Pascal Terrien Université catholique de l’ouest / OMF Conservatoire national de musique et de danse de Paris (18 rue Thiers, 49100 Angers – France) (+33(0)6.81.33.04.58) (pascal.terrien@wanadoo.fr) Nicolas Marty Université Paris-Sorbonne / OMF (5 Rond Point de Fukuoka - Appt B01 33300 Bordeaux - France) (+33(0)6.71.88.24.05) (nicodria@hotmail.com) Listening behaviors and formal representation of an extract of acousmatic music in non-expert listeners This research follows our presentations at Stockholm’s EMS12 conference. Pascal Terrien studied the understanding of existing relationships between the auditory experience of listeners familiar with musical listening, but who are not specialists of electroacoustic works, and their perception of an electroacoustic work. He tried to understand how non-expert listeners used perceptive strategies drawn from other listening situations (Terrien 2006, 2012). Nicolas Marty studied the “narrativization” of anecdotic electroacoustic music, by connecting together the listening behaviors proposed by Delalande, Anderson, Baboni, Kaltenecker, Schaeffer, as well as the three forms of cognitive representations studied by Meunier (Marty 2012). It is difficult (as well as rare) to study listening behaviors regarding electroacoustic works which present a musical discourse or temporality detached from traditional references – the François Bayle piece studied by Pascal Terrien used quite clearly a modal discourse, and the Trevor Wishart extract studied by Nicolas Marty presented mainly what we could call “evocative” sounds. Listeners do tend to hold on to such characteristics in their listening and interpretation of a work. For our current work, we chose two research methodologies applied to the same musical extract – the first two minutes of Elizabeth Anderson’s Chat Noir (1998), an acousmatic piece presenting a musical discourse without anecdotic connotations and whose syntax is abstracted from the materials. On the one hand we collected testimonies written during and right after the listening by people who were not experts in electroacoustic music. On the other hand, we did seven explicitation interviews with listeners who were either experts or non-experts in electroacoustic music. We studied the testimony following a single hearing, in order to determine what happens during the discovery of the extract, as well as what remains after this discovery, rather than what is constructed because of repeated hearings. We will present for this conference the results regarding written testimonies. Two questions were asked to the listeners, who first had to write – while listening – single words about what they were hearing (this should help us understand listening behaviors as well as draft the formal segmentation and discrimination implied); then listeners were asked to write, after the end of the extract, what struck them the most (this should help us define the anchor point of their memory as well as hypothesize about their formal representation of the extract). This research differs fundamentally from our previous experiments. Contrary to Marty (2012), the extract used here is of an abstract nature: this necessarily reduces the expectations we might have regarding cognitive representations – and we may thus start on a more equal footing for the study of listening behaviors. Contrary to Terrien (2012), here we have only one hearing: this means we will not study the link between the listeners’ (emotional or other) reactions and the construction of knowledge about the extract and music, but rather we will study the reactions themselves.