Overview

In a recording, what sounds count as music? Sounds made by a musician's body--including inhales, finger taps, and grunts--have for decades been dismissed as extraneous noises. In Sounds as They Are: The unwritten music in classical recordings, author Richard Beaudoin pioneers a field of inquiry into non-notated sounds in recordings of classical music, recognizing often-overlooked sounds made by the bodies of performers and their recording equipment as music.Beaudoin classifies such sounds via inclusive track analysis (ITA), a bold new theory based on a comprehensive census of audible events on a given recording, and then codifies their musical function. He builds a typology across four large categories: sounds of breath (inhaling and exhaling), sounds of touch (guitar squeaks, piano pedals), sounds of effort (grunting and moaning), and surface noise (on early recording formats). Breaths are shown to be as complex and diverse as chords. Touch sounds create empathy with listeners. Effortful vocalizations reveal connections between music-making and sex. The measurement of surface noise reveals moments of synchronization with the meter of the recorded piece. He draws analogies between unwritten music and painting, photography, poetry, psychology, and government. The book's methodology is intertwined with the aesthetics and ethics of non-notated sounds: who is allowed to make them, and how they are received by listeners, critics, and scholars. Beaudoin uncovers insidious inequalities across music studies and the recording industry, including the silencing of body and breath sounds along lines of gender and race.Sounds as They Are demonstrates the expressive, interpretive, and embodied possibilities that emerge when all sounds are valued coequally and asks music theory to face a simple truth: that all sounds deserve recognition.

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9780197659281

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Reviews

Sounds As They Are is a beautiful-looking hardback of 240 dense pages with musical examples, an extended discography, a list of works cited, and an index... Beaudoin's intensive research is impressive and exhaustive. * Janet Horvath, The Interlude * This book not only changes the way you think about music; it changes the way you hear. Spellbinding, ear-opening, and impossible to put down, Sounds as They Are is a groundbreaking exploration of our capacity to listen unconditionally. In a field dominated by extraction and exclusion, Beaudoin compels us to imagine an expansive musical ecosystem in which composers, interpreters, sound engineers, and listeners are all cocreators in a radically transformed experience of hearing and appreciating music. Every musician should read this book. * Claire Chase, Professor of the Practice, Harvard University * Sounds as They Are helped me remember how I used to listen to music, how to apply that same child-like joy to my performances, and how to (rather literally!) breathe life into my listening. Fearlessly written, a new mode of deep listening emerges from this book, which addresses performers, audio engineers, theorists, musicologists, and everyone who loves recordings. * Dashon Burton, Assistant Professor of Voice, Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University * Groundbreaking in its pursuit of equal recognition for all recorded sounds, Sounds as They Are unlocks the latent potential of 'unwritten music.' Beaudoin exposes biases in our perception of classical music recordings, enriching our auditory experience and inspiring innovative scholarly contemplation. His lucid mapping and inventive typology will become standard tools for analyzing sounds that have long been overlooked. * Yves Balmer, Professor of Music Analysis, Paris Conservatoire *

Author Information

Richard Beaudoin analyses audio recordings and uses his research to create scholarship and compose new music. He has held posts as Preceptor in Music at Harvard University, The Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Amherst College, and Visiting Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music, London. He is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Dartmouth College.

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