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F. Tito Rivas
Fonoteca Nacional de México
AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF LISTENING:
A TEMPORAL STRATOPHONY OF MUSICAL DISCOURSES
ABSTRACT: This paper discuss the idea of an archaeology of listening. In the same way an
archaeologist observes an ancient spoon, or a piece of ceramic and speculates on the possible
practices and social behaviors related with that object, we could also imagine, based on certain
remains, which were the aural practices of a community, by studying its sound objects and its aural
memory devices. Through this dialectic relationship among produced sound and listened sound we
could observe, on a historical grid, how our listening is a transformable device and how these
transformations occurs –or not- following the structures of the prevaling musical discourses.
KEY WORDS: Archaeology of listening, aural devices, musical discourses, archaeology of sound,
aural practices.
An Archaeology of Listening: A temporal stratophony of musical discourses
F. Tito Rivas
Fonoteca Nacional, Mexico
Change and continuity: The time of objects
When we think of continuity and transition, permanence and change, we are thinking, almost
necessarily, about time. Not an abstract and external time but the time of objects, their durations and
hence their biographies. We may consider those forces that preserve objects and also destroys them,
which makes them appear and transforms them until their final disappearence. In fact, we must not
say that time makes objects appear, exist and disappear. Quite the contrary, it is because objects
appear and disappear that we feel, precisely, that time exists.
Let’s then stop saying that time passes through things. We only feel time because we feel that things
pass by. Thereby, each object generates its own image of time, carved at the scale of its object
condition. The time of a pencil is different than the time of a loaf of bread; the time of a temple is
different to the time of a whisper.
To consider time from this vantage point, means to look at mechanisms of transformation and

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permanence, as if they were the “internal clocks” of things, where the move of the pointers (slow or
fast, longer or instantaneous) is a symptom, a consequence of the transformation of the object. To
observe the subsistence, the permanence or the fading of something, is to observe the time of the
thing: the thing emerging, lasting and being destroyed, mixed and dissolved.
So, if we wish to think about the mechanisms of continuity and transformation of the musical
object, we are, therefore, trying to understand the time condition of this object. We will see that
understanding the nature of the time of music, helps us to unpick the enigmatic nature of time itself.
This is not fortuitous: for some, music operates as an expression, image or metaphor of time itself.
It is not a secret that, if anything, music is time. Not having any other material substratum to sustain
its existence, temporality is its sole rigging, the sole apparatus or platform that enables its
emergence.
Certainly, musical instruments, scores, recordings and other mechanisms have been invented to
preserve the existence of music in palpable objects. But these instruments are not the music itself.
They are just memory devices, apparatus that allow us to register the image of an object that is, at
all times, undergoing processes of transformation and dissolution.
The score is not the music, but it gives it a sort of existential basis. A musical instrument is not the
music, but thanks to it, certain sounds have the possibility to be heard again; to try, once again, to
be part of the music to which they once belonged. Even a recording, that would appear to be the
closest replica that we can sculpt from music, is nothing but just that, an sculpture carved by a
wonderful handcraft maker that holds on a continuous movement that cannot be converted, by itself,
into fixed matter. The magic of recording is that, on each playback, it makes music and its sound
appear again; it turns music and sound into that essential condition that makes it a being that
appears and dissolves, and whose being is to leave out being.
These memory devices: the instrument, the score, the recording, become unmuted witnesses,
remains or announcements of a precious object: the sound object. And a new logic of time rises in
and through them. As objects, as they are too, they reveal their own continuities and
transformations; they reveal their own passing of time in dialog with the sound object from which
they are the support and motif.

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Musical Archaeology
When I learnt that the subject of this conference was the “…stablities of continuity in the musical
discourses”, I thought immediately in terms of archaeology.
What is archaeology but a science that helps us to reveal the time of objects, interpreted
retrospectively and creatively from the perspective of a different era (a passing present)? Does not
the archaeologist, that curious person that observes an object in its actual state (of destruction or
conservation), when carefully removing earth, dust and extraneous stoney materials, let us imagine
the object in its original time dimension? Is not archaeology the discipline that tells us of the
emergency and origins of this object, its changes through time, and the causes by which it was
destroyed or abandoned?
Let’s think of the typical image of an archaeologist digging the soil to release an ancient monument.
(S)he would have to remove the top layers, understand the logic of the strata, regard the object in its
context and, starting from here, then try to reconstruct its history, to narrate its movements, to
interrogate the signs it offers about the mechanisms leading to its transformation. The archaeologist
releases the object and imagines it in its entirety. With the help of other concomitant objects and
with fantasy, he reconstructs the temporal truth of this object: how it was made, how it was
modified, how it disappeared…
Folowing this line of thought, I would like to posit a dialogue between archaeology and music. To
understand the mechanisms of change and continuity in musical discourse, we could develop an
archaeological approach.
But of what might this archaeological gaze consist? Under what premises would it be possible to
talk about an archaeology of music?
Archaeology of Listening: Premises
In what follows we will limit ourselves to a discussion of the main premises for an archaeology of
music as understood at the time of writing.
Firstly, we would have to say that an archaeology of music is, before all, an archaeology of sound.
And, consequently, we must understand that an archaeology of sound is, above all, an archaeology
of listening.

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When we talk about music we are necessarily talking about sound. More particularly about
organised sound: which is to say, sound organised around specific cultural, aesthetic and technical
limits.1
Music requires certain forms of organisation, certain orders, certain structures, certain
conventions. Even in the more chaotic or randomised music, there is some desire, some organising
principle, some aim of order under its own logic of existence.
Thus, understanding music as sound allows us to percieve more clearly its correlate in which sound
receives its more profound existence: listening.
Accordingly, we can say that music, that is, sound produced as art, is a consequence of the ways in
which a community listens. We may also note a further aspect of this; namely how a community
listens, obeys and responds to the sound that this community produces and reproduces.
There is a dialectical relationship, a game of mirrors between these two poles of music. On one side,
we have the produced sound and, on the other side, we have an ear, an aural behavior that not only
listens and responds to that sound, but that is also shaped by it. We cannot think music without
thinking listening. Listening is music’s ontological ground; it is its existential place of occurrence
and emergence. The musical sound is created for and through listening.2
Thus if music supposes a modeled, organised, crafted sound, what would prevent us from thinking
that there is also a listening that is modeled by hearing music?
But to separate the organisation of music from the organisation of the ear that listens to such music
is not straightforward. This being said however, by an effort of analytic deconstruction we can
differentiate these poles and scatter these layers, these folds that would offer the form-flow of music
on one side, and the form-flow of the ear on the other side, to observe in each one its own essential
behavior.
This is where the archaeological approach begins its exploration. By certain archaeological effort
we should admire the unfolding of the perceptual process of musical listening and how it becomes
an archaeological object.
1
We may differenciate between “organised sound” and “natural sound”. The first would mean sound
produced under a leading or gramatic intention, and the latter refers to the sound that is just consecuence of
the flow or the movement between beings and objects. By the contrary, organised sound is precisely created
to produce an specific listening experience.
2
For these ontological thoughts on sound cf. Francisco Rivas, “Territorio sonoro, apuntes para una
fenomenología del sonido en la escucha”, Megalópolis Sonoras, Identidad cultural y sonidos en peligro de
extinción (2009) 71-84

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Of course, when we refer archaeology in this context, we do so in the sense of an archaeology of the
human sciences. We may explicate this through the archaeology of knowledge as defined by Michel
Foucault in 1969.3
Foucault uses archaeology as a method to understand the continuities and discontinuities of social
and discursive practices. Domains of specific types of knowledge and their associated techniques,
institutions and their discourses, individuals and their means of existing as social subjects are
devices that archaeology excavates from the dirt to show their continuities and their deteriorations.
An archaeology of knowledge understands social realities, the non-objectual human objects
(behaviors, practices, knowledge) as if they were archaeological objects: they emerge due to diverse
circumstances, they rise and impose, they suffer the passing of time, they deteriorate, they are
modified and they dissapear or they may remain buried and become the substratum of new objects,
bringing meaning to the surface even in its dissolution.
If we understand musical practices as discursive objects, and consequently, as archaeological
objects, we have then to postulate an archaeology of the aural behaviours that makes possible
musical discourses. This archaeology suggests understanding human listening as a result of a
network of practices, of enunciations, of sonorous successes and failures, of promises and
expectations. This line leads us to consider listening as a discursive organism, as a device
(dispositif) that produces sound and extra-aural reality; a device that organises social and causal
relationships around it. Listening is, in fact, an autopoietic device emerging from sound discourses
and sound products that are, at the same time, results of its exercise.
To better grasp this, we must understand listening not as an automatic act of perception, as we
would normally do; but as a product of organised practices, of sequences of actions, of temporal
reminiscences, of codified sequels that produce specific listening subjects.
Listening is not a pure operation of perception; nor the mechanism of transparency that
communicates directly produced sound with sound heard. Listening is a codified operation that acts
with presumptions and it is affected by current local cultural devices that have shaped the way of
hearing of an individual and that of the group to which the individual belongs.
Accordingly, listening would be almost always a social act; an act that mirrors, that resonates,
3 Cf. Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard, « Bibliothèque des sciences humaines »,
1969 ; rééd. 1992. The first to posit the idea of an archaeology linked to sound was Hugues Dufourt, cf.
“Pierre Schaeffer : le son comme phénomène de civilisation”, Ouïr, entendre, écouter, comprendre après
Schaeffer / François Bayle, Denis Dufour, (1999) 69-82

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dominant sound discourses; but, at the same time, these sound and musical discourses feed from
this listening condition, from this aural culture that selects it, discriminates it and organises it as a
discursive product.
Archaelogical Vestiges: Aural devices
To make a history of listening would be quixotic if we do not had certain registers of it, which, it is
proposed, could be found in the consensual codification of sound in societies, mainly in the
discourses of music4
. If we trace the manner in which a society codifies the means and techniques
of producing sound, and articulate its own sound discourse, we could envisage the codes and
devices that have been used for this society to hear.
In the same way that architecture gives form to, fixes and unfolds the perception of social space,
musical objects could be treated as a frozen sculpture that reveals the different hearing devices at
use. A piece of music would be the trace, the testimony, the archaeological evidence of a listening
culture that created it and brought it to life within the community.
In the same way an archaeologist observes an ancient spoon, or a piece of ceramic and interpretes
and speculates on the possible practices and social behaviors related with that object, we could also
imagine, based on certain remains, which were the aural practices of a community, by studying its
sound objects and its aural memory devices.
What are these vestiges? We have already mentioned them: first of all, the musical instruments, the
scores, the recordings; but also the texts, the images, the paintings, the architectures, everything
able to evidence, even by reflection, the index of an aural behavior.
And how do they show it? How is it possible to derive from a physical, material object an intangible
and immaterial object as an aural, listened, ear-witnessed object?
To answer this question, we need to understand first, that both objects, the physical and the aural,
are like organs of a same body. Only by an analytic and reflexive exercise we can extract the sound
object from the social practices in which it is embedded and suppose it through its traces.
This involves trying to understand, for example, how the existence of a musical instrument,
4
Certainly, not only music covers the spectrum of aural devices. There should be aural devices involved in
the operation of speaking, in the social and codified sounds, in the mass media discourses, and so on.

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whatever this might be, expresses the framing of a series of possible sounds; sounds that respond to
a certain codified culture, to a certain previous listening condition, that in the musical performance
they will become the auditioned musical object. An Iranian ud or a marimba from Chiapas, México,
sound as they sound: as objects they necessarily rule the listening acts that are related to them, but
they also obey a range of listening acts that existed before them.
We must keep in mind that a musical instrument is a device to set the morphological borders or
limits of a sound or a group of sounds. Such features give an acoustic identity that is the correlate of
a listening act that has foreseen it and embeds it in the design of the instrument. The timbre, the
register, the dynamics, the intervals, the envelop, the harmonic possibilities of an instrument are, in
some way, a result of the dialectic relationship between the produced sound and the sound heard. As
a product of this aurality, of this listening act, the instrument sounds like one likes to sound or as it
must sound. This willing, this wish, this duty, would obey specific listening devices that guide the
constructive destiny of the instrument as a way to satisfy an aural expectation.
We can imagine the luthier perfecting their instrument: What are the indexes, the signs, the aims,
guiding their constructive work? That indexes and signs are, for sure, aural objects, listening
devices that exist in the imagination and to which the luthier appeals to establish the criteria, the
guidelines that limit and shape the instrument.
In this sense the lutherie, as has been said by Pierre Schaffer5
, could represent the local history of a
musical practice and thus the correlate of an aural practice. To reconstruct the history of a musical
instrument would mean to relate also the history of an ear becoming with a sound. An instrument is
a memory device and therefore it is the counterpart of a listening device associated with this
memory. The logic and the architecture of the instrument lead and determine the listening acts
denoted by it.6
We can designate these temporal and communal energies as listening devices. There are structures -
more or less rigid -, grids - thin or wide -, rules – strong or weak- , theories and exceptions,
solfèges, that register and define the sound spaces articulated for music in a given listening
community.
Thus, the logic of changes and reticences of the devices in a specific listening community would
5
Traité des objets musicaux. Paris, France: Le Seuil. 1966
6
An instrument should be a mirror of a community’s listening memory. It symbolizes their aural present and
past. But also their future. It also could mirrors their aural expectations.

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provide the narrative index of its aural behaviours; it would provide an account of its breakups, its
irruptions, its need to impose stability and rule, or to transgress and innovate.
So, if we are able to trace any change or permanence, stability or alteration in musical discourses,
we have to turn to the modifications and processes of the listening devices that come with them.
Aural devices : Change and Permanence
Of course, it is hard to establish what kind of existence, what kind of ontological entity these
listening devices possess. Let’s imagine that they exist in the aural mind of persons, in the fantasy
that restores and groups the sound memories, in the sum of representations that aural history
produces in each individual, supplying him/her with an “ear”, with a specific musical preference.
As they dwell in the territories of fantasy7
, or those of the aural mind, we cannot see or hear these
listening devices directly. However we can find a direct reflection, an echo, a sound box that
resonates it, in the musical instruments, in the scores, in the musical grammars, in the recordings.
We have already seen how, each time an instrument sounds, it is sounding and reproducing a shared
social listening device. The same happens, in its particular ways, with compositions and musical
works, and also with different formats of memory and writing. They also involve social aural
devices that, if they can also be created and articulated by an individual, portray the game of aural
traditions that this individual recovers and repeats, remembers and organises, and even battles or
fights.
It is not possible, in that sense, to isolate us from the aural past. The listening-sounds of our
community sound through us. For better or worse we hear just as our community has taught us to
hear. As a historical subject that we are, we inevitably also take part of an aural subject that we
share more or less with the others.
To finish, let’s just posit the following question: what kind of theoretical orientation offers an
archaeology of listening to think in operations of change and continuity, stability and instability,
permanence and transformation of musical practices and its discourses?
If any musical discourse inherits a specific practice of listening, it not only inherits it: each musical
7 Thinking on the idea of fantasy of Brentano and Husserl: as a creative activity of conscience.

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work perpetuates or transforms that practice; it repeats it or modifies it. The musical discourse is
also like the reflection, the echo of the aural device that resounds with it. Within this resonance, the
discourses become devices. Each music projects the result of the aural organization in which it
emerges, reproduces, propagates, transforms and dies out.
Accordingly, music is always repetition, permanence, a will to fix an aural tradition, a specific
listening experience. At the same time each music, each work, each composition, repeats aural
tradition but can also turn aside from it. Also in repetition, is incorporated the possibility of change
and breakdown even, as an axis that provides the structural force of the musical discourse itself.
Thus, a discourse emerges as repetition and resonance or as transformation and change. In fact, the
transformation of the musical discourse obeys the necessity of incorporating an intuition of change,
of movement, of rupture with the prevailing devices. To add a note to a chord, to reform a rhythm,
to invent an instrument or to force an invented one to play a sound that has not been codified for the
rules in which the instrument was conceived, are all signs of change and transformation but always
within a musical tradition; always, then, within specific manners of listening and anticipating the
form of the listened. The new sound emerges against the old sound but in its novelty the new sound
cannot avoid resounding the old. Resonance involves not only repetition; it is also an echo that
subverts itself. It means a regenerated form, a dumb repetition that actualizes itself with the mask of
a new sound.
As much as we want to revolutionise a music or a genre, that revolution has to deal essentially with
the laws, rules and listening operations that it pretends to transform. It is precisely by this that the
transformation makes sense. A composer cannot stop dialoging with musical traditions. Regardless
of how hard he tries to improve or destroy a genre, the latter always appears in their music as an
inescapable ghost. A ghost that, even by via negativa, can be heard, even if it does not sound. The
logic of continuities and breakdowns sets an ulterior conclusion: there is no escape from the
device…8
Thus, if there were some place in which we could regard the games of transformation and
8 We are aware that this would mean some kind of structuralism. Certainly we dont want to think just in a
simple a priori determinism. We could talk better of a paradigmatic listening, in the same way Ferdinand de
Saussure would talk about a syntagmatic and paradigmatic function in language. There is a paradigmatic field
that supose all signs that could ocuppy an specific space in a syntagmatic chain. Thereby, we could presume
something similar for musical listening: there, where it sounds a note or a chord, it could sound another. The
sonic existence of a note alludes or implies other notes that spins, without sound, in a parallel paradigmatic
field. And this would be the ground in which any musical discourse is played, and also any critical listening:
when we hear, we should be able to listen everything that music makes, but also all it does not do…

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continuity, change and permanence through musical discourses this is it: the complex and flexible
grid of codified human listening. A territory that is not grounded in the object that produces sound,
nor in the physical ear that reports it, but in the middle; in the liminal space where the device is
woven by vibrations and resonances, thanks to the constant game of listening that is modeled by the
repetition of a sound and from which it is capable to imagine and fantasise other new, unheard
sounds. It is on this site, where the archaelogist may dig up the laws of solidification and
construction, or dissolution and confusion of discourses and musical traditions; and it is from this
exhumation, from this unearthed fantasy, that (s)he can obtain new treasures to showcase, to play,
in her big resonant museum.
F. Tito Rivas
Belgrade, april 22th, 2014
The author express acknowledgements to Tania Hernández and J. Milo Taylor for helping with english translation and
proofreading.
SUMMARY
This papers present a discussion about the idea of an archaeology of listening. First it sets the
problem of the time condition of musical discourses. As temporal objects, musical discourses are
afected by movements and transformation. To understand the logic of these movements we could
use an archaeological approach. The article discuss these theoretical premises inspired by Michel
Foucault’s epistemic categories. Then postulates the concept of “aural devices” which is very useful
to understand how we listen and understand music and how operates the logic of creation and
destruction of musical discourses, all based on a phaenomenological consideration of dialectial
relationship among produced and listened sound, and the problem of sound memory based on
devices like scores, instruments an recordings.