What You Hear Is Where You Are

Linda-Ruth Salter deals with the ways in which hearing contributes to the realities we create and within which we live. Discussing different cognitive theories and findings from neuroscience, she details how sensory data—specifically auditory stimuli—are processed, and how this processing activates imagination in determining who we are, how we are, and where we are. Reality, Salter argues, is a cognitive construct. Hearing plays a significant part in forming that reality—for example, by guiding our attention to certain stimuli rather than others—and it further helps us to successfully inhabit our constructed reality.

Presence, Environment, and Sound and the Role of Imagination

Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard addresses the role of sound in the creation of presence in virtual and actual worlds. He argues that imagination is a central part of the generation and selection of perceptual hypotheses—models of the world in which we can act—that emerge from what Grimshaw-Aagaard calls the “exo-environment” (the sensory input) and the “endo-environment” (the cognitive input). Grimshaw-Aagaard further divides the exo-environment into a primarily auditory and a primarily visual dimension and he deals with the actual world of his own apartment and the virtual world of first-person-shooter computer games in order to exemplify how we perceptually construct an environment that allows for the creation of presence.

Imagining Acoustic Spaces through Listening and Acoustic Ecology

Using the concept of acoustic ecology as his bulwark, Barry Truax theorizes listening as an embodied interface to our auditory environment. Acoustic spaces, Truax argues, should be understood as simultaneously real and imagined, and he discusses how such forms of dual perception exist in both everyday soundscapes and technologically mediated soundscapes. He contends that memory, imagining, and anticipation are closely connected to all stages of listening. These aspects of listening are further used to explore and define what Truax calls the “acoustic community”—that soundscape that emerges as a product of collective individual imagination.

The Listener’s Choice

Ola Stockfelt theorizes listening through discussion of a number of personal cases, such as listening sessions in his car and his observations during film music teaching sessions. Stockfelt suggests that meaning comes before hearing sounds. Listening involves listening for confirmation of what you already know and this allows us to complete the gestalt of a sound even when the full auditory signal is not present. Hearing something, Stockfelt argues, is a cultural conception of reality, and we usually merely imagine that we heard sounds first, whereas we really experienced meaning. The idea that we listen through meaning rather than listen for meaning is further illustrated in studies of storytelling in documentary films.

Imagining Sonic Stories

Sonic narratives are the subject of Vincent Meelberg’s chapter, in which he discusses the capacity of sound not only to trigger narratives but also to tell stories that unfold over time. Meelberg uses his own sound collage work as an example of how narratives can be created through a sequence of sounds. He argues that sonic narratives emerge when the sequence of sounds represents a temporal development. Examples are provided that show how this temporal development emerges from either the referential qualities (hearing a succession of concrete events) or the acoustic qualities (e.g., the succession of tension and release) of the sound.

Opera and the South African Political

Christopher Ballantine’s focus is on timbre, in particular the timbre of the singing voice, and how this combines with the imagination to create meaning. His investigation is largely philosophical; but the growth in popularity of opera in post-apartheid South Africa provides empirical means for Ballantine to indicate this powerful but analytically neglected way of creating meaning in the performance of music. His case study shows how timbre can produce musical experiences that have a particular, and often surprising, resonance. Through interviews with leading figures in South African opera, Ballantine demonstrates that timbre is a vital wellspring of imagined meaning; it should especially be seen thus if we seek to understand the singing voice in a sociopolitical context such as that of South Africa during and after apartheid.

Musical Preferences and the Imagined Self

Alexandra Lamont discusses how musical preferences are a way to construct, reconstruct, and communicate a sense of identity, indicating aspects of personality, attitudes, and lifestyle. She reviews recent research demonstrating how musical preferences can provide information about age, gender, and personality. In addition to the social dimension, she also touches on aspects of personal musical identity that are developed through imagination. Lamont furthermore considers our imagined relationships with the music itself and the musicians responsible for creating and performing it, taking a lifespan perspective from childhood and adolescence through to old age.

Imagining Sound as the Absolute

Saam Trivedi ponders the Sangita Ratnakara by the Ayurveda physician Sarangadeva. In this thirteenth-century manuscript, Sarangadeva asserts that Sound, identical to the Absolute, is the only fundamental thing in the universe and that all other things are illusory or, at best, some derivative or other manifestation of Sound. While the twenty-first century, non-monist Trivedi is critical of this claim, he finds much to be fascinated by, and, in his dissection of the main points of the Sangita Ratnakara, he offers the reader an imagining of sonic monism that, while far-removed from the orthodoxy of today’s acoustics and natural sciences, might one day come to be seen as inspiration for the latest scientific ideas concerning sound.

Auditory Imagination

Daniel Schmicking explores auditory imagination from a phenomenological perspective. He starts with an outline of phenomenological tools building mainly on Husserl’s thinking, and then sets out to analyze the structure of auditory imagination and its function in collaborative music-making. In his account of the workings of auditory imagination, Schmicking challenges the traditional Western notion of imagination as something private. A central part of Schmicking’s account of auditory imagination comprises a distinction between pure and weak forms of imagination, and this distinction is further used to explore how imagination contributes to other intentional forms, such as perception and memory.

The Sound of an Endless Column

Zohar Eitan and Hila Tamir-Ostrover start their chapter with a survey of existing empirical studies of sound-space mappings—in particular, pitch/spatial height associations. Using Ligeti’s Endless Column as a case, they exemplify how music might challenge these mappings by pointing out contradictions in the associative link between the auditory dimension and spatial and motion features. These contradictions, the authors argue, on the one hand can illustrate novel opportunities for composers to use music-space correspondences to create paradoxical spaces while, on the other hand, could demonstrate how the music-space correspondence revealed by empirical research could be used in the analysis of music.