1Burger Time ou les Tentations de Saint Antoine is a 12-minute (12’54’’, to be precise) piece of electronic music composed by Mauro Lanza. Being a close friend of the composer, I would have no problem in extorting him the information that I might deem useful for the description of the piece, from the aesthetic principles at its origin down to the minute details of its technical implementation. However, this existential proximity is embarrassing for a semiologist as I am: the goal of the semiologist being the description, though certainly problematic, of how sense is constructed as immanent to the object, regardless of its genetic history. In Jules Verne’s Les enfants du Captain Grant, Lord Glenarvan retrieves a fragmentary document in a bottle swallowed by a shark. In investigating the three-part document, the only assumption that he makes concerns the enunciation: the message has been certainly written by someone. As Glenarvan says, “les quelques mots qui ont résisté ne me laissent aucun doute à cet égard”. But, on the other hand, Glenarvan also observes: “les mots tracés sur ces documents sont fort incomplets”. Thus, in order to understand the message, a difficult reconstruction attempt is to be tried. These two elements, an assumption of significance and a state of incompleteness, are the starting points for the hermeneutic effort of both Lord Glenarvan and the semiologist.

3So, how to introduce such a distance?

4I will start from three basic hypotheses, according to three models of distance that I will discuss later:

1. I will access the piece Burger Time (hence on, BT) assuming that it is a message, and that therefore it should be framed within a situation of enunciation. What is presumed about this enunciation framework is (only) that the message has an acoustic nature. Therefore, its organization cannot abstract from its perceptual access. It is an audible message and it must be analyzed through listening;

2. as a control step for the previous results, I will propose a formal analytical framework, i.e. a machine-based procedure to extract information from BT. Such a step aims at an “objective” description, where the adjective here has no ontological value, but simply a methodological one: it means “consistent with its starting assumptions”. It is therefore necessary to access the piece as an acoustic signal recorded on a decodable support;

3. Finally, I will reduce the problem of context to a microcorpus consisting of the piece itself and the program notes. I will delimit the content according to such a microcorpus and verify a minimum interpretation on the data gathered from the previous steps, that is, I will try to propose an overall articulation between expression and content.

Audible industry

6Following the model of lithic industry, I will thus consider BT under the notion of audible industry.

7First, the nature of BT as an object has to be questioned, and, second, the forms of corporeality that it sets up in relation to the audible domain have to be investigated.

8The nature of BT as an artifact is undoubted: the acoustic datum shows a specific craftsmanship. Such a feature would be less obvious if the documentary evidence presented itself as a recording of a previous acoustic situation. In the context of electronic music, one may think about field recording, that is to say, a genre in which the work is conceived, in the extreme case, as a recording of a certain acoustic landscape. How can we assume that BT is not a reproduction of an existing soundscape? A fundamental clue is a set of acoustic features (for example reverberation and distribution of sound in space) that allows the listener to reconstruct an acoustically realistic scene, following the optical model of photography. Now, these elements of “aural realism” (on the model of optical realism) are absent from BT. On the contrary, these aspects are carefully avoided. BT therefore does not show a documentary nature, rather it is constructed as a sort of chiseled object, presenting itself to the ear with clear boundaries and a precise organization.

9Once the first threshold has been exceeded, it is possible to observe how the BT object, while not proposing itself as an acoustic documentary, still refers to a clearly figurative background. But what is a figure in the audible domain? How is it related to corporeality?

11Apart from the plurality of possible listening heuristics, two features are relevant:

1. • 9 From a physiological and cognitive perspective, Alain Berthoz has underlined the role of gesture in (...)

   auditory scene analysis may be seen as a common anthropological background. In the listening scenario, the figurative dimension, i.e. the recognition of elements according to a certain encyclopedia, thus takes the form of a sort of mechanics that deals with actions to be linked to perceptions: the “form” in the visible domain has its audible equivalent in an “action”9;

2. back to BT, it is neither safe nor necessary to assume that we are dealing with “music”. More generally and cautiously, I will assume that BT is simply an audible message.

12Therefore, my starting assumption is to reorganize the perceptual content of BT as related to a plausible auditory scene, made up of various acoustic sources. To include at least a musical reference, one could describe this approach as a rendering in terms of an abstract instrumentality. I will call “figures” these set of sound actions, as they are related to a minimal figurative, “mechanical” so to say, recognition framework.

15Flows are:

• Trumpet: the sound at the beginning of the piece, in the acute middle register. It recalls a toy trumpet, or rather a section of toy trumpets, since parallel, overlapping events can be heard;

• Cymbalom: in the beginning of BT it is immediately opposed to Trumpet. It shows a sort of percussive and plucked nature, hence the name;

• Voice: a vaguely vocal flow, in the middle-low register. If compared to Frog (see later), however, it does not have a creaky feature. It is very often associated with Cymbalom, but two facts favor its identification as autonomous. First, sometimes it appears without Cymbalom, and, second, when the two flows are together, they show uncorrelated behaviors;

• Frog: a sort of vocal and/or animal emission, with a creaky feature that vaguely recalls a croaking (hence the label). It is presented in solo as a sequence of repetitions after the first section that alternates between Trumpet and Cymbalom/Voice. It also (probably) makes a first fleeting appearance in pianissimo after the very first alternation of Trumpet and Cymbalom (see Figure 1 and 2);

• Breath: an eminently noisy, even if pitched, sound, as blowing into a bottle;

• Pluck: this flow has a plucked string-like quality. It differs from Cymbalom because it displays a sort of metallic nature that provides also a stronger and noisier attack.

16These flows are organized into note-like sequences, that is, they are made up of short events, clearly delimited in time, i.e. provided with a beginning and an end. Thus, flows have two main features:

1. • 13 I am referring to the description of temporal profile in Schaeffer, op. cit. The term “eumorphous” (...)

   they are made up of temporally well-formed, “eumorphous” sound events13;

2. even if displaying a complex timbre, they still shows a pitched quality.

18Objects are:

• Alarm: a two-tone object made up of a sequence of two pitches;

• Glock: a sort of glockenspiel gliding towards the acute, sometimes presented in an incomplete form;

• GlockB: again a glockenspiel, but with different arrangement with respect to Glock, so that it might be considered as a set of variants of the latter. Given the many identical occurrences of Glock, GlockB is used for the all the others;

• Doorbell: a tremolo doorbell-like sound;

• Song: the most peculiar object is a clearly melodic fragment that is partially or completely repeated. It is actually a composite object, as it is made up of various sources grouped by its organization.

21Figures are divided into the two groups from top to bottom.

22Starting from the figurative score, some considerations can be drawn:

• Group I is organized temporally as a sort of spring, as the flows first dilate and then shrink in duration, until the final compression.

• Cymbalom and Voice are almost strictly synchronized;

• Frog, except for a curious initial (and maybe dubious) appearance in ppp, is functional to dilatation, since it is presented at the peak of dilatation with a long sequence, then it shrinks;

• Group II is introduced very progressively, and, quite differently from Group I, is subdued to a process of thickening;

• Alarm works as a sort of marker for this general acceleration, while Glock, GlockB and Doorbell work mostly as a punctuation for Song;

• the sum of the two processes results in a general increasing of density with a synchronous climax around 11’20’’;

• repetitions of Song are presented as a final coda in solo;

• before the end, a last, isolated, Trumpet event takes place;

• with respect to this global trend in two aligning processes, Breath has an ambiguous status because, while it belongs to Group I (it is already presented at 3’), nonetheless it contributes to the thickening process of Group II. It could be seen as a mediating object, which holds the two processes together.

23BT’s overall organization is therefore firmly non-architectural, as it is not based on the presence of sections. Eventually, some figures may work as markers for certain phases of the processes (one may think about the presentation of Frog at about 3’40’’), but nothing more. Thus, it is the notion of process that describes the overall configuration style of the piece. Such a procedural feature is crucial and it also emerges in details that cannot be revealed by the low temporal resolution of the annotated score of Figure 1 (but see Figure 2). Each flow in Group I is in fact a process itself, with its own internal articulation. The density of events in each flow is very high, and events are usually structured in their flow by means of a temporal grid that brings out metric regularities. This valuable and almost constant density is able to partly mask the overall configuration of the piece, as it forces the listener’s perception to focus on a short time span. Moreover, BT shows some specific local configurations. The most striking is the alternation of Trumpet and Cymbalom (and/or Voice). This alternation can be seen as a sort of syntagma, still undergoing to a unique temporal manipulation. While the couple Cymbalom/Voice initially acts as a short tail to Trumpet, during the following presentations the process is reversed, so that Trumpet is shortened and Cymbalom/Voice stretched. This process is apparent at the beginning of Figure 1. Also, when Trumpet occurs again (just before 10’) the same syntagmatic organization is respected, this time in the context of a general temporal compression.

24Thus, in BT the “form” is the result of a recursive organization: a set of processes (e.g. the flows) organized into processes (e.g. the Trumpet/Cymbalom syntagma) organized into processes (the spring or the thickening in the two groups) organized into an overall process (that synchronizes Group I and II).

Sound test

27In short, I will start from two assumptions:

1. auditory streams are organized starting from the information converted into the frequency domain by the ear. This conversion occurs not in terms of linear frequency, but tonotopically, that is, even if very roughly, by pitch;

2. vice versa, pitch relations are perceptually basic and accessible to the subject (they are common currency for all musicians) and are based on the tonotopic organization of the ear.

29The first step consists in finding good representatives of the identified figures: here, “good” indicates a compromise between class representativeness and a technical constraint, the acoustic isolation from the other figures to obtain a “clean” extraction. A set of 11 figures are retrieved from BT’s audio signal, placed in sequence and the resulting signal is then analyzed (Figure 3).

30The second methodological hypothesis is to filter the spectrum. In Figure 2 it can be easily noticed how the energy is concentrated in certain areas of the sonogram, which obviously have a greater perceptual weight (in terms of perceived volume). If white indicates silence, then a yellow area is a sort of halo surrounding more relevant dynamic regions. After choosing a dynamic threshold, all the samples having a lower dynamic are thus reduced to zero, while those having a higher one are kept unchanged. Figure 3, top, shows the filtered sonogram of 11 labeled figures (note that Frog is represented by several emissions). This filtering operation carves out from the sonographic representation a set of visually representative shapes. How to characterize them further? In the following I am proposing various indices to be extracted automatically from the spectral matrix:

1. • 25 Schaeffer, op. cit., passim. See also Michel Chion, Guide des objets sonores. Pierre Schaeffer et l (...)
   • 26 While the notion of caliber seems not particularly problematic, site, if so expressed, captures the (...)
   • 27 Indeed, from a signal processing perspective, the notions share an analogy with bandpass characteri (...)

   Pierre Schaeffer has proposed the notion of “mass” as a phenomenological generalization of pitch25. The mass of a sound is the way in which the pitch axis is occupied. Mass can be described by two different features. The first is “caliber”. Caliber indicates how much the axis is occupied: a sound with a recognizable pitch has a reduced caliber, while a noisy sound has a relevant one. The second feature is “site”, that can be thought as a position on the pitch axis. It corresponds to pitch in a sound with reduced caliber, while, with the progressive increase of the latter, it tends to indicate its mean value (noisy sounds do not allow to recognize a pitch, rather they can be characterized by a register, such as low, middle, high). It is not at all obvious to provide a formal definition of these two phenomenological parameters so that they can be implemented computationally. Without claiming a faithful translation of Schaeffer’s proposals, I will therefore define the caliber as the maximum distance between pitches with non-zeroed dynamics in the filtered spectrum and subsequently the site as the average value between upper and lower values26. In short, in the sonogram the caliber of a sound is defined by its upper and lower dynamic boundaries, and the site is the average contour. Intuitively, given a filtered sample with energy spread between pitches 60 and 80, the caliber will be 20 and the site 7027. In Figure 3, the caliber/site curve plots the behavior of caliber (in red) and site (in blue) for all the figures. In the case of Breath, the caliber practically coincides with pitch axis and the site is thus simply its midpoint. Instead, in Trumpet the caliber is limited, and the site meaningfully indicates the acute register where Trumpet is placed.

2. • 28 Schaeffer, op. cit., passim., as translated by Christine North and John Dack, Treatise on Musical O (...)

   A second index may take into account energetic concentration. In the filtered sonogram, it is apparent that, in each figure, energy can be concentrated into certain pitches (painted in dark brown or black) or scattered all over the spectrum. As a simple measure of this feature, for each sample an average dynamics is calculated as a reference point. Then, for every pitch in the sample, the absolute difference between the dynamics and the average value is calculated. The sum of all the absolute differences divided by 88 provides the average “concentration” for the sample. The higher concentration is, the more energy is assigned to positive and negative peaks with reference to average dynamics. This means that some pitches are prominent on a lower background, while others have (almost) no energy: the sound maybe pitched (if a single pitch is dominating) or “channelled”28 (if more components can be heard, like in bell sound). Vice versa, if concentration is low, more energy is distributed among all pitches, and the sound will be noisier. In the concentration curve, the blown nature of Breath results in a low concentration, while the presence of a clear pitch in Frog is shown in the initial peak. Alarm, with its bi-tonal nature, displays a maximal constant concentration.

3. • 29 William A. Sethares, Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale, Springer, London, 2005 (2^nd ed), passim and p (...)

   Another possible index is based on the calculation of the internal dissonance of a figure. The term “dissonance” is far from being unequivocal, since it includes psychoacoustic measures that however are compared with historical and acoustic data. In the proposed implementation, each interval (i.e. relation between tow pitches) from unison (1:1) to major seventh (1:11) is associated with an estimation of the dissonance curve proposed by Sethares29 in relation to 12 equally tempered intervals, normalized between 0 and 1. In short, each interval is assigned a dissonance value. In the analysis, for each sample only the six pitches with higher dynamics are taken into account. Each interval in this 6-note chord receives its dissonance value, and the overall dissonance is normalized between 0 and 1. In Figure 3, the dissonance curve shows that the dissonance index has a minimum value for Doorbell and a maximum one for Frog (a bit surprisingly, given its clear pitch). The variation of dissonance over time may also reveal interesting aspects. The maximum variation is associated to Trumpet and Song: indeed, they are in some way sequences of chords of variable composition (that is, with a variable dissonance).

4. • 30 Algirdas J. Greimas and Joseph Courtés, Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage, (...)

   Finally, the last index can take onto account spectral variation. The latter is calculated through the absolute difference between the dynamics of each pitch in a sample and the one relative to the same pitch in the previous sample. This means that a perfectly constant sound over time will have zero variation. In Figure 3, it can be seen that the curve is punctuated by peaks related to the attack of events: this is because between a sample representing silence (whose amplitudes are zero) and the one containing the beginning of the sound, there will be a great difference. This consideration is less obvious than what it may initially appear: rather, it indicates that all figures share a somehow percussive nature, that is, a clear attack. By contrast, if a sound starts in crescendo, there would be no variation peaks, as the difference with the preceding silence would not be so relevant. Therefore, this general behavior of all sounds underlines an important temporal feature, the relevance of “inchoativity”30, a semantic category indicating the beginning. In relation to spectral variation, Trumpet and Song are the most variable, reflecting their nature of composite sounds including various pitches, while Pluck, but also Alarm, are the most static/stable.

31If we consider the discussed indices, both in terms of average value and variation over time, then we can observe how the basic figures are structurally differentiated at least on the basis of an index. With two interesting exceptions, one for each Group. Among Group II (objects), Glock and GlockB share, at least in the analytical terms expressed by our machine, the same features: it has already been noted that they are, in fact, variants of a single type. In Group I (flows), instead, two examples are analytically indistinguishable, Cymbalom and Voice. Again, their close kinship was already observed while discussing Figure 1, in which they were related by parallelism or substitution.

33In our case, assuming that the value above the threshold is represented by 1 and the lower one by 0, we obtain a differential matrix like the one in Figure 4. The structural matrix indicates again that Cymbalom and Voice are (at least in terms of the proposed categories) structurally identical. On the other side, it is possible to individuate a difference between Glock and GlockB in relation to the caliber threshold. Thinking in terms of information theory, only 4 bits (that is: 4 categories) would be necessary to represent 11 figures (2_values^4categories = 16 values), but we need at least 5 to express all the figures in a differential way. It is like a larger structural palette (2⁵ = 32 possible values) is prepared by the author, and only some elements are used, so that differences among the selected sound materials can be amplified.

34Summarizing, in the selected microcorpus of 11 figures we note a common feature for all materials, the inchoative dimension that underlines their discreteness, while their identity can be effectively expressed structurally by a binary differential grid built from a set of indices.

Sounds from the outer space

36From the perspective of a now sidereal distance, and to limit the information to a minimum, one can then suppose to receive BT on a golden record, which contains only one other document. The other available document is a written text, indexed as “Burger Time Nota Programma”. It declares the author (“Mauro Lanza”) and the title of the piece (“Burger Time ou les temptations de saint Antoine”). These are followed by an aggregate of quotations from four sources, reported in footnotes, in three different languages (by the way, three languages exactly as in the message recovered by Lord Glenarvan): English, French and Italian.

37First of all, the title, Burger Time ou les tentations de saint Antoine, is double. By means of the conjunction, it declares two elements related by an analogy. The first is the title of an “arcade game”, “Burger Time”, the second is in turn double. On the one hand, it refers to a theme, a narrative and figurative topos typical of the “Moyen Âge fantastique”, on the other it refers to a reprise of the same topos by Gustave Flaubert. The quotations are therefore distributed, in an interlaced and perfectly uniform way, between these two elements: four quotations related to Burger Time (from two sources) and four quotations for the temptations, two related to the medieval and gothic topos (from Baltrusaitis), and two from Flaubert. Thus, Burger Time, a videogame, and the temptations of Saint Anthony, a theological, but more generally cultural, topos are related: the analogy is developed in the reported fragments.

39The first is that of revolt. It takes two forms: one, dominant, of a figurative type, in which objects hurl themselves against the man, be them “the food that does not want to be eaten” or the “inorganic bodies of nature”. The second version of revolt is more explicitly theological: now it is Satan who raises himself against God (“che si solleva contro Dio”). It can be noted that this isotopy has an aspectual dimension, that is, it is a process. This process finds its starting point in a call: such a call is developed through the isotopy of temptation (“tentation”), which shifts the presence of evil from a figurative dimension to a cognitive one. In the case of Burger Time, this temptation takes the form of a “curious dilemma” that concerns the behavior of objects, a sort of counterfactual conditional (“What if”) that becomes true in what is no longer just a Gedankenexperiment but, rather, an actual struggle (the game). Yet this temptation is also explicitly invoked by the subject (“Je l’ai appelé”). A third isotopy, abundantly represented, is the one related to the monstrous. Monstrosity takes the form of a hyperbolic amplification: the gigantic (the antagonists of Burger Time are “gigantic foodstuffs”), the deformed (“couverts d’écailles”, for example), the multiple (“les Dieux[…] qui ont plusieurs têtes). The multiple in itself is further distributed among the fragments: the monstrous is multiplied in a variety of heterogeneous elements (“di diversissima provenienza”) that are opposed to the solitude of the anchorite. The isotopy of transformation is linked to the previous one but partly independent: in other words, the monstrous is the result of a sort of figurative distortion, in which the ontological frontiers between worlds collapse. The cause is attributed again partly to the subject through the “nightmare”, the “fantasy”, the “phantasmagoria” and the “hallucination” (as said in Italian by Baltrusaitis). Another isotopy is related to food: it structurally concerns Burger Time (the “fast food nightmare”), but it is also active when the Buddha remembers that he spent “douze ans à me nourrir de parfums”. Some results of an analysis in terms of isotopies are collected in Appendix.

41In short, assuming an integrating perspective based on the redundancy of distributed isotopies, the fragmented aggregate seems to set up a classical narrative form. But if the narrative form that can be reconstructed from the program note is classical, nevertheless it is disturbed by the perturbing figurative elements (monstrosity, that turns towards grotesque in Burger Time) and by the enunciative work that deliberately collides different, heterogeneous sources in a collage without attempting any harmonization.

42Which relationships between the two documents stored on our golden record? In other words, how does BT stand as an expression of a certain content as developed by the program notes?

43As a conclusion of this essay on distance, I will thus propose four hypotheses for a crossover interpretation of our minimal corpus of two texts.

The monstrous

44Far from presenting itself as an abstract sound meditation, BT proposes a sort of imaginary and somehow “teratomorphic” instrumentality: just think of Frog, halfway between human vocalization and croaking. The phantasmagoria of temptations is thus translated into a monstrous orchestra, a sort of Bachtinian grotesque sound body: it is in fact composed of strange sound sources but also of alarms and toys (think of toy trumpet), it includes stringed instruments that collapse onto themselves and sound devices that accelerate as if they contract spasmodically. The electronic medium therefore serves the composer to stage a revolt of instruments through their monstrous presences and their internal transformations.

The congeries

45In BT each flow does not describe the sound emission of a single sound source, rather it depicts a population of actors caught in their multifarious hectic productions. BT therefore exhibits a feature that could be labeled as “congeries”. I have already discussed the effect of progressive agglomeration, which thickens and concentrates the figures along the piece, up to the final diminuendo, where Song acts as an isolated closing statement. All along BT, the sequences of acoustic events have such a local density that they menace the perception of the overall process. As in the game Burger Time, in BT the figures “would stop at nothing”, like the pursuers of Peter Pepper. There is thus a sort of acoustic horror vacui, tempered only in short moments, according to the model of the demonic assault and the hectic chase in the grotesque fast food.

The narrative articulation

The metalinguistic dimension

47The program note is an aggregate that triggers a metalinguistic dimension both in its construction as a collage from multiple sources and in the direct quotation from Flaubert. I have already observed that the same logic, although partially homogenized acoustically, is active in BT through the opposition between the two groups of flows and objects. Objects, presented by ostension, work as citation signals (replicas) with respect to flows. If flows can be read as an example of the monstrous category, objects belong mostly to the grotesque, according respectively to the opposition between “les temptations de saint Antoine” and “Burger Time”.

A tempting conclusion

48There is a final element that can emerge by intertwining our two documents, and I propose it as a conclusion. It deals with temptation.

49As the program note tells us, temptation is an invasion of the devil. Yet the Buddha demands it as necessary. The evocation of the monstrous, the trigger of the incoming nightmare, is therefore the only documentary indication concerning the subjectivity of production in our corpus. The phantasmagoric theater results from the evil-induced altered state of the hermit: he is properly the author of the nightmare, the one in charge of the hallucination. Said with a different flavor, he is the one that accepts to play Burger Time: “You controlled Peter Pepper”. Thus, the program note proposes a “Model Author” that, before struggling with demonic entities, triggers himself a fantastic evocation and at the same times a game. Such a characterization of the Model Author may be projected onto BT. In that case, the authorial subjectivity (the work of the composer, “Mauro Lanza”) can be thought both as an evocation of monsters and as a playful activity.