Sonopoietic Space

John Puterbaugh, 1999

We do not hear sound as simply inhabiting physical space. Instead, we construct a space through listening. Both the physical sound and the listener contribute to building this space of listening. For example, the space of Chopin’s preludes does not produce the same space as Scott Joplin’s Heliotrope Bouquet; John Zorn’s Naked City does not take place in the same space as Bill Evan’s A Simple Matter of Conviction. The space of listening is not merely the location of sound objects within some three-dimensional environment – a Cartesian space where everything can be located on a uniform grid. It is rather determined by (i) pitch, spectral quality, and duration of the sounds that give rise to different perceptions of volume and size; (ii) thematic relations between sounds being close to one another, above one another, occurring at the same time as one another, after one another and; (iii) particular tones used within a piece to stimulate the resonances of a room in a specific manner. Our sense of space also changes with respect to musical style and genre. Most importantly, the space of listening is inexorably bound to timbre.

Timbre cannot exist in physical space. The timbres contained in our space of listening are created by our interaction with the environment. For example, the nerve firings along the auditory pathway are simultaneously excited by sound waves from the physical world and other nerve firings originating from different portions of the brain. Maturana and Varela make a similar case for vision, stating that “... our experience is moored to our structure in a binding way. We do not see the space of the world; we live our field of vision. We do not see the colors of the world; we live our chromatic space” (Maturana and Varela 1987, p. 23). In addition to the chromatic space of color, we live in the sonopoietic space of sound. Inspired by Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis, I coined the term sonopoiesis by combining the Greek sono- (sound) and poiesis (creation, production). Sonopoietic space is the space of listening that we create through the act of listening to sound. Just as we create and live in visually constructed spaces, we similarly create sonically constructed spaces. These spaces are customized by us for specific purposes and necessarily bear our imprint. We are coupled to our environment and change our responses to sounds as we interact with them.

To encompass such a view of visual or sonic space, the notion of space must be defined more generally, such that “space is the domain of all possible interactions of a collection of unities (simple, or composite that interact as unities) that the properties of these unities establish by specifying its dimensions” (Maturana and Varela 1978, p. 33). Unities are formed by making distinctions. And listening is simply making distinctions in sound. Distinctions, made implicitly or explicitly, reveal assumptions that we, as listeners, make about the world that we experience. In making these distinctions we indicate our dispositions – the specification of our perceived differences and similarities in the world. These distinctions become the basis of how we record the threads of our experience, form similarities, make generalizations and build larger structures and groupings out of our experience – how we construct our sonopoietic spaces. Every time we make new distinctions we add detail and dimensions to this sonopoietic space.

It is beyond the scope of this work, but research in other types of spaces reveal underlying rules that apply to particular (sonopoietic) spaces. Fauconnier (1994) has established such rules for how grammatical constructors (e.g., prepositional phrases) build what he refers to as mental spaces. Similar to sonopoietic space, instead mental spaces donot have an ontological status outside the mind (See Lakoff 1987). Mental spaces are the medium for thought. The notion that there might be rules governing the construction of sonopoietic spaces was inspired by Shepard’s (1981) discussion of the way we use metaphorical extension of spaces. Shepard (1981) points out that we do not accept interchanges between locatives when describing concepts in spatial terms. Locatives are prepositions that function similarly to Fauconnier’s space-builders – they construct a particular space and the relationships between entities within that space. For example, an interior locative in (e.g., in the key of G) cannot be replaced by the surface locative on (e.g., variation on a theme). We do not say that something is on the key of G or that someone is playing a variation in a theme by Bach. Similarly, we do not use on in place of the simple locative at when referring to an event occuring at measure five. It is beyond the scope of this work to determine to what extent these relations are simply by-products of language or whether they are governed by the way in which we represent a particular space of listening.

Fauconnier, G. (1985) Mental Spaces. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Lakoff, G. (1987) Woman, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Maturana, H.R. and Varela, F.J. (1987) The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambhala.

Shepard, R.H. (1981) Psychophysical complementarity. In Kubovy, M. and Pomerantz, J. (Eds.) Perceptual Organization. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.