Sound, Image, Index by Brian Willems This paper examines Pierre Schaeffer's thought on the separation of sound from image, thus arriving at an index rather than a sign, in a number of contexts: experimental musicians Reiko and Tori Kudo trace the roles of interruption and error in the way some birds develop a song they will sing together; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's thought of “The Refrain“ and the deterritorialization of rhythm; and the traditional reading of the 13thcentury poem The Owl and the Nightingale is more than reversed – it is not that the Owl's dark and discordant dirges are merely more “musical“ than the Nightingale's romantic melodies, but rather that the Nightingale's songs themselves begin to function as an index. All these examples are used to argue that the separation of sound from the visual image is not about the conflict between nature and culture, but rather an example of how nature can only find its deepest fulfillment in art.
Even the song of birds, which we can bring under no musical rule, seems to have more freedom, and therefore more taste, than a song of a human being which is produced in accordance with all the rules of music. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
1. Pierre Schaeffer For Schaeffer, there is a very literal separation of image and sound. An important instance of this separation takes place when hearing music through the radio or a phonograph: “Listening to live orchestral music is essentially deductive listening, it is strongly deduced from vision, whereas listening to the radio or a phonograph is inductive or acousmatic listening“ (Malina and Schaeffer, 1972: 256). The acousmatic is important because it “marks the perceptive reality of sound as such, as distinguished from the modes of its production and transmission“ (Schaeffer, 2006: 77). Film theorist Michel Chion has made much of this term. In The Voice and Cinema he argues that an infant's experience of his/her mother is closer and more intense when it happens through smell, touch and sound, not vision. When the mother is actually seen there is “at least some distance and separation“ implied (Chion, 1999: 17). Locating instances of this separation is important for Schaeffer because once the clear visual source for a sound has been removed, more attention can actually be paid to hearing that sound: “Vision can, indeed, be a distraction“ he says (Malina and Schaeffer, 1972: 256). Separation, therefore, can make the act of hearing more vital. At the same time the act of hearing becomes more difficult, because one is less distracted: such a “reduced listening“ (écoute réduite) can “give back to the ear alone the entire responsibility of a perception that ordinarily rests on other sensible witnesses“ (Schaeffer, 2006: 77). In other words, when the separation of sound and source takes place, one begins to wonder; when the image is absent, attention is redirected by the sound object. This shift can be strengthened through Schaeffer's techniques of the closed groove (sillon fermé, or skipping needle) or the cut bell. As Chion argues in his Guide to Sound Objects, “if the 61