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ABSTRACT
Making music together relies, among other things, on the mutual hearing amongst co-performers and on the visual monitoring of each other’s actions and gestures. This is better facilitated when musicians share a mutual visual space where hearing and seeing play a primary role. However, drawing from workplace studies, linguistic anthropology, anthropology of the senses and multimodal interactional studies of sensoriality, we observed how mutual visibility was (tacitly) more important for coordination among musicians than they themselves were willing to admit. Thanks to the video recording of trio rehearsals, by experimentally suspending the sense of hearing, often regarded as a predominant sense in the playing of a musical instrument and to make music together, we realized that mutual visibility not only enables musicians to notice pertinent/relevant visual cues and professional gestures, but also to make sound visible and then audible, activating what we call visual hearing, a specific hybrid sense, that we captured in action.
Acknowledgments
We thank Valentina Marcheselli for the video recording of trio rehearsals and the participation in some of our video-data sessions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. It is beyond the scope of this essay to deal with the phenomenon (moreover much studied in neurology) of synaesthesia, that sensorial/perceptive situation which indicates a contamination of the senses in perception (Cytowic Citation2002, Citation2003; Marks Citation1978). In its mildest form it is present in many people, often due to the fact that our senses, although autonomous, do not act completely detached from others. More indicative of an actual presence of synaesthesia is the case in which perceiving a stimulus (such as sound) causes a clear and proper reaction of another sense (such as sight). By “pure form” it is meant synaesthesia which automatically manifests itself as a perceptive and non-cognitive phenomenon. Some research claims that the synesthetic phenomenon affects 4% of the population and most of this 4% are artists (Simner et al. Citation2006). The concept of hybrid senses could justify the “normality” of a phenomenon still considered exceptional, or even pathological (as in the case of research on autism).
2. The concept of visual touch has strong analogy with our concept of visual hearing. However, in the former, the gaze that leads to tactile sensations occurs without touch. Unlike, in our case the musicians look and hear each other. Thus, despite the apparent similarities between these phenomena, there are important distinctions to be made.
3. In the same page, Searle (Citation1990) also talks about the “sense of us”.
4. The trio is an Italian professional trio, specialized in French chamber music of the twentieth century. At the time of video recording, they had been playing together as a trio for two years, since they had met at their conservatory.
5. The musician on the left is the Oboist; in front of him, on the right, is the Bassoonist. The Pianist is seated next to the researcher (Valentina Marcheselli), who video-recorded the interactions among the musicians during the rehearsals.
6. There is a large literature highlighting the limits of laboratory experiments (Cicourel Citation1996): the artificiality of the situation; the unnaturalness and exceptionality of tasks requested to the participants; the not always complete understanding of the stimuli proposed. An attempt to overcome these limits by using ethnographic experiments or quasi-naturalistic experiments (Heath and Luff Citation2018) that study collaboration, talk and actions through recordings of naturally occurring interactions, in line with the principles of an experimental ethnomethodology (Mehan and Wood Citation1975, 149–52).
7. We also made a second experiment in which we changed the location of the musicians in the space so that they could hear but not see each other. Hence, during this experiment the musicians could only rely on hearing. However, since the video-data under scrutiny did not allow us to see how the musicians used their hearing (and besides they were also positioned back), we decided to only describe the first experiment. We have however collected their comments after both experiments.
8. The musicians’ comments were translated from Italian.
9. We thank Alessandro Duranti for this suggestion.
10. The rehearsals were video-recorded with two different camera angles. The first one (A) was filming the three musicians while the second one (B) was more focused on the bassoonist and the oboist.
11. At the end of the experiment, the bassoonist will comment laughing that she had forgotten to turn the score and that’s why she was a bit lost.
12. This manner of thinking is especially evident in Taoism, which believes that Tao (the Way) has no name and that classification is meaningless because have and have-nots are constantly changing into each other, like yin and yang: “this may explain why some of our students are not used to the idea of reflexivity, which injects the researcher as an object for meticulous scrutiny” (Chen Citation2015, 8). Consequently, quite a number of the students find themselves unable to cut texts into pieces and label them with codes, categories, properties and dimensions, “because it has lost the beauty of the whole, the haziness and the poetic, which we Chinese people cherish most” (Chen Citation2015, 7).
13. A similar discomfort occurs when talking to someone in a dark room. Hearing is not enough to understand and converse with the other.
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Notes on contributors
Barbara Pentimalli
Barbara Pentimalli is Lecturer in Management and Innovation in Healthcare Organizations at the University Sapienza of Rome (Italy). She recently coordinated with V. Rémery and C. Datchary the Special Issue La fabrication du regard dans l’apprentissage du métier for the Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances. Her interests concern: social studies of scientific imaging and visualization; sociology of the senses; workplace studies and cooperative learning for vocational training.
Giampietro Gobo
Giampietro Gobo is professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Milan (Italy). His books include Doing Ethnography (Sage, 2008), Qualitative Research Practice (co-edited with C. Seale, J. F. Gubrium and D. Silverman, Sage, 2004), Constructing Survey Data (with S. Mauceri, Sage, 2014), Merged Methods (with N. Fielding, G. La Rocca and W. van der Vaar, Sage, 2021) and Science, Technology and Society (with V. Marcheselli, Palgrave 2023).