Audio Animation

"New composers of electronic music are expressing a new‐found romanticism, not unlike their 19th‐century counterparts. The important difference is, however, that the visions of a Berlioz, a Liszt, a Wagner, or a Busoni are no longer just idle dreams of creating magic musics. 'Sonic visions,' the 'sounding space,' the 'sounding mass'—all such dreams are realizable today." New York Times, 1971

Infinite Mimesis

The arrival of sound recording and the dawn of electronic sound gave music amazing new powers of illusion. Previously, nearly all we could hear had been beyond the medium's reach. A millennium-spanning wall between concert hall and wider world had held fast. Then, suddenly, we could replicate any audible event at will. That was the first step in breaking through. But the barrier persisted, so far was this ability outside music's widely accepted parameters. The breakthrough only occurred when we began distorting these event replicas and creating new events electronically. The strange aural experiences that resulted played tricks on our minds, inviting us to infer fantastical explanations for what we were hearing. From there, infinity opened up. The interior power of music met the exterior power of the soundscape. Emotions merged with physical phenomena. The discovery of an ever-expanding dream universe was under way… 

Music as Audio Animation

This opened the door for an intensified, up-close way of experiencing musical diegesis. It’s now possible for music not just to gesture at a storyworld—but actually embody one. The forces you hear in the music become events transpiring in the story. It’s as though you really are physically inside another world, no longer hearing about it from afar, but hearing it happening all around you. 

Perceiving music as “audio animation” may have always been possible, but with music that draws on these new powers, such perception becomes especially vivid. If audio animation is a tool, it's a tool that goes from semi-useful to super-useful when applied to a select yet ever-growing subset of music. So although audio animation is a way of hearing above all else, our investigation will posit that there are works of audio animation, and that there is something like an audio animation canon. This canon spans many different genres and subcultures, built out of contributions from the streets and the academy alike. Its emergence has been largely unrecognized.

Why Animation?

A more widely used analogy posits that electronic music is like sculpture. Invoked by Aphex Twin, Pierre Henry, Sophie, Goldie, A Guy Called Gerald, and many others, the comparison is perfect up to a point. It captures how material sound can feel, how the range of sounds now available in music can evoke endless varieties of texture, mass, viscosity, luminosity, and so on. And it captures how these qualities are malleable, how getting them right can be a matter of artisanal skill. However, there is a crucial sense in which the comparison falls short: it glosses over the temporal nature of music—the freeform trajectories of these sound materials.

If we want to investigate this new mode of perception, motion is the key. Musical motion is a matter of rhythm, but not just rhythm. It's the confluence of rhythm meeting position in space meeting the qualities above (and more). A single sheet-notated rhythm can become many different motions, depending on the properties of the sound materials used. It can be a percussionist improvising on a drum, or shrapnel ricocheting through a tight space, or a river babbling at a point of elevation change. Likewise, a sound can evoke different motions depending on its rhythm. A subterranean rumble can be an act of nature if it appears erratically, or the pulse of a factory if it appears with rigid regularity. The stereo field can also produce differences in motion. The tremolo drone of an alien aircraft can move in circles, recede away, hover in place, or teleport from point A to B to C...  So the word "animation" more fully conveys this process in which materiality and spatiotemporality work together in the listener's imagination. Sonic forms are shaped and brought to life.

Like visual animation, it's a process attempted to varying degrees of effectiveness. We can appreciate this by searching for several virtues. The first is clarity. Rendered motion should be unmistakable and undeniable. The more definite the motion, the harder it hits. The second virtue is nuance, which is a matter of escaping the claustrophobia of cheap placeholders and increasing immersion through brilliant detail. The third is naturalism. In order for what you're hearing to feel physical, it has to bear some degree of resemblance to the real soundworld. The fourth virtue is stylization. Audio animation combines recording-realism with Music, in order to become more satisfying and psychedelic and heart-wrenching.

What’s important about these virtues (approximate as they are) is that they pull in opposite directions, creating a kind of aesthetic compass, with clarity <-> nuance as one axis and naturalism <-> stylization as the other. With too much emphasis on nuance, the visceral push or pull of motion gets buried under detail. But with too much emphasis on clarity, motion feels flat and contrived. If music is overly naturalistic, you might as well go out and listen to nature. And yet, in brazenly defying realism in pursuit of style, there's a risk of lessening the underlying sense of illusion. So the difficulty isn't just in achieving these virtues individually, but also in finding a balance between them that feels right. Different balances emerge across different genres. Techno, for instance, excels at clarity and stylization of motion; jungle excels at nuance and stylization; soundscape composition excels at nuance and naturalism... (Obviously, there's endless variation within these broad generalities.) And yet the best audio animation breaks down the compass, mastering each virtue simultaneously.

So then… why Audio?

The comparison with visual animation invites the question of why you'd want music to be like another artform in the first place. It would be stupid to venerate aesthetic redundancy, especially if this veneration obscured music's true and unique strengths. We ought to consider why we're exploring this line of thought.

We don't want to proceed too literally. Audio and video animation are similar in that they bring imaginary worlds to life, with total freedom of depiction. That's the parallel in which we're interested. But we don’t want to get caught in the fallacy that for any aesthetic choice in visual animation there's an exact audio equivalent. Direct equation can be fruitful, but, in my experience, is far more likely to a pointless headache. No amount of cross-sensory translation could make Walt Disney's interpretation of the Snow White fairy tale "equivalent" to Jacques Lejeune's. Different aspects of our surroundings are revealed when we favor a particular sense. And so each medium forever contains its own charms and mysteries. 

With that out the way, here’s one possible answer. Audio animation is a helpful listening trick. There's a long history of electronic music with a reputation for being difficult and strange—more for machines than for people. If you are drawn to this stuff, you need an angle of approach. Hearing in this way can help you get past the outward austerity of the music. It gives you a way to mentally organize what can't be comprehended through listening tricks passed down in the concert hall. So the animation lens is a navigation tool for the Weird Sound Specialist.  

I don't think this answer is wrong, but I'm not satisfied with it either. To paraphrase McLuhan, the specialist takes faultless steps toward the ultimate mistake. Any medium becomes richer when you don't seal it off from other areas of art. Music contains parallels with poetry and painting and video games, and recognizing this can strengthen our appreciation of it all. This process of consilience doesn't detract from—but rather deepens—the strangeness of what you're hearing.

So here's a second, more speculative answer. Audio animation offers a special kind of immersion that even video animation does not. It's not that music is a uniquely emotional medium. Visual media are all too capable of stirring pathos. No, what's special about music is that it's the most empathetic medium. We don't just react to it, we sync with it. We become it. Maybe music's power rests on primordial intuitions that splintered off from speech a long time ago. Mysterious intuitions that allow vocal and body movements to not just express, but transmit feeling. The best audio animation does not jettison these all too human empathetic responses so much as extend the same responses to the surrounding world. Audio animation supports other forms of storytelling by escaping exposition and plunging us into the heart of things, into a state of deep emotional and physiological receptivity. We find ourselves caught in the intensities of dreamworlds that resonate from the atomic level up.