Genius Loci: Music, Carnality and Contact-Sound

Beginning with the experience of listening – the perceptual flux of sonic stimuli overwhelming the body – Labelle is led to consider the process by which music arises out of and refers back to this sensual experience of listening. The continual unfolding of the sounds around us exist as a perceptual phenomena within and against which we locate ourselves the sensual flux of sonic stimuli forms patterns through which the world becomes knowable. Yet this sonic excess exists as more than just information. It unfolds as part of the flow of the beating of time and place, the very sensuality of the material world in which we are enmeshed. Music as sound is constituted by the phenomena of listening – its very materiality is defined by the perceptual flux of sonic stimuli. ln this way music is always somehow wrapped up in the soundscape of the physical world. Yet as a cultural project it also extends the phenomena of the sound-world. This extension functions as an imaginary response to the materiality of the world: it defines its own space, traces a tender map of a possible reality.