Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper investigates the way that sound art and musique concrète from the last quarter of the twentieth century represent, create, and play with a couple forms of authenticity: the representation of the natural world and the representation of exotic locales. I begin with Francisco López’s La Selva (1997), which culls acoustic phenomena from the Costa Rican rainforest in order, on the artist’s reading, to produce a perfectly acousmatic sound-world. Acousmatic sound, according to Michel Chion and Pierre Schaeffer, is “pure sound” in the sense that we listen to it without reference to the source that produced it. For López, the particular acoustic qualities of the rainforest—the multi-dimensional nature of its jungle canopy, its many reverberant and resonant surfaces, and the way its exuberant flora masks the provenances of sonic phenomena—divorce the rainforest’s sounds from any particular location. (“This is not la selva [the rainforest],” López pronounces in an auto-critical essay, echoing Magritte.) However, my interpretation of La Selva runs against the grain of the artist’s understanding of the piece. Far from categorically transcending “causal listening” in favor of acousmatic listening, I attempt to show, La Selva ultimately puts into question dichotomous understandings of these forms of sound perception, suggesting that they are not mutually exclusive but rather continuous and richly dynamic. The essay then marshals these insights in order to reflect on other, previous works, including François Bayle’s Tremblements de terre très doux (1978) and various versions of Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien (1977, 1989).