THE NATURE OF THE LISTENING OF MUSIC IMPROVISED IN THE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN ACOUSMATIC PERCEPTION AND NON-ACOUSMATIC PERCEPTION

This paper will reflect upon the nature of the perception of freely improvised music. Taking as a reference the criticism raised by Andy Hamilon against Robert Scruton's theses on his piece The Sound of Music published on Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays, it will examine if the perception of that way of making music is of an acousmatic type or, on the contrary, of a non-acousmatic type. The Greek term akusmatikoi refers to the followers of Pythagoras who listened to their master from behind a curtain so that his presence wouldn't distract the attention away from his lessons. This notion was revisited in the 20th century by musique concrste artists who manipulated sounds from everyday sources hampering the recognition of their origin in order to highlight their perceptual materiality. A perception of sound in which the existence of a causal origin is unrecognizable is acousmatic: Scruton states that musical listening involves a divorce between what is perceived and its material cause, whereas Hamilton argues that music is an art of performance related to human behavior and that every musical experience, even if it lacks any visual information, rouses a causal awareness of the origin of sound and its location in a space. Free Improvisation appeared in mid-1960s in the United Kingdom, pioneered by musicians like Derek Bailey or the band AMM. It is a music that doesn't resort to previous compositional elements or consciously predetermined stylistic limitations in which technical developments are put together individually or colectivelly according to subjective aesthetic preferences. Even though this absence of generic a priori structures apparently emphasizes the autonomy of sound, it doesn't lessen the procedural nature, linked to the use of a tool, of a music whose symbolic system arises in the specific moment of performance. The deliberate refusal to external musical prefigurations - beyond those created by contingent elements such as the acoustic characteristics and the accidental sounds of the environment-brings the real-time sound-making processes to the forefront, reminding us auditorily that the generation of musical sound is the result of an instrumental operation that takes place in a space.