do not concentrate on an object--a delimited part of time and space--but on why and how a particular sound emerges simultaneously in music and in the listener's imagination.

To go back to musical analysis, we could start an analysis by searching for the genesis of a sound--in other words, a process--that we can listen to in Audible Ecosystemics. Such a sound may be any sound, which we would grasp at random. It would emerge from a particular process and a particular way of listening, namely an ecosystem. As mentioned above, we should not consider this sound as a delimited and static, structured entity: it appears just once and never emerges again. We should not consider it as being more than a particular case, an example.

What is moving inside this particular sound? With this question, we do not analyze a "sound"--a sound object--but a moving phenomenon. Thus, one specific sound becomes a complex and multiple phenomenon--a single sound is composed by many movements. When we look at what is moving, we need to define the space that is created by the movements and in which they emerge. We must question the relationships between all these movements. By doing so, we question what we perceive and what we imagine. Little by little, and from movement to movement, this sound, as an entity, vanishes, and we build up an imaginary complex structure. In this imaginary complex structure, listening is not the result, the aim or the end of musical analysis but rather the beginning. In Agostino Di Scipio's Audible Ecosystemics, structure is an underlying phenomenon; strictly speaking, it is inaudible and invisible. The question "What is moving inside this particular sound?" allows us to partially reveal a structure.

This question also allows us to tackle the musical composition. The answers--the movements we are looking for--concern the composed process as well. We can try to understand why and how this particular sound (this process) emerges. Understanding the composed interactions (cf. Audible Ecosystemics' DSP score) can help us to understand the origin and the form of the specific sound we want to analyze.

Finally, a musical analysis of Agostino Di Scipio's Audible Ecosystemics involves an analysis of the relationships between what we have listened to, what we can only imagine and the compositional techniques.

A sample taken at random

This paper focuses its analysis on Audible Ecosystemics 3b-Background noise study, with mouth performer (2005), for one performer; two microphones, one in the room and one used by the performer who puts it into his mouth; a DSP unit (Kyma workstation or Pure Data) and eight loudspeakers in the room, turned backward, facing the walls. The score is shown in figure 3. (This score is intended for the mouth performer and is followed by detailed instructions.) However, without audio support, we cannot analyze a specific sample--for instance, a one-second clearly-delimited sample--extracted at random from the Audible Ecosystemics study. We shall merely outline the potential of such an analysis. 2004-2005: 11].

A short sample from this study can be described as several little sounds: a lot of grains, some impacts, several little clicks, different whistles. In spite of this brief description, every sample that we could analyze is very difficult to define and to describe. All the little sounds, which we can listen to in a sample, cannot be well delimited in time and space. All these sounds are manifold and heterogeneous movements: the sample is always a complex interlacing (network) of disparate and multiscale movements. In other words, different time scales and different spaces are entangled in a sample: these time scales and spaces go beyond the sample's limits.

During the performance, sound is dispatched from eight loudspeakers turned backward, facing the wall. Thus, any sample is heard as a background noise, and any sample emerges from the background noise. For this reason, it is impossible to define a duration for each movement entangled in the sample. For instance, we cannot say when a whistle or a grain appears or when it vanishes because it cannot be disconnected from the moving background noise from which it emerges. The eight loudspeakers, turned backward, facing the wall, indeed create several transverse spatial dynamics and indirect sound: every event is immersed in a dynamic jumble, while remaining an active element of it. Every single sound is not an independent entity (an object): it is a spatial and temporal link. For this reason, each sound or each event is directionless. In other words, every little sound heard in a sample can be considered simultaneously as a movement, a single part of larger movements and a combination of movements.

What is the root of these movements we can listen to in a sample? A part of them is emitted directly from the ambient and barely audible background noise (audience noise, airconditioning, etc.); another part of them arises from the amplified background noise and the amplified performer's vocal tract noises, which were recorded 20 seconds earlier. The last part of the sample movement arises from the DSP processing (the recorded background noise is processed in this instance). Thus, when a sample is heard, all these parts are mixed together, compiled and made to clash: each movement from the sample can be one of these parts or the result of the confrontation and the interweaving of these various parts.

When we want to analyze a sample taken from Audible Ecosystemics 3b, we are aware that some movements of the sample arise from ambient background noise, but we cannot recognize and delimit them. We also know that some of the movements are an amplification of the previous 20 seconds, which are in themselves an amplification of the previous 20 seconds, and so on. Thus, in the analyzed sample, we can listen to and recognize what happened in the previous 20 seconds, 40 seconds or 60 seconds: some present movements-which we can listen to in the analyzed sample--take root in these past processes, in these various spatiotemporal strata. In the present space (the sample space), previous spaces are entangled or fossilized (like an "imprint" [empreinte]). Finally, we have to analyze the more complex part, which arises from the DSP processing.

When we focus on the DSP processing, we can first observe that what we are listening to in the sample is spatialized on eight loudspeakers, which are sharing seven outputs (cf. figure 4; in the Audible Ecosystemics 3-Background noise study score, Agostino Di Scipio provides a network of live-generated control signals, the network of audio signals and the loudspeaker assignment schemas; cf. Di Scipio, 2004Scipio, -2005: 6-8): 6-8). Two outputs (out 1 and out 2 in figure 4) emit the amplification of the previous 20 seconds. Five other outputs (outs 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 in figure 4) are dependent on a switch. The latter is activated depending on the input amplitude, and it controls programmed triggers in various ways. But the input amplitude is based on erratic sound waves caught by the two microphones; thus we cannot foresee when each output will be activated.

These five unsteady outputs arise from two processes. The first three out of five outputs (outs 3, 4, and 5 in figure 4) send out the input signal depending on different delays and differently programmed triggers. This means that we may recognize some movements among previously heard movements. The last two outputs (out 6 and out 7 in figure 4) send the results from a granular sampling, which reads the mixed signal from the three previous outputs. The granular sampling parameters (grain duration, density, memory pointer, memory pointer jitters) are dependent on shifting inputs (signal amplitude, switch, etc.). Thus we cannot foresee how this granular sampling will react. In every sample, this granular sampling is very important because it forms many grains. It is impossible to hear them independently, and they are combined (with all sounds) as unstable movements. Di Scipio, 2004[START_REF]Journées d'Informatique Musicale[END_REF].

Conclusion

This sketchy analysis, which could be used as a basis for further investigation, displays important features of Di Scipio's Audible Ecosystemics. Each moment (each sample) depends on various aspects, which are comprised of present and previous spaces. None of the samples or sound events is ever fully realized or well delimited. In other words, they are never an object (a "sound object") or an image; a point in front of us in time and space. They appear to be a moving articulation: a constantly acting and accomplishing metamorphosis. This short analysis attempts to grasp this complexity, to show the multiplicity of interleaved live roots, and to link various movements: those we can listen to (sounds) and those that are inaudible (DSP data).

Finally, the analysis of Di Scipio's Audible Ecosystemics gives a glimpse of a forgotten aspect of music. More than any other art, music consists not only in a design of (sound) apparitions or creations (temporal and spatial "sound images", which can be analyzed--whereby "analyze" means "breaking down" or "dissecting") but also in a design of disappearings or disintegrations (whereby "analyze" means "rebuilding"). The various processes, the delays and loops that we can observe in the Audible Ecosystemics studies, show not only recurrences but also disappearing spaces. Sound is always both the emergence and the breaking up of many movements.

Agostino Di Scipio's music, especially his Audible Ecosystemics, is a good example of emergent sound structures. In these specific structures, we can never study independently of listening (which is music's subjective side) and the computer processing (its objective side). We should always confront and question "conflicting sides". The notion of movement--and the question "What is moving inside what we are listening to?"--allows us to link these processes and to focus on the instability of the emergent construction.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Agostino Di Scipio (2003: 272): composed interactions for the Audible Eco-Systemic Interface.

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Part of the DSP schema for Audible ecosystemics 3a/3b [Di Scipio, 2004-2005: 6]. On this figure, we can see a loop: [Hp2nd]  [integrator]  [delay]  [InAmp0]  [scale: InAmp0 / freq: (100+(lag⋅100))hz]  [Hp2nd].

Figure 3 .

 3 Figure 3. Agostino Di Scipio: Audible Ecosystemics 3b. Background noise study, with mouth performer: score. [Di Scipio,2004-2005: 11].

Figure 4 .

 4 Figure 4. Loudspeakers assignments schema for Audible ecosystemics 3a/3b [Di Scipio, 2004-2005: 8].

The new subtitle is: Background noise study, in the vocal tract.


A pioneer of acoustic ecology, the composer and soundmaker Hildegard Westerkamp shows that sound is not only a mere vehicle of representation or way to arouse emotions: her musical works and writings activate an awareness that sound is a decisive dimension of the world. In this view, music becomes dialectical, allowing us to construct a subjectivity that would care for the world. The expression of this idea follows two modalities: on the one hand, it understands music as experience and, in particular, as experience of place; and on the other hand, it puts forward music's capacity to create links, connexions and bonds. The 1992 two-track tape Beneath the Forest Floor illustrates the development of these thoughts. "Composed from sounds recorded in old-growth forests on British Columbia's West Coast," this work "moves us through the visible forest, into its shadow world, its' spirit; into that which [a]ffects our body, heart and mind when we experience forest" (H. Westerkamp, "Beneath the Forest Floor," http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/program_notes/forestfloor.html).

Introduction

A pioneer of acoustic ecology, composer and self-described soundmaker, Hildegard Westerkamp is known for numerous soundscape compositions using environmental sounds, and for her ecologically minded considerations [START_REF] Westerkamp | Listening and soundmaking: A study of music-asenvironment[END_REF][START_REF] Westerkamp | Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology[END_REF][START_REF] Westerkamp | The Local and Global 'Language' of Environmental Sound[END_REF][START_REF] Westerkamp | Exploring Balance and Focus in Acoustic Ecology[END_REF]. In her music and writings, she develops the idea that music can activate an awareness of sound in which sound is approached as a decisive dimension of the world. In this view, music becomes dialectical, allowing us to construct a subjectivity that would care for the world. Westerkamp's approach belongs to a larger effort to build awareness of our sound environments and their acoustic qualities, aiming to understand our own listening relationships and interactions with these environments. It is a question of proposing points of reference to listeners to make them aware of the sense and impact of sounds, which are often perceived unconsciously, so as to appropriate them.

To analyze this approach, we will focus on one of its most important dimensions, conceiving music as experience, and in particular, as experience of place. Beneath the Forest Floor will serve as example for this analysis. With its sounds recorded in oldgrowth forests on British Columbia's West Coast, this 1992 two-track tape soundscape composition takes the listener into an immersive journey inside the mysterious world of rich acoustic and historical environments. As we shall see, this work is a good illustration of how soundscape composition can create a space for reacquainting ourselves with experience.

On Experience

Erfahrung and Erlebnis In the ecological conception of sound that Hildegard Westerkamp develops, there is a strong emphasis on human experience. In her writings, she infrequently or indirectly addresses this notion. Our use of the term is inspired by Walter Benjamin's philosophy. In the 1930s, Benjamin developed the idea that modern times push toward the impoverishment of experience. To explain this idea, he introduced a distinction between Erlebnis, which can be translated as "lived experience," and Erfahrung, "experience per se" or "genuine" experience [START_REF] Benjamin | On Some Motifs in Baudelaire[END_REF]. The mode of experience specific to the new world is determined by the growth of technology (including characteristics such as speed and circulation of information), which establishes Erlebnis, a type of experience inscribed in primary reaction to the present and ephemeral moment, at the expense of Erfahrung, which introduces the possibility of a collective and continuous memory. It would be off topic to develop this idea further here; let us only insist that the interest of Benjamin's analysis lies in its dialectical position. On the one hand, committing himself to the revolutionary political movements of the time as well as to modern art, Benjamin considers the loss of experience as a necessary condition to build a new world, where individuals could construct themselves from nothing. In this world, one would prefer glass or steel architectures. "If you enter a bourgeois room of the 1880s, for all the coziness it radiates, the strongest impression you receive may well be, 'You've got no business here,'" states Benjamin. "And in fact you have no business in that room, for there is no spot on which the owner has not left his mark [...]." He adds, "This has now been achieved by Scheerbart, 1 with his glass, and by Bauhaus, with its steel. They have created rooms in which it is hard to leave traces" (Benjamin 1933, 734).

On the other hand, Benjamin insists that "the lived experience (Erlebnis) specific to urban modernity [prevents] the 'so to speak spontaneous persisting image', by its mechanical rhythm, its journalistic chatterings and its crowd movements, in short its reifying character--an image that is, however, revived by the taste of the madeleine" (Bredet 2005, 20). Hildegard Westerkamp's music is not without affinities with glass or steel transparent architecture, which allow the individual to move freely. But this architecture is not conceived as a sanitized place--all sorts of "madeleines" and "traces" can be found within. As a matter of fact, Westerkamp reevaluates experience (Erfahrung), but without invoking the authority of the elders or the privileged.

References to personal life

Thus her work is crossed by many references to her own life. These references are transparent and light. They do not have an exhibitionist character, nor do they seek to carry the listener in a spiral of empathy. They are simply there, giving evidence to the possibility of experience. In Für Dich (2005), for example, different people closely related to the composer read Rilke's poem "Liebes-Lied." The listener can also hear sound recordings from places important to Westerkamp: Vancouver, where she has lived since the late 1960s, and North Germany, where she was born. In Breaking News (2005), the material features recordings of her grandson's voice, and in Moments of Laughter (1988), we hear her daughter's voice. Elsewhere, Westerkamp "enters" the work herself. For instance, in her first recognized piece, Whisper Study (1975Study ( -1979)), she works with her own whispering. And in Breathing Room (1990), she records her own breath, reflecting music "as breath-like nourishment," and describing breathing "as nourishing musical space..."

The breath--my breath--is heard throughout the three minutes. All sorts of musical/acoustic things happen as I breathe in and out. Each breath makes its own, unique statement, creates a specific place in time. Meanwhile the heart beats on, propelling time from one breath to the next. [START_REF] Westerkamp | Breathing Room[END_REF] Why her own breath? It is probably a question of transmitting an experience, of conceiving music as an experience happening here and now. From this perspective, listening is primary and immediate: each act of listening constitutes an experience, each experience recreates a listening. Thus, we seem to depart from the usual notion of music, at least this is what Westerkamp posits, noting that she is "no longer interested in making music in the conventional sense," instead she is "interested in addressing cultural and social concerns in the musical idiom." She relates further, That's why I use environmental sound and language as my instruments. I want to find the 'voices' of a place or situation, voices that can speak most powerfully about a place/situation and about our experience in and with it. I consider myself as an ecologist of sound. (Westerkamp 1985, 8)

Experience of place

In the traditional conception of music, sound constitutes a means to elaborate representation or to arouse emotions. In the ecology of sound that Westerkamp supports, sound is understood as a decisive dimension of the world. Music becomes a dialectics by which our relationship to the world can be contemplated, and a subjectivity that would take care of the world can be constructed because sound and music give account of experience. As previously noted, a light, transparent, non-empathetic integration of personal traces characterizes Westerkamp's music; these traces correspond to what she calls "situation" in the above quotation. She similarly speaks of "places," referring to experiences of another nature.

Soundscape composition deals with this kind of experiences. In the article, "Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology," Westerkamp categorically refuses the idea that soundscape composition might be regarded as a subcategory of musique concrète. Supporters of this vein, if we take literally the positions its "inventor" Pierre [START_REF] Schaeffer | Traité des objets musicaux[END_REF] defines in his Traité des objets musicaux, contend that the listener should focus only on sound's morphology; sound should be cut off from its origin and decontextualized to the extent possible. On the contrary, "acoustic ecology or soundscape studies [consists of] the study of the inter-relationship between sound, nature, and society" [START_REF] Westerkamp | Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology[END_REF]. Thus in soundscape composition, the origin of a specific sound should be transmitted, even if it is, physically speaking, decontextualized by recording. The experience of the global context--in which the sound was born, developed and disappeared--should be transmitted to the listener, and through it, the experience of a specific place related to this context. Thus, Für Dich, previously mentioned for its soundscapes related to the composer's personal life, "explores a sense of place and belonging, of home and love" [START_REF] Westerkamp | Für Dich[END_REF].

The experience of place is also the aim of environmental pieces such as Fantasie for Horns II (1979), in which horn sounds "are soundmarks that give a place its character and give us, often subliminally, a 'sense of place'" [START_REF] Westerkamp | Fantasie for Horns I[END_REF]. It is also the purpose of sound installations. For example, the visual and sound installation At the Edge of Wilderness (2000) "explores the moment of encounter between the contemporary visitor and the abandoned industrial sites" [START_REF] Westerkamp | At the Edge of Wilderness[END_REF]. Not to forget, finally, soundwalks and soundwalk-based compositions like Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989).

Beneath the Forest Floor: subjectivity and experience 'Beneath the Forest Floor'

To illustrate these issues on the notion of experience, we will focus on Beneath the Forest Floor (1992). This two-track piece is the result of a commission by CBC Radio and was produced in CBC's Advanced Audio Production Facility in Toronto [START_REF] Westerkamp | Beneath the Forest Floor[END_REF]. For this soundscape composition, Westerkamp used recorded sounds taken from ancient forests of British Columbia's West Coast. The composer made most of the recordings herself during the summer of 1991, mainly in the Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island but also in the forests close to Cowichan Lake as well as on Galiano Island and in Lighthouse Park near Vancouver. The Carmanah Valley's forest is known, as the composer underlines, to have one of the tallest Sitka spruce ever known on earth and cedar trees older than one thousand years [START_REF] Westerkamp | Beneath the Forest Floor[END_REF]. (Note Fig. 1 and2.) Beneath the Forest Floor explores a natural environment with a focus on the acoustic specificities of place. The piece operates on the encounter of different sounds recorded in these forests: sounds of running water, birds, flies, mosquitoes and mysterious sounds resulting from studio treatment (McCartney 1999, 344). Thus, a simple adult raven's croak can become a deep muffled "throb that seems to come from the depths of the earth." [START_REF] Bernstein | From Dream to Nightmare[END_REF]quoted in McCartney 1999, 344). This heavy and deep sonority, which regularly returns as a percussive beat to punctuate the piece, particularly at the beginning and the end, was indeed obtained by slowing down the raven's croak (McCartney 1999, 141). This sound can also be heard at normal speed at different moments of the piece, for instance at the beginning (at 0'26'') or inside a moment of silence in the middle of the work (at minute 8'17''). There is also another adult raven's croak, a larger one, which we can hear for instance at 2'49'', and which was recorded by Norbert Ruebsaat, Westerkamps's former husband--again a reference to the composer's personal life. 2 Also present are other small sounds of birds that "when slowed down, yield shimmering sounds" [START_REF] Bernstein | From Dream to Nightmare[END_REF]quoted in McCartney 1999, 344). In a way, these sounds seem to suggest the light and the life force of the forest. Globally, the interaction of these sounds contributes to creating an atmosphere, which is at once peaceful, mysterious, ethereal and unreal.

As the composer explains, Beneath the Forest Floor "moves us through the visible forest, into its shadow world, its spirit; into that which [a]ffects our body, heart and mind when we experience forest" [START_REF] Westerkamp | Beneath the Forest Floor[END_REF]). Westerkamp insists on the deep inner peace "transmitted surely by the trees who have been standing in the same place for hundreds of years" [START_REF] Westerkamp | Beneath the Forest Floor[END_REF]). Thus, as she writes, Beneath the Forest Floor seeks to create a space to experience the peace of this place. A contemplative character therefore marks this composition.

Rediscovering one's inner voice

Beyond the mere suggestion of apparent expressive qualities and figurative images, this work aims to appeal to physical and psychological sensations aligned with the sound characteristics of a forest environment far removed from the acoustic agitation of the urban soundscape. For Westerkamp, the relaxing peaceful properties of high quality sound environments, such as those of the forest, give us the opportunity to return to the acuity of listening. The piece immerses the listeners in the deep serenity emerging from these sounds, inviting them to focus on their "inner voice" [START_REF] Westerkamp | Beneath the Forest Floor[END_REF]).

...the sounds in the wilderness have something to 'say' to us about the environment, about the season, the time of day, about the life that we encounter in this space. [START_REF] Westerkamp | Listening and soundmaking: A study of music-asenvironment[END_REF] Beneath the Forest Floor encourages us to renew contact with an active listening experience. It not only aims at a pure contemplation of an objective soundscape but also enhances a dialogue between these external sounds and our own "inner life". As a matter of fact, the composer wants to show that the sounds of a quiet, peaceful forest environment offer us a space to focus on our own inner voice, a space in which we can be rid of the restless sensations caused by urban acoustic environments. In other words, listening to these sounds becomes a question of refocusing on oneself. According to the composer, an extended experience within an acoustic environment, such as that of this forest, allows us to adjust ourselves progressively to quiet surroundings. Then, [START_REF] Westerkamp | Listening and soundmaking: A study of music-asenvironment[END_REF] describes "a desire [that] emerges to express, to voice, to put ourselves acoustically into the environment--but now in a more sensitive way than when we first arrived." She states, The hi-fi soundscape encourages this. Its acoustic space allows us to explore and find our own voice, to find the voice that wants to interact with the voices of that place, to find the music for and of such a place. [START_REF] Westerkamp | Listening and soundmaking: A study of music-asenvironment[END_REF] For Westerkamp, nowadays, the search for our inner voice through nature's voice constitutes a political act. Because, as she says, "in that act, on this continent, one moves in opposition to the dominant political voices, who no longer hear nature's voices, who no longer understand the meanings of nature's voices, but can only see nature as a place for resource extraction and profit" [START_REF] Westerkamp | Listening and soundmaking: A study of music-asenvironment[END_REF].

On experience in 'Beneath the Forest Floor' After these few developments, it should be clear that the sounds of Beneath the Forest Floor are not cold, objective recordings or transcriptions of a soundscape but aim to transmit the experience of a place, the experience of Westerkamp's living relation with these forests, and the way this environment talks to her and opens a listening to her own inner voice. It is a question of creating links, connections, and bonds--to make this experience alive enough to share with listeners an intense relation with these forests.

Thus, we could say that she leaves her trace the way the handprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel. 3 In Westerkamp's hands, soundscape composition opens a space for creativity through a constant dialogue between sounds and what they suggest as possible developments. The creative gesture is not predetermined; it emerges along with the dialogue she maintains with the sounds, their particularities, their meaning, and their context. Creation becomes the result of a constant discussion between sounds and the composer's voice. Beneath the Forest Floor reinvents the idea of experience by the interaction of the forest's sounds, the creative voice they elicit within the composer, and the listener's voice.

Beyond musical experience, Beneath the Forest Floor is an invitation to visit places like Carmanah Valley, a victim of massive deforestation with more than half of the forest having now been destroyed. As Westerkamp explains that apart from encountering the overwhelming "stillness...." a visit will also transmit a very real knowledge of what is lost if these forests disappear: not only the trees but also an inner space that they transmit to us: a sense of balance and focus, of new energy and life. The inner forest, the forest in us. [START_REF] Westerkamp | Beneath the Forest Floor[END_REF] In this forest, as [START_REF] Westerkamp | Listening and soundmaking: A study of music-asenvironment[END_REF] contextualises, "aside from the fact that we experience a lowering of our threshold of hearing, we also become acute listeners because the sounds in the wilderness have something to 'say' to us about the environment, about the season, the time of day, about the life that we encounter in this space." In this way, she points out,"...this information is vital for our orientation, our survival and feelings of connectedness. If we open our ears to this soundscape without fear, we realize that every single sound in the wilderness has a meaning, which is worthwhile knowing about." What this means, she affirms, "As we understand the meaning we are placed more firmly within the context of this environment. We become part of it and stand in an interactive relationship with it" [START_REF] Westerkamp | Listening and soundmaking: A study of music-asenvironment[END_REF].

For a long time, music has focused on the production of autonomous objects, erasing the listener's relationship to the world in favour of a deep interiority. 4 This idea of music was a historical conquest, which allowed music to renounce functionality (religious or social); but it results in a kind of autism that can be taken by cultural industry to serve its own interests. This is why the notion of ecology of sound briefly developed here through Hildegard Westerkamp's thought and music is becoming necessary. This notion allows us to reconstruct the links, the connections, the bonds; instead of being reified objects, sounds invite us into an act of listening, constituting an experience by which we can change our relationship to the world.

End Notes

1 . Paul Karl Wilhelm Scheerbart (1863-1915), pacifist writer, one of the founding fathers of German expressionism. 2. In a first version of this article, we were saying (based on [START_REF] Bernstein | From Dream to Nightmare[END_REF]quoted in McCartney 1999, 344) that the raven's croak recorded by Norbert Ruebsaat was the one that is slowed down. Hildegard Westerkamp gave us the following precision: "The raven's croak recorded by Norbert is not the one that produced the low frequency throb. It is the one that is heard at the beginning (at 0'26''), and is purposely put alongside it's own transformed/processed sound, the throb. When working on the piece it amazed me that this raven's specifically 'grainy' call against a very quiet, slightly reverberant ambience produced this specific and clear throb when slowed down (pitch shifted). No other raven call recording gave me this. Norbert's recording came from a larger raven and when I tried to slow it down, it gave me an entirely different sound, that I did not use in the composition. That raven has a deeper, throaty sound and for your information, appears for the first time at 2'49'' in the piece and comes back one or two more times later--always with water or wind sound in the background, because the original recording had a hissy background ambience (recorded on cassette, I believe) that I wanted to mask" (Hildegard Westerkamp, email to Frédérick Duhautpas and Makis Solomos, December 2013). 3. We are paraphrasing here a Benjamin's text Benjamin 1936, 91), which is also quoted by Felix Guattari (2005, 69). 4. "The core of assumption in Western aesthetics concerns the attribution of emotionproducing qualities to music conceived strictly as sound. By this is meant that we in Western culture, being able to abstract music, and regard it as an objective entity, credit sound itself with the ability to move the emotions. (…) In other words, the Western aesthetic separates the experience of music from its social context. When one is moved by the music in that sense, one is moved internally, privately, as an individual" [START_REF] Westerkamp | Listening and soundmaking: A study of music-asenvironment[END_REF].

About the Author

Frédérick Duhautpas & Makis Solomos (University Paris 8, E.A. AEsthetics, musicology, dance and musical creation, France).

Frédérick Duhautpas is a musicologist and teaches at University Paris 8 as Maître de conférences. His main areas of research concern aesthetics, and most specifically expressiveness, significations, emotion, social and political issues in musics. He tends to favor a multidisciplinary approach to musicology including sociology, psychology, philosophy, hermeneutics and semiotics. He is the author of several publications dealing with expression and modern music.

Makis Solomos is Professor of musicology at the University Paris 8 and Head of the music and dance research team. His main fields of research are today music (exploring subjects like Adorno, globalization, new technologies, spectral music, electronic music, the emergence of sound, ecology of sound…). He is also one of the main specialists of Xenakis' music. He has published many articles and books, and he has organized symposiums on various topics. His last important book is: De la musique au son. L'émergence du son dans la musique des XXe-XXIe siècles (Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013), which analyses the way how sound became a major issue for today music. He has co-founded the review Filigrane. Musique, esthétique, sciences, société.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. The forest in Carmanah Valley. Photo byHildegard Westerkamp, July 1991.

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig. 2. Lake Cowichan southwest side. Photo byHildegard Westerkamp, July 1991.

Acknowledgments. We wish to thank Hildegard Westerkamp for her comments and the material she has sent to us.


Makis Solomos

Some Preliminary Thoughts on Chiyoko Szlavnics' Music

Listening to Chiyoko Szlavnics' music opens up broad questions having to do with music, aesthetics, and human existence. The Canadian composer achieves significant depth in dealing with these questions in a variety of works, including chamber-orchestra music-Heliotrope (2007); pieces with electronics-Constellations I-III for piano and sine waves (2011); chamber music, such as the recordings collected here; and multichannel sound installations. Her compositions also vary widely in duration, ranging from short pieces, such as the five-minute-long chamber-orchestra piece Wind in the Ceiling (2004-2005), to longer ones, such as the forty-five-minute Interior Landscapes II A for sine waves (2010).

Chiyoko Szlavnics clearly positions herself within the recent North American tradition of such composers as Morton Feldman and James Tenney (Szlavnics studied with Tenney)-a practice that eschews the old tradition of development, replacing it instead with a new world of "immersion in sound". This is an aesthetic shared by many European composers, including, [among many others,] Giacinto Scelsi, György Ligeti (especially the early works), and Gérard Grisey. The fourth composition on this CD, (a)long lines: we'll draw our own lines, is reminiscent of Scelsi's music, without making direct reference to it: the composition brings splendid individual sounds and sound combinations to the fore. The aesthetic of immersion in sound is not limited to matters of timbre and sound. I would like to propose that Szlavnics' music consists of composed sound textures. The compositional process develops two components in particular: pitch intervals and glissandi.

The pitches in Szlavnics' compositions are defined by using just-intonation ratios from a network of related overtone series. The simpler of these ratios produce certain consonances, i.e., beatless intervals. With such pitches, in juxtaposition with more complex ratios, Szlavnics is able to produce smooth and static surfaces, in a meditative mood. She uses a staff-notation system of accidentals for just intonation named, "The Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI Notation". 1 The glissandi in Szlavnics' works are generalized in a manner similar to Xenakis' approach in the 1950s, when he said that a fixed sound ("fixed" in terms of pitch) is simply a special kind of glissando, one for which the "slope" (the interval of the glissando divided by the duration) is equal to zero. Since the glissandi in Szlavnics' music arise from drawings, as I will later discuss, they form sound morphologies, rather than figures. These morphologies-created by often extended glissandi over long durations-produce a sensation of very fluid, almost imperceptibly changing textures.

The relationship between just-intonation pitches and glissandi produces extraordinary effects for the listener. When the music focuses on fixed pitches, a sensation of fullness (consonance) dominates, as if one were in the presence of a Being in the Parmenidian sense of the word. But when glissandi are also present, the ear learns to discern an infinite number of "hidden" pitches beyond the fixed pitches. Suddenly, the reality of that Being is called into question-it seems to have been an illusion, and one adopts the Heraclitean vision of a world in perpetual motion. All of Szlavnics' music can be understood as a (nondialectic) relationship between being and becoming.

I described the relationship between pitches and glissandi as producing effects for the listener. In some sense, an integral part of Szlavnics' music is not composed; rather, it emerges as a direct result of what is composed. For example, harmony is a very important dimension of Szlavnics' music, as the listener will immediately realize while listening to (a)long lines: we'll draw our own lines and Gradients of Detail. The harmony in her work, however, rather than being through composed, is a consequence of the composer's work with intervals and glissandi.

More generally, Szlavnics is interested in what we call psychoacoustic phenomena-i.e., sensory realities with particular qualities that arise from the nature of our perception, rather than from acoustic reality. The string quartet Gradients of Detail, for instance, works with the concept of a critical band-a psychoacoustic phenomenon already explored by James Tenney in his piece Critical Band (1988). A critical band is a frequency bandwidth within which pitches-due to their proximity-are not perceived individually, but rather as modulations of loudness. When pitches within a critical band are played simultaneously, beating and low-pitched difference tones may be heard. These phenomena are more pronounced between homogenous timbres, such as a string quartet or pure sine waves. Szlavnics has analyzed these phenomena in an article with the selfexplanatory title "Waves, Ripples, Beats: Psychoacoustic Phenomena Produced by Electronic Means as Compositional Material, and the Potential of Sine Waves to Trace the Acoustical Properties of a Given Room (Heightening the Listener's Awareness of Her/His Own Location in It)". [START_REF]Presentation to the Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium (TES)[END_REF] Her music is concerned with the intimate relationship between the listener and the sound, with the ways in which sound affects the listener. As she writes, "This direct experience of how sound affected my neurological processes opens up an area which still begs for research: to what degree do forms of music and sound affect the body's processes and chemistry, and how do they affect the imagination and thought processes?" [START_REF] Szlavnics | Opening Ears. The Intimacy of the Detail of Sound[END_REF] Chiyoko Szlavnics also uses a special compositional method: drawing. Her works are sonic translations of abstract drawings that consist of horizontal lines (which become fixed pitches in the sonic translation) and transversal lines (glissandi). The lines might be solitary (monodies or unisons), or multiple (polyphony). Szlavnics explains how, for quite a long time, she listened to music with her eyes closed, in order to fully concentrate on the music. This then triggered mental images, which primarily consisted of lines. [START_REF] Cf | Opening Ears…[END_REF] In a kind of reverse process, she began drawing compositions in 2000, and consolidated the method in 2004 with (a)long lines: we'll draw our own lines: "The very sensitive, fragile music that emerged in this work was quite stunning in its austerity and beauty, and hearing it in concert gave me the courage and desire to continue using this method". [START_REF] Szlavnics | notes for the program of the concert Frau musica (nova)[END_REF] Furthermore, she explains, the ability to use drawings to create structures for the long, sustained sounds helped to prevent them from sounding like drones. [START_REF] Cf | Opening Ears…[END_REF] The drawings consist of primary forms, hence the predominance of the line: "Inscribing the 'inner' on paper through a nonmediatory, most primitive form of demarcation: lines. These lines are almost like breaths, inscriptions of being: 'I am here, alive, this line proves this. Here is my being in time and space'". 7 Szlavnics explains that the musical translation of the drawings is an arduous but exciting process, consisting of four phases: definition of the global scale by placing horizontal and vertical grids on the image; setting regions by adjusting the grid and the image; setting the local pitches using justintonation ratios and orchestrating them; and, finally, producing a score in more or less traditional notation.

For Szlavnics, this method has had an emancipatory character. It allowed her to release herself from working directly with meters and meter-based rhythmic units. It also allowed her to trust her imagination: "Suddenly there was a freedom in hand, and it emerged that I had a kind of imaginary sound world, which I could 'draw out' on a page, and translate into music". 8 This emancipatory character of the method affected the fundamental level of the content. Composing with drawings-that is, making a clean sweep of conventional methodsallowed Szlavnics to distance herself from traditional points of reference in creating her music: "The absence of a mediatory symbolic language (traditional building blocks) right at the beginning of the process allows me to create music which itself is, I hope, unburdened by historical signification, tradition, ideology-or expectation. This music-stemming from curving shapes, contours, and drawn lines, which themselves create a unique dynamic on the page where they exist-is an abstract expression of the limitless potential of ratios, and the detail of soundand our ability (willingness) to hear it". 9 Through this abrogation of conventional content, Szlavnics released herself from the heavily connoted world of expression and subjectivity, just as Cage demonstrated in his own work. In an attempt to dismiss "the violent drama of the ego in material", 10 her scores have indications such as, "Dramatic moments should be avoided"; 11 "Expressiveness should be avoided-the form of the material is the expression. No vibrato at any time"; 12 "The dynamics may naturally (or collectively) exceed those that are in the score, due to register, density, or structural dynamics; however, individual expressivity (solos) should be avoided". 13 By releasing herself (and the listener) from expression, Szlavnics' music casts off the oppressive universe of "feelings", and rejuvenates the rich and light world of emotions: 14 her musical works convey notions such as movement or energy, rather than images and representations. To use Deleuze and Guattari's terminology, she composes a music that has to do with sensation, which liberates the "affect". [START_REF] Cf | Qu'est-ce que la philosophie ?[END_REF] Hers is a music which stimulates our senses, which shows us the pleasure we can have by simply being, without the need to impose ourselves on anything at all. It is a universe in which everything that exists is of equal importance. That is why Szlavnics focuses on detail, achieving it by slowing down textures. Her very first compositions (such as the saxophone quartet Papyrus Bending, 1994) already exhibited a calm, slow tone. In the pieces that followed, this tone asserted itself. It shows both a great fragility and an infinite sweetness-which is partly achieved by her use of just-intonation ratios, and by indications such as (for stringed instruments): "bow changes should happen naturally, and should be subtle". 16 This shares some features with Alban Berg's tone, of which Theodor W. Adorno writes, "the authority lies in the absence of any authoritarian character". 17 In a similar way, it is as if the subject behind Chiyoko Szlavnics' textures, which are so liquid, flexible, and evanescent, voluntarily disappears-and the listener willingly does so, as well. This kind of disappearing, itself, has nothing to do with morbidity; it might, nonetheless, allow one to be less helpless in the face of death.

Marc Sabat, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, "Helmholtz Ellis JI Pitch Notation Introduction and Legend, version with accidentals up to

23limit", 2005/9. (http://www.marcsabat.com)