AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts Friday morning 73
Jong. Schat’s insistence that “the intention of the work remains an open question, which only
the individual creativity of the spectator can extract” also reflects early Situationist emphasis
upon “experimental life-play” as an antithesis to the passivity of the spectacle. It simultaneously
marks the beginning of Schat’s re-evaluation of the social role of music, a re-evaluation that
was to have a defining impact on the politicization of Dutch musical life in following years.
FROM SOUND TO SPACE: LISTENING IN/TO RYOJI IKEDA’S MAtrix
August Sheehy
University of Chicago
Since first garnering international attention with his album +/- (touch, 1996), Japanese
composer and installation artist Ryoji Ikeda has been pushing the limits of both electronic
music and the technologies used to create it. This paper examines Matrix [for rooms] (touch,
2000), arguably the most focused example from Ikeda’s challenging oeuvre. Matrix, an exacting,
hour-long collage of computer-generated sine waves, questions important concepts in
musical discourse, including the role of technology, meaning, perception, and above all, notions
of musical space.
The terse liner notes for the piece read, “Matrix [for rooms] forms an invisible pattern that
fills the listening space. The listener’s movements transform the phenomenon into his±her intrapersonal
music.” Matrix is thus both music and installation, and the two concepts represent
extreme senses in which it can be understood. In the first case, we might speak of listening to
Matrix, as an aesthetically consumable musical product; in the latter, of listening in Matrix, as
an acoustically defined space that a listener can explore. As the liner notes indicate, however,
the difference is not merely discursive. Rather, it is precisely the listener’s perceptual inability
to locate a sound source or to stabilize rhythm or pitch content—both shift unpredictably
when the listener moves within the listening space—that draws discourses of musical space(s)
into question.
I present two readings of Matrix. The first is broadly ecological, drawing on psychoacoustics
and evolutionary psychology to explain the perceptual instabilities in Matrix as auditory
illusions. While I find this reading essentially correct, it falls short in two ways. First, by assuming
a Newtonian/Cartesian space a priori, it fails to take the conceptual challenge posed
by Matrix seriously; second, it fails to account for the musical, phenomenological, and technological
discourses Matrix clearly solicits. Without simply discarding empirical evidence, I
propose another way of thinking about Matrix, in which the concept of space is more tightly
entwined with these discourses, by suggesting that Matrix recaptures a phenomenology of
pre-conceptual perception. The listener’s inability to resolve temporal and spatial attributes of
sonic events in Matrix closely simulates the poor perceptual resolution of human infants, as
documented in psychological research. Extrapolating backwards, the space created by Matrix
becomes a neo-natal world in which sounds have yet to resolve themselves into auditory objects
with definite locations.
Ikeda’s Matrix thus deconstructs rigid distinctions between physical and musical spaces,
and between percept and concept. Its constantly morphing sound events also belie the binary
logic of digital media, which is also often assumed to provide an accurate model for human
cognition. Ultimately, I argue that Matrix exposes an illusory distinction between descriptive
analysis and criticism by providing a phenomenological experience that defies assimilation by
the terms of either discourse.