January 2024

Occasional Column: The Musical Point Of View
Audio systems are communicators - not just modes of communication.
Article By Jules Coleman

Communities Communicate
The audio community is a community – actually, many overlapping and intersecting ones. Like other communities, its members share norms, support and encourage excellence in one another, celebrate achievements, mourn losses, welcome new additions, and more. Communities communicate. This is an obvious truth; perhaps even a banal one. It's not always bad to be obvious or banal, however. After all, 'obvious truths' come in two varieties: those so obvious they require no defense or argument in their favor; and those that are obvious only after the argument for them has been made. And while many banalities are simply that, the history of ideas is basically a catalog of great works expanding on apparent banalities.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears was not the first but may have been the most influential purveyors of the great banality, to wit: what goes up must come down – which after all first hit Newton in and on his head, and once having done so has led to the not at all obvious and quite complex physics exploring the concept of gravity and its implications.

Even if obvious and banal, the fact that communities communicate is nonetheless both informative and insightful. To see this, we need to understand community and communication independently, and then explore some of the ways in which they can and do impact one another.

What Is Communication?
To communicate is to convey information between or among (typically, but not necessarily) people. Arguably, every communication involves a Who, What, How, and to Whom. A communication has a source of the communication (the communicator), the object of communication (the message), a mode or manner of conveyance, and the intended or actual recipient (the audience). In some cases, communication takes the form of an assertion of fact. Assertions of fact possess what we call propositional content, and they can be either true or false. True if the proposition they assert is true, false otherwise. Other times communication takes the form of an expression of emotion or attitude. Emotions and attitudes are typically analyzed in terms of dispositions to behave in specified ways. If you are angry with me, that means that you are disposed to act in ways (to me) that indicate your anger. Belief is an attitude.

The object of a belief may be a proposition, for example, I believe that the Go-Betweens was an underappreciated band. My belief doesn't have propositional content, but the object of my belief does. In other words, what I believe is something I allege to be true. But the belief is itself an attitude that I take towards its object; and that attitude is itself analyzed in terms of a disposition to behave in certain ways. Because I believe that the Go-Betweens was an underappreciated band, I am disposed to act as one who held such a belief would. For example, I would be inclined to praise their work and compare it favorably to others whose work I do not view as nearly as good but who achieved far greater fame, for example, Maroon 5, or Blink 182.

I can often convey the same message both propositionally and non-propositionally. For example, I can express my disappointment in your not sharing my view about the Go-Betweens, by stating that you do not treat them with the respect their work warrants, or I can merely shake my head in disbelief whenever you reject putting one of their albums on the turntable when I request that you do so.

Because assertions of fact are either true or false, we say that they observe or are responsive to the truth norm. When we make assertions of fact, our behavior is norm governed in two senses. First, as just noted, what we say can be either true or false and in that sense is subject to the truth norm. Secondly, and more importantly, our behavior is norm-governed in the sense that if we are presented with strong evidence or proof that our assertions are false, we are disposed to withdraw them.

In contrast, emotions and attitudes are neither true nor false. This means that they are not governed by the truth norm, but they can be appropriate or not. Feeling guilt or shame is appropriate when one has wronged another. It is not appropriate when the harm another suffers is not your fault. Sympathy for the pain others experience, whether caused by their own negligence or just bad luck, is a more appropriate reactive attitude. Similarly, most of us are disposed to laugh at jokes, and most of the time laughter is a perfectly apt response to a joke. However, laughing at a 'tasteless joke' is not appropriate. Emotions and attitudes are responsive to standards of appropriateness, and to that extent, and in that way, they too are norm-governed forms of communication.

Assertions of fact and expressions of emotions and attitudes are not the only kinds of messages that we convey or communicate to others. Sometimes we make moral or value judgments, and other times we issue commands or orders. Moral and value judgments in general create no additional issues and that is because there are typically two ways of understanding such judgments: either as expressions of fact or as expressions of attitude.

If we take it as a fact that harming someone without justification is as much a fact as is the fact that the sun rose this morning (though not where I am in Bremen, Germany at the moment), then moral judgments, like other facts are governed by the truth norm. Others believe that moral judgments are simply expressions of feeling or attitude and not alleged statements of fact. But if they are expressions of feelings and not statements of fact, that just means that though they are neither true nor false, they can be either appropriate or inappropriate attitudes to have. In that case, they are subject to the 'appropriateness norm.'

Commands or orders present a special case. Brush your teeth! Follow my lead! Get in line! All are commands or orders. They neither assert truths nor express emotions. Instead, they make demands. But demands come in at least two forms: those one has a genuine authority to make, and those we make upon others when we lack the authority to do so. We usually characterize the latter as exercises of power, not authority. This means that commands too are regulated by norms – those that distinguish genuine authority from sheer power.

Communications also take the form of questions. Asked sincerely they are requests for good-faith responses in the form of assertions as in – did the Jets win today? – expressions of emotions or attitudes as in – can you show me how their losing again makes you feel? – to queries about whether you have the authority to command or order action, as in – what makes you think you can tell me how I should respond to yet another loss? So, albeit indirectly, questions are calls for answers that are themselves subject to exactly those norms we have just discussed.

Often communities adopt characteristic modes of communication designed for different purposes. Sometimes modes of communication are designed to facilitate the ease with which the audience can understand the message being sent. In these cases, the mode of expression may be chosen because it eliminates vagueness and ambiguity or leaves nothing unsettled or subject to conflicting interpretations. Other times a mode of communication is chosen to convey the seriousness of the message, and so on. Sometimes the most effective mode of communication is silence. Modes of communication can run the gamut from the obvious and familiar – natural as well as body language – to the more creative –works of art, dance, and musical performance.

For example, it may be natural to think of a choreographed dance performance as the mode of expression that the choreographer has chosen to convey whatever message she intended. So too a painting by a painter; a musical composition and a performance of it. The same could be said for books and sculptures. If the performance communicates a message, it is the choreographer's, composer's, or musician's. It cannot be a message initiated by the dance, song, painting, sculpture, or performance. At least that is the conventional wisdom.

Though natural, the conventional view reflects an artificial, unduly restrictive, and, frankly, mistaken view about the capacity of various modes of expression to also be sources of communication themselves. Indeed, a mode or modality of communication may serve poorly as a way of expressing the author or artist's vision or intention or fail to bring the intended message to the intended audience. Yet, the performance itself may spark extraordinary responses among the audience and succeed as a powerful expression of an altogether different idea than the one the author had in mind.

How can something that is presented as a tool or instrument for conveying a message also constitute the initiator of a message? This is a fair question, but once we explain the answer, it may forever change the way you think about audio systems, and especially the role they play in the chain between musical source and listener experience.

We can agree that an author or creator may be privy to their intentions and the messages they mean to communicate in ways that no one else is or can be. I know what I want to say in ways that you may not even if you know exactly what I want to say. After all, they are my thoughts and not yours. I therefore have a kind of access to them that you do not, and unless you are a mind reader, ways in which you cannot access them. And, we can agree that an author or creator may possess knowledge of why they have chosen a particular mode of expression to convey their message that others may not have and can only guess at. After all, I can know both what I want to say and how I want to make my point.

Having a special kind of access to what one wants to communicate and control over the method for expressing it does not confer interpretive authority: a right to determine the most plausible, interesting, or correct interpretation of what the mode of expression conveys. Once created, the acts have a standing of their own, and as a result are open to several competing interpretations, some that may see them in much the same way the choreographer or author does, but others that interpret the performance in ways the author never imagined – for better or worse. Access grants no authority.

A choreographer may be disappointed with the way the public responds to the dance she has fashioned, and even more so if she believes the public misunderstands it, which is to say understands the dance differently than she had intended or envisioned. And her disappointment may only worsen upon learning that the dance she has choreographed has come to have a social meaning different not only from what she had in mind: different from what she could ever have imagined the dance coming to have. The best interpretation is the one that ultimately makes the best sense of the work and in doing so explains its virtue and value; and this is not for the author to decide. The author can determine what she intended the dance to convey, but she cannot determine what it conveys.

To view the creations simply as modes of communication and not also as communicators is to misunderstand the social aspects of communication, the nature of interpretation, and ways in which everything from legal, logical, and philosophical arguments as well as performances come to have the social meaning that they do.

The best interpretation depends on many factors, but it is certainly not settled by you claiming correctly that you are its author! And that is the important point. It means that modes of communication stand as acts on their own, that they communicate, and most importantly, what they actually communicate depends on the entire environment and not at all, let alone entirely, on the intentions or visions of their creators.

If this is right, and I believe it is, we need to reconceptualize how we think about audio systems, their role in the chain between source and listener, and the standards we employ to access them. If the listener is the audience, the system is the show.

On the standard view, an audio system is nothing more than a mode of communicating a musical message that has been encoded to vinyl or digits. Audio systems provide the conventional mode for communicating that message. If an audio system is merely (even a uniquely) appropriate mode for communicating recorded music's message, then the proper standard for assessing its success or failure would seem to be 'fidelity to the source.' When combined with the common view among audio designers that the best designs are those that get out of the way of the music and imprint nothing of their own character onto the signal, we are left with the view of audio systems as expensive transmission devices.

Let's be clear. The conventional view dominates reviews and discussions, and we know that because so much of the language we use to describe our experience with audio suggests that the best systems are those that present accurately the information on the disc, or the ones that transport the listener back to the original event, or those that reveal the composer's intention or vision, etc. To be sure, audio systems are modes or modalities of communication, but so too are works of literature, dances and musical performances. By now, it is commonplace that works of art, sculpture, dance, and musical performance can be both modalities of communication and sources of content and meaning on their own.

My view is that the same holds for audio systems. They present the same music in very different ways not just because some are noisy and others quiet; and not because some are transparent and others not.

They differ because they present different interpretations or representations of the same source material. It's because they speak in different voices.

Working from the same source, they can nevertheless present the material with a different emphasis than the composer or author had in mind, or the presentation may fail entirely to present the material as anything like what the author had in mind. An audio system brings a voice to the music that represents its own way with the music, invites different interpretations of it, and opens us up to see how the social meaning of the piece and this or that recording of it comes to have the meaning that it does. Audio systems can convey messages, but they also interpret, represent, organize, and arrange the messages they convey and in doing so sometimes fail to convey the composer or player's intentions well, but succeed at creating something much more vital and meaningful than the creator had in mind.

They are, after all, interpreters of information, and not just transmitters of it.

In the next column, I suggest that the most appropriate language for reviewing audio equipment is not that of fidelity to source, but that of interpretation, and that the most important concepts in reviewing are those that are not well understood at this point: voicing and the musical point of view.

Jules Coleman