Over at Weird Vibrations, Ben blogged about an art project that uses the same principle of acoustic levitation as this video I blogged a few days ago. He comes to a similar conclusion as I did about the impact of these demonstrations on one’s ideas about “sound”:

Sonolevitation “wows” us because we imagine sound as propagating in an autonomous and indescribable channel – a channel that isn’t quite physical.

I would add that it is this kind of conception is what allows someone like Pierre Schaeffer to say that “sonorous objects” are not physical things, but perceptual ones. He doesn’t mean that the objects are relative or subjective, but that they reside in their perception by an ear (and he assumes that all ears hear more or less the same). This is a defensible position, but there is no sense of the physical embodiment of sound in his definition of musique concrète, as he discounts the tapes and instruments that produce sounds as “not the sonorous object,” and certainly does not consider it in the air. Projects like Sonolevitation do the good work of reminding us that sounds are physical things, even when not fixed in a medium or produced by a machine.

(via THIS IS WEIRD VIBRATIONS)

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Pierre Schaeffer & Pierre Henry - Valse, Symphonie Pour un Homme Seul