Freak out! At the acousmonium: François Bayle and the dynamics of the subject

Abstract

French electroacoustic music in the post-war decades has typically been associated with a high modernism that spurned popular or mass culture. This article situates electroacoustic music in the late 1960s and 1970s in relation to the transformation of the cultural field in this period, which unsettled clear divisions between high and low cultures. Attending in particular to the question of subjectivity as it appears in the theoretical writings of the composers Pierre Schaeffer and François Bayle, the article aligns Bayle's thinking with that of contemporary writers including Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, who launched a critique of the Enlightenment subject. This theoretical nexus suggests that Bayle's L’Expérience acoustique (1969–1972) posits a form of subjectivity closer to the psychedelic counterculture than to the sober listening of Schaeffer's writings. In unsettling the Schaefferian listening subject, the piece opens itself to a heterogeneous listening, the social consequences of which remain significant today.

Keywords

electroacoustic music counterculture subjectivity psychedelia poststructuralism cybernetics

Have you, yourself, made explorations with the intention of arriving at states of consciousness other than the normal or habitual states? Could sounds not be used as hallucinogens?

– Audience member to Pierre Schaeffer (Schaeffer, 1968: 288).

The musical activities of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM), founded in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer, have frequently been aligned with a post-war high modernism that, like Schaeffer's contemporary Pierre Boulez, disdained popular culture and counterculture and inoculated itself against their influence through appeals to science and technical progress.¹ Though such an account may capture something of Schaeffer's programme of ‘music research’, by the mid-1960s a young intake raised on John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and jazz were developing a set of practices and aesthetics that shared less with the sober concentration of a scientist (or structural linguist) of sound than with the hallucinogenic psychedelia of the counterculture.² This was, on one level, a reckoning of electroacoustic music with its mass-cultural preconditions (radio and records, for example), but it was also, by extension, an encounter with the plurality of subject positions outside an elite cultural field, and an encounter with shifts that placed in question the subject itself as a normative category for cultural experience. Grappling with electroacoustic music's uncertain and contested cultural positions in the tumultuous period around 1968 opens the music to hearings that are obstructed by conventional accounts of post-war musical modernism.

This article draws together several overlapping assaults on the Enlightenment subject to illuminate the forms of agency and perspective operative in L’Expérience acoustique (1969–1972), by François Bayle, the director of the GRM from 1966. These critiques include that of the composer in post-Cagean experimentalism, cybernetic or systems theory's displacement of the monadic subject with an ecology or system, and the counterculture's psychedelic critique of the stultifying subjectivity of dominant culture. Through the 1960s and 1970s, such critiques, and the social and cultural changes that conditioned them, rendered the model of the Cartesian subject in the full command of its senses on which Schaeffer's theories were founded increasingly untenable. Bayle's theoretical reflection and musical practice, I argue in what follows, elaborate a form of subjectivity at odds with Schaeffer's specialist listener.

Electroacoustic music in the expanded field

By the end of the 1960s, the cultural field had undergone a profound transformation that unsettled conventional boundaries between high and low. The straightforward dichotomy between mass culture and ‘cultivated’ culture, the sociologists Paul Beaud and Alfred Willener argued in the early 1970s, could no longer account for a new ‘pluralism of reception’ (Beaud and Willener, 1973: 13). That reception, the critic Denys Lemery argued in 1969, adhered to a single principle: ‘openness, or even naivety. To like is to understand’ (Lemery, 1969: 25; cf. Lemery, 1971). The ‘transverse jumps across the cultural field’, in Benjamin Piekut's phrase, were closely related to changes in mass-cultural technologies, and in particular the dominance of the LP (Piekut, 2019: 399). The philosopher of music Daniel Charles described the convergence of experimental and popular musical practices in a ‘new orality’, a scriptural economy in which recorded sound displaced literate traditions of notation (Charles, 1978: 75).³ Such an orality could be said to have encompassed in the late 1960s the diverse practices of Tangerine Dream, Gong, Terry Riley, Miles Davis, Musica Elettronica Viva, and Karlheinz Stockhausen (Briggs, 2006; Keister, 2014; Piekut, 2019).

The cultural moment to which Lemery and Charles responded was the years following May 1968, an intensely politicised period in which the very character of the political was contested. Splitting from the orthodoxies of the French Communist Party, for example, for the soixante-huitards the front lines of political struggle were not necessarily limited to the confrontation between labour and capital, but extended to the terrain of sexuality, cultural production and everyday life. As such, as Chris Warne argues in relation to the magazine Actuel, perhaps the central rallying mouthpiece of the French underground from 1970, French counterculture saw its cultural subversions as moves on a political battlefield, rather than a retreat into the “merely” cultural (Warne, 2007).

The formation of a countercultural musical aesthetic in France owed a great deal to the reception of the British-based progressive rock acts Pink Floyd and Soft Machine. Among its distinguishing features, as Eric Drott notes, was its greater proximity to jazz—and free jazz—than its Anglo-American equivalent (Drott, 2011: 165), at a time when many important US jazz players were resident in France and Western Europe. Soft Machine had themselves emerged from the overlappings of free jazz, Beat poetry and performance art between London and Paris in the years before 1968. Daevid Allen, a founding member of the group, had been close to Terry Riley when the two lived in Paris in the early 1960s, where they performed and associated with a set that included Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. While in Paris, Riley continued his experiments with tape loops that had begun with Mescalin Mix (1960–1962), a piece inspired as much by hallucinogenics as by Cage's Fontana Mix (1958), and began to develop the delay system he dubbed the ‘time lag accumulator’ (Rizzardi, 2014).⁴ After Allen was denied re-entry to the UK in 1967, he founded the group Gong in Paris.

Around 1970, then, a range of electronic music practices had developed in France that drew freely on Terry Riley's repetitive music (as well as its Anglo-American resonances in the music of, for example, Soft Machine, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp), the free jazz of the Art Ensemble of Chicago or Archie Shepp and the kosmische rock developing in West Germany. Recordings such as Heldon's Électronique guerilla (1974) or Philippe Besombes and Jean-Louis Rizet's Pôle (1975) attest to a wide-ranging circulation of techniques, personnel and styles between cultural realms thought sealed from one another.

Electroacoustic music was, François Bayle argued in 1971, both a symptom and a motor of these cultural changes, numbering among the musics that emerged from ‘the “irruption” of machines, from the displacement of the cultural norms of the musician […], from the psychological displacement of the exchange values in musical communication (towards the impact of mass media), from the questioning of traditional settings and actions’ (Bayle, 1971: 71). Commentators and musicians including Jean-Pierre Lentin, Alfred Willener and Igor Wakhévitch aligned electroacoustic music's defamiliarisation of musical listening with the counterculture's radical critique of accepted social norms and categories (Lentin, 1973: 62; Nouvelles musicales de 23 juillet, 1970 ; Willener, 1970: 278n.2).

The boundaries of electroacoustic music itself were unclear, a state of affairs attributed by GRM composers in the mid-1970s to the proliferation of electroacoustic technology and to the generic confusion created by the electronic music practised by West German groups like Tangerine Dream. (Indeed, as the two instances of the word in the previous sentence confirm, the capaciousness of ‘electroacoustic’ music as a category—the complex of genre, institution and technology it indexed—was indeterminate.) Bayle noted two important facts about the years between 1967 and 1977:

The stretching of the ‘stylistic fabric’ of music that electroacoustics has stimulated, generated, or caused to degenerate, and which covers a very wide field, from the popular domain to the scholarly domain, passing from professionals to amateurs.

The coming revolution in the domain of access to music, in education both in school and elsewhere (Super-Nova, 1977: 22).⁵

These large-scale transformations coincided with more local institutional shifts. ‘Currently’, Bayle remarked in 1971, ‘things are changing’: Having completed the Traité des objets musicaux in 1966, Schaeffer almost entirely removed himself from the GRM, which as a consequence ‘exited the gravitational field of his personality’ and aimed anew, ‘by multiplying the points of observation’, at a ‘generalised conception of the musical fact’ (Bayle, 1971: 81; cf. Bayle, 2007a: 30). By the early 1970s, the GRM increasingly functioned as a composer's workshop rather than the acousmatic research facility that Schaeffer envisaged, and was, to his chagrin, ever more integrated with contemporary Parisian musical scenes (Gousseland, 1971; Schaeffer, 1971).

That electroacoustic music and countercultural rock operated in overlapping zones by the end of the 1960s is registered particularly strikingly in the involvement of members of Soft Machine in François Bayle's L’Expérience acoustique.⁶ Bayle in many ways embodied the sorts of cultural and intellectual concerns that decentred Schaeffer's project through the 1960s and 1970s. He was a fan of jazz, rock and post-surrealist literature, who from the early 1960s had composed instrumental works indebted to the experimentalism of Cage, Earle Brown and Sylvano Bussotti. The insurrectionary moment of May 1968 that was, at best, a source of bemusement to Schaeffer (and at worst the repugnant symptom of a sick society), was particularly significant to Bayle (Bayle, 2012b: 16; Chion and Vande Gorne, 1994: 38–65; Schaeffer, 1978: 202–203, 1970: 46).⁷

During a 1968 Soft Machine tour of France, Daevid Allen, Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers were invited to a recording session with Bayle, who, Allen suggests, had heard a radio play by Allen commissioned by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Planet Gong, 2005). The resulting recordings, eventually included in L’Expérience acoustique, included a driving guitar track in which Allen and Bayle accompanied one another, the latter on synthesiser, initially forming part of the soundtrack for Peter Foldes's short film La belle cérébrale (1968), produced at the Service de la recherche, the GRM's parent department within the French state broadcaster (Langlois, 2012; Peter Foldes, La belle cérébrale, n. d.).⁸ A later version, titled Solitioude, was published in 1970 on the Philips survey set Electronic Panorama: Paris, Tokyo, Utrecht, Warszawa, and combined the initial recordings with recordings of the demonstrations of May 1968 and The Mothers of Invention. Another recording was a version of Soft Machine's ‘We Did It Again’, performed by Wyatt and Ayers. This song, based on a bluesy two-note mantra, had appeared on Soft Machine's first album in 1968 and frequently formed the basis of extended improvisatory performances: one rendition in Paris in 1967 was reputed to have lasted 40 minutes (Daevid Allen, le Soft, la Lune et le Gong, 1969: 28). ‘It’, as the Bayle rendition was titled, sets Wyatt's stuttering polyphonic overdubs to a pulsing drone of an open fifth and a flat seventh, calling to mind the blues-drone of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Velvet Underground. However marginal this moment appears to later histories, Évelyne Gayou's characterisation of the piece as an ephemeral breach in the division between the avant-garde and popular music does not accurately reflect the porous and shifting character of the divide at this moment, particularly given Soft Machine's longstanding associations with figures such as Riley, Burroughs and Brion Gysin.⁹ Rather than a disjunctural montage that dramatises the impossibility of mediating its constituent parts, the recording indexes an encounter of shared, if internally diverse, approaches to electronic music (Gayou, 2007: 427; cf. Born, 1995: 21). As such, the commitment to trance-states, hallucination and vernacular surrealism of Soft Machine's contribution to L’Expérience acoustique offers a way into the theoretical and aesthetic dissensus of the GRM in the late 1960s.

Pierre Schaeffer and the subject

The sound object, the central theoretical object of Schaeffer's Traité des objets musicaux, is the artefact of a specialised and attentive listening, one capable of bracketing ordinary forms of listening so as to discover the nature of human perception underwriting existing particular musics. Schaeffer's theory is predicated on a practised and skilled listener, a listener who can function as the point of origin for a universal account of human listening in general. This is a listener who masters their habits and directs their attention to the morphological characteristics of sounds (Kane, 2012: 443; Schaeffer, 2017). Everyday listening is, Schaeffer argues, structured by the interactions between four listening modes: écouter or indexical listening, ouïr or passive reception, entendre or qualitative hearing, and comprendre or understanding. A form of listening that Schaeffer terms ‘reduced listening’, which attends to a pre-cultural sound in itself, provides access to the sound object, an ideal object that is constituted in the listening act and confirmed intersubjectively (Kaltenecker, 2012; Kane, 2014: 15–41; Schaeffer, 2017: 80–93, 103–18; Valiquet, 2017: 259).

Invoking the models of structural linguistics and phenomenology—though without assiduously adhering to either—Schaeffer's writing on sound begins and ends with a sharp distinction between subject and object, and insists on the capacity of a subject, properly prepared and skilled, to transcend their particularity and access the object in itself (Schaeffer, 1957: 26, 2017: 208–9, 2012: 91–93). In the face of, for example, post-Heideggerian phenomenology, Schaeffer insists that there is simply no escape from this dualism (Schaeffer in Charles, 1971: 95). The sound object is founded on listening as intention, entendre: as Kane has it, ‘a subject, possessing the capacity for attention, who wills its direction’ (Kane, 2012: 443; Schaeffer, 2017: 103–16). As Schaeffer explains to a student in a seminar at the Paris Conservatoire, to arrive at reduced listening ‘one must take a decision, choose a listening intention and an analytical attention’ (Pierret, 1969: 68). Schaeffer's ideal listener is frequently cast as a specialist, a professional and an initiate, a sovereign subject uniquely in command of their faculties (Schaeffer, 1951: 45, 2017: 88).

As Patrick Valiquet suggests, Schaeffer's commitment to a self-present, autonomous subject was rather out of step with the intellectual currents of France in the middle of the 1960s, when existing critiques of this subject from both existentialist and structuralist quarters were intensified in the writing of figures such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In the work of Jacques Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva and others from the mid-1960s onwards, an account of subjectivity emerged that was incommensurate with Schaeffer's. Where, for Schaeffer, ‘[b]odies, desires, and identities are completely evacuated, along with their sometimes turbulent social and political conditions’, as Valiquet has it, for these thinkers the subject was not a point of origin but a linguistic, and thus social, artefact (Valiquet, 2017: 276). Unlike the dry group listening sessions that formed the basis of Schaeffer's research, Barthes and Kristeva were drawn to those moments in which the subject's unity falters in experiences such as schizophrenia, sexual bliss and drug-taking.¹⁰

Troubling the subject

The opening salvoes of Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language describe the decentring and destabilisation of the Cartesian subject carried out by linguistics, semiotics, anthropology and psychoanalysis, which characterise the subject as the epiphenomenal effect of a process rather than an infallible ground (Kristeva, 1984: 14). Existing accounts of signification presuppose what is called into question by the theoretical innovations Kristeva lists, namely a unified, coherent subject who means or intends meaning, ‘cut off from its body, its unconscious and also its history’ (Kristeva, 1986: 28). Rather than a point of origin, then, the subject is preceded by the language system and the unconscious. The ‘thetic’ positioning of subject and object, aligned with Lacan's account of the child's entry into the Symbolic, is therefore not a given, but the outcome of a signifying process that exceeds this positioning. Such a theory of meaning is concerned with ‘that which produces, shapes, and exceeds the operating consciousness’, revealing what a ‘univocal, rational, scientific discourse’ hides (Kristeva, 1980: 131 and 135). This signifying process, or signifiance, consists in an ‘unlimited and unbounded generating process, […] [an] unceasing operation of the drives toward, in, and through language’ (Kristeva, 1984: 17, 1986: 28).

Skeptical, like Barthes, Derrida and others, of the structuralist account of communication, Kristeva sought to theorise utterances in which communication was scrambled. It was above all in avant-garde literary practices from the late nineteenth century onwards—in Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Joyce and Artaud—that Kristeva found an epochal subversion of linguistic order and subjectivation. Poetic language, Kristeva argued, is ‘an unsettling process […] of the identity of meaning and speaking subject’, introducing the heterogeneity of the psychic and the social into communication (Kristeva, 1980: 124–125). In setting in play the materiality of language, disrupting syntax and obscuring any clear meaning, ‘poetic mimesis maintains and transgresses thetic unicity by making it undergo a kind of anamnesis, by introducing into the thetic position the stream of semiotic drives and making it signify’. Such texts reveal the social, material and psychoanalytic preconditions of language and the subject, their unconscious texture. This is a texture structured by different signifying systems, such that a ‘“place” of enunciation and its denoted “object” are never single, complete, and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered, capable of being tabulated’ (Kristeva, 1984: 60).

Kristeva valorises an excess or heterogeneity to signification in various forms, invoking ‘music, dancing, painting’ as forms that reorder ‘the psychic drives which have not been harnessed by the dominant symbolization systems’ (Kristeva, 1986: 30). The introduction of ‘colors, sounds and gestures’—the material and social preconditions of meaning—into signification threatens clarity in favour of ‘wandering or fuzziness’, but is, in addition, the point at which novelty or the unthought arises in artistic practice (Kristeva, 1977: 132, 1980: 136). In unsettling the seemingly harmonious correspondence between subject and object, artistic practices that open themselves to signifiance usher in new forms of subjectivity, ‘capable of bringing about new social relations, and thus joining in the process of capitalism's subversion’ (Kristeva, 1984: 104–105). As such, Kristeva argues, they participate in a contestatory political movement, alongside ‘other phenomena of symbolic and social unrest (youth, drugs, women)’ (Kristeva, 1980: 140).

Similar arguments are advanced in the writings of Kristeva's contemporary, Jean-François Lyotard. Lyotard had been a student of the philosopher Mikel Dufrenne, and in his writing staged an encounter of phenomenology with psychoanalysis that shared much with Kristeva, Deleuze and Barthes. Lyotard theorises an unthinkable, unconscious outside of language and perception, a pre-predicative field which meaning both depends upon and excludes. Where Kristeva attended above all to literary examples, in Discourse, Figure (1971), Lyotard interprets visual art by Paul Klee, Paul Cézanne and others in support of his claims, noting the deconstruction of the visual “language” of European art since the Renaissance found in their work, which as such index the figural—an excessive conditioning outside to representation—in discourse (Lyotard, 2011).

In essays from the same period, Lyotard develops analogous readings of music by Luciano Berio and John Cage. Thus, in Berio's Sequenza III, Lyotard and his collaborator Dominique Avron find the traces of Freud's primary processes, those associated with the dreamwork, attesting to ‘the existence of an irreducible alterity in the circuit, seeking to manifest by traces the presence-absence of a meaning that is irreducible to linguistic or numerable signification’ (Avron and Lyotard, 1971: 35). Lyotard's engagement with Cage, in dialogue with the work of Daniel Charles, another student of Dufrenne's, affords the formulation of a sonorous analogue to his accounts of Cézanne: Cage reveals the filtering and exclusion on which the recognition of musical objects—and the musical tout court—depends, such that the musical listener presupposed by the tonal system ‘requires the desensibilisation of entire sonorous regions’ (Lyotard, 1973: 283). Reckoning with the divisions between sound and noise, music and non-music, logos and pathos, subject and object that are constituted by existing social systems is, finally for Lyotard, a question that goes to the heart of the political debates of the period (Avron and Lyotard 1971: 44; cf. Lyotard, 2011: xxiii).

As the preceding suggests, Kristeva, Lyotard and their contemporaries’ critique of the Enlightenment subject was coterminous with that put forward by the counterculture.¹¹ Here, a vernacular philosophy sought transfigurative experiences that liberated subjects from the strictures of bourgeois society. Through drugs, extended improvisatory performances and immersive concert situations, the repressive psychic mechanisms of mainstream culture might be cast off and an ecstatic state of harmonious flow achieved (Briggs, 2008; Keister, 2014; Turner, 2006: 61–68). Such practical and theoretical critiques are echoed in Barthes's formulation of a ‘drugged reading’, a ‘hyper-aesthetics’ that ‘cannot be explained by any phenomenology of reading, as this type of reading assumes that we do not know where the subject is: in any case, he is no longer in an armchair’ (Quoted in Stafford, 2008: 98).¹²

This unlocatable subject entails a form of attention in which the stability of the object and the demarcation of subject and object cannot be taken as given. An author is no more capable of fixing a meaning in a text than a reader is of deciphering an author's intention. Instead, a digressive engagement, a psychoanalytically inflected ‘evenly-suspended attention’, traces the production of sense, engaging the text as plural and polyphonic (Barthes, 1990; Lyotard, 2011: 309; cf. Freud, 1958). In an essay from 1977, Barthes articulates this form of attention to experimental music, describing a listening that floats, ‘evenly hovering’ like that of the psychoanalyst. Instead of deciphering communications, this listening catches the noisy texture of signifiance at work. Barthes suggests that such a listening is solicited by the musical practices of John Cage, which, he argues, reject the good, cultured listening of the afficionado, able to recognise the structural integrity of an organic work. Where conventional music reiteratively constitutes a certain subject, the music of Cage troubles the solidity of the listening subject, resulting in what Charles refers to as a ‘simultaneous desubjectivation and de-objectification’ (Barthes, 1991: 259; Charles, 1971: 78).

Ivanka Stoïanova, Charles's doctoral student and colleague (and the younger sister of Kristeva), elaborates this undecidability of the disjunctive bar between subject and object in relation to experimental music practices that put the subject positions of composer, performer and audience in question. Stoïanova theorises the “repetitive music”, as French critics termed it, of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley as a refusal of the interpellatory mechanisms of the Western tonal tradition. Here, ‘the listener is no longer forced to follow the story of a narrative development, but can wander at will, abandoned to his fantasies, in the enveloping place of the repetitive utterance [énoncé]’. Repetitive music, Stoïanova argues, effects a ‘dilution of the subjectivities of individuals in the musician's play and during listening’; it ‘exceeds the subjectivity of the author, of the musicians, but also of the listeners’ (Stoïanova, 1977: 70 and 73; cf. Ridout, 2024).

This line of argument is brought to bear on Schaeffer's thinking in Charles's Le temps de la voix, in which he suggests that Schaeffer's ‘atomism’, seeking to reconstruct the musical through an ‘additive confrontation of micro-data’, an accumulation of neutral and isolated objects, misses the ‘background noise’ that precedes and conditions the musical as musical. These objects do not stand in themselves, but instead ‘involve real, oriented sonic areas, arranged and positioned “ecologically”’, Charles writes, deploying a term that will assume greater significance in what follows (Charles, 1978: 19; cf. Charles, 1967; Valiquet, 2023).

Troubling the object

In his own theoretical reflections in the 1970s, Bayle articulated a gentle critique of Schaeffer's theories that centred on the dyad of subject and sound object at the heart of Schaeffer's project. Bayle's disagreement hinged on characteristics of Schaeffer's thought very close to those identified by Valiquet: it presupposed a complete, fully conscious and fixed subject untouched by difference, the unconscious or the social, and resulted in a static musical unit divorced from music as process (Bayle, 1975: 127). Bayle's riposte to Schaeffer is formulated in a vocabulary shaped by the intellectual world of Paris in the late 1960s, one for which ‘Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, [and] Breton have shown the way’ (Bayle, 1972: 63). Bayle cites the writings of Carlos Castaneda, whose pseudoethnographic accounts of shamanist practices with hallucinogens were hugely popular in the US counterculture, as influential on his desire when composing L’Expérience acoustique to ‘induce the same states without the need for exotic mushrooms’ (Chion and Vande Gorne, 1994: 71).

As such, Bayle theorises electroacoustic music as a practice or experience that puts Schaeffer's discrete subject—and, by extension, object—in question. Rather than clearing the ground for an account of the sound object in itself, as it does for Schaeffer, the acousmatic ‘cut’ ‘reveals the variety and the variation of points of view and of listening intentions’ (Bayle, 1975: 127). Deploying an argument that resembles Kristeva and Lyotard's contemporaneous alignment of artistic production with the dreamwork, Bayle compares the experience of composing and listening to electroacoustic music with pre-Oedipal stages of psychic development, comparing the composer's experience with the mirror stage and drawing on Jean Piaget's theories of cognitive development (Bayle, 1972: 59, 1977: 17; cf. Kristeva, 1984; Lyotard, 2011). The play of signifiers initiated in electroacoustic experience ‘establishes a short circuit with the productive and drive-governed psychic agencies [instances pulsionnelles] (a short circuit which is pushed to the paroxysm of feedback in pop or underground music)’ (Bayle, 1972: 62). Such an experience entails the opening up of the subject to the ‘energetic charges’ beneath consciousness, in which the dynamics of drives and desires scramble the ordinary discursive functions of sound (Bayle, 1972: 60–61). The subject thus liberated, ‘discharges his fantasies’. Electroacoustic composition as Bayle understands it consists in the ‘shaping of drives and psychic calls’ (Bayle, 1977: 17). It is ‘the volcanic site of the urgent response of the entire demand of the unthought, of the uncreated, of all the extra-texts [hors-textes] of sonic communication’ (Bayle, 1972: 62).

Drawing his argument into relation with both poststructuralist critiques of the author and post-Cagean critiques of compositional authority, Bayle argues that electroacoustic experience ‘leads to an unknown language, in which the intention and the meaning projected by the author recede into the background. Contact is established beyond the discovery of meaning [.] […] Content is put on hold so that the question is posed in terms of production’. Like his poststructuralist contemporaries, Bayle connects this practice with a generalised social upheaval, which questions established ‘ideologies of knowledge and systems of language’ (Bayle, 1972: 62–63). An uncertain, unlocalisable subject has as its corollary a similarly uncertain object, and here Bayle expresses his allegiance to a post-Cagean critique of the musical work. Bayle is committed to a ‘liberty [that] opens onto the very dynamic of the subject and concerns the supplementary operations of interpretation at moments of signals without correlation, [and] incomplete, unpredictable, equivocal or aberrant forms’ (Bayle, 1977: 17). He describes L’Expérience acoustique as ‘something like the opposite of a work’, which aimed ‘to provoke states of availability, of openness, so as not to repel as a work sometimes does, […] which presents itself as a safe that must be opened’ (Chion and Vande Gorne, 1994: 69). Instead, L’Expérience acoustique is ‘a demanding inner exercise—informal and open’ (Chion and Vande Gorne, 1994: 74n. 69).

In a programmatic essay from 1975 titled ‘Pour une musique invisible: un acousmonium’, Bayle set out a theoretical rationalisation for his development of the multispeaker system he termed the acousmonium, inaugurated in 1974 with a performance of L’Expérience acoustique. Bayle rejects the paradigms of ‘broadcast’ and ‘high fidelity’, as well as their practical manifestations in concert playback on two or four speakers such that a select few listeners enjoy a faithful representation of a static piece. Instead, the ensemble of speakers developed with Bayle at the GRM would allow a varied and mobile performance, with a range of colours and positions modelled on the symphony orchestra, complete with ‘soloists’ (Bayle, 1975: 128–34; cf. Bayle, 2007b: 242).¹³ As such, Bayle privileges a certain openness in opposition to ‘a premature consummation of the work’. The ‘invisible work’, he writes, ‘must not be the result of a neutral apparatus, but of a continual lived synthesis’ (Bayle, 1975: 130).

Electroacoustic music as cybernetic system

The language of cybernetics—whose influence on post-war French thought is hard to overstate—provided another resource for conceptualising open concatenations of people, technologies and instruments that scrambled questions of agency and authorship (Geoghegan, 2023). In ‘Pour une musique invisible’, Bayle describes the process of electroacoustic composition as a sort of feedback ‘loop’ or ‘system’, in which the composer initiates and then responds to an open-ended process that encompasses technical devices and the unconscious processes that Bayle terms, invoking Deleuze and Guattari's cybernetically flavoured language, ‘desiring machines’ (Bayle, 1975: 125–126 and 129).¹⁴ As documented in the 1973 television film Les Espaces Inhabitables de François Bayle, Bayle's practice at this time abjured the ends-oriented and objectifying procedures that characterised Schaeffer's typological project, in which a rational subject analysed a sound object prior to any composition. Instead, Bayle worked in an improvisatory fashion with a combination of small acoustic instruments, microphones and electronic modules (Chion and Vande Gorne, 1994: 71). The zither that features prominently in the second chapter of L’Expérience acoustique was, in Bayle's words, ‘improvised in reaction to the movements provoked by the generators’ (Bayle, 2012a: 55). Bayle's invocation of a cybernetic model aligns him with other accounts of musical practice that drew together new technological formations and a disavowal of compositional authority, and particularly the post-Cagean experimentalism of groups and musicians such as Musica Elettronica Viva, Gruppo d’Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza and Max Neuhaus. For these musicians, a cybernetic epistemology afforded a non-mechanistic vision of musical practice that reconciled a Cagean commitment to chance and accident with the stability of an emergent order sustained through autopoietic feedback processes (Belgrad, 2016, 2019: 109–137; Pickering, 2010: 83–88). Even within France, Bayle was not alone in conceiving of electroacoustic production in terms of feedback systems involving an improvisation with materials and tools, ‘a global system consisting of man and his environment’ (Beaud, 1973: 48–49 and 73; cf. Chion and Reibel, 1976: 309–10; Blaukopf, 1971: 167–168).

As N. Katherine Hayles (1999: 2) notes, the cybernetic model is one that tends towards a destabilisation of the liberal humanist subject, attributing machinic qualities to human activities and human qualities (such as adaptibility and the capacity to learn) to machines. The boundary between the human subject and its other is flattened and, particularly with the development of second order cybernetics in the late 1960s, the subject is instead understood to emerge through an ongoing process of interaction between self and environment (Barrett, 2023: 12–32; Belgrad, 2016; Bateson, 1973; Hayles, 1999: 74–78). Cybernetics, then, entailed an epistemological disposition in which, in contrast to Schaeffer's thinking, the dichotomy of subject and object is rendered problematic. Applied to musical practices, cybernetic thinking led to an account of creativity as an emergent product of a dynamic system rather than the property of a sovereign subject and refused a priori the possibility of separating art and artist from their social environment.

L'Expérience acoustique

This constellation of ideas affords a reading of L’Expérience acoustique as a heterogeneous system or ecology which troubles any univocal ‘musical’ attention. Listening appears here as an activity embedded in an environment such that frame and framed, figure and ground are hard to distinguish. Rather than demanding a competent recognition of variations of sound objects, disciplined and rigorous conformity of subject and object, the piece opens a space in which multiple identifications are solicited. The question of framing and listening context is staged through the extended use of static drone textures, which, as Joanna Demers suggests, call attention to the material and cultural conditions of listening, pressing at the limits of the body and the attention span (Cage, 1967: 30–33; Demers, 2010: 91; cf. Belgrad, 2019: 125). As Charles writes of ‘non-metrical’ new music, one is ‘liberated from the idea that each sound is related to others by logical implications or a hierarchy, or a structural line concerning what precedes or follows’ (Charles, 1978: 61). Rather than a syntactical analysis, the fourth chapter, ‘L’Épreuve par le son’, which consists of 25 min of near static drone, solicits the sort of horizontal, floating attention that Barthes and Bayle associate with psychoanalytic practice.

The first chapter, ‘L’Aventure du cri’, is organised around a long loop of a woodlark call being fed through the intermodulation processes of the GRM's Coupigny synthesiser (Bayle, 2007b: 247; Teruggi, 2007: 220). The chapter integrates natural sounds into a kind of morphogenetic biofeedback system that engenders the zigzagging textures of the piece, a sonic field in which the composer exercises a guiding control. A background of insect noises recurs intermittently, extending the piece's exploration of an animal, ‘alert’ listening for signals and cries that interrupt musical or “reduced” listening. Rejecting the discipline of Schaefferian listening, ‘L’Aventure du cri’ disrupts itself, interjecting fragments of sporting events, rock music, animal and human cries, admitting no easy inoculation of musical listening against its others.

Where, as Brian Kane has argued, Schaeffer's account of listening occludes its technological conditions, L’Expérience acoustique traces the contours of a media ecology that constitutes the experience in question (Kane, 2014: 119–133). For example, the end of the second chapter erupts into manipulated alien percussion sounds, followed by abrupt shards of Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Mozart, Beethoven and recordings of demonstrations during May 1968, sharply intercut as though caused by the tuning of a radio dial. The listener-composer is embedded in an ecology structured around a form of experience theorised by Raymond Williams as ‘flow’, an experience in which distinctions between different programmes, different forms (news, sport, drama, music) are rendered imperceptible (Williams, 2003: 86–120).

Flow resonates here with the theorisation of the ‘analogue’ emergent in contemporaneous poststructural thought, which critiques the discrete, binary information units of structural thought through an emphasis on depth, noise and flux (Charles, 1978: 277–88; Deleuze, 2003; Lyotard, 2011; cf. Massumi, 2002: 133–43; Pinhas, 2001; Verón, 1970; Wilden, 1972: 48–49; ). Beaud invokes Anthony Wilden's account of the analogue to account for a novel syncretic ecology, in which differences are not binary but encompassed by ‘a global system that constitutes man and his environment’ (Beaud, 1973: 72–73). Such a syncretism touches on the more utopian aspects of this thinking, which risk recapitulating the universalism of earlier thinkers, which aspired to a view ‘from nowhere’ transcending cultural difference, occluding the partiality of that view (cf. Binkley, 2007: 24; Haraway, 1988; Ridout, 2020). For example, a looping flute-like texture in the second chapter recalls Central African polyphonic music (as documented in recordings made by Simha Arom, on which GRM classes drew) as well as Terry Riley's burbling streams of organ, while the zither improvisations, emphasising microtonal inflections, recall the acid folk sonorities of Richard Fariña or Emmanuelle Parrenin (Phonothèque, 1971). But rather than hailing a consumer of eclectic late twentieth-century media, Bayle's piece might be heard, in attending to the unheard preconditions and limits of that subjectivity, to solicit a listening practice that is, in John Mowitt's words, ‘predisposed towards others’, figuring a ‘symbolically constructed collectivity’ (Mowitt, 2012: 222–223).

Conclusion

The musical activities of the GRM in the late 1960s and 1970s were a part of a moment in which the nature, political stakes and the social values of music were radically placed in question (Briggs, 2015; Cagney, 2015: 137; Drott, 2011). This can be mapped sociologically by the paths taken by various GRM alumni: Igor Wakhévitch, Ragnar Grippe and Jean-Michel Jarre were soon fully assimilated into the world of the 1970s counterculture. Grippe, Martin Davorin Jagodić, and Luc Ferrari would go on to collaborate with Philippe Besombes (who also collaborated with Jarre and oversaw the production of a number of important French underground records) as part of the Atelier de Libération de la Musique, an improvising group that sought a “free” practice engaged with its social environment, in 1975 (Ferrari, 2018). Similarly, in the early 1970s the electronic improvising group Opus N, led by former GRM students Alain Savouret and Christian Clozier, regularly performed with the hurdy-gurdy player René Zosso and the free jazz saxophonist Philippe Maté. These trajectories reflect a vision of electroacoustic music as both aesthetically pluralist and politically committed, ‘a collective process’ initiating a break with the highly specialised character of art-musical composition (François, 1972).

As the radical energies of the post-68 years dissipated, however, divisions between high and low, learned and vernacular reasserted themselves: by the final year of its first run, the magazine Actuel rarely included coverage of, for example, Vinko Globokar records alongside those of Pink Floyd. Equally, a sort of mundane conservatism lingered in the GRM's institutional formation when compared to the radical experiments undertaken at the Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes, for example: while the music courses at the latter made no stipulations regarding musical experience or fluency in Western notation, acceptance on the GRM's course at the Paris Conservatoire was contingent on passing a solfège examination, amongst other requirements.¹⁵ For many observers, the GRM continued to be problematically associated with Schaeffer's authoritarian style (Jean-Claude Eloy in Bizot, 1974: 48; cf. Schaeffer, 1978: 181). Bayle's optimistic invocation of the ‘democracy’, ‘heterogeneity’ and ‘cybernetics’ of the group was quickly dampened by the institutional reconfiguration the GRM underwent in the mid-1970s, which left it an increasingly marginal player in Parisian musical life (Bayle, 1971). Perhaps, as GRM composers feared, the social and technical changes in which the group participated rendered an institution such as theirs rather superfluous: from at least the mid-1960s, a rich underground of electronic musical experimentation existed outside of the confines of state-sponsored studios.

Articulated in the terms of this article, however, this moment has much to offer contemporary debates regarding the social and aesthetic heterogeneity of electronic musics: An account of electroacoustic music's interminable fraying and hybridising cultural position might function as what Georgina Born terms a ‘new past’ for new musical practices (indeed, one that places significant pressure on Born's own earlier Manichean account of modernism and its others) (Born, 2022, 1995). Indeed, Bayle's assertion of a listening that reaches beyond the limits of the liberal subject finds an echo in the stylistic diversity championed and theoretical work produced by François Bonnet, the GRM's current director. Like Bayle, Bonnet positions himself in opposition to the purity of Schaeffer's ‘reduced listening’, developing instead a theory of listening that draws on poststructuralist theorists of desire like Lyotard and Deleuze (Bonnet, 2016).

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Sam Ridout

Notes

Author biography

Sam Ridout is a writer based in London. His current research is concerned with the ambivalent cultural positioning of electroacoustic music in France between the 1940s and the 1970s, attending to its various engagements with mass culture, counterculture and avant-garde theoretical and artistic production.

References

Avron

Lyotard

J-F

(1971) “A few words to sing” (sur Sequenza III de Berio). Musique en jeu 2: 28–44.

Barrett

(2023) Experimenting the Human: Art, Music, and the Contemporary Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Barthes

(1990) S/Z. Translated by R Miller. Oxford: Blackwell.

Barthes

(1991) Listening. In: Barthes

(ed.) The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Translated by R Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 245–260.

Bateson

(1973) The cybernetics of ‘self’: A theory of alcoholism. In: Bateson

Steps to an Ecology of Mind. St Albans: Paladin, 280–308.

Bayle

(1971) Musique pour l’an 2000. Études 335: 71–82.

Bayle

(1972) Musique et expérience. Musique en jeu 8: 57–63.

Bayle

(1975) Pour une musique invisible: un acousmonium. In: Conférences des journées d’études – Festival international du son. Paris: Radio, 125–134.

Bayle

(1977) Support/espace. Cahiers recherche/musique 5: 13–32.

10.

Bayle

(2007a) Hasard et nécessité: Entretien de François Bayle et Évelyne Gayou. In: Gayou

(ed) François Bayle: Portraits Polychromes. Paris: INA/Sacem, 13–51.

11.

Bayle

(2007b) Space, and more. Organised Sound 12: 241–249.

12.

Bayle

(2012a) Acousmatic analysis: François Bayle visiting the seminar Akusmatische Werkanalyse: François Bayle (summer semester 2006 at the University of Cologne). In: Erbe

von Blumröder

(eds) Le monde sonore de/ The Sound World of/Die Klangwelt des François Bayle: Begegnungen an der Universität zu Köln 2005 bis 2010. Vienna: Der Apfel, 54–85.

13.

Bayle

(2012b) L’expérience acoustique: conférence du 18 novembre 2005, suivie d’une discussion avec le public et une projection de l’oeuvre. In: Erbe

von Blumröder

(eds) Le monde sonore de/ The sound world of/ Die Klangwelt des François Bayle: Begegnungen an der Universität zu Köln 2005 bis 2010. Vienna: Der Apfel, 2–37.

14.

Beaud

(1973) L’électro-acoustique. In: Beaud

Willener

(eds) Musique et vie quotidienne: essai de sociologie d’une nouvelle culture. Paris: Mame, 21–108.

15.

Beaud

Willener

(1973) Musique et vie quotidienne: essai de sociologie d’une nouvelle culture. Paris: Mame.

16.

Belgrad

(2016) Improvisation, democracy, and feedback. In: Lewis

Piekut

(eds) The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 289–306.

17.

Belgrad

(2019) The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in ‘70 s America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

18.

Binkley

(2007) Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s. Durham: Duke University Press.

19.

Bizot

J-F

(1974) Le coin culturel: Jean-claude eloy. Actuel 58: 68–70.

20.

Blaukopf

(1971) L’espace en musique électronique. La Revue Musicale. 268–69: 157–172.

21.

Bonnet

(2016) The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago. Translated by Robin Mackay. Falmouth: Urbanomic.

22.

Born

(1995) Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press.

23.

Born

(2022) The dynamics of pluralism in contemporary digital art music. In: Born

(ed) Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology. London: UCL Press, 305–377.

24.

Briggs

(2006) Distinction? The IRCAM, progressive rock, and class at the End of modernization. Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 33: 450–464.

25.

Briggs

(2008) The pot head pixies: Drug utopias in the music of Gong, 1969–1974. Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 23: 6–23.

26.

Briggs

(2015) Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities and Pop Music in France, 1958–1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

27.

Cage

(1967) Happy new ears!. In: Cage

(ed.) A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 30–36.

28.

Cagney

, 2015. Synthesis and Deviation: New Perspectives on the Emergence of the French courant spectral, 1969–74 . PhD thesis. City University London.

29.

Castanet

(2012) Le Médium mythologique du rock’n roll et la musique contemporaine. Intersections 32: 83–116.

30.

Chantler

, 2021. No Such Array: Developing a material and practice for electronic music performance . Masters thesis. Royal College of Music Stockholm.

31.

Charles

(1967) Sur l’objet musical: Réflexions sur le “Traité des objets musicaux”, de Pierre Schaeffer. Revue d’Esthétique 2–3: 299–307.

32.

Charles

(1971) Musique et An-archie. Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie 371: 71–109.

33.

Charles

(1978) Le Temps de la voix. Paris: Jean-Pierre Delarge.

34.

Chion

Reibel

(1976) Les Musiques électroacoustiques. Paris: INA GRM/edisud.

35.

Chion

Vande Gorne

(1994) Le Caprice et la cohérence: entretien avec François Bayle. In: Chion

(ed) François Bayle: parcours d’un compositeur. Ohain: Musiques et Recherches, 36–126.

36.

Daevid Allen, le Soft, la Lune et le Gong (1969) Actuel 9: 27–29.

37.

Deleuze

(2003) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. London: Continuum.

38.

Deleuze

Guattari

(2004) Anti-Oedipus. London: Continuum.

39.

Demers

(2010) Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

40.

Drott

(2011) Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981. Berkeley: University of California Press.

41.

Ferrari

(2018) Liner Notes to Atelier de Libération de la Musique [LP] Italy: Alga Marghen

42.

François

J-F

(1972) La musique électronique est éducation. Musique en jeu 8: 3–10.

43.

Freud

(1958) Recommendation to physicians practising psychoanalysis In: Strachey

(ed) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by Strachey J. London: Hogarth, xii, 111–120.

44.

Gayou

(2007) Le GRM, Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales: Cinquante ans d’histoire. Paris: Fayard.

45.

Geoghegan

(2023) Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. Durham: Duke University Press.

46.

Gousseland

(1971) Journées-Rencontres avec le Groupe de Recherche musicale. Combat, 25 February, 13.

47.

Haraway

(1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14: 575–599.

48.

Hayles

(1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

49.

Kaltenecker

(2010) Résonances théologiques de l’écoute chez Pierre Schaeffer. Droits de cités. 4 <http://droitdecites.org/2010/10/15/kaltenecker/> (accessed 5 November 2017).

50.

Kaltenecker

(2012) L’écoute comme exercice collectif. In: Kaltenecker

Le Bail

(eds) Pierre Schaeffer: Les Constructions Impatientes. Paris: CNRS, 191–200.

51.

Kane

(2012) Jean-Luc Nancy and the listening subject. Contemporary Music Review 31: 439–447.

52.

Kane

(2014) Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

53.

Keister

(2014) The long freak out: Unfinished music and countercultural madness in avant-garde rock of the 1960s and 1970s. In: Whiteley

Sklower

(eds) Countercultures and Popular Music. Farnham: Ashgate, 141–156.

54.

Kristeva

(1977) Modern theater does not take (a) place. Translated by Alice Jardine and Thomas Gora. SubStance 6–7: 131–134.

55.

Kristeva

(1980) Desire in Language ( Roudiez

, ed). Translated by T Gora, A Jardine and LS Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

56.

Kristeva

(1984) Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press.

57.

Kristeva

(1986) The system and the speaking subject. In: Moi

(ed) The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 24–33.

58.

Langlois

(2012) Les cloches d’Atlantis, Musique électroacoustique et cinéma, Archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore. Paris: MF.

59.

Lemery

(1969) La musique nouvelle en mouvement. Actuel 8: 24–27.

60.

Lemery

(1971) Musique contemporaine, pop-music et free-jazz, convergences et divergences. Musique en jeu 2: 80–87.

61.

Lentin

J-P

(1973) Quand le synthétiser vous monte à la tête. Actuel 31: 62–65.

62.

Levitz

Piekut

(2020) The Vernacular Avant-Garde: A Speculation. ASAP/Journal. 3 September 2020. Available at: https://asapjournal.com/the-vernacular-avant-garde-a-speculation-tamara-levitz-and-benjamin-piekut/ (accessed 16 August 2023).

63.

Lyotard

J-F

(1973) Plusieurs silences. In: Lyotard J-F Des dispostifs pulsionnels. Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 281–303.

64.

Lyotard

J-F

(2011) Discourse, Figure. Translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

65.

Massumi

(2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press.

66.

Mowitt

(2012) The sound of music in the era of its electronic reproducibility. In: Sterne

(ed) The Sound Studies Reader. Abingdon: Routledge, 213–224.

67.

Nouvelles musicales de 23 juillet 1970 (1970) Radio broadcast, France Culture, 23 July 1970.

68.

Peter Foldes, La belle cérébrale (n. d.). Available at: https://fresques.ina.fr/artsonores/fiche-media/InaGrm00854/peter-foldes-la-belle-cerebrale.html (accessed 16 March 2023).

69.

Phonothèque (1971). Dossier 237, Fonds GRM, Paris Inathèque.

70.

Pickering

(2010) The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

71.

Piekut

(2019) Henry Cow: The World is a Problem. Durham: Duke University Press.

72.

Pierret

(1969) Entretiens avec Pierre Schaeffer. Paris: Pierre Belfond.

73.

Pinhas

(2001) Les Larmes de Nietzsche: Deleuze et la musique. Paris: Flammarion.

74.

Planet Gong (2005) Gong in Japan: Daevid Allen with Udi Koomran, 2005. Available at: https://planetgong.co.uk/archives/interviews/daevid-allen-2005-japan.shtml (accessed 16 March 2023).

75.

Ridout

(2020) From the totem to the antenna: Musique Concrète and the Universal at the End of the French empire. Music and Letters 101: 743–764.

76.

Ridout

(2023) The Musical Text: Theorizing Openness After Structuralism. Twentieth-Century Music First View: 1–15.

77.

Rizzardi

(2014) The complete birth of the loop: Terry Riley in Paris, 1962–63. In: Meyer

Oka

Rathert

Shreffler

(eds) Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000. Woodbridge: Boydell, 350–363.

78.

Schaeffer

(1951) Donner à entendre, donner à penser. La Nef. 73–74: 43–50.

79.

Schaeffer

(1957) Vers une musique expérimentale. La Revue Musicale 236: 11–27.

80.

Schaeffer

(1959a) La musique expérimentale, comme exercice spirituel. Dossier 981, Box 99, Fonds Schaeffer, Caen Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine.

81.

Schaeffer

(1959b) Musique concrète et connaissance de l’objet musical. Revue Belge de Musicologie 13: 62–67.

82.

Schaeffer

(1968) La sévère mission de la musique. Revue D’esthétique 2–4: 279–291.

83.

Schaeffer

(1970) L’Avenir à reculons. Paris: Casterman.

84.

Schaeffer

(1971) Lettre au GRM, 15 February. Dossier 238, Fonds GRM, Paris Inathèque.

85.

Schaeffer

(1978) Les Antennes de Jéricho. Paris: Stock.

86.

Schaeffer

(2012) In Search of a Concrete Music. Translated by C North and J Dack. Berkeley: University of California Press.

87.

Schaeffer

(2017) Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines. Translated by C North and J Dack. Oakland: University of California Press.

88.

Séance du 16 Octobre (1970) Seminar notes of the Groupe d’analyse et de composition. Dossier 237, Fonds GRM, Paris Inathèque.

89.

Séance du 6 Novembre (1970) Seminar notes of the Groupe d’analyse et de composition. Dossier 237, Fonds GRM, Paris Inathèque.

90.

Stafford

(2008) Préparation du romanesque” in Roland Barthes’s Reading of Sarrasine. Paragraph 31: 95–108.

91.

Stoïanova

(1977) Musique répétitive. Musique en jeu 26: 64–74.

92.

Super-Nova (1977) Cahiers recherche/musique. 4: 19–37.

93.

Teruggi

(2007) Technology and musique concrète: The technical developments of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales and their implication in musical composition. Organised Sound 12: 213–231.

94.

Turner

(2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

95.

Valiquet

(2012) The spatialisation of stereophony: Taking positions in post-war electroacoustic music. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43: 403–421.

96.

Valiquet

(2017) Hearing the music of others: Pierre schaeffer’s humanist interdiscipline. Music and Letters 98: 255–280.

97.

Valiquet

(2022) Scoring the Listener: Notation and representation in acousmatic music. In: Schuiling

Payne

(eds) Material Cultures of Music Notation: New Perspectives on Musical Inscription. Abingdon: Routledge, 50–64.

98.

Valiquet

(2023) Vibration and Lysis: On the skin of the loudspeaker. Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 46: 50–58.

99.

Verón

(1970) L’analogique et le contigu. Communications 15: 52–69.

100.

Warne

(2007) Bringing counterculture to France: Actuel Magazine and the legacy of May ‘68. Modern & Contemporary France 3: 309–324.

101.

Weheliye

(2005) Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press.

102.

Wilden

(1972) L’écriture et le bruit dans la morphogénèse du système ouverte. Communications 18: 48–71.

103.

Willener

(1970) L’Image-action de la société ou la Politisation culturelle. Paris: Seuil.

104.

Williams

(2003) Television: Technology and cultural form. London: Routledge.