Select a sound, the sound of a cough, a mobile phone text alert, the sound of a single spoken word, any sound. Close your eyes, try to forget that it is the sound of something or that it means something and focus on the sound itself. Become obsessed with the sound, record it, play it back, do it again and again. Change it, use some free audio-edit software from the internet to add effects, reverb, echo and so on. Stretch it, bend it, slow it down, speed it up, make as many changes as you can. Save them. Listen to the modified sound, one file after the other. Maintain focus on the sound and notice invariant qualities existing across the different files. These properties belong to the sound object - the essence of the sound - and you have just listened to it.
That’s not all, the sound object has a strangely mute side. In perceiving the invariant properties of the sound object, in recognising the sound object across a variety of manifestations you have created it. You have given it its unity, the foundation of its earthly subsistence. What began as an eminently realist enterprise, to uncover the essential nature of sound itself, turns out to be idealist. Lesson learnt? You can’t listen to the sonic real? Not quite, only one part is accessible via perception, that part that comes from our (very real) relation to the real sound. The sound object is henceforth split in two: there are the primary (mathematic) properties of frequency, wavelength, amplitude and so on, and their corresponding secondary (sonorous) qualities of pitch, loudness etc that we perceive. Each modification that you made before thus created a new sound object.
If you'd like to read a more detailed account of Schaeffer's reductive listening than this glib outburst take a look at Brian Kane's more scholarly essay.
