Wednesday, June 4, 2025 | 1:00 PM MDT
Online via Zoom
A Communal Journey Into Sound
Join us for the inaugural Acousmatic Crossings live listening event featuring works by acclaimed composers Paul Dolden and Leonie Roessler. This special Zoom session brings together listeners and creators to experience this “cinema for the ears” through both sonic diffusion and thoughtful discussion.
What to Expect
Experience acousmatic music—sound detached from its physical source—in the company of fellow enthusiasts and the composers themselves. Together, we’ll:
- Listen to selected works in a focused, communal setting
- Engage in optional discussion about the experience
- Connect with the composers to learn about their creative process
- Explore the imaginal realms that open through deep listening
About Acousmatic Music
Acousmatic music is an immersive sonic art form where sounds are valued for their inherent qualities rather than their physical origins. Pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer, this approach encourages “reduced listening”—a state where we set aside questions of source and meaning to engage directly with sound’s texture, shape, and movement, opening gateways to the imaginal realm.
How to Participate
Registration is free and open to all. Register here →
For the most immersive experience, we highly recommend using headphones or earbuds for this event. The subtle spatial movements and sonic textures are best appreciated in close quarters, where the inner ear becomes the concert hall.
Acousmatic Crossings is an ongoing series exploring the transformative potential of sound. This live event aims to raise awareness, deepen appreciation, and open new portals to listening as an act of imaginative awakening.
Hosted by Michael Eisenberg and presented by Metapsychosis Journal.
Hi everyone, hope some of you can make this. We will be featuring a piece by Paul Dolden which you can find here:
And a piece by Leonie Roessler which you can find here:
Both artists are scheduled to be with us, talking about their music, methods and who knows what else. Headphones or earbuds are strongly recommended for these diffusions, not to mention an open mind as well as an unleashed imagination.
See you soon!
Michael
Leading up to this live diffusion, I think it might be a good idea to throw some basic definitions out there. It may help in establishing context about what this music is, and also shed some light on my suggestions on how to listen to it which I may touch on at the event.
Here is a paper from 2022 by Natasha Barrett. Barrett is one of the leading lights in the Acousmatic space today and she’s very high on the list of pesonal favorite artists in any musical genre. Here, she does a great job at presenting some of the basic jargon (and believe me, this music is jargon heavy) and breaking it down into very easy to understand bite sized nuggets.
The paper is not that long but I’m going to quote some of the parts that may be relevant to people not familiar with this music. All bolding and caps are mine.
To quote Schaeffer, “by deliberately ignoring any references to instrumental causes or pre-existing musical meanings, we seek to give ourselves over entirely to listening, and so to come across those instinctive pathways that lead from pure ‘sound’ to pure ‘music’ […] turning our backs on the instrument and musical conditioning, and placing sound and its musical potential squarely before us.”
Musique Concrète
Musique Concrète was a term given by Pierre Schaeffer around 1948 to a method of working that starts with concrete sound material (i.e. sound recordings, normally of non-instrumental sounds), and then sought to abstract musical values from it. Musique Concrète describes a reversal of the way musical work is done. Instead of notating musical ideas using the symbols of music theory (where the composer creates the abstract score), leaving it to known instruments and known performance techniques to realise the score (which leads to concrete listening in the performance), the aim was to gather sound, and abstract the musical values it potentially contained. The composer perceives every detail that constitutes the sound, from which musical structure and an abstract discourse are then derived
Acousmatic
In musical terms, simply put, acousmatic describes the process of listening and composing with sounds removed from their visual causation. In practice it means much more: the acousmatic approach to listening and composing is not as straightforward as simply using recorded sources (which was one of the issues Schaeffer had with the term ‘concrète’), and to quote Schaeffer, “by deliberately ignoring any references to instrumental causes or pre-existing musical meanings, we seek to give ourselves over entirely to listening, and so to come across those instinctive pathways that lead from pure ‘sound’ to pure ‘music’… turning our backs on the instrument and musical conditioning, and placing sound and its musical potential squarely before us.”
… and finally…
Reduced listening
In reduced listening we listen to the sound for its intrinsic information by ignoring its real or supposed source, or the meaning that the source may convey. Reduced listening refers to the notion of the phenomenological reduction called Époché (suspension of judgement), or bracketing out the sound from its real-world context. To quote Schaeffer, “The acousmatic situation first disconnects the audio-visual context, but above all it makes possible, but not compulsory, to explore the sound in itself […]. We must emphasise the fact that this type of interest does not follow automatically from simply being disconnected from the audio-visual complex but from a specific INTENTION on the part of the listener.” Here I have italicised to emphasise what is often misunderstood. In other words, we are not putting the existence of the external world in doubt. The point is to keep oneself in a state of freedom, which is particularly important because it means as composers we can still access the other modes of listening if we wish. Yet for normal listeners, reduced listening is difficult! It requires a listening focus that is unnatural compared to how we engage with the sounding world around us, and is normally attained by repeated listening to small sections of sound. Yet in composition it is a useful way to explore the musicality of real-world sounds and reveal qualities that can then be emphasised through sound manipulation. It is not necessary to engage in reduced listening while enjoying the final work.
I’ll continue this thread with my personal reasons for attempting to listen to this music in the way’s suggested above.
I’ve been engaged with this music for nye on a quarter of a century now and to this day, it never gets old for me. I was originally introduced to it by a musician friend whose music I greatly respect—David Kerman (we will be featuring a wonderful Plunderphonics piece by David in the Acousmatic Crossings series) David isn’t local to me but thankfully, I have another close friend who happens to be a creator and has also studied in Paris with some of the titans of the space (Xenakis!!!). Chris was responsible for baby stepping me along and gently, but methodically introducing new artists to me till eventually I was able to swim in the deep end, striking out on my own and buying shit tons of cd’s, mainly from the great Montreal based online store electrocd.
At the time, I never stopped to ask myself why this music immediately shook me to my core but, it just did. It wasn’t till recently, when I started reading the French philosopher/Islamic mysticism historian/translator Henry Corbin that I started to put two and two together. It basically started with his essay called “The Mundus Imaginalis”— that’s when the seeds of an answer started to germinate. Corbin, channeling his ancient Islamic “masters” (Sorwavardi, Ibn Arabi, Mulla Sandra and many others) described a liminal world between our Earth that we know and the pure Angelic intellect and he called it the Mundus Imaginalis.
The Islamic cosmology is intense and very detailed but basically, their contention is that this is an actual place that can be visited, not by your material body but by your active imagination. It’s located on the convex side of our sphere of the fixed stars (the universe we know) and is accessible through the most powerful sense organ we possess, our imagination.
Even though these are baby steps, I go into much detail about how these strange sounds incite my own active imagination with two essays that Metapsychosis was kind of enough to publish. You can access both of these essays through the Acousmatic Crossings landing page.
Warning, they are fairly long and my understanding of Corbin was very nascent, but they are what they are and I’m really glad I wrote them because, just the act of spilling the words out was a—call it a magical act that paved the road for further study which is still going on today and, I suspect will be ongoing for a very long time..
The TL:DR of it all is, Acousmatic music—through a very close, active and intentional form of listening was able to, not crack open my own personal Mundus Imaginalis but maybe pin pricked it a little, giving me a glimpse of the potentialities, the possibilities that reside there.
So that’s a very condensed version of my story and why I love this music. What i’m hoping to do is not only act as the super-fan/evangelizer par excellence but also, offer up a suggestion on how to listen to these sounds. To be perfectly blunt, this is not the easiest music to connect with. Why it connected with me straight out of the gate was a long kept mystery. Now that I’m older and allegedly… wiser (maybe) I think I found a reason (if I even needed one) as to why. My project is to share that with others while, at the same time trying to elevate this music, which is very much on the margins to a bigger listening audience.