Drops still drops! or From the desire to listen to water ...
Sound installation presented during the SoMuThe seminar (Music Sounds and Therapy), PRISM laboratory.
CNRS - Campus Joseph Aiguier, Marseille
As an anecdote, I recorded these sounds in Tunisia. On my way to record a potter living at the top of her clay hill, feet in the mud, my attention was stimulated by these tiny sounds of streaming and droplets, in a very wide sound space, in the middle of nature, far from all noise of humanity.
So it's a sort of reconstitution of a soundscape that I sought to do. Everything becomes music in my perception. This is what I tried to broadcast: this distortion of natural reality, into a musical piece.
Sound levels are very low, around -35 db on the mixing console. Beyond the reality of these low intensity sounds, I found interesting to attract attention by this almost nothing, to draw the listener into a subtle experience where the body had to be active in order to be receptive.
By the composition of isolated sounds, by the electronic transformation of these sounds, and by hexaphonic spatialization – like the hexagonal structure of water in the process of crystallization –, the soundscape becomes a musical work.
Why choose to put these singular sounds to music, beyond the aesthetic of almost nothing? At first I had no hesitation, it was my experience there, of sound poetry, that powerfully caught my attention and my listening. Sound becomes subject, and I become object of attraction. So why precisely this enjoyment? Could it be my body?
And it is this questioning that leads me to extend the phenomenological analysis with a hermeneutical interpretation. According to Heidegger "hermeneutics is a going beyond phenomenology because it applies to what is not shown". Transposed to music, it can be applied to what cannot be heard. So it would be about having an experience, of what one does not hear.
Gino Stefani, Italian musicologist-semiotician, for his part makes us understand that the foetus has a vibratory experience of sounds, by bone transmission of vibrations. Among other things, he perceives the sounds of displacement of amniotic fluid. He is immersed in an aquatic sound bath. The substance of the water resonates in his body even before birth. It’s a kind of pre-listening, proto listening. Through the experience, later of listening, through our auditory system, we might relive the intra-uterine experience, which could explain this auditory enjoyment.
scientific paper:
Du désir d'écouter l'eau (https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02416873/document).