2. TEMPORALITY VERSUS SPATIALITY

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, music has evolved through the exploration and adoption of new methodologies and technologies. Post-tonal compositional techniques led to new possibilities for pitch organisation and an increased interest in subtle qualities of sound (i.e., timbre). Electronic technologies, at the same time, provided composers with new tools for establishing their own sonic palettes by capturing, preserving and manipulating sounds or by synthesising and mixing sound materials. These developments, in turn, led to a new musical aesthetic in which sound is no longer a mere ‘result’ of composition but a subject of composition (Solomos Reference Solomos2020: 2). Creating, designing and fixing sounds thus became as important as structuring sounds, as is especially the case in the practice of electronic music, the field in which the traditional focus of composition with sounds was replaced by the composition of sound (Risset Reference Risset, Howell, Paynter, Orton and Seymour1992: 591).

By refocusing on sound and exploring new technologies, composers and musicians transcended the established boundary of music, posing in turn challenges to the audience’s flexibility and capability in listening. Outside a system based around pitch hierarchies, one may have difficulty in making sense of interactions between sounds. How can we recognise and categorise unconventional sounds as musical materials and subsequently understand their structural relationships? These questions had to be addressed when examining musical repertoires based on an extended sound palette.

Establishing a new sound hierarchy was an especially pressing issue in the research and analysis of electronic music. It is precisely in this context that the father of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer, emphasised the necessity of a sound typology in his theory of objets sonores (Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer1966). In it the author encourages us to discount the source of a sound (i.e., what the sound is made by) and, instead, carefully to observe and describe the physical qualities of the sound itself (i.e., how the sound is heard), by focusing, for instance, on the degree of pitchedness, energy distribution (duration) or graininess. An extensive sound typology for acousmatic music can help us develop our listening capability in order to distinguish subtle differences in quality between sounds that may otherwise be heard to be similar or to be incomprehensible. This process of recognition subsequently allows us to investigate the structural relationships between sounds, no matter how noisy or unfamiliar they may be. It can thus be shown that any sound can serve as a structural constituent of music as long as it is organised in a temporal framework of a piece. This means that novelty in sound does not change the traditional ontology of music: that a musical work should embrace an autonomous structural momentum and distinct sonic sculpture in time.

The idea that music exists as a temporal object can, however, be challenged by the intense physical experience of sound. Over the course of the twentieth century, the idea became gradually accepted that sound can simply exist for its own sake without playing a definite role in structure, namely, without conveying a strong sense of movement and progression in time. In this aesthetic, traditional elements of music for creating a sense of momentum – melody, rhythm and harmony as discernible structures – are considered to be of lesser importance. As observed in Giacinto Scelsi’s Quattro Pezzi su una nota sola (1959), a piece can entirely consist of an indefinitely prolonged single pitch with variation in texture and timbre, creating in turn a sense of stasis, ambiguity and stillness in time. A similar effect can also be created through perpetual repetition of the same sonic elements, as often articulated in minimal music. In both cases the identity of music as a temporal object is thrown into question while the spatial experience of sound itself is emphasised. Such a state of sonic existence is most effectively achieved when materials of a piece are electronically processed – sounds that are indefinitely prolonged or perpetually repeated (looped) are most easily produced through the use of electronic apparatus even though it is still possible to create analogous examples by means of a massed sonic construction in acoustic instrumental music. The focus on spatiality is, however, most prominent in sound art, the field in which sound is treated primarily as a spatial object to be exhibited in a museum gallery or an open-air space.Footnote ²

When sonic spatiality is prioritised over temporal progression, traditional formalistic analysis used for uncovering the abstract structure of music is not an effective way to investigate a piece. Instead, what López (Reference López, Cox and Warner2004) describes as ‘profound listening’ or Oliveros (Reference Oliveros2005) as ‘deep listening’, namely, the intense focus on the environmental sound matter and space–time continuum, can be said to be of more use for the appreciation of the acoustic reality. Music always must exist in time, however. No matter how intensified the spatial aspect of a work, time necessarily remains essential for its sonic space to be experienced and examined, as when observing the spatial contents of a soundscape that is full of acoustic information. As Smalley (Reference Smalley2007: 37) puts it, ‘[a] listener needs time to progress from an initial listening encounter with the soundscape to a state of engaging actively and fully in scanning and exploring the spectromorphological and spatial properties on offer. I cannot listen to everything simultaneously and need to devote attention to each of the zones in turn, accumulating a global view, which emerges over time.’ What Smalley is discussing here is analogous to Voegelin’s debate on sound art, where she argues that one can only build the sonic space in one’s listening through a durational experience, therefore time and space are mutually related and bound in one concept, namely, ‘timespace’ (Voegelin Reference Voegelin2010: ch. 4).

Time serves as a medium for experiencing a sonic space rather than a platform to be neatly filled and structurally organised. This understanding of time is especially relevant to the obfuscated temporality in sound art. In this category of art practice, as Cox (Reference Cox2018: 34) argues, sound is not considered to be a definite object in an abstract form but rather a physical condition that transforms in a constant flux of ‘events and becomings’. The temporal framework of a work is an incidental result of this ambiguous flux and therefore not an aspect to be examined in musical analytical terms. What are deemed to be of more interest in this discipline are the concepts behind the composition and their philosophical, cultural, historical and political meanings and contexts (e.g., Kim-Cohn Reference Kim-Cohen2009; LaBelle Reference LaBelle2015; Grant, Matthias and Prior Reference Grant, Matthias and Prior2021).

Ikeda’s work is often discussed in the context of sound art mainly because of its conceptual nature and close association with visual art. While this interdisciplinary approach is evidently important to understand the broad picture of his work, I argue that it also leaves sufficient room for a musical analytical investigation. The intricate spatiotemporal relationships in Ikeda’s sonic work exemplifies a new perspective of musical time, the importance of which has nevertheless been overlooked as a result of the emphasis on sonic spatiality. It is a quality of time that contains a high degree of stasis yet also presents a non-linear progression based on sonic repetition and variation. The degree to which this temporality can be observed depends on the format of the work. My primary focus here is his purely sonic composition presented in the form of audio albums, the idea of which nevertheless originates, in most cases, from his audiovisual pieces. The section that follows will therefore discuss the relationship between his audiovisual work and his sonic composition.

3. IKEDA’S AUDIOVISUAL COMPOSITION AND SONIC COMPOSITION

Multisensory stimuli in Ikeda’s audiovisual compositions are generally created through the use of flashlights, large-scale visual images and a stream of sounds including harsh, loud noises. The scale, size and volume of their perceptive information often transcend the limit of human cognition, overwhelming our sensory system. In his gallery installations and audiovisual concerts, the visitors/audiences are immersed in a plethora of spatiotemporal events and motions. The excess of information has been described as a ‘density of nothing’ (Lee Reference Lee2018: 11) in which neither semantic nor syntactic meaning can be found. Despite this absence, however, the final composition nevertheless provides a physical, immersive experience that is unique to its space and time.

The excess of information in Ikeda’s audiovisual work is not a consequence of a random accumulation of events. Using extraneous data sets as a primary source of composition, Ikeda meticulously designs and arranges his sonic and visual materials. In the Datamatics series (2006–), for example, he explores ‘the potential to perceive the invisible multisubstance of data that permeates our world’, such as DNA sequences, Morse code, dimensional mapping of the universe or molecular structures. By digitally processing these data sets and converting them to sequences of sonic and visual events, Ikeda outlined the basic principle of this project on the occasion of the 2006 Datamatics concert premiered in Japan (Ikeda Reference Ikeda2022). In it the encoded data sets are first rendered into quickly moving visual patterns, which consist of lines, dots, geometric shapes or letters in black and white with some colour accents. Sonic rendering also takes place using minimal materials, that is, a small number of fixed frequencies, which are combined with complex rhythmic patterns. In the next stage of rendering the graphics, 2D sequences of patterns undergo 3D rotation and 4D mathematical processing, a process by which the movement of 2D or 3D objects are given a higher degree of geometric complexity. These graphic transformations are paired with a meticulous layering of various sound components to create an expansive sense of acoustic space. These processes of data rendering outlined here were further developed for other Datamatics pieces, including later versions of audiovisual concerts, a series of installations, multichannel concerts, publications and CD releases. By deconstructing the visual, sound and source codes and creating new orders, Ikeda achieves multiple abstractions of his original source (ibid.).

Ikeda’s work has the strongest impact on our sensory systems when sound and visual elements are combined to provide a powerfully immersive experience. Despite his frequent use of visual elements, however, Ikeda remains primarily a sound artist, choosing also to create purely sonic compositions. Since the 1990s he has actively released recordings of his electronic and acoustic musical compositions as part of a large-scale art project, an independent solo album or as a compilation album for archival purposes, examples of which include +/- (1996), 0°C (1998), Matrix (2000), op. (2002), Test Pattern (2008), Supercodex (2013), The Solar System (2015), Code Name A to Z (2017) Music for Percussion (2018) and EP (2021). His audio pieces are not a compromised version of his artistic imagination but a self-sufficient artform that provides an equally intense, immersive experience. The following discussion will focus on this purely sonic aspect of his composition with specific reference to the 2005 album Dataplex (CD derived from the Datamatics series). As will be explained in further detail, the tracks that constitute his albums exist in rhizomatic networks of sonic materials, creating in turn a coherent auditory universe.

4. RHIZOMATIC NETWORKS IN IKEDA’S MUSIC: AN ANALYSIS OF DATAPLEX

Ikeda’s sonic composition is generally simple in structure. Its formal outline can be illustrated by analysing the distribution of materials on the spatial and temporal axes. Despite this, however, it has frequently been argued that Ikeda’s work is ambiguous in terms of its interpretation. Weil (Reference Weil and Moscatelli2012: 123) states, for instance, ‘[t]he interpretation of Ikeda’s work can be considered totally open’ even though ‘it formally attains a state of extreme precision that implies the opposite’. Responding to Weil’s statement, Collis (Reference Collis2017: 381) further provides a more concrete example of this paradox. Analysing ‘dataflex’, a track extracted from Dataplex, he argues that the piece’s conformity with the stereotypes of dance music (e.g., clear patterns of layer construction and temporal design) is merely superficial in that ‘the conventional pitch-based procedures of dance music – chord progressions, verse-chorus forms, modulations to different tonal centres – are missing’. He therefore concludes that, due to the absence of pitch movement, a sense of musical momentum is significantly reduced and replaced by a sense of stasis and, as a consequence, the overall formal design of a piece is not considered to be of significance. In addition to this syntactic ambiguity, Collis also indicates ambiguity in terms of semantic content. Encoded data sets as structural elements of Ikeda’s composition (e.g., Morse code messages) do not convey semantic/symbolic meaning but only serve as a ‘paratextual’ inspiration for organising sounds. In both syntactic and semantic terms, the primacy of structure is hence cast in doubt. What is instead at stake in Ikeda’s work, according to Collis, is the spatial experience defined by the (postmodern) notion of the sublime.Footnote ³ The sheer amount of sonic information overwhelms our senses, leaving us with a feeling of awe. The bodily sensation created by this process is of an ephemeral kind and can only be captured at the moment of its very experience, which is ‘a moment that cannot be reconstructed by memory’ (ibid.: 383).

Even if structural impetus in a traditional sense – movements towards a climax and eventually closure – is replaced by sonic stasis, there is, however, always movement and change in Ikeda’s composition. In his work, minimalistic repetition (loops) of the main sonic components necessarily combines with variations in frequency (pitch), rhythmic patterning, the combination of layers, dynamic balance and overall density. That Ikeda’s sound provides a spatial experience is therefore only metaphorical in reality – by overemphasising spatiality and momentary experience, we may miss what is subtly yet unmistakably happening in Ikeda’s audio pieces, namely, transformation through repetition and variation. In contrast with traditional concepts of musical momentum, however, this transformation does not have a specific goal but occurs as a process of becoming in and of itself without resolving, achieving or arriving.

Non-goal-orientated music is not a new concept. Since the twentieth century it has been viewed as a temporal feature distinct from traditional Western musical teleology, especially as Cox indicates, in the context of post-war American experimental music.

Radical examples of non-teleological music as a representation of unstructured temporal flow – what Kramer (Reference Kramer1981) originally described as ‘vertical time’ – have been observed in some genres of experimental electronic music, such as drone music, techno dub or noise music, where a high degree of stasis is created through the slow process of sonoristic change over a long stretch of time. In these types of music ‘materials are not fertile seeds poised to grow but rather inert objects’ (Demers Reference Demers2010: 102), a sense of growth or development hence replaced by ‘the ultimate still life displaying a motionless progress’ or ‘moving immobility’ (Hainge Reference Hainge2004). While Ikeda’s music can be said to exhibit a similarly boundless flow of sound, however, its process is not as open as the Cagian notion of time, nor is its duration as static and arbitrary as can be found in drone music and techno dub. Rigidly controlled, Ikeda’s work provides listeners with a direction for exploring the sonic flow. In the context of Ikeda’s music, this flow does not merely refer to what is happening in an individual track but to larger-scale networks between tracks within an album. It is questionable whether a single track can adequately be called ‘a piece’, given that many of his tracks are short in duration (most typically from one to three minutes) and do not contain dramatic changes within them. Track contents within an album as a whole are instead associated by rhizomatic relationships, together forming a loose concept of album unity, which itself could be considered to be a ‘piece’. In order to show an example of these relationships, the following paragraphs will focus on discernibly related materials across the entire album Dataplex. This contrasts with Collis’s approach, in which he analysed a single extract to support his discussion on spatiality. This selection will clarify how sonic spatiality at a local level can be integrated into larger-scale temporality.

Ikeda’s music consists primarily of repetitive rhythmic patterns rather than pitch movement. In this context, intricate repetitive rhythms do not function in a conventional manner, that is, so as to lend an impetus to musical motion. A sequence of durations, instead, serves as a basic unit for indefinite looping, which then becomes a textural motif within the continuous sonority. Here durational hierarchy is of lesser significance than the nature of the acoustic surface such as its regularity, graininess or density. In Ikeda’s work, looped rhythmic patterns are therefore treated analogously to prolonged or iterated sounds in structural terms – all of them can be indefinitely stretched in time and combined to create a sense of stasis.

Many looped/prolonged sounds in Dataplex are deployed in multiple tracks, providing discernible links and a sense of order between them. While some tracks exist independently (see those marked with an asterisk in Table 1), the majority of them are related to those next to them, suggesting, in turn, formal divisions within the album. At the beginning, for example, the material that features in track 1, high-pitched regular beeps, is also used in tracks 2 and 3. The largest group with discernible links, tracks 2 to 8, overlaps this first group. The repeating material that integrates them – with the exception of track 6 – is an irregular rhythmic pattern that sounds like a fast Morse code message, fixed approximately on pitch A (an octave higher in tracks 5 and 8). In each track this Morse rhythm coincides with other looped sonorities so as to form a distinct texture. Most of these superimposed materials are similarly high-pitched/non-pitched, dry, fricative or iterative and used several times as repeating layers for static textures in a series of tracks. Track 6 is integrated in a different fashion. Although the Morse rhythm is absent, a new noisy rhythmic pattern appears, which is shared with track 7 that nevertheless also contains the Morse rhythm. Overall a sense of separation between tracks 1–8 is, as a consequence, diminished. Instead there is a subtle sense of homogeneity, with overlapping links: track 1 to 3 (beeps); 2 to 8 without 6 (Morse) and 6 and 7 (noisy pattern). As suggested by the titles (e.g., data.simplex, data.duplex, data.triplex), the overall texture gradually increases, as the tracks proceed, in density (number of strata) and complexity until it reaches saturation point at the end of track 7, leading to the fragmentary structure that features in track 8.

Table 1.

Track contents of Dataplex with the indication of formal divisions

Within this large-scale transformation, individual tracks are simple in structure. What we experience in a large proportion of Ikeda’s music is, as has been discussed, statically prolonged time sculpted by constant repetition of the same/similar materials with occasional changes in textural content. In this sense, as Fink said about pulse-pattern minimalism, Ikeda’s composition can be considered a ‘low-involvement’ style of music (Fink Reference Fink2005: 157); it requires little involvement in listening since it lacks constant movement, transformation and structural momentum, as observed in conventional forms of music. By focusing on the process of sonic becoming and its implication for wider progression, however, an alternative view is also possible. In Ikeda’s composition, changes occur on a different time scale from what we would normally experience in a musical piece, namely, more slowly and beyond the boundary of individual tracks. Even where only repetition seems to be occurring, however, this content, served over a period of time, nevertheless is a necessary precondition for what follows. This suspended time does not ‘resolve’, for example, as an extended dominant does so in tonal music, but simply leads to the new environment emerging from it. Listening to this process of becoming requires close attention to what is happening in the moment and to how it transforms over time. Given that Ikeda’s music contains a certain sense of direction, his ‘low-involvement’ style can, in fact, be said to be highly demanding in terms of listening.

After the first set of track connections (1 to 8), eight of those that follow exist as pairs: 9/10, 14/15, 16/17 and 18/19. For instance, the connection between tracks 9 and 10 is built upon the similarity in the main looping material, which is an abruptly panned rhythmic pattern fixed on a single pitch. In contrast with tracks 1 to 8, these looped materials are not strictly identical but merely alike. Despite the differences in precise rhythm, central pitch (respectively G♭ and D♭) and tempo, however, the homogeneity of their general features – for example, their clarity in pitchedness, soft, muffled timbre and panning – suffices to provide a sense of continuity between the tracks. An analogous example is also found in tracks 14 and 15, where an identical set of chords in middle and low registers are used as anchor materials even though they feature distinct rhythmic patterns in each. In both of these pairs the physical appearance of the material transforms over time. This contrasts with tracks 1 to 8, where identical materials repeat while appearing in different textural contexts. These two forms of sonic repetition and variation combine to form more complex threads of material in the later part of the album, the most remarkable example of which is observed in the connection between tracks 18 and 19.

Two types of sonic materials are used as anchor materials between the two tracks. One is an ambiguously pitched, prolonged reverberant sound (described in the following text as material A), and the other is a harsh, bright static noise that coincides with two looping layers based on pitched structures, that is, a descending figure shown in Figure 1a and a looped rhythmic pattern shown in Figure 1b (together described as material B). In track 18 these materials are laid out to form a simple structure that begins with a seamless prolongation of material A, subsequently joined by divided layers of material B that slowly fade in and increase in loudness (Figure 2). Except for the occasional addition of other incidental materials, this track is simply a slow process of transformation in which these two main elements are gradually combined to form a texture with increasing degrees of overall density, harshness and loudness. The way in which these materials are deployed in track 19 is, however, more indirect and complex. This, the longest track in the album, is, as shown in Table 2, symmetrical in form; it starts with a texture based on material A, followed by a long middle section in which material B appears, before closing with a return to material A. In the opening section, material A emphasises a lower-frequency band than it did in track 18. This change allows new rhythmic layers (Table 2) to be discerned in the resulting texture, despite its complexity. In the closing section, on the other hand, material A appears in its original form, providing a light floating sonic effect within a simpler and quieter texture. While making a clear reference to the previous track, the repeating material is carefully adjusted for new textural contexts.

Figure 1.

Transcription of pitched elements within material B.

Figure 2.

Formal outline in track 18 of Dataplex.

Table 2.

Formal outline in track 19 of Dataplex

A similar adjustment is also made when Ikeda uses material B in the middle section, which consists of a newly introduced rhythmic pattern followed by its seven variations (see Table 2). Four of the components of the initial rhythmic pattern – beeps, reverberating pitches, a sustained bass and bursts of an extremely high-frequency sound – are used as repeating entities that consistently appear throughout the proceeding variations. In each of the variations, click sounds with a distinct rhythmic pattern are superimposed on these fixed looped entities, combining also with additional layers and occasional sonic modulations. Throughout the seven variations degrees of density, rhythmic intricacy and textural complexity gradually increase. Within the context of this large-scale transformation material B is used in variations 4 and 7. In variation 4 material B is almost the same as in its original form (track 18) and its slow fade-in and subsequent increase in loudness and density also remind us of track 18 (see Figure 3). Variation 7 features a further increase in textural density and complexity (Figure 4). In it material B is varied, distorted and saturated by means of various sound modulation techniques. For example, the descending figure that forms part of material B (shown in Figure 1a) is now laced with permutations and inversions, further filling an already condensed sonic space.

Figure 3.

Sonogram with annotation in variations 3–4 in track 19.

Figure 4.

Sonogram with annotation in variations 6–7 in track 19.

While local networks of materials are most relevant to our experience of the album, links are not limited to local relationships but also expand among tracks placed at a distance. For instance, regular beeps used in tracks 1 to 3 later reappear in track 11, fixed on the same pitch. Moreover, rhythmic patterns that are discernible during the second half of track 13 and in the final section of track 19 show great similarity to the looped Morse rhythm, the element that is most frequently used during tracks 2 to 8. These examples confirm the rhizomatic nature of the track connections within Dataplex as a whole.

That these relationships are a feature of Ikeda’s style and not limited to this one piece is confirmed by examining other of his albums. For instance, one of his earliest albums +/- (1996) shows a similar approach to the grouping of tracks. The album consists of 10 tracks, which form three sets of three, namely, ‘Headphonics’ (tracks 1–3), ‘+’ (4–6) and ‘-’ (7–9), followed by the coda ‘+/-’ (10). In each of these groups the same looped materials are used, though sometimes with changes of frequency and/or timbre, that is, swiftly repeating sine wave beeps (‘Headphonics’), iterative beats with different frequencies and timbres (‘+’) and an ambiguously pitched prolonged sound with different frequencies (‘-’). This example contrasts with the more complex and aperiodic networks of material in his most recent album Ultratronics (2022). Three elements are of particular importance for the rhizomatic relationships between its 17 tracks (ultratronics 00 to 16). The first is a modulated (or possibly synthesised) voice that is utilised in tracks 1 to 8 and track 13. Despite differences in the degree of distortion, semantic content and overall textural context, the distinct character of this repeating voice provides a sense of continuity in the first half of the album. This is reinforced by an internal connection between tracks 2, 4 and 7, all of which deploy an identical, heavily distorted vocal noise loop. The second is the ambiguously pitched, prolonged, reverberant and muffled sonorities that constitute tracks 11 to 16, which contrast with the preceding tracks, which are largely based on pulsing looped rhythmic patterns. A sense of homogeneity, which is nevertheless inexplicit and loose, is consolidated by three sublinks between individual tracks: 1) tracks 12 and 13 exist as a pair, deploying the same set of looping layers; 2) the looped material that appears at the end of track 14 is developed in track 15, providing a clear sense of continuity; and 3) the same clattering sound is used in tracks 12 and 14 (and also, more distantly, in track 3). Lastly, in order to suggest large-scale symmetry, Ikeda uses the same high-frequency sine wave in the first and last tracks of the album.

Experiencing the ordered series of tracks in Ikeda’s albums means accumulating information and exploring memory within a non-interchangeable process of sonic flow and metamorphosis. These internal continuities are, however, fragmentary and therefore cannot be understood as a logical, linear formal progression. The rhizomatic relations that are discreetly established through the configuration and re-contextualisation of repeating materials nevertheless provide a means to understand and even to listen structurally to the spatiotemporal complexity.