The Application of Memetic Analysis to Electroacoustic Music

Richard Dawkins’ concept of the meme was first formulated in his book The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976). In The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture (Ashgate, 2007), the first substantial text applying the concept of memetics to music, Steven Jan proposes a theory of music and an associated analytical method centred on the meme. For Jan, memes are a multitude of musical ‘units’ or ‘replicators’ that are transmitted by imitation both within, and across genres of music. Jan’s study focuses primarily on the application of memetics to the analysis of classical music. This paper will assess the contribution of memetic analysis to electro-acoustic music. The artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi wrote that, ‘all human experience is just one big collage’ [1]. This idea is given a more rigorous grounding in the writings of memetic theorists such as Dawkins (1976/1989), Dennett (1990), and Jan (2007), who maintain that our culture is essentially an interconnecting network of memes. The all pervasiveness of the meme is clearly demonstrated by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene where he writes that, ‘examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches...’[2] and that the three characteristics for the successful meme are its copying-fidelity, its fecundity, and its longevity. Memes are neuronally-encoded cultural information and their phemotypic products (behaviour and artefacts) spread through a process of imitation from one individual’s memory to another. The neuropsychologist, Paul Broks maintains that, the harder one stares into the machinery of the brain, the starker the realisation that there is no one in there. There is no inner sanctum of the self. Neural networks have a life and logic of their own. There is no one running the show. The self is a shadow-puppet shaped by the firings of a hundred billion brain cells. [3] Broks’ writing strongly echoes Susan Blackmore’s concept of the self as a vast collection of mutually compatible memes, or a memeplex, that she terms the ‘selfplex’ [4] and Daniel Dennett who writes that the ‘haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artefact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.’[5] Memetics thus challenges our idea of the composer and original conscious intentionality or agency. Jan writes that, ‘memetics maintains that conscious intentionality, the fundamental attribute of the human mind, is not some unitary presence, but the resultant construct of a multitude of memes in constant competitive interplay.’[6] Jan also states that the identification of memes can tell us much about ‘both local issues of musical structure and organization, and global issues of musical style configuration and its diachronic change.’[7] In attempting to define the meme in music we need to identify what exactly is being replicated. When listening to baroque or acousmatic music, or free improvisation there are clear musical and gestural patterns that allow us to differentiate clearly between them. Similarly, it is possible to identify small units of sound material that occur in a number of works by different composers. Jan has identified such units in the music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. The identification of memes in this instance facilitates a discussion as much about musical culture and its evolution as it provides a mechanism for understanding individual works. The identification of memes within works, or a genre of music has been widely debated. Dawkins questions whether the meme works at the level of a whole ‘work, a movement, a tune, a bar, [or] a chord?’[8] Daniel Dennett states that ‘these new replicators are, roughly, ideas.... complex ideas that form themselves into distinct memorable units.’[9] In an attempt to provide a more concrete definition of the meme and a more analytically useful unit of reference, Jan adapts Dawkins description of the gene to describe the musical meme as, ...any portion of [musical patterning] that potentially lasts for long enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection...a...unit that is small enough to last for a large number of generations and to be distributed around in the form of many copies...a unit which, to a high degree, approaches the ideal of indivisible particulateness.[10] Musical patterning can operate at different structural levels. Examples are: 1) Structural memes – where composers employ a similar global structure repeatedly in a number of works. 2) Topic Memes – which involves the association of a musical meme with a verbal-conceptual meme (e.g. the chromatically descending tetrachordal bass in classical music is associated with death or grief. In electroacoustic music an example is the sound of crickets and exotic birds associated with the topic-meme of hot nocturnal-tropical environments. 3) Musicooperational memes – where a similar compositional or generative process is replicated between works despite the use of different musical material. 4) Low-level memes – where a short cadential or melodic figuration is replicated from work to work (e.g. in electroacoustic music one such example is the sound of a door opening and closing a musical phrase. Although this sound configuration can also act as a musico-operational meme where the sounds are spectrally similar then low-level memes can be identified. The assigning of memetic status is reliant on the identification of self-contained units or particles, regardless of the hierarchical level at which the musical unit in question is operating. Such identification is reliant upon splitting the audio stream into units. Segementation is a large topic and beyond the scope of this paper. It has been covered elsewhere by Delalande (1998), Diamantides (2007), Jan (2007), Lerdahl and Jackendoff (19**). From a memetic perspective the subdivision into discrete units of information takes place by reference to other copies or co-indexes of that information or meme, through the identification of that portion of the pitch, rhythmic or timbral continuum that is replicated... For such a particle to be regarded as a meme, a unit of imitation, one must, by definition, isolate the copy/copies – which one might term the co-equal/s – of the particle, from which the particle is imitated, or which is/are derived by imitation of the particle...It will be understood that particularity, the segmentation of the symbolic stream, can only be defined by reference to coequality, the presence of analogous segments of the same or another symbolic stream... [19] However, in electroacoustic music, the use of referential or anecdotal sound differentiates electroacoustic from purely acoustic music and implies additional criteria to enable the segmentation and perceptual grouping of memes. In instrumental music topics such as the Sturm und Drang of the Classical period involve the association of a musical meme with a verbal-conceptual meme. In electroacoustic music, topics often involve the association of referential real-world or anecdotal sound materials associated with a verbal-conceptual meme. An example of a topic-meme in electroacoustic music is the identification of homologous environments associated with the ‘urban’ or ‘exotic’. One of the characteristics of such topic-memes both in instrumental and electroacoustic music is that although it is possible to identify the topic as a replicated pattern of musical meme and verbal-conceptual meme in a stable co-adapted relationship, it is not possible to identify low-level musical memes that are common to all members of a particular topic-class. A ‘nocturnaltropical’ topic-meme can be identified in: Sud by Jean-Claude Risset, Hot Air by Jonty Harrison, Signé Dionysos by Francis Dhomont, Tangram by Robert Normandeau, Near and Far by David Lumsdaine, La Création du Monde by Bernard Parmegiani, Associations Libres by Gilles Gobeil, Les Couleurs de la Nuit by François Bayle, and La Disparition by Christian Calon. The topic-meme appears in each work at different structural points. The topic-meme is pervasive throughout the works by Bayle and Lumsdaine, whereas in the others it is one topic-meme amongst many other sound elements. In electroacoustic music a musico-operational meme can be identified as a replicated compositional process occurring at a deeper structural level than the surface low-level memes. A musico-operational meme occurs when compositional devices and ways of handling material are replicated between works even though the material itself may be quite different. Like topic-memes, it is not possible to identify low-level musical memes that are common to all musico-operational memes. Two examples will be given: the first demonstrates two musico-operational memes in abstract works; the second considers musico-operational memes occurring in works that use anecdotal material. In Denis Smalley’s Windchimes (1987) and Andrew Lewis’s Time and Fire (1991) a number of musicooperational memes can be identified. The two illustrated here are taken from the opening and the close of the exposition of each work. The sonograms below (fig.1) are taken from the first two minutes of each work. What they illustrate is a musico-operational meme in which a single opening attack/resonance gesture, followed by a period of silence is gradually developed during the exposition through the extension of the resonance and iterative textures into extended musical phrases. This musico-operational meme, and others throughout the work, such as the harmonic change at the climax of the work, give rise to a shared structural meme in these two works. Andrew Lewis: Time and Fire 0’00 – 2’00 Denis Smalley: Windchimes 0’00 – 2’00 (Fig.1) A second example occurs at the end of the exposition of these two works. In both Smalley’s and Lewis’ works the end of the exposition is marked by a strong low frequency attack that cuts off a musical texture that has been