3. From Discourse to the Performative Act: Sound Fusion

In one of the video interviews, Pierre-André Valade specifically tackles the question of sound fusion by discussing the notion of sound spectrum (Video 4): “What is a sound spectrum? It’s a musical object that has a balance and the balance of the sounds of this spectrum is fundamental. If there is a really bad balance, bad intonation, bad balance of pitches within the spectrum, this will make the spectrum inaudible. And when the pitches are perfectly respected, the spectrum merges completely. You can really hear the base of the spectrum and then, you get a colour. It’s not a set of notes anymore, it is not one note stacked on top of another anymore, etc. [...] There’s a kind of merging effect that is going on which is quite confusing to the orchestra [1].” In this quote, a spectrum – more precisely, a spectrum resulting from an instrumental synthesis in Grisey’s sense – is defined as a unified object whose cohesion is due to a balance of its internal components – implying pitch intonation but also amplitude –, which constitute the condition to achieve a fusion of these components. The idea of “synthetic timbre” is expressed through the perception of a fundamental accompanied by a colour.

The conductor also provides a relatively detailed description of his personal auditory experience of these fascinating objects: “you listen to a spectrum and all of a sudden, you realise that there’s a note that does not belong to the spectrum. And that note right there, you hear it. You can see it like the nose on your face. It’s like you have a blue surface and all of a sudden you have a red spot on the surface. [...] So you can tell the orchestra, here you’re playing a C a quarter tone sharp. It should be a C three quarter tones sharp. [...] it creates a contrast that makes you hear this instrument even louder than the others [2].” The phenomenon he describes here involves auditory segregation [3] that allows the conductor to detect approximations in pitch to the extent that the corresponding sounds show increased perceptual prominence. In other words, the conductor relies on sound fusion anomalies in the overall sound to detect and adjust local deviations in the individual sections of the orchestra.

He adds that he thinks this aural skill of spotting extraneous notes in a spectrum is attainable by any musician with experience with this type of music: “it is in fact possible to hear these things well. [...] any musician properly trained to listen to these spectra can obviously hear such false notes because they stand out so awfully, much more than in a chord in more traditional music, or music that doesn’t make use of spectral techniques [4].” Sound fusion is considered here as a listening paradigm.

It is interesting to compare this discourse on sound fusion with what the two flautists in the orchestra, Marion Saumon (flute 1) and Cristina Isaura (flute 2), had to say about this when interviewed on the piece Partiels (Video 5). Cristina Isaura points out the difficulties inherent in such passages, both in terms of personal intonation and in listening to the other instruments: “I think in the other movements, too, when we’ve got this, it’s difficult because we lose a bit of the rightness. [...] to be able to find the quarter tones, that’s really difficult. [...] we cannot rely on the other instruments because they too are on other notes [5].” The flautist shares her impression that these passages, based on fused spectra, are sometimes out of tune. One of the main difficulties lies in the fact that the flautists have few pitch cues, as they play their respective parts alone, without any doubling with another instrument in the orchestra. In addition, their playing is likely to be destabilised by very close frequencies produced by other instruments, whether they are fundamentals or higher partials. They are therefore responsible for their own sound within the ensemble.

Marion Saumon explains in more detail the listening strategy she has adopted: “Well, I for one only listen to the main note because that’s what gives the harmonic. [...] The fundamental, in fact. [...] But it’s true that in classical music, we’re used to that. When we’re faced with a chord, of course we’ll be adjusting according to what we hear. For instance, a perfect chord, sometimes, the third, we’re be higher or lower. So it’s more or less the same thing. Except that in this case we’re talking about quarter tones [6].” Here the flautist explains that she focuses her listening on the fundamental note of the instrumental spectrum – in Partiels, the low E of the double bass – and tries to ignore the other individual parts. This type of global listening is to some extent similar to that used by the conductor, but is perhaps all the more difficult to achieve because it involves an instrumentalist producing a sound through his or her own instrument at the same time, and thus balancing global listening with local listening. The flautist also makes a comparison with the techniques for correcting intonation that are commonly used in “classical” – or tonal – music. Playing in quarter tones as a kind of intonation correction is also a way of appropriating a microtonal musical language on the basis of known instrumental techniques.