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Shocking Intimacy: Techniques, Technologies, and Aesthetics of Amplification in Clara Iannotta’s Intent on Resurrection *

Giulia Accornero

Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (Fall 2021), pp. 5–33, ISSN 2784-8949. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. © 2021 Giulia Accornero. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss15487.

The bones I feel inside my skin
are scaffolding that holds me in.
Earth will glean them when I’m chaff,
and wafted off.
Those bones will be an implement,
an ornament or instrument.
Fingers will wrap themselves around
the hollow sound.
They’ll play the bones fortissimo,
disturb me when I’m lying low.
Intent on resurrection—spring,
or some such thing.
(Dorothy Molloy, “Playing the Bones,” Hare Soup)

Bring your hand to your ear and gently brush a finger from the earlobe up to the cartilage, before spiraling down towards the canal. What do you hear?

Michel Chion would call these “small sounds.” [1] Small sounds can reveal themselves in a broad palette of textures: rub a fingernail on the pad of your thumb, close to the ear, and the sound will transform into something “crisper.” Their “small” quality however endures in their “weight-image”—that is, the perceived “strength of the cause in relation to our own scale,” regardless of what that cause is and whether or not we identify it. [2]

While Chion’s definition focuses on the small scale of their source of emission, I want to draw attention to the feeling of intimacy these sounds generally convey. They may bring to mind the image of a child’s room resounding with the whispered words of a bedtime story. Or we might imagine the soothing sounds of a hairbrush running through our hair; or even the smack of a kiss that reddens our skin, embracing for an instant the whole of our face. In the epigraph above, the Irish poet Dorothy Molloy envisions yet another world of small sounds deep underground. She can hear the “hollow sound” of her bones pounding “fortissimo,” damped by the deafening silence of the earth. [3]

Molloy’s poem also serves as the epigraph to Clara Iannotta’s Intent on Resurrection – Spring or Some Such Thing (2014), a work which invites us to question: what would happen if one attempted to listen to small sounds outside of these intimate, contained spheres? In a concert hall, for example? What happens to small sounds when they are transplanted in a public, larger space of interaction, possibly crowded with people, breathing, yawning, whispering, and brushing their arms against the velvet of their armchairs?

In this article I explore how Italian composer Clara Iannotta (b. 1983) brings small sounds to the public in the first minute of Intent on Resurrection (measures 1–13). [4]

Audio excerpt. Beginning of Clara Iannotta, Intent on Resurrection, track no. 1 of A Failed Entertainment: Werke 2009–2014, performed by Ensemble intercontemporain, conducted by Matthias Pintscher, Edition RZ 10023, 2015. With permission of Edition RZ.

What are the instruments, techniques, and processes that occasion or allow for small sounds? How does our listening craft small sounds, and vice versa? In answering these questions, I will look closely at the relationships between their modes of production, materialities, and aesthetics, paying particular attention to how the affordances of the actors involved exercise technological agency. [5] The more closely we examine small sounds, try to define them, or pin down their acoustic or perceived origin, the more they resemble a moving target, revealing the limits of Chion’s static definition. Reconsidering small sounds also leads me to shed new light on music-theoretical elements, such as dynamic signs, and the role of techniques and technologies in generating a sound quality that exists only at the intersection of the acoustic and the perceived worlds. [6] By articulating the technological means harnessed to allow for such a quality to emerge, we reveal the conditions that are necessary for a sound to be recognized as intimate—even when it is experienced in a large public venue. [7]

First, a few words about my approach. The discursive frameworks commonly associated with the construct of New Music—the field in which Iannotta locates herself—could potentially have provided a predetermined context for my investigations of her work. [8] I will nevertheless keep them at a critical distance. I want to eschew the implicit historiographical discourse of “New Music,” which posits a unified trajectory in which individual composers, acting in their capacity as rational minds, mark the progress of Western art music—minds that, as if guided by “immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession,” [9] ensure a unified trajectory in the history of music creation. [10] I also want to avoid the temptation of this discourse to turn materials and mediators into black boxes—opaque devices that unidirectionally transform ideally determined inputs into ideally forecasted outputs. [11]

I am interested instead in what we might gain if we shift our focus from the rational agency of human actors, and towards an alternative perspective that construes the composer as simply one actor in a network among others, thereby privileging an understanding of agency as distributive. [12] This leads me to follow Bruno Latour in decoupling action from consciousness, treating the composer instead as a “node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled.” [13] It also allows me to draw attention to how mediators “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry,” [14] and can thus be understood as part of an actor-network. And finally it compels me to jettison normative a priori understandings of this or that entity and their causal relations—be it an instrument and a performer, a composer and an architecture, or an affect and a new technology—in favor of a close observation of how action is distributed and translated between them. [15] Thus, in this article, I explain Intent on Resurrection’s small sounds not in conjunction with the course of New Music, but rather in relation to the emergence and withdrawal of the affordances of the sonic techniques and technologies of the past century.

The focus on mediators also leads me to lend the concept of affordance significant weight. In Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition, Jonathan De Souza provides a useful point of reference for how the notion of affordance could be productive for the field of music studies, in particular when it comes to the interactions between humans and objects. Relying on psychologist James J. Gibson’s definition of affordances as “possibilities for action by a particular agent,” De Souza reminds us that Gibson thought of them “independently of an agent’s need or skills,” and thus independently of human intentionality. [16] In the next sections, therefore, I will guide you through an exploration of the affordances of megaphonic and microphonic amplification as they emerge from the first measures of Intent on Resurrection. These affordances, I will show, are part of scientific and artistic discourses that have been around since the invention of megaphones and microphones—and even earlier, when the microphone was just an imagined device—showing how the distribution of compositional agency is not just a synchronic phenomenon but also a diachronic one: it cuts through history.

This exploration will also lead me to the discovery of unexpected forms of interplay between affordances and abilities. On the one hand, I will reveal how the affordances of small sounds as acoustical objects shock the listener, setting out parameters for action. Small sounds invite us to focus our attention into their qualities, amplify them in our awareness, and perceive the sensation that is coupled with such a change in focus—the sensation of entering a zone of intimacy. On the other hand, we, as listeners, also bring into the network bodily and cognitive affordances that shape how we might perceive and identify small sounds. [17]

While following Intent on Resurrection’s small sounds at the intersection of the acoustic and the perceived worlds, between human and instrumental technologies, we will necessarily follow the linear trajectory imposed by the means of writing. I hope, however, to disrupt the idea that such a trajectory reflects a specific line of causation. As listening is always at the boundary between nature and culture, we should expect that our affordances craft small sounds just as much as small sounds (and the network of techniques and technologies involved in their production) craft our abilities.

The Enormous Voice of a Pianississimo

Now imagine that you are holding an electric megaphone. Bring your mouth as close as possible to its mouthpiece, turn it on, and move your lips and tongue “slowly and irregularly,” as if you were sucking a piece of candy. [18] Actually, you already have part of this technology at hand—or better, at face—as the sound of your mouth can provide you with an approximation if you are in a silent enough room. Intent on Resurrection begins with the notation of these actions, entrusted to the flutist, the clarinetist, and bassoonist (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1. First page of Clara Iannotta’s score of Intent on Resurrection – Spring or Some Such Thing.

The sounds obtained from these prescribed bodily movements are immediately mediated by electric megaphones placed on stands in front of each performer. The megaphone conceals within it a microphone located at the mouthpiece, which receives the acoustic sound and transforms it into an electric signal; a transistor, which amplifies the input electrical current into a more powerful output; and a loudspeaker, which transduces the electric signal into acoustic waves, amplified further by travel through the exponentially widening concentric ducts of the reentrant horn.

On the score, Iannotta indicates the sound quality these bodily actions should produce: a pianississimo (ppp). Are these meant to be small sounds? What that ppp stands for is unclear, as the megaphone amplifies the mouth sound. If this sign is supposed to apply to the sound of the mouth before it is mediated by the megaphone, it would require the performers to focus and nuance their own mouth sounds. This interpretation however proves problematic because the closeness of the megaphone’s mouthpiece—“almost touching [it]”—makes it impossible for the performers to listen to their mouth sounds before mediation. They can sense and control their own mouth sounds only through the megaphone’s voice.

Perhaps, then, the pianississimo applies to an ideal mouth sound that the performers do not actually hear but convert in their imagination from the magnified sound of the horn. The performers then control their mouth sounds based on the feedback they hear from the megaphone. But the megaphone’s auditory feedback is complicated further by the presence of “audio feedback”—also known as the Larsen effect—that is created by a positive loop gain between the megaphone and the mouth, which acts as both a sounding board and a locus of production. As Iannotta explains in the performance notes:

NB: opening the mouth slightly, one can cause feedback with a very strong dynamic. The effect itself is very pleasant, and it can be integrated into the texture as long as one moves away from the mouthpiece as soon as one hears the feedback emerging in order to maintain a quiet dynamic. [19]

The performers must therefore also modulate their closeness to the microphone in order to obtain and control the faint growl of the Larsen effect, coupled with the magnified sound of their mouth, while maintaining the “quiet dynamic” Iannotta prescribes. Thus, the mouth sound is from the beginning a megaphonic sound, produced in network with the megaphone.

The pianississimo the performers must strive for thus quickly loses any quantitative connotation. The level of the constantly changing acoustic mouth sound has an average of 40 decibels (dBA), with peaks of 60 when the tongue strikes the hard palate. However, a 50-Watt megaphone amplifies that sound to 90 dBA near the source—with peaks of 100 when, for example, the tongue is striking the hard palate—and has the potential to cover over 700 meters. (According to the American agency for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a construction site produces circa 100 dBA.) [20] The pianississimo must therefore be a qualitative descriptor, rather than a measure of loudness quantifiable in decibels. Preserving a ppp despite amplification means preserving the quality of Chion’s “small sounds”—ensuring that no matter how loud, the small sound conjures small sources. Dynamic signs thus begin to assume a different depth.

So far, we have observed that small sources are one of the defining features of small sounds, just as Chion suggested. The following exploration of the technologies harnessed in Intent on Resurrection will show, however, that focusing on small sources is not enough.

Megaphone: Technologies of Public Intimacy

Having scrutinized how performers, the megaphone, and the notation interact in producing small sounds, I now want to locate the activity of the megaphone within a constellation of historical uses—thereby highlighting what I earlier called the “diachronic” distribution of compositional agency. These uses feed into the affordances of amplification that Iannotta’s composition allows to emerge or withdraw to produce an aural-affective experience of intimacy in a large public venue such as a concert hall.

What here is called a megaphone is the combination of a microphone and a horn. [21] The history of sound amplification and its cultural meanings have already been thoroughly examined, [22] but I now want to take a closer look at the horn’s basic affordance—the power to project sound across space—by considering the ways in which Thomas Edison’s aerophone (1878) was advertised. The aerophone, which today we might understand as a kind of megaphone, was exalted for its power to cover space and reach large gatherings of people, a power enacted in settings “from suffrage protests to the English admiralty.” [23] Through it, Edison believed, “the Declaration of Independence may be read so that every citizen in any one of our large cities may hear it.” But coverage was only one of the possible social constructions of the aerophone’s projective power. Edison also imagined that his invention could be used to reduce distance in communication, so that for instance “steamships [could] converse at sea.” [24] In this case, the projective power of the megaphone was directed towards cutting through space and generate a sense of proximity, acting as a sort of (unprivate) telephone. Intriguingly, the aerophone was designed to work in tandem with yet another piece of technology called the megaphone, as shown in figure 2, which at that time was an ear trumpet shaped to enhance the sound, but only at the receiver’s end. In Edison’s imagination, not a crowd, but “two persons provided with this instrument, [were] enabled to converse in the ordinary tones of voice some miles apart.” [25] In other words, the projection power of the aerophone could afford to spread the loud word of its user to a public (i.e., to cover space), as well as to serve as the bridge for an intimate conversation between two users at a distance (i.e., to cut space).

Fig. 2. “The Latest of Mr. Edison’s Inventions,” Daily Graphic, July 19, 1878.

Iannotta’s megaphone displays a similar dual functionality. In the first measures of Intent on Resurrection, the megaphone participates in an actor-network constituted by sounds that are characterized by low air pressure, and a concert hall, which is generally optimized for orchestral sounds and imposes predetermined distances between performers and public. Thus, in this environment, the megaphone becomes a prosthesis that establishes contact between the small movements of the performer’s mouth, and you, sitting multiple rows away in the audience. It thus generates a sense of closeness and intimacy that is customarily associated with the soundscape of the private sphere, despite concert-hall distances. [26] What could otherwise be heard only at close proximity now cuts through space to touch you. [27] This touch is also enhanced by the fact that the horn seems to be unmediated: unlike a normal microphone, there are no cables or loudspeakers dislocated from the sound source.

At the same time, the megaphone’s power to cover space serves the public nature of a concert hall. While small sounds are usually heard at close range, giving the impression that they are reserved for you alone, the megaphone generates a sense of proximity for an entire concert hall. Thus, an aural and affective oxymoron comes into being: an intimacy meant for public consumption, a proximity within imposed distance. Through its affordances, the megaphone becomes a technology of public intimacy—that is, a technology that can mass-generate a feeling we are meant to experience alone.

There are other ways in which the megaphone reinforces this oxymoron, distorting sound on both a material and a semantic level. As it is designed to magnify mid-high frequencies the most, in order to enhance the clarity of the articulated speech, it inevitably colors the intimacy of mouth sounds with a metallic overtone: “the anonymous bray of the infernal megaphone,” in Virginia Woolf’s notorious words. [28] Moreover, the megaphone can be detached from the sound source to create an acousmatic setting. This is a feature that has been variously exploited towards artistic effect. [29] The megaphone of Intent of Resurrection is clearly visible on stage, but the audience entertains an indirect relation with the actual sound source—i.e., the performer’s mouth—because the megaphone also covers it. When we hear someone speaking through a megaphone, we might easily identify the sound source as the whole speaking body. But in the case of Iannotta’s small sounds, the source is the mouth alone, and more specifically the inner cavity. Looking at the megaphone “in action,” one is confronted with a disturbing ambiguity: does the megaphone simply cut out of our view the sound source it puts us in aural touch with, or does it instead become part of the performer’s face, revealing the actual sound source—i.e., the new megaphonic persona? [30] In the first case, by covering the sound source, the megaphone might “amplify” for the audience the feeling of an “unnatural” or “artificial” contact. [31] But in the second case, by witnessing the megaphone as an integral part of the performer’s body, we are reminded that bodies are mediators themselves. From this perspective, the dualism of natural and artificial starts to dissolve, and the various mediators (bodies included) are co-defined by the affordances and abilities revealed in a certain activity—in this case, through the production of small sounds.

A close reading of this actor-network has shown how the megaphone transforms both the acoustic sound it brings forth and its meaning in ways that are ultimately independent from the composer’s intention—or, at the very least, that shape the composer’s intention. Megaphones never simply serve as prostheses, understood in the narrow sense of “devices that extend the body’s ‘natural’ sound-producing capacities.” [32] Rather, this amplification technology, by “mak[ing] sounds that do not already exist,” acquires the poietic function that Johnathan De Souza attributes to musical instruments. [33] According to De Souza, we can salvage the word prosthesis (and rehabilitate the prosthetic qualities of instruments) insofar as we understand the term in accordance with philosopher Bernard Stiegler: “a ‘prosthesis’ does not supplement something, does not replace what would have been there before it and would have been lost: it is added.” [34] We can say that the megaphone as prosthesis does not represent the boundary between the “natural” human being and an artificial apparatus, but rather rearticulates what we thought of as the performer’s body in a new uncanny persona.

Microphone: Technologies of Close-Up Intimacy

Let us now shift our focus to the microphonic component of the electric megaphone. Electric megaphones combine the technology of the horn with a microphone, which has the power to gain, magnify, and transmit the faintest sounds through either the horn or loudspeakers. Considering the microphonic component of the megaphone will further enrich our understanding of how the public/intimate oxymoron plays out through Intent on Resurrection ’s small sounds.

At first, the integration of a microphone’s affordances with those of the megaphone might simply be understood as a potentiation of the horn’s power to cut distances between the transmitter and the receiver. [35] This is a function exploited in technologies for speech transmission, such as the telephone or hearing aid, which are driven by what Mara Mills calls the concerns of “noise reduction, focused transmission, listener control, selective amplification … This is the history of speech becoming ‘signal’: a thing that could be isolated, amplified and otherwise processed or ‘improved.’” [36]

But in addition to the regular “signal” (i.e., the speech), the microphone magnifies another world of acoustic nuance that might go unnoticed by the unassisted ear, even at close range. This affordance has been observed many times throughout history—and even was before the technology was invented. In a seventeenth-century treatise, the English clergyman Narcissus Marsh described an imaginary device called the “microphone” that could “render the most minute sound in nature distinctly audible, by magnifying it to unconceivable loudness,” as “microscopes or magnifying glasses help the eye to see near objects, that by reason of their smallness were invisible before.” [37] In the nineteenth century, D.E. Hughes isolated the ability of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone to “magnify weak sounds” into a prototype of the microphone, an independent tool capable of rendering “the movement of the softest camel hairbrush on any part of the board” as “distinctly audible.” [38] And, as Douglas Kahn has observed, the same fascination eventually fed “into the arts, forming the krill in the baleen of musical and artistic experimentalism from John Cage to the sonocytological and nano arts.” [39]

Iannotta is also fascinated by the microcosmic. In an interview for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, she describes the vision that guided Intent on Resurrection:

I had this image of being in a room completely full of dust in which you do not see anything. … Then, little by little, your eyes get used to this dust, and you can see the little particles of dust, each tiny cell. … The piece, for me, is that image. At the beginning, with all the megaphones, etc., what you hear is basically my dust. [40]

The microphone in Iannotta’s megaphone picks up the vibrational components of the mouth sounds that would otherwise be inaudible; in doing so, it turns their spectral micro-properties into an essential textural and timbral component. To return to De Souza’s notion of prosthesis, I would argue that the poietic function of the microphone operates on both an acoustical and a semantic level: vibrations that previously fell outside the limits of human hearing are now made perceptible because, first and foremost, they have been gained and pre-amplified as signal by the microphone. The amplification system thus functions as a discourse network, defined by Sybille Krämer as “the networks of techniques and institutions that preprocess what will even be considered data in a given epoch.” [41] The more sophisticated the amplification system, the more vibrations once considered irrelevant or inaudible will be gained and consequently processed as data, and thus the more richly detailed the perceivable microcosm. By making microscopic sounds audible, when they are usually detectable only at close proximity (if at all), microphones are turned into technologies of close-up intimacy. The sense of intimacy they produce is enacted by the microscopic world of sounds that, without mediation, would unfold as undetected noise.

From this perspective, however, the microphonic affordance of the megaphone seems rather unsophisticated. Indeed, why wouldn’t a modern cardioid microphone, to take just one example, render a more detailed acoustical world? I have already partly answered this question by highlighting how the megaphone’s horn exercises its agency on an aural as well as on a visual level, in ways that a simple microphone could not substitute. But the issue of genre should also be taken into consideration. Despite the methodological disclaimer I offered earlier, it is undeniable that the field of New Music acts as a genre. [42] And recognizing oneself as a composer within a certain genre imposes the principles, behaviors, and expectations of a specific assemblage of social and institutional settings. In certain European New Music circles, amplification systems that remain visually and sonically transparent—i.e., whose tools are not explicitly raised to the status of musical instruments through the compositional process—are still viewed with suspicion. [43] The instrumental nature and dramaturgic presence of Iannotta’s megaphone complies with these expectations.

Nevertheless, during the first rehearsal of Intent on Resurrection at the concert hall of the Cité de la Musique in Paris—a space that hosts up to 1600 people—Iannotta discovered that the smallest sounds of her ensemble acoustic instruments were being lost. She thus decided to partially amplify the music box machines, harp, piano, and string instruments with cardioid microphones. [44] Although this is the kind of amplification that could be considered visually and sonically transparent, it acts on small sounds in ways that no bare instrumental technique would make up for. For cardioid microphones, placed extremely close to the sound source in the technique known as “close miking,” allow for the hyper-amplification of peripheral spectral components and enhance the intimacy of the soundscape in several ways.

First, close miking (especially with cardioids) produces what is known as the “proximity effect,” which is characterized by an increase in low frequency response that grants the sound a “warmer” quality. This effect was artistically deployed in crooning—the technical name of a vocal style popular from the 1920s onward, which paired the amplification technology of the microphone with softer voices, delivering (first by radio and then live) a recognizably “intimate singing aesthetic.” [45] Second, close miking catches the direct sound and excludes many of the collateral reflections, providing the “subjective impression of listening to music in a large room and its sounding as though the room were small [, which] is one definition of intimacy.” [46] Finally, increasingly sophisticated microphones have perfected the gain and fidelity of frequencies in the higher range as well, providing the listener with what is often described as a brighter and richly detailed sound. That sound is also associated with a lack of reflections from the environment, and thus suggests closeness to the sound source.

Since the premiere of Intent on Resurrection, amplification has been “highly recommended” on the score. Iannotta’s decision to place it there confronts the stigma that associates amplification with poor orchestration, shaped by the humanistic fear of spoiling the ear with the artificiality of live amplification. In her next work, Troglodyte Angels Clank By (2016)—which she thinks of as a continued exploration of the same material from Intent on Resurrection—the amplification takes on a structural role in the compositional process, and the piece is explicitly written for “amplified ensemble.” [47] Iannotta not only fully acknowledges the poietic potential of “amplification” as part of the compositional process—she also introduces contact microphones in line with her interest in “creating and hearing the internal sound of each object.” [48]

To allow for small sounds to emerge in the concert room, however, the amplification of megaphones and microphones is still not enough. These affordances act within the “small sounds” network only thanks to the combination of a specific set of compositional and instrumental techniques. If we consider the initial texture of the piece, which lasts around a minute, we observe that Iannotta excludes the production of any louder instrumental sound or the presence of an articulated speech that would lead to an energetical and informational auditory masking effect. [49] Moreover, the specific texture the instruments produce reinforces the haptic perception of a sound heard close-up, as if the matter generating those very sounds could enter in contact with our skin. For this reason, I will call these techniques of haptic intimacy.

The Instruments’ Grain: Techniques of Haptic Intimacy

Media theorists demonstrated decades ago already that no technology operates as a transparent medium for a transcendental theoretical sound. (Adorno showed us, for instance, what it would mean to listen to a Beethoven sonata over the radio rather than live.) [50] But this phenomenon proves even truer in this case—or at least, true on a different level—given that the medium takes on an additional poietic function. Media theorist Wolfgang Ernst has clarified that “musical theory in the occidental tradition continued the Pythagorean epistemology of harmonic calculations. Sound is thus not perceived as the sonic event in itself but becomes a phenomenon of mathematics in the widest sense of the symbolic regime.” [51] But the unstable, unpredictable, and inharmonic events of Intent of Resurrection invite us to listen quite differently. Musical instruments, including megaphones and microphones, do not simply convey a transcendental sound; their materiality does not simply “allow” sounds vibrations to be, but has a hand in the creation of their specific spectral texture that emerges in our acoustic foreground. The material of this piece is thus self-referential, in the sense that it stages the agency of the media that produced it. [52] What saturates our attention is the moist flesh of the mouth before the megaphone, the metallic distortion of the horn, the sensitivity of the diaphragm of the microphone to low frequencies, the stickiness of the rosined bow against the metal string—what I call the grain of the instrument.

With the word grain, I intend to evoke two different discourses, both quite well known in music studies. The first is Roland Barthes’ concept of the “grain of the voice,” which indexes the bodies of singing humans through the sonorous materiality of their voice. [53] My own understanding of the word grain is however distinct from his in two respects. First, unlike Barthes, who deems certain voices as “without grain,” I assume that the material conditions of sound production are inescapable, and thus that the grain of the instrument is always present. What changes is its level of emergence, or its centrality in the awareness of the audience. Second, the voice we hear in Iannotta’s work is that of the classical instruments, megaphones, and microphones played by trained musicians—not only human bodies, but instrumental bodies as well.

To better explain what is at stake in this definition, I find it useful to draw on Brian Kane’s model, which “diagnoses” how the voice (phoné ) can be articulated: through logos (i.e., as conveyer of semantic meaning), echos (i.e., phoné’s “purely sonorous aspect, capable of subjection to all the standard forms of phonetic and acoustic analysis”), and topos (i.e., the voice’s “site of emission,” its “source.”) [54] According to Kane, Barthes aims with the “grain of the voice” to shift the focus toward topos and echos: the sonorous materiality of the voice produced by a given body. But, as he reminds us, the voice is never essentially just one of these things (logos, echos, topos), but is rather the “perpetual displacement” between these poles, a displacement—and here comes the most important point—“modified by technê,” which is to be understood both as technologies and bodily techniques. [55] Applying Kane’s model to the grain of the instrument, we observe that the source of the voice we hear, the topos, is that of technê in the action of displacing phoné. Hearing the grain of the instrument is hearing the voice of technê. Furthermore, in this specific instance, as a product of the overlap of topos andtechnê, what emerges in the listener’s attention is not a body per se as the site of sound emission, but its materiality. Rather than an acousmatic question, this condition stimulates a haptic perception of the material friction produced by the matter of both human and instrumental bodies involved in the kinetic act of playing. The echos of the sounds I am dealing with is characterized by what Chion would call high “materializing sound indices,” or qualities that cause one “to ‘feel’ the material conditions of the sound source.” [56]

The second discourse about the grain that I am invoking here is the one developed by Pierre Schaeffer in his typology of sound objects. For Schaeffer,

grain is a microstructure of the matter of sound, which is more or less fine or coarse and which evokes by analogy the tactile texture of a cloth or a mineral, or the visible grain in a photograph or a surface. … every time it is the “overall qualitative perception of a large number of small irregularities of detail affecting the ‘surface’ of the object.” [57]

What interests me about Schaffer’s definition is the experience of a microstructure of discrete components rather than a continuum—an experience afforded, in his reflection, by a slowed-down tape recording. The shift from continuum to discrete—that is, from a sustained pitched sound to a sound composed of recognizable microstructures of sonic “grain”—is, I argue, what allows for the emergence of an experience of sound as echos (in particular, its material indices) rather than logos (e.g., an A440 heard within a specific harmonic system). [58]

Let’s return to the first texture of Iannotta’s piece and examine the performance techniques that allow for the grain of the instruments to emerge. On the score (see fig. 1), the composer asks the horn, trumpet, and trombone players to crinkle (froisser) aluminum foil gently and irregularly, “one grain at a time.” [59] “One grain at a time” also appears in the instructions to the percussion player, who must rub (frotter) a damped low gong with the edge of a small dobachi, or singing bowl. The violins and violas are also damped and instructed to move a heavily rosined bow on the strings with the highest degree of pressure (écraser) but extremely slowly. This gives rise to a shattered (brisé) sound, cracked by small silences, that must be maintained between a nearly inaudible dal niente and pp. The texture is further enriched by the sounds that come from a music box machine, which allows the performer to control twelve different music boxes simultaneously. Four of these are activated in sequence six seconds apart, set to rotate so slowly that the pins of the drum pluck the teeth of the comb against it one at a time, complementing the granularities obtained by the other instruments with a short crackling sound. [60] By renouncing periodic vibrations—the defining feature of the “musical tone” of Western classical tradition—this texture encourages listeners to discard their propensity to listen for pitch, and direct their attention towards the exploration of sonic events unfolding in an unmeasured microtime. Thanks to its high materializing sound indices, this texture can be perceived haptically, as if unfolding against our skin. [61]

Tuning into the Small Sounds: Techniques of Hyper-Intimacy

Iannotta’s metaphor generates yet another reflection. She asserts that the illuminated dust is defined by the clarity of our attention. Taking her idea seriously means accepting that the dust, her microcosmos of sounds, cannot actually be perceived clearly (as she would wish) without our attention tuning into them. Our attention is not a set of given and unchangeable cognitive abilities; instead, we, as listeners, can be “shocked” into attuning to new ones. According to Vladimir Jankélévitch, tools such as musical instruments impact the performer’s cognition in unpredictable ways through “reverse shock”— i.e., through the way “they work, their material possibilities and the gestures they enable, and what they feel like under one’s hands.” [62] Similarly, I argue that small sounds, bearing the material traces of the instruments and amplifying apparatus that generated them, are the instruments that shock the listener into generating new cognitive abilities. Hearing small sounds is, first and foremost, hearing our own senses tuning in to a different perceptual wavelength as their affordances define our abilities. They shape our sense of hearing, touch, scale, and spatial distance.

But at the same time, our bodily and cognitive affordances shape the way we turn small sounds into a perceptual object, into what might become an aural-affective feeling of intimacy. [63] I choose the word intimacy because it encompasses both spatial features (it etymologically refers to the innermost, the deepest) and the affective world—in fact, despite being a spatial indicator, we have learned to use the word intimacy mostly in a figurative sense, in reference to a range of affections and feelings. [64] In this sense, we as listeners could be thought of as microphones, transducing sound to our consciousness through more or less vibrating, more or less receptive membranes. Unlike actual microphones, however, our affordances are constantly changing. The level of vibration and receptivity is affected by our own story; and, unlike objects which are constantly changing according to the law of decay, our affordances can follow unpredictable patterns. Only if we are disposed to receive closeness and touch, can we then indulge in the pleasure of tuning into a heightened sense of emotional or haptic connectedness, turning anything else into background noise.

If we can afford such an attunement, then small sounds could be turned into hyper-intimate objects, heralds of intimacy despite the reality of a public concert hall with its imposed distances. The prefix “hyper” can be understood in reference to the artistic genre of Hyperrealism. [65] In a Hyperrealist portrait, the artist confronts us with a saturation of details that goes beyond the photographic—beyond what we might notice in something physically present, close-up, erasing the visual appearance of the whole. It involves pictorial techniques that seem to augment or shock our senses. In Marilyn Minter’s Blue Poles, shown in figure 3, the grain of the skin overwhelms us with its details: its innumerable pores and freckles, infinitesimally small folds and wrinkles, the glistening points of sweat or grease, the sparkling makeup surrounded by thousands of thin hairs—all this, despite the distances a museum environment typically imposes, with its velvet ropes and museum guards.

Fig. 3. Marilyn Minter, Blue Poles, 2007, enamel on metal, 60 x 72 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York. © Marilyn Minter.

Conclusions

In Intent on Resurrection, we see how the multiple affordances of the megaphone emerge as technologies of public intimacy, and those of the microphones as technologies of close-up intimacy. We also witness the combination of compositional and performance techniques that enable the emergence of what I have called the grain of the instrument, leading the audience in turn to experience a haptic sense of intimacy. I have furthermore shown that we as listeners can craft small sounds as hyper-intimate objects, or turn them into undesired noise, as much as small sounds shock our perceptual abilities.

The locution “small sounds” has served in this recognition as a sort of place holder. I asked you to experience them through a brief exercise—“bring your hand to your ear…”— as well as through your imagination. You heard them in the first minute of Intent on Resurrection. We also searched for them with the performer, between the score and the movement of their megaphonic mouth; in the microphones and the loudspeaker; and finally, in the interplay between amplified material traces and our bodily and cognitive abilities. Small sounds, in other words, are best understood as relational, located neither in the “acoustic” nor in the “perceived” world, and always at the intersection between ourselves and the materialities of the sound source, sound waves, and space of resonation. [66]

Departing from Chion’s static definition, we observed how small sounds are constantly dislocated throughout the actor-network I have here unraveled, and how their identity is each time constituted through provisional assemblages of specific mediators. My hope is that the necessary linearity of my descriptions was disrupted by the detailed acknowledgment of a continuous feedback loop that involves an actor-network of small sounds, and that this undermines the temptation to search for unidirectional vectors of agency that originate with the composer, or any of the other actors involved.

The play of affordances I have so far retraced, in my last section, reflects back at us, as we realize how the right sort of microphones, real and metaphorical, can allow for the amplification of the smallest of sounds—not only those close to our bodies, but even within it. Dorothy Molloy’s epigraph witnesses the achievement of such an attunement: she can hear the microscopic sounds of her bones inside her body, behind the skin, out of sight, buried and damped in the earth playing fortissimo. Even microscopic sounds can become fortissimo—and “vicinissimo” (“very close”), I would add—once we have tuned into them. Could Molloy’s internal sound be brought into a concert hall? The answer might be yes, as long as your ears had the right microphonic prosthesis.

Perhaps scientists have provided the means. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, researchers in the field of surgical diagnosis—particularly one of its pioneers, a certain Professor Hueter—envisioned that possibility…

The introduction of the microphone for the purposes of surgical diagnosis …
has led Professor Hueter of Greifswald to try whether it would not be possible by its means
to detect certain sounds, whose existence might be a priori asserted,
but which are inaudible by ordinary means. … He has proved that we can not only
hear the rush of blood through the capillaries of the skin (dermatophony),
but also the sounds of muscular contraction (myophony), of tendinous extension (tendophony),
and of the vibration of the long bones when percussed (osteophony.) [67]