Traité des objets musicaux

The musical note, a notable assortment of pitch, duration, and intensity, has borne sway over European tradition and laid claim to universality. Owing to a notational system, the composer sings in silence, plays in silence, sight-reads in silence. The score prefigures the work, which is one and the same with the symbols of writing: ‘Beethoven’s quartets lie in the storerooms of the publishing house like potatoes in a cellar’. The composer does not hear but reads, ‘pre-listens’. Schaeffer likens his demarche to the scholastic exercise of translating a text from one’s mother tongue into a foreign language. The performer translates symbols and notions into sound, and an implicit, readable work, becomes explicit, audible to laymen. Still, there is something sonorous in a musical composition. ‘The thingly element is so irremovably present in the art work that we are compelled rather to say conversely that the musical composition is in sound’.

The sound recordist does not read but listens.

Comparing the sound image generated by the electroacoustic chain with the original sound phenomenon, which originates from real instruments and unfolds in real magnitude over the acoustic field, he translates from sound. Schaeffer likens this demarche to the scholastic exercise of translating a text from a foreign language into one’s mother tongue.

In 1954 Heidegger stated that humans were delivered over to technology in the worst possible way when they regarded it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which they particularly liked to do homage, made them utterly blind to the essence of technology.

Because the essence of technology was nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it ought to happen in a realm that were, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm was art. But only if the arts were not conceived as deriving from the artistic, if art works were not enjoyed aesthetically, if art were not a sector of cultural activity. Art demanded to be reconducted to the golden age of Greek techne. In 1958 Simondon saw culture as unbalanced because it enshrined the aesthetic object in the world of significations while driving the technical object back into the structureless world of what had no signification but a use. Simondon sought to integrate the machine into the family of human things as a component of a global rebirth of culture. The gap which separated the occidental man from the work of his hands demanded to be bridged. And the activities of the craftsman, simultaneously ancient and modern, provided a model of understanding, employment, and humanization of the machine.