Interpretation and musical signification in
acousmatic listening
SIMON ATKINSON
Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK
E-mail: satkinson@dmu.ac.uk
URL: http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk
The challenges of understanding musical meaning are
considered in light of ways in which electroacoustic practice
and acousmatic listening might embody yet further nuances in
how music can function as a signifying system. ‘Classical’
semiotics is discussed, as well as more recent developments
with post-structuralist approaches and musical semantics in
other areas of music scholarship. The idea, inherited from the
tradition of ‘absolute music’, that musical meaning lies
exclusively in the inner operations of the musical materials
and their structural organisation, is questioned. Concepts
from ecologically inspired music psychology are drawn upon
to highlight the importance of interpretation, as well as
perception, in acousmatic listening. It is argued that if new
theoretical terminologies are needed, an invaluable project
would be to develop a taxonomy (and thus theoretical
framework) of how sound can ‘stand for something’, i.e.
function as a sign in semiotic terms. It is also argued that such
terminology should not reinforce distinctions between intra-
and extra-musical that feature in many theoretical constructs
used in relation to this music. Consideration of the Peircean
semiotic model in electroacoustic music (as well as the more
widely used Saussurean one), tropology in the study of
literature, and a much more widely comparative and
culturally explicit approach to analysis are suggested as
practical starting points. A more critical approach to the
integral role of sound recording and reproduction in relation
to concepts of representation is needed.
1. INTRODUCTION
An important goal of analytical exploration is … to
attempt to reconcile and relate the internal world of the
work with the outside world of sonic and non-sonic
experience. (Camilleri and Smalley 1998)
Within the context of musical signification in acous-
matic listening, my aim here is to make an initial and
partial response to Camilleri and Smalley’s assertion.
Theirs is a challenging requirement of analysis, but
nevertheless one that (nearly a decade later) remains
crucial for electroacoustic music studies to address in
greater depth. It would seem theirs is also a requirement
for which our theoretical framework remains unsatis-
factory. The study of signification is by far more
widespread and developed in disciplines other than
music. Yet music can justifiably claim status as a special
Organised Sound 12(2): 113–122 ß 2007 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom.
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and distinctive example of signifying system, full of
richness, diversity, sophistication and complexity. This
complexity may account for the difficulties for music
theory in engaging with musical signification, but it is
also hampered further by its own ideological history.
Approaches adopted in other fields of music scholarship
in recent years may be of great relevance to the study of
electroacoustic music, and some will be mentioned later.
But, also, the challenges that are singular and specific to
electroacoustic music must be identified and addressed,
and theoretical tools critiqued and new ones developed
where appropriate. My premise here is that music is
meaningful, and that electroacoustic practices ask yet
further challenging questions regarding the ways in
which music can be meaningful. What follows are some
initial thoughts on how to approach this question of
relationships between ‘internal worlds’ of works and our
broader lived and subjective experience of the world (or
Lebenswelt). I will suggest that thinking which locates
musical meaning solely in the structural organisation of
materials at the level of the individual piece (or what
could be called the intra-musical as opposed to the more
widely used term extra-musical) offers only a partial
framework, and one that does not acknowledge some of
the more distinctive discursive and signifying aspects of
the musical listening under consideration.
Given the proliferation of musical materials, practices
and modes of musical discourse represented by the
expansion of activity in electroacoustic music, it is
perhaps surprising that the consideration of meaning
within this music has not been more widespread. The
scope and diversity of aesthetic orientation and musical
practice within the electroacoustic field is wide and
impressive, and its consideration in broader cultural and
social terms is a vast project. It seems pertinent to
suggest that much, if not most, electroacoustic activity
can most usefully be conceived of for analytical
purposes as ‘practice’ as distinct from the traditional
musicological concern with the ‘work’. In this paper, I
wish to focus on a specific area of electroacoustic
practice – the development of the acousmatic tradition
from the 1950s onwards. This term is now becoming
widely used to denote a particular genre of electro-
acoustic music. Whilst the idea of an acousmatic genre
doi: 10.1017/S1355771807001756
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 114 Simon Atkinson
(which therefore foregrounds the significance of rela-
tionships between individual pieces) is of significance
here, I will also use freely its more general (and original)
sense of referring to a listening situation.
Music of the modern era of electricity has exhibited a
general tendency towards containing the possibility of,
to varying degrees, being a representational art form, as
well as one of entirely abstract relationships. The
acousmatic tradition can be viewed as being central in
this. What can be represented, and what is the nature of
this representation? Representation may include forms
of narrative, and this, in various guises, is a term that has
increasingly been used in relation to this practice. If
forms of narrativity are in evidence, semantically
oriented approaches may suggest themselves. Because
of the central role of sound recording and reproduction,
the concept of mimesis or the mimetic is also used as a
theoretical tool. It therefore appears that the practice
might problematise the classical pairing of mimesis
(showing) and diegesis (telling). The theory of acous-
matic music is also strongly influenced by the
(Schaefferian) concept of ‘reduced listening’. As has
been discussed elsewhere, this concept has been subject
to reflection and critique in recent years, but seems to
remain central to many theoretical frameworks in that
binary distinctions are made in relation to those musical
materials for which reduced listening seems most
appropriate and those for which it does not. As a
consequence, received notions of intra- and extra-
musical may be reinforced, something which I am
arguing against, and to which I will return. In response
to reduced listening, the composer Jonty Harrison has
coined the term ‘expanded listening’ (Harrison 1996)
and another way of formulating my motivation here is
that I am interested in the nature of this ‘expansion’ in
terms of signification. Relationships between abstract
materials and discourse and referential materials and
discourse have become considerably looser as conceived
of by composers. Both signify, and I am arguing that it
would be wrong to consider that traditional abstract
category as having exclusive claim to being ‘properly’
musical. Equally, we need more sophisticated means for
considering the referential category, i.e. beyond ‘also
ran’ or simple denotational signs.
The acousmatic tradition is an artistic practice
concerned with the nature of the aural ‘recreation’ of
versions of reality. I am interested in how sounds (and
their relationships) can ‘stand for something’, i.e.
function as ‘signs’. It is a logical step, therefore, to turn
to semiotics. If the consideration of meaning within
electroacoustic practice seems not to feature largely in
its study, speculation as to the application of semiotic
techniques features even less. A literature survey
confirmed my intuition that although semiotic
approaches have gained increasing credence within
music theory and musicology, the analytical objects
are overwhelmingly those works from the canon that
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are already widely considered and discussed. Little has
been written (particularly in English) specifically about
electroacoustic music. Furthermore, little appears to
have been produced in media studies (for which semiotic
methods are a keystone) concerned specifically with
music or sound in radio, cinema, television and so on.
The basic definition of semiotics is that it is the study of
signs and of sign systems. This disarmingly simple
definition tells us little. Some nuance regarding how
musical studies and semiotics have interacted hitherto
may be useful.
2. CONTEXT
The history and scope of semiotics is a complex affair.
Raymond Monelle suggests that, ‘A survey of the
subject will reveal not a single developing discipline but
a collection of varied and unrelated programmes’
(Monelle 1992). Furthermore, he warns: ‘Drawing
together the many aspects of musical semiotics is like
rounding up a flock of particularly wayward sheep’.
Eero Tarasti summarises the current situation of the
field as follows: ‘One might generalize … that most so-
called classical semiotics now accepts the idea that
semiosis is the same as communication plus significa-
tion. The central notions of semiotics – sign and
meaning – are not exhausted by mere description of
the process of communication as a chain going from
sender to receiver. Nor is the entire truth of semiotics
revealed only by the elucidation of the structure of signs,
without investigation of its context, isotopy, or semio-
sphere’ (Tarasti 2000).
Historically, ‘classical’ semiotics can be characterised
as a series of developments based on Saussurean (and
subsequent) linguistic theories, and on the Peircean
theoretical model of signification (and subsequent
applications), which was based on an elaborate logic-
based taxonomy. Both traditions have witnessed
application in music theory and music analysis. It was
in ethnomusicology and anthroplogy in the 1950s and
60s that thinkers first began to speculate as to the uses of
semiotics’ scientific approaches, in the context of
developing methodologies for the analysis of non-
Western musics. In essence, this consisted of seeking
the musical equivalent of the phoneme, as a founda-
tional starting point, and was not directly concerned
with the consideration of meaning. According to one of
the pioneers, Bruno Nettl: ‘The problem of meaning is
not essential in that branch of descriptive linguistics
with which we are concerned. The identification of
distribution of elements, rather is its task’ (Nettl 1958
cited in Monelle 1992). Also in the 1960s, Nicholas
Ruwet began to develop the idea of distributional music
analysis, also based on the musical equivalents of
phonemes. This formed the basis of Jean-Jacques
Nattiez’s work in paradigmatic analysis, initially
propounded in his Fondements d’une Sémiologie de la
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Musique in 1975, and the gradual evolution of the
concept of ‘analysis of the neutral level’. To Paul
Valéry’s poietic level (of intention) and esthesic level (of
reception), Molino added the neutral level. The neutral
level was to be the level of music as acoustic
phenomenon, and a description thereof without bias
(cultural or aesthetically based judgements), and the
concept was rigorously developed in Nattiez’s work
(although for him theoretical rather than material since
emphasis was on score rather than sound). Also in
linguistics, musical connections were made with
Chomsky’s theories, his transformational-generative
grammar. The generative analytical theory of Lerdahl
and Jackendoff and such thinking can have its roots
traced to here. Such work constituted part of the
broader development of structuralism, and develop-
ments have had a significant impact on musicology. Its
structuralist premises indicate its nature as a science – a
science of signs. The work must be characterised as
having linguistic concerns, with the phoneme, syntax,
and syntagmatic and paradigmatic planes, with seg-
mentation and distribution, and with transformational
principles, rather than any explicit concern with specific
musical meanings. The idea of meaning, as such, has
been regarded by many as unscientific (and therefore
one presumes problematic). It might be useful to note
that this tradition of musical semiotics differs in nature
and method from a more popular and widespread
understanding of semiotics (although also broadly
Saussurian) as the study of (largely visual) signs, for
example in fashion systems or advertising, and as
emblematically represented by Roland Barthes’ famous
discussion of the Panzani advertisment in his essay
‘Rhetoric of the image’ (Barthes 1977).
The structuralist tradition may have much to offer
electroacoustic studies, particularly in the analysis of
‘pertinences’ within works which fall into Simon
Emmerson’s category of ‘abstract discourse’1 (which
can be thought of as comprising exclusively intra-
musical relationships). In English, Rajmil Fischman has
provided an excellent exemplar with a rigorous analysis
of Michael Vaughan’s tape piece Crosstalk (see
Fischman 1997). The premise here is that the ‘analysis
of the neutral level’ is informed and guided by concepts
derived from Denis Smalley’s spectromorphological
theory. Fischman successfully identifies pertinences,
producing a taxonomy of sonic materials, supported
and illustrated with a graphic score, and proceeds in
describing the musical discourse according to semiotic
syntagmatic and paradigmatic principles. The promi-
nent music semiotician Nattiez has considered electro-
acoustic repertoire, perhaps most notably in his
approach to discourse within Bernard Parmegiani’s
De Natura Sonorum. Here, he proposes an analysis of
the neutral level which is informed by the composer’s
See Emmerson (1986).
1
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Interpretation and musical signification 115
own description of the piece which uses poetic forms of
language, including oppositions of terms, often meta-
phorical. He considers the ‘poetic universe’ in relation to
what is demonstrable within the ‘work’. Also in French,
Nattiez’s influence is to be found in the work of
Stephane Roy who has produced a wide-ranging
summary of various analytical approaches to electro-
acoustic music, including various semiotically inspired
methods (see Roy 2004). The work that has been
conducted in the study of electroacoustic music tends to
broadly follow the lines of the structuralist tradition.
‘The semiotics of C S Peirce … seemed relevant to
music because Peirce placed iconic and indexical signs
alongside the linguistic variety which he called symbolic.
This meant that many things, both in nature and
culture, could be considered signs by virtue of their
similarity to other things, or their habitual association
or contiguity with their objects’ (Monelle 1992). Work
informed by Peirce appears to take a more protean
form, appearing in various theories of art, and appears
specifically in music in the work of Eero Tarasti, Kofi
Agawu, Robert Hatten, David Lidov, Raymond
Monelle, Vladimir Karbusicky, and David Osmond-
Smith. Peirce’s theoretical requirement of the sign that
something ‘stands for something to someone’ exists in
contrast to the purely linguistic tradition. The sign must
be considered in terms of how and what it might signify.
It must be remembered that Peirce’s project was
primarily philosophical, a ‘grand theory of everything’,
if you will. Of the Peircean tradition, Robert Scholes
writes: ‘Because the attainment of Peirce’s ideal has not
proved to be an easy task, many scholars have followed
the urge to limit realistically their domain of enquiry. In
fact the huge and complex edifice that Peirce erected for
distributing various kinds of reality has more or less
trickled away, leaving in its wake a tripartite division of
signs into icons, indices, and symbols’. Scholes con-
cludes that ‘the great usefulness of semiotics … will not
be found in its elaborate taxonomies, but rather is to be
derived from a small number of its most basic and
powerful concepts, ingeniously applied’ (Scholes 1982).
Despite these more recent Peircean-inspired endeavours
(which have largely focused their energies towards the
Western canon), it is broadly true that it is the
Saussurean tradition that has the strongest legacy
in musical studies, particularly in Europe. The
foundational premises of Saussure’s original work
that the (linguistic) sign is arbitrary and the
inherently ‘static’ nature of binary signifier and
signified seem to offer little room for manoeuvre in
relation to the fluidity and sophistication required for
the complexities of musical listening. Supplementing
syntactic and distributional structural analytical
approaches with the open-endedness, tripartite/trian-
gular Peircean model, with its explicit possibilities of
‘webs’ of signification and ‘infinite’ semiosis, seems
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 116 Simon Atkinson
logical in searching for nuanced approaches to
meaning per se.
3. ECOLOGICAL THEORIES OF PERCEPTION:
AFFORDANCE AND INTERPRETATION
Past semiotic accounts of music have attracted critiques
from various quarters. One is the ecologically inspired
work from psychology that has deservedly attracted
interest in electroacoustic music studies. Fundamental
here is the conception of the relationship between
perceiver and their environment (which includes both
nature and culture, critiquing their relationship).
Ecological theory provides opportunities for a radically
revised framework within which to consider musical
meaning. ‘… An ecological approach to listening
provides a basis on which to understand the perceptual
character of musical meaning. Perception is fundamen-
tally concerned with picking up what is happening in the
world, and picking up what is happening in music is
central to musical meaning … A number of authors …
have shown how ecological principles can account for
the way in which listeners perceive structural processes
in music, but in a more far-reaching manner people also
listen to the ways in which musical sounds specify the
wider world of which they are a part’ (Clarke 2005). In
discussing the various existing frameworks for con-
sidering musical meaning, Clarke highlights approaches
that do not attach adequate importance to the
perception of music, writing: ‘Although all … give
some consideration to the experience of hearing musical
sounds, none of them is particularly concerned with
explaining how that experience comes about. Most
writers on the subject assume that sounds are picked up
in one way or another, form basic units of some kind …
and are organized into structures, but that the
perceptual processes involved play little or no role in a
theory of musical meaning. The explanation of meaning
is to be found elsewhere-in theories of expression,
semiotics, or social construction, for instance’ (ibid.).
His recent book, Ways of Listening: An Ecological
Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning, puts
forward a very different view, its thesis foregrounding
the act of perception. His work also serves as a critique
of semiotic approaches to music, and questions the
concept of representation. He presents a series of
analyses that discuss the ‘subject-position’ of the
perceiver in relation to musical materials and social
meanings through a principle he calls ‘specification’
which is contrasted to the semiotic concept of ‘codifica-
tion’. By way of illustration, he ‘re-reads’ semiotic
analyses of Beethoven by Robert Hatten and Kofi
Agawu through the lens of ecological theory. Clarke
argues that music can simultaneously function as an
autonomous set of features (or ‘virtual reality consisting
of objects and events that are experienced simulta-
neously as motifs, rhythmic groups, and cadences, as
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well as spaces, actions, places, and agents’ [ibid.]) and as
an experience rooted in relationships with ‘real-world’
actions, objects, language and social relations and so on.
This viewpoint represents one approach to addressing
the nature of the relationship between the world of the
individual work and the wider world beyond it. If
Clarke’s observations on the rather vague status of
perception within some approaches to musical meaning
ring true, his critique would seem a little harsh if applied
to the study of acousmatic music with its tradition of
(and basis in) privileging listening and perception. The
significance of such recent ecologically inspired theories
based upon the primacy of perception seems obvious to
the study of some forms of electroacoustic music. As
with Schaefferian, spectromorphological and acoustic
communication theories, musical listening is nuanced
and is acknowledged as being located within a series of
other modes of hearing and listening. Within such
ecological approaches the ‘subjectivity’ of the listener
changes status from music-theoretical problem to
central guiding premise.
In the work of Luke Windsor we find a further
dimension. He has focused attention on acousmatic
music, his Ph.D. thesis entitled, Towards a Perceptual
Theory of Acousmatic Music, and more recently his
ideas are summarised, with example analyses, in a
chapter, ‘Through and Around the Acousmatic’
(Windsor 1995 and 2000). Like Clarke, he has
adopted Gibson’s concept of affordance.2 ‘The
relationship between stimulus and object or event,
and between perception and action, come together in
an important concept for which the psychologist J. J.
Gibson coined the term affordance. The affordances
of an object are the uses, functions, or values of an
object – the opportunities that it offers to a
perceiver’ (Clarke 2003). Furthermore: ‘by considering
music in terms of its affordances, discussions of musical
meaning (which have often been excessively abstract, or
diverted into a consideration of emotional responses to
music, or caught up in discussions of music’s relation-
ship with language) can combine with a consider-
ation of its social uses and functions in a manner
that recognizes the plurality of music’s social
functions without being swept away by total relativism’
(ibid.).
If ecological theory offers a model where material,
listening strategy, and human action are all linked in
relationships defined by both context-specific and
perceiver-specific circumstances, the contribution of
Windsor’s that is key here concerns the acousmatic
listening situation. Given the overwhelming emphasis
placed on one sensory mode, a certain type of attentive
listening with (normally) minimal visual or other
2
Highly detailed accounts of Gibson’s theories and their potential
significance in musical study can be found in Clarke (2003, 2005)
and Windsor (1995, 2000).
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stimulus, he proposes that the listening situation itself
represents a specific case of Gibson’s affordance.
Given the potential range of musical materials and
musical arguments a listener might encounter in
the acousmatic situation, the music affords interpreta-
tion. The listening situation is, in and of itself, an
affordance.
However, in terms of relating specifics of musical
materials to social meaning and action, acousmatic
music presents another apparent singularity. Whilst in
collective listening situations, various social rituals of
concert going may be of relevance, it is hard to conceive
of this musical practice in the social terms along the lines
represented by the work of authors such as Richard
Middleton or Simon Frith in the development of
popular cultural studies. At the actual moment of
musical experience, action is highly internalised in the
sense of focusing all on attentive listening, one of the
defining features of this musical practice (and presum-
ably one of the criticisms that some may be inclined to
level at it as a social activity). Acousmatic music
privileges the role of sound as mediator between
material and imaginative worlds. In ecological terms,
we are unlikely to witness outward and immediate
responses (for example, dancing) to environmental
stimuli. As such, as a social and cultural activity,
acousmatic listening would appear to share much in
common with the act of reading of literature. As with
literature, a considerable theoretical challenge exists in
relating the subjective to the intersubjective. Windsor
himself acknowledges methodological challenges in his
approach. ‘Neither composers nor listeners are fully in
control of what will be perceived’. He writes of ‘many
limitations, especially the difficulties it presents for
understanding how more culturally convened … pro-
cesses operate’ (Windsor 2000, my italics). Having
loosely established a connection with reading, we turn to
explore how subjective interpretative experience might
be understood at a broader cultural level.
4. TEXTUALITY
Earlier, I attempted to give some sense of musical
semiotics as influenced by the broadly structuralist
tradition. I will now turn away from the tradition that
takes linguistics as its model to some other recent
threads of thinking occupied with more post-structur-
alist concerns: hermeneutics, semantics, texts and
textualities. Here we broadly witness less of an emphasis
on scientific method and a greater explicit concern with
meaning. Kofi Agawu writes, ‘Out of a wide variety of
music-theoretical offerings now claiming a semiotic
orientation has emerged two distinct schools of
semioticians, one which I shall call the taxonomic-
empiricists (following Allan Keiler), and the other,
which I shall call the semanticists’ (Agawu 1991). Or, as
Raymond Monelle thinks, ‘The idea of musical
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Interpretation and musical signification 117
semantics has become respectable … The world of
‘‘hard’’ semiotics was tough and polemic. The new,
softer world is more fruitful, more fallible, more
exciting’ (Monelle 1992).
It is now a widespread idea that cultural objects other
than the printed word on the page can be conceived of as
texts. Texts display ‘textualities’ and exist in relation-
ships to each other: intertextuality. Just as in literature,
so in music can we distinguish between the text and (the
closed world of) the ‘work’. Texts engage their readers in
some active performative process (this aspect, at least,
does not appear mutually exclusive to the concept of
affordance introduced above). In his work, Text
Production, Michael Riffaterre describes the reading of
the signs of a text as a ‘game’ which is ‘guided and
programmed by the text’. In fact, he uses a musical
analogy: ‘Content is not assured by the kind of passive
reception involved in normal communication, but by
the active performance (in the musical sense of the term)
of the score represented by the text’ (Riffaterre 1983).
One way of establishing a conceptual framework for
addressing Camilleri and Smalley’s goal of reconciling
the internal world of the work and its relationships to
the world outside of itself might be to establish an
analogy between acousmatic listening and the reading
of texts, and in so doing draw upon concepts and
techniques of post-structuralism and in the more
established study of literary signification. I do not wish,
for the purposes of this paper, to enter into a discussion
of the ontological status of the ‘text’ in the sense widely
discussed in (largely French) theory and philosophy.3
The breadth and manner in which I would like to use the
term is brilliantly summarised by Georgina Born and
David Hesmondhalgh, who describe: ‘… the multi-
textuality of music as culture and the irreducible
complexity of musical signification. Music exists and
generates meaning in a number of different, simulta-
neous forms: as musical sound, and this as mediated by
notations, by technological and visual forms, by the
practices and sociality of performance, by social
institutions and socioeconomic arrangements, by lan-
guage in different guises (lyrics and dramatic narratives,
theoretical and critical exegeses, and other discourses)
and, relatedly, by conceptual and knowledge systems’
(Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000). I would also like to be
clear that the analogy of reading does not de facto imply
that of writing (although some have advocated ideas of
écriture in relation to acousmatic practice), and I do not
mean to give privilege to the written, or to language, in
what has established itself as a predominately aural
musical tradition.
As mentioned above, one area that has critiqued
semiotic approaches is that of music psychology and
3
Writers such as Riffaterre, Kristeva, and Barthes discuss ‘text’ and
‘intertext’ in highly nuanced and differing ways. Production of a
common, positivistic ‘definition’ was not a goal of such thinkers.
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 118 Simon Atkinson
ecologically inspired approaches. Another is anthro-
pology. Ruth Finnegan writes:
I would … urge that for exploring musical experience we
would do well to abandon the fashionable concept of
‘text’ ... ‘Text’ turns us away from people’s diverse
experiences back into that limiting approach of locating
emotion in the work and its exposition by experts …
people participate in music in multifarious ways in the
different roles they take, the occasion, or their own
personal histories – experiences of ‘the same’ text are not
necessarily uniform. … Textual analysis cannot replace
time-consuming ethnographic investigation of the actual
experiences of variegated participants in all their
dynamics and multiplicities.
Further, even in the expanded sense in which the term is
now sometimes used, the connotations of ‘text’ inevitably
privilege linguistic and cognitive matters: easier for
scholars to capture, admittedly, and in keeping with the
academic tradition of studying ideas, but for musical
experience definitely not the whole story. (Finnegan 2003)
Some have pursued the option of using reception-based,
social science-type methods, where the listener becomes
respondent regarding their experience in attempts to
bridge the poietic and esthesic in meaningful ways.4 Of
course, such investigations are a response to such
critiques of ‘authoritative’ accounts of musical meaning,
although this is not their primary concern. Such
methods could be most illuminating, and it is perhaps
a shame that there is not greater activity in this
direction. It is worth noting here that the popular music
semiotician Philip Tagg’s work has involved the
extrapolation of a series of semiotic sign types5 as a
result of intersubjective consistency in the outcomes of
listening tests involving several hundreds of (largely
‘non-musician’) participants. There may be some
parallels with listeners’ visual signing activities in the
IRCAM project, but this model of listener testing as a
means of establishing sounds’ functions as signs might
be interesting to apply in the study of electroacoustic
music.
I find it difficult to agree with Finnegan’s critique in
the present context, in the sense of textual approaches
necessarily imply a privileging of the linguistic. In fact I
am suggesting a shift from approaches that use
linguistics as a model to a more semantically oriented
model. The analogy of reading of texts (rather than
structural description of works) is suggested precisely
because of the significance of individual acts of
interpretation informed by listeners’ subjective experi-
ence in acousmatic listening. What seems to present a
great challenge is developing methodologies for con-
sidering this interpretation at a complex intersubjective
4
See, for example, Delalande (1998, 2002), Donin (2004), Landy
(2006), Weale (2005, 2006).
5
These are sonic, kinetic and tactile anaphones, genre synechdotes,
episodic markers and style indicators. This (audio-visual) project is
described in Tagg (1992).
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level, lying between the individual reading and any
definitive or authoritative decoding produced by an
expert. Intersubjectivity obviously implicates a search
for what people might share in listening strategy, for
culturally shared ground in how sounds may stand for
something both within and beyond the confines of a
given work. The approach should be based on a notion
of open rather than closed interpretation. Textual
approaches could offer means of accessing broader
relations between works, between music and other
forms of cultural practice and of locating musical
listening within broader listening experiences. If one
accepts the attitude towards subjectivity represented by
writers like Clarke and Windsor, the greater challenge is
posed by intersubjectivity. The acousmatic tradition
privileges perception and the (Schaefferian) mantra of
‘primacy to the ear’ is now long established. Amongst
some acousmatic practitioners there is a philosophical
tendency (or sympathy) towards the idea that a
particular piece does not ‘properly’ exist unless being
listened to, that clearly stands distinct from the received
ontological status of Bach’s ‘48’ or Beethoven’s
Symphonies … This, of course, relates to ‘primacy to
the ear’ But more than a philosophical stance on
perception along ‘trees falling down in forests’ lines, this
seems to point to the absolute importance of the
listener’s active interpretation (at least for some) within
the concerns of the poietic plane. The composer Michael
Norris writes:
Electroacoustic music does … reinstate the importance of
individual acts of interpretation. This is especially valid
when one considers the ability to incorporate direct
source recordings from the environment into the work. It
is clear that electroacoustic music taps into our individual
sound contexts in an unprecedented manner. These are
defined by the sound environments we have been brought
up with and our own personal associations we have with
sounds. I call them sociocultural sound narratives, and as
listeners we bring these with us into the concert hall,
informing any listening experience. (Norris 1999)
This is of course true, but we would do well not to
forget that the medium of sound recording also creates
the highly mediated situations in which we conduct our
listening. Through the work of the World Soundscape
Project, I may have a certain sentimental fondness of
certain soundmarks of the city of Vancouver, a city I
have never visited. Not only is my specific musical
listening mediated by my general experience of musical
listening, my experience of sound also occurs in the
representational media of television, cinema, radio,
games, etc. (which of course may affect my interpreta-
tion of a sound-standing-for-something in my musical
acousmatic listening). We must be critical of any
tendency to think of some ‘authentic’ mode of listening
that occurs in an unmediated fashion as we conduct our
lives in the ‘real world’. In light of Clarke’s earlier
comments, electroacoustic practice and theory can be
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guilty of a tendency towards an imagined (or even
idealised) listener, a solitary figure or audient, rather
than a social and cultural being (or member of an
audience). That the interpretation central to acousmatic
listening draws on our experience of the world as we
have lived it is clearly crucial to this musical practice, but
I do not see that it can claim distinctive or special theore-
tical status within our study of this music. In other
perceptual modalities it occurs when we attend a visual
art exhibition, poetry reading or cinema and so on.
5. MUSICAL TOPICS AND THE INTRA- AND
EXTRA-MUSICAL
Some semiotic studies of eighteenth-century (and other)
music have demonstrated the inadequacy of received
notions of intra-musical and extra-musical. Approaches
to musical ‘topics’ or archetypes demonstrate how
specific and potentially illuminating intertextual rela-
tionships between musical materials and other modes of
cultural representation can be. Topic theory first
appeared in Leonard Ratner’s Classic Music (Ratner
1980). As with ecological perceptual theory and much
work within electroacoustic studies, the concept of
‘material’ takes precedence over individual musical or
acoustic ‘parameters’. This material is culturally and
historically charged, existing within complex networks
in society and across artistic modes. Informed by
Peircean semiotics, musical material could move from
the iconic (where it might resemble something) to the
symbolic if its use became conventional, or a cultural
‘code’. Within the eighteenth century, Ratner identified
twenty-seven possible topics, including, Sturm und
Drang, pastoral, Mannheim rocket, hunt style, singing
style, fanfare. The topical approach has been adopted
and developed by several writers. Kofi Agawu, in his
book Playing With Signs writes:
My aim is not so much to effect a reconciliation between
structure and the morphology of expression as to present
a semiotic framework that not only accommodates but
insists on the mutual interaction between the two. It is in
the interaction between topical signs and structural signs,
a notion that might be described in terms of play, that the
essence of my theory lies.
To establish this model, we need to introduce a critical
term deriving from Roman Jakobson: this is the
distinction between ‘introversive semiosis’ and ‘extrover-
sive semiosis’ … By introversive semiosis, Jakobson
means ‘the reference of each sonic element to the other
elements to come’ (and presumably to those that have
come before), while ‘extroversive semiosis’ denotes ‘the
referential link with the exterior world’. (Agawu 1991)
Agawu effectively achieves his aim in now widely cited
analyses of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. He makes a
convincing case that the conventional dichotomy
between intra- and extra-musical is, at best, a highly
problematic one.
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Interpretation and musical signification 119
Stéphane Roy, in a fine analysis of Francis
Dhomont’s acousmatic work Points de fuite (Roy
1996), adopts the methods of implicative analysis
proposed by Leonard Meyer (see Meyer 1973). He
successfully considers the relationship between ‘anec-
dotal’ and more abstract material within the structuring
principles and poetic concerns of the piece. However, I
find it problematic that in such a piece this anecdotal
material is labelled as ‘extra-musical’. The anecdotal
material is certainly intended to signify sentiments and
concepts in the world ‘exterior’ to that of the piece. But
this material is central to the musical argument of the
work, and is therefore just as ‘musical’ as the more
abstract content. My argument here is, of course, based
on the idea that ‘musical’ could be defined as ‘mean-
ingful’. Perhaps the thinking behind Agawu’s consid-
eration of the Classical repertoire may have something
to offer to how we consider the status of sonic materials
within acousmatic works. The mutualism Agawu
demonstrates is, it seems to me, just as relevant in the
musical workings of a composer such as Dhomont, and
to the way in which some intersubjective common
ground might exist in the way his music is listened to.
Raymond Monelle also extensively developed topic
theory, illustrating the potential for incredible nuance
within intertextual archetypes: the horse in instrumental
music taking noble, military, hunting, Medieval
romance, and chivalric forms; at one moment featuring
as an integral part of social life, at another functioning
as a metonym for the road, at another implicating issues
of gender. The search for topics and the comparative
techniques used in their elucidation can take an open-
ended nature, and so even though the idea of conven-
tional signs may not be as obvious in the acousmatic
repertoire as it is in the Classical, topical investigations
could provide another useful model for addressing
Camillieri and Smalley’s requirement of analysis. This
would include investigating a mode of thinking that
involves introversive and extroversive semiosis in a
mutualism and seeks concrete intertextual networks
that are analytically demonstrable. The musical
mechanics by which intertextuality may operate in
acousmatic work may differ considerably from the
conventions of the Classical and Romantic eras but this
should not invalidate the approach. Acousmatic music
may exhibit established topical themes (the ‘pastoral’
springs immediately to mind, notwithstanding the
radically different manner in which this might be
signified) and even though we are not strictly speaking
with ‘codes’ it could be perfectly possible to find new
musical topics in this music.
An obvious starting place in the search for ways in
which sound may function as sign is to consider
connections between musical works themselves in these
terms. This analytical approach has been surprisingly
uncommon in the study of the acousmatic repertoire.
One author who has previously suggested a theoretical
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 120 Simon Atkinson
model for this is Mathew Adkins. Adkins has adapted
the Lacanian concept of the signifying ‘chain’ and
paired it with the concept of ‘affordance’ from Gibson
and adapted by Windsor and Clarke. In this context,
Adkins discusses the relationship between the ‘sounding
object’ and ‘sound object’ in the search for meaning
within and between acousmatic works. The author gives
the example of Francis Dhomont’s Novars where
Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame and Schaeffer’s
Etude aux objets are quoted, and Henry’s Variations
sur une porte et un soupir is invoked through the use of a
particular sound object, a door. It is worth noting that in
development of his model, Adkins adopts and develops
a distinctly un-Schaefferian point-of-view that the
perception of the sounding object takes primacy over
the perception of the sound object.
Acoustic chains may … form when a similar affordance is
stimulated even though the sounding object is not exactly
the same in the respective works. Such instances occur
when generic environments are presented within an
acousmatic context. Although specific elements within
these environments may differ, it is the recognition of
similar geographical locations, temperature, wildlife, or
presence of technology within a given environment that
stimulates the assigning of similar affordance. The
primacy of the signifier and the acoustic chain it
engenders has to be accounted for by a composer if the
poietic and esthesic aspects of a work are to result in
similar signification (Adkins 1999).
In what is an assimilation of concepts of Gibson and
Lacan into Smalley’s spectromorphological theory,
Adkins’ ‘acoustic chains’ begin to form when a
sounding object is perceived in two or more acousmatic
listening situations. This could happen equally with
concrete or abstract material or the presentation of
similar sonic ‘environments’. In a wide-ranging search
for a similar environment-type across works, he writes:
An extended acoustic chain can be perceived through the
presentation within the acousmatic context of a con-
stellation of what may be termed homologous environ-
ments. Sud by Jean-Claude Risset, Hot Air by Jonty
Harrison, Signé Dionysos by Francis Dhomont, Tangram
by Robert Normandeau, Near and Far by David
Lumsdaine, Children’s Corner by Yves Daoust, La
Création du Monde by Bernard Parmegiani, Associations
Libres by Gilles Gobeil, Les Couleurs de la Nuit by
François Bayle, La Disparition by Christian Calon and
VIT from Life Forms by the Future Sound of London all
present a similar ‘nocturnal’ or ‘tropical’ environment.
Even though the signified meaning of the homologous
environments in the above works engenders different
affordances in each of the above works it is the initial
perception of the signifier that links them in this acoustic
chain. (ibid.)
Further to the implications here regarding the impor-
tance of the sounding object over the sound object,
having established these connections, further nuance
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regarding differences in both how the environments are
manifest within the structural logic of the work, and any
specific signifying implications in broader cultural terms
could tell us more about the ways in which their
appearance might be interpreted (i.e. enable us to
consider the individual work’s meanings in an inter-
textual framework). Moreover, the nocturnal in acous-
matic listening would seem to offer rich potential for
treatment as a musical topic.
6. SUMMARY
In spectromorphological theory we still seem to have far
more sophisticated theoretical and analytical concepts
for dealing with what Smalley calls the interactive
(where linguistic semiotic concepts, amongst others,
would seem to be of some use) than we do for the
indicative.6 Earlier in time, Schaeffer’s category of
Comprendre must surely imply that sounds might signify
beyond the specific sound world of an individual piece
of musique concrète and that the consideration of
signification must extend beyond the sound object to
its proper musical context, in terms of both the
interactive and indicative? Adkins’ model suggested
that the sounding object takes precedence over the
sound object in our search for relations between works.
Over time, emphasis in work in post-Schaefferian music
theory has shifted from a predominant concern for the
interactive to an increasing acknowledgement of the
indicative, and we seem to currently witness a context in
which the various manifestations of terms relating to the
abstract and non abstract (and that owe varying debts
to Schaeffer) exhibit a degree of freedom, elasticity and
flexibility. In the indicative realm, the idea that the
loudspeaker can act as a window on a mysterious thing
called the ‘real world’ is problematic. The use of sound
recordings of environmental sounds is neither techno-
logically ‘transparent’, nor simply denotation. The fact
that I might perceive the sound of rain does not seem of
itself enough to tell me anything about musical meaning.
In the interactive realm, the concept of ‘reduced
listening’ is typically described as the direction of
attention ‘to the sound itself’ without regarding it as a
vehicle of signification. Of course, it does not follow that
nothing is signified through reduced listening.
Smalley’s account of the indicative and interactive is
not dissimilar to the idea of introversive and extrover-
sive semiosis mentioned earlier. Smalley himself makes
the connection between the beginning-continuing-end-
ing approach of both spectromorphological interactive
6
Smalley describes his terms as follows: ‘In an indicative relationship
the listener, in responding to the object of perception refers to a
range of phenomena outside the work; this indicative process,
prompted by the object of perception, can embrace real/imagined
sources and causes detected in the work, as well as more fanciful
and autobiographical listener constructs. The interactive relation-
ship, which embraces reduced listening, involves active exploration
of sonic qualities of the object of perception’ (Smalley 1999).
IP address: 128.83.234.76

discourse and the approach to introversive semiosis
illustrated in Agawu’s Playing With Signs. His emphasis
on pertinence and listening strategy shares much
common ground with the work of Clarke and
Windsor. In discussing the evolution of spectromophol-
ogy, he also writes:
My elaborations of ‘motion and growth processes’, of
‘behaviour’ and of ‘structural functions’, were conceived
of as relational frameworks for considering the musical
context, and I now think that they are best understood as
metaphorical mappings which might simultaneously
embody intrinsic and extrinsic views. (Smalley 1999)
When considered as a semiotic system, music presents a
challenge precisely because of its richness, complexity,
and diversity of signifying potential. Electroacoustic
music can genuinely claim to have added to this in its
diversification of materials and discursive modes.
Acousmatic music poses new challenges in the manner
in which it can represent through its integral basis in
sound recording and reproduction, modes of represen-
tation that go beyond our traditional understanding of
the term in musical contexts.
I have suggested that the primary questions relate not
to whether music means anything but to the challenges
posed through attempting to elucidate and articulate
this through language. Considering how sound could be
approached from the point of view of how it might
stand for something appears to problematise the
distinction between intra- and extra-musical as it
manifests itself in acousmatic music. Rather than invent
further theoretical terminology that enforces the tradi-
tional dichotomy between intra- and extra-musical, a
useful task would be to develop terminology that defines
a more rigorous (and analytically usable) taxonomy of
ways in which sounds and their structural organisation
can exist as signs (stand for something else for someone)
in acousmatic listening. There exist two seemingly
obvious starting points for such a project, the literary
model of tropology and the sign taxonomy of Peirce.
The former can, of course, acknowledge the inherent
differences between words and musical sound as
signifiers, not least to do with the differing temporalities
in which they are used in the poietic plane and
experienced in the esthesic. Neither starting point
should necessarily discount any developments in this
regard made through direct observation or insight. The
topical approach developed by some provides a useful
reference point in considering acousmatic ‘texts’ in
relation to broader cultural ‘texts’, and certainly wider
use of comparative analytical approaches may have
much to offer in understanding sounds-as-signs and in
attempting to ‘reconcile and relate the internal world of
the work with the ‘outside’ world of sonic and non-sonic
experience’ (Camilleri and Smalley 1998). We may well
learn more about this music by looking rather further
‘outside’ of it. Topical approaches may teach that
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Interpretation and musical signification 121
danger lies in conceiving of ‘purely’ musical significa-
tion, which seems to be what lies behind approaches
based upon pitting the abstract against the non-
abstract. All musical signification operates in relation
to our embodied selves existing within cultural contexts.
Considering the idea of ‘communication’ in relation to
music, any behaviour of any sound can act as a ‘carrier’
of ‘information’. An apparently abstract musical event
can signify through our interpretation of it relating to a
kinaesthetic phenomenon, or indexically signifying a
certain manner of time passing, or both. Work,
particularly since the 1990s, that has been developed
with great theoretical sophistication in relation to other
musical practices (classical music and popular culture in
particular) may provide us with models and starting
points for rigorous semantically concerned (or ‘soft
semiotics’ as Monelle has called it) approaches to
acousmatic listening, that foreground such listening as a
culturally charged interpretative act. Such an attitude
may well assist in the development of our understanding
of ‘pertinence’ within spectromorphological thinking,
the question ‘what is there to hear?’ in ecologically
inspired thinking and in achieving a greater degree of
sophistication in considering electroacoustic practice as
representational.
This is by nature a theoretically preoccupied piece,
that has drawn on diverse (and sometimes seemingly
contradictory sources) and I hope that it does not seem
excessively abstract. In future work I shall endeavour to
demonstrate how some of these ideas might work in
practice in relation to this music (and listening) itself.
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