Crossing cultural boundaries through technology
Simon Emmerson · 2016
In the radio play music can serve as both outer and inner space, to accompany both scene-changes and internalised thought. In cut and dried cases the music is indeed incidental in that it amplifies events in a foreground narrative, in a similar manner to the emotional narrative supplied by music in film. The activity of listening can make us vulnerable; by apprising us of associations that we might not expect, or want, to encounter, or by prising all kinds of emotional resonances from the depths of our memory banks. Perhaps the kind of trivial sampling trick that produces a chorus of dogs barking the National Anthem is mildly amusing because it makes a play on the discrepancy between these two listening attires. At the other extreme, it can sometimes seem as if the proffering of listening theories' to delineate the abstracted timbral gestures of acousmatic music is an attempt to fit us out with musical' clothes of a predetermined style.