Conkers (listening out for organised experience) KATHARINE NORMAN City University London, Northampton Square, London EC1V OHB, UK E-mail: Katharine.Norman@city.ac.uk By comparison to contemporary artists in other disciplines, such as the visual and literary arts, composers of sound-based art and electroacoustic music sometimes appear strangely diffident in articulating their motivations in other than material-based terms, or at least seem so within scholarly debate. Reception-based investigations (such as Weale 2005) seem either at a relatively early stage or understandably inconclusive, with an emphasis on how the listener accesses, or might access, the work. While this might appear a semantic nicety, I suggest that it could be fruitful to proceed instead from considerations of how the work might ‘access’ the listener, via considering diverse experience, rather than direct associative responses to sound, as material that is organised in both creating and listening to sound-based work – and by whom left open to negotiation. 1. INTRODUCTION Lately I have been picking up horse chestnuts (or ‘conkers’ as we call them in the UK). Each night the driveway is littered with the latest fall, gleaming in the September dusk, or squashed and splayed open by passing cars. I juggle a handful of my slithery prizes in one hand as I fumble to unlock a still unfamiliar door in an apartment that’s temporarily ‘home’. Two days later my latest finds are disappointingly wrin- kled, their shine dulled like pebbles pulled from water. But as more and more of them harden in the dish by the door they bring to my mind an increas- ingly rich evocation of half-remembered experience: of a time of year, a place, a month, a memory of a nip in the air, the first frosts soon, school beginning, new shoes, new coat, the last sun before the gloomy days of the autumn term. Behind all this recollection some as yet intangible things are gradually gathering together. I think I may be on my way to making something, but am still organising my thoughts as to why and what that might be, and what it would mean to anyone else. I’ll put a few more conkers in the bowl and come back to it later. Much theorising about music and sound-based art that employs recognisable ‘real world’ sources rests on divining those associations that certain kinds of sounds and sound behaviours might reliably elicit in the listener, proceeding to a proof via supporting examples from appropriate works. In his valuable survey of listeners to electroacoustic music, for instance, Rob Weale finds that listeners often make indepen- dently similar associations to sounds, and certain sounds or gestures evidently (and more or less reliably) evoke certain images or scenarios, which are never- theless inflected by individual experience. Sixteen listeners (thirteen InEx, two Ex and one HiEx), out of the forty-two who identified the accordion sound, interpreted it as French music and/or as indicating a French location. For example, 18InEx/M ‘accordion gives impression of France – Paris’, 2InEx/NM-A ‘accordion – French sound’. Interestingly, five of these listeners were in the non-musician category. This sug- gests that their lived experiences, rather than musical education, has given them the means through which to place a particular musical style/instrumental sound into a cultural context. (Weale 2005: 139) Naturally the hit rate for accurate sound identifica- tion (and/or sufficiently similar listener associations) is high when the sound sources are clearly recogni- sable (speech, planes, birdsy) and when the group culturally homogenous. It is unsurprising, in the case of this UK-based listener grouping, that many listeners had obviously encountered the familiar stereotype of an accordion-playing Parisian in their TV-viewing or ad-reading experience. Rob Weale is upfront in admitting to a focus on ‘fixed medium works where the composer’s commu- nicative intent is based wholly or in part on the real- world referential characteristics of the sounding content’, which he notes as ‘a subset of a corpus of works that appears to be based, for the most part within academia and the professional E/A art music community’ (Weale 2005: 2 [my italics]). Projects such as Weale’s are gratifyingly inquisitive with regard to what listeners, both ‘experienced’ or ‘inexperienced’, might be ‘finding’ in works (or indeed not finding), but they are few and far between, and perhaps tend to apply a rather expansive empirical methodology to a self-proscribed field. As with all ethnographic studies the author can betray his or her own proclivities (as might any; I am a prime example) inadvertently through choice of listening repertoire. Rather than seek proofs for any kind of alternative proposition, I want to offer a sequence of assertions that will perhaps serve as a means of departure and Organised Sound 15(2): 116–124 & Cambridge University Press, 2010. doi:10.1017/S1355771810000105