The Place of Listening

John Puterbaugh, 1999

In geography, a distinction is made between place and location. A location is a point in space designated by some set of objective, pre-defined criteria or convention. For example, Princeton, New Jersey is located in the Western Hemisphere at 40.5 degrees latitude and 74.3 degrees longitude, or the Red Top diner is located two miles south of the train station on Route 20. In other words, location is essentially a set of functional relations (See Entrikin 1991). The world of functional locations is the physical world where scientific theorizing takes place; a world which Thomas Nagel (1987) refers to as a view from nowhere.
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Place, however, captures the specificity and subjectivity of location. My house is much more than a location. It is a place that is infused with meaning and context. According the Entrikin (1991), “the concept of specific places draws attention to the relationship between particularization and universalizing discourses and between subjective and objective perspectives” (Entrikin 1991, p. 6). In order to tie places together – to find similarities between places – one abstracts commonalities. Repeated abstraction of place results in turning the notion of place, as a specific situated context, into what becomes location. For example, timbre spaces result from turning the specifics of space (place as context) to generic space (place as location).

The timbre spaces produced by, for example, multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) studies attempt to create a view from nowhere out of a set of judgements. MDS is successful because the context is so limited. MDS studies control both sides of the formation of these spaces. On the one hand, the stimulus is controlled – single tones are carefully constructed with a specific duration, pitch, loudness, and an exact number of harmonics. On the other hand, the classifications of judgements are reduced to a numeric scale that must correlate with the perceived dissimilarity between pairs of sounds. Although the resulting information provides insight on how listeners make pair-wise judgements in confined situations, it does not capture important aspects of the particular timbres involved.

Because the notion of place (subjectivity) is so personal it resists any attempt at naming or describing its quality.

The fact that a quality cannot be named does not mean that it is vague
or imprecise. It is impossible to name because it’s unerringly precise.
Words fail to capture it because it is much more precise than words.
The quality itself is sharp, exact, with no looseness in it whatsoever.
But each word you choose to capture it has fuzzy edges and extensions
which blur the central meaning of the quality (Alexander 1979, p. 29).

This is one problem with describing what and how we as individuals hear the sonic world – the ineffable quality of sound and music. Place is the space of subjectivity, the ineffable world of quality. Location is the space of objectivity, the generic world driven by abstraction and functionality. Understanding timbre involves choosing a standpoint between location and place.

Alexander, C. (1979) The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford University Press.

Entrikin, J.N. (1991) The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Nagel, T. (1986) The View From Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press.