Music Book Review: Sound Actions - Conceptualizing Musical Instruments by Alexander Refsum Jensenius

Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments
by Alexander Refsum Jensenius (Music 781.11 Jen)

In our era of rapidly-evolving technology, one would expect that the music world would be enjoying some fascinating new directions made possible by new musical inventions. If we look at a wider range of time, that’s definitely true: synthesizers in particular dramatically expanded the possibilities for music over the last 50 years or so, and recording technology has moved forward by leaps and bounds in that same range of time. However, advancements in musical instruments themselves have moved relatively slower, especially in recent years. The primary orchestral instruments have changed very little in the last several centuries, and the electric and electronic instruments of the last century largely imitate the core designs of acoustic instruments that came before them. Despite the wide range of new sonic possibilities afforded to musicians through synthesizers, for example, the overwhelmingly most common interface for playing synths remains the keyboard, relatively unchanged in design since the early clavichord instruments of the Renaissance era.

 

From a musicians’ perspective, this all makes sense—the time and effort invested in learning to perform on a keyboard makes it possible for musicians to express themselves easily on all kinds of instruments that feature a keyboard interface, while other kinds of interfaces could create a new learning curve. But what if new interfaces could offer new kinds of musical possibilities that are hard to even conceptualize through the lens of our usual strings and horns and percussion? A new book published by MIT Press raised this question for me. It’s called Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments by Alexander Refsum Jensenius, and you can borrow it from the Polley Music Library.

 

The author of this book, Dr. Jensenius, has spent much of his career at the University of Oslo, where he has been a music technology instructor and also was briefly the director of their musicology department. He is currently the deputy director of RITMO at the University, which stands for “rhythm, time and motion,” a program that investigates various ways that rhythm influences our thinking and behavior. In “Sound Actions,” he uses these knowledge areas to break music down to a unique set of constituent parts that can help all of us to consider new approaches to music. In some ways, the book reads as a kind of applied philosophy book: Jensenius introduces a set of terms, defines the terms, and then uses them to analyze how music-making works from fresh perspectives, which often suggest new kinds of musical interfaces we might try. And he gives us his “conclusion” in the Prelude of the book, which is refreshingly simple: “Relationships between actions and sounds are at the core of music making. Consequently, such relationships should form the basis for thinking about music.”

 

As we jump into the main body of the book, the first important term introduced is “musicking.” This is a subtle but important distinction from other near-synonyms like “music-making” or “thinking about music,” in that it’s presented as a form of interaction with music that is always active. Jensenius looks at a number of roles involved along the chain of music creation, from creating instruments to composing, performing and listening, and then looks at these roles from several different perspectives: are they happening in real time as music is being made? Is their nature fundamentally about creation of music, or is it more experiential? And new musical technologies create new roles, such as the producer in many recorded and even live music settings. There are many levels of analysis that can be applied to all of these musicking roles, too, from cognitive issues like the speed or latency of our perception to social and cultural perspectives.

 

Next, Jensenius discusses the “embodiment” of music, or literally how music relates to the human body. Again there are so many perspectives to consider: our physical gestures and actions create music, our bodies perceive the results, we’re sometimes motivated to respond to music with our bodies through activities like dancing, and so forth. Here, we’re approaching the title of the book conceptually: from one particularly distilled perspective, musical activity can be thought of as a series of “sound actions,” physical gestures of musicking. These thoughts are followed by a chapter on the nature of musical instruments. Defining these proves to be somewhat difficult, in part because we generally think of musical instruments as some kind of “technology” with physical form that has been manipulated to better serve our musical purposes. But it’s also true that many natural items have been used to make music just as they are, and that forms of technology made for other uses have been used as musical instruments. Some of our instruments are already part of us, anyway: the human voice is probably the earliest “instrument” by most measurements. Jensenius settles on a definition borrowed from the Grove Music Dictionary: “Vehicle for exploring and expressing musical ideas and feelings through sound.”

 

At this point, the focus turns to those “sound actions” directly, or “music-related body motion” at its most elementary form. Looking at these concepts at this granular level, where human motions are put into service to impart forces on objects which then produce sounds, gives us an opportunity to reconsider both the design of these objects and the nature of the movements we’ve been using to stimulate them. These concepts even spill over into areas like music notation in the following chapters, which is just one of many potential forms of producing “representations” of “sound actions.” By this point, readers will have made it roughly halfway into the book, and while all of this jargon might feel unnecessary, it’s giving us a precise point from which to start conceptualizing future musical instruments. Hang in there! The next section discusses “action-sound couplings,” which is where we start getting into the nuts and bolts of how various human motions work with objects to create different kinds of sounds, and how adjustments to those motions can produce musically useful variations in the sounds such as different volumes, textures, or durations. And this is further amplified by a chapter on “action sound mappings,” which takes the information implied from the “couplings” area which is useful for acoustic instrument design into the area of electroacoustic instrument design. That is, the final sounds being produced in an electroacoustic musical situation, such as a synthesizer, might be coming from a slightly less-direct motion/sound relationship than “coupling” describes, but we can organize a series of related actions into a “mapping” that serves as an intuitive or logical interface between our motions and the sounds that can be produced by such an instrument.

 

The final chapters of the book continue to hone in on how different aspects of modern technology can be applied to music situations. Computing and digital modeling introduce new possibilities that can lead to new interface concepts. Both analog and digital technologies can create the opportunity for new kinds of spatial relationships between musicians, or between musicians and their instruments. Toward the end, many of these concepts are applied to “unconventional instruments,” which can be made of all kinds of shapes and sizes, and sometimes played by multiple performers. Gestures in the air can be made into music. Brainwave activity can be made into music. And if we keep a space open for ourselves to think about new technology from elemental perspectives, we may continue to find all kinds of fascinating new ways to make music!

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Science of Music: How Technology has Shaped the Evolution of an Artform by Andrew May or Sound Inventions: Selected Articles from Experimental Musical Instruments edited by Bart Hopkin.)

 

( official Alexander Refsum Jensenius blog )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

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