The sound shape
If we think of sound as a disturbance in air pressure that we detect at our eardrums, the onset, duration, and decay of this disturbance are what constitutes the sound shape.
This passage from Muray Schafer’s The Soundscape (1967) says it all:
“The attack is the onset portion of the sound object. When a system is suddenly excited, an enrichment of the spectrum results, giving a rough or dissonant edge to the sound. Thus every attack of sound is accompanied by noise, and the more suddenly it appears, the more noise is present—a fact which is especially significant in electro-acoustical systems with their brief switch-on times. When a sound develops more slowly, less of this sudden spectral excitement is present and an even tone quality emerges. Many musical instruments have varying modes of attack, but some have a natural tendency to “speak” more quickly than others: compare the mandolin and the violin. The onset-transients of the attack may be only a few milliseconds long, but their importance in terms of characterizing the sound should never be underestimated. In fact, as Schaeffer and his colleagues demonstrated, when the attack portions of certain sounds are amputated, they may become wholly unintelligible or may be mistaken for others (a piano may then sound like a flute or a bassoon like a cello).
The middle portion of the sound object used to be called the stationary or steady-state portion, but it is better to call it the body, because nothing about sound is ever really stationary. Nevertheless, there may appear to be a period in the midlife of a sound when to the naked ear the sound seems unprogressive and stationary. Some sounds, such as bells, gongs, pianos and percussion instruments, have no apparent body, consisting exclusively of attack and decay. Other sounds, such as that of the air-conditioner, remain exclusively in the intermediate or stationary state. They do not die. This is an artificial condition, initiated, as I have already said, by the factories of the nineteenth century and extended by the Electric Revolution into all corners of modern living.
The bio-acoustic analogies I have just introduced are not merely personal ramblings, for the relationship between the two disciplines is made explicit in the term decay. The energy of a sound weakens; it withers and dies. There are rapid decays and there are infinitely slow decays. The decay is usually combined with some sensation of reverberation. W. C. Sabine, the acoustician, has defined reverberation time technically. It is the time that elapses from the instant a sound source is switched off until its energy decays to one millionth of its original strength (a drop of 60 decibels). As far as the ear is concerned, it is the time it takes for a sound to melt and be lost in the ambient noise. Echo differs from reverberation in that it is a repetition or partial repetition of a sound, due to reflection off a distant surface. Reverberation is also reflected sound but no separate repetitions of the original are distinguishable. Although the sound object may thus be subdivided for purposes of ear training, it must nevertheless always be considered integrally. Schaeffer: ‘A composed structure (such as we perceive it) cannot be deduced from separate perceptions of its component objects.” But Schaeffer deliberately excludes all considerations of the sound object in any but physical and psychophysical terms. He does not want to confuse the study of sounds by considering their semantic or referential aspects. That a bell sound comes from a bell does not interest him. To him it is a phenomeno-logical sound formation only. “The sound object must not be confused with the sounding body by which it is produced,” for one sounding body “may supply a great variety of objects whose disparity cannot be reconciled by their common origin.’
The limitations of such a clinical approach for soundscape studies will be obvious, and though soundscape researchers will want to be familiar with such work, we will be equally concerned with the referential aspects of sounds and also with their interaction in field contexts. When we focus on individual sounds in order to consider their associative meanings as signals, symbols, keynotes or soundmarks, I propose to call them sound events, to avoid confusion with sound objects, which are laboratory specimens. This is in line with the dictionary definition of event as “something that occurs in a certain place during a particular interval of time”—in other words, a context is implied. Thus the same sound, say a church bell, could be considered as a sound object if recorded and analyzed in the laboratory, or as a sound event if identified and studied in the community. The soundscape is a field of interactions, even when particularized into its component sound events. To determine the way sounds affect and change one another (and us) in field situations is immeasurably more difficult a task than to chop up individual sounds in a laboratory, but this is the important and novel theme now lying before the soundscape researcher.”
from Schafer, M. “The soundscape”, loc 2594-2626
This reading introduces to the importance of sound-shape creation in sound-making. The shape determines, aurally, how a sound will appear to us, but also carries the information that sound can communicate. A faster/shorter attack, a longer/shorter decay, not only gives us an idea of the timbre of the sound but also activates other psychophysical and psychological associations that expand our understanding of the auditory event.
Complementary to Murray Schafer’s view, we should also note Pierre Schaeffer’s discourse. This video narrated in French by Schaeffer’s himself with English subtitles, outlines Schaeffer’s thoughts also accompanying them with sounds descriptions.
Most importantly for creating sounds is to acknowledge the function of the attack transient of a sound in determining our recognition of the source. In this second video, still by P. Schaeffer, the attacks and bodies of different sounds have been swapped, producing very interesting results and surprising misunderstanding:
Lesson 3 will thus support and provide the essential tools for learning how to create sound-shapes in Max, moving on to model and shape the harmonic and waveform content you have learned to create so far.