Phantasy and Illusion: Audio Unconscious in Creative Sound Practice

Simina Oprescu, Sound Studies & Sonic Arts, UdK Berlin

Listening to music through headphones while gazing out the window of a moving train exemplifies a profound perceptual exercise in linking sound and vision through a manifold arrow of time. This experience, where one element might appear external and the other internal, engages internal processes as we emotionally interpret the external environment alongside the music’s auditory stimuli.

Imagination is crucial in bridging sound with imagery, functioning through recognition and memory. This sensory training involves a discerning process, an automatic response of consciousness. In video art, particularly when a film lacks clear directives, the composer is free to select from a rich tapestry of memories that resonate with the moving images. This selection often activates based on the sensory-emotional stimuli provided by the visual content, followed by a reflective phase where initial emotional responses are rationalized and linked creatively using available tools.

This dynamic not only demonstrates technical skill but also a deeply intuitive act that melds sensory experiences with emotional and cognitive processes to transcend their individual components. It underscores the seamless integration of sensory inputs to form coherent, emotionally resonant experiences. For example, anxiety symptomatology, often manifesting as psychological noise, resembles auditory noise in its creation of defragmentation, dissonance, distortion, repetition, and intensity. Elizabeth Grosz's framework underscores the relational nature of time, highlighting how it is shaped and experienced through ongoing engagements with the world—an embodied and interactive notion of time contrasting with what she terms "empty time" or "time in itself."1 By conceptualizing time in this manner, Grosz invites a reevaluation of conventional notions of temporality, foregrounding the complex interaction between human agency and temporal phenomena.

Dysfunctionality stands out and persists until understood, deciphered, and unified, much like an unknown language. Henri Bergson articulated that unity is the product of mental simplicity, with divisibility arising from spatial extension.2 Repetition forms a unity, coagulated in form, like the rhythmic clicking of a lighter trying to light a cigarette—a repetitive action reflecting anxiety. The separation between internal desire and external repetition is evident in how others perceive this action differently. Repetition is insistence but lacks meaning or true knowledge, making perception subjective. The tolling of bells, discussed by Bergson, illustrates how individuals attribute significance to the sequence of rings, counting them to ascertain time—a pattern sensation that forms a desire to know, control, construct, shape, and form an atemporal sensation that is "time in itself."3

R.D. Laing highlighted the destructive potential of lost experiences, suggesting that our behaviors are influenced profoundly by our memories and perceptions.4 As we navigate between reality and dreams, the forms we encounter are the result of opposing forces, their intensity dictating the solidity of our perceptions and existence. Repetitive sounds serve as reminders of time's passage, delineating the subjective internal experience from objective external events.

Phantasy, the imaginative mind, differs from illusion, the perceptual mind. Phantasy involves creative imagination and mental imagery, encompassing dreams, daydreams, and imaginary scenarios, reflecting individual desires, fears, and aspirations.5 In contrast, illusions are deceptive perceptions of reality, where senses misinterpret stimuli or cognitive processes distort sensory information. Illusions involve misperceptions of actual sensory input, arising from the brain's efforts to interpret ambiguous or incomplete data.6

The overlap of phantasy and illusion becomes evident in scenarios such as the repeated hoots of an owl at night, which may conjure a potent psychological response that merges real auditory inputs with imagined fears. In such states, the role of anxiety is dual: it can both distort reality and enhance creative engagement with it. In the sleepless state, sounds and their interpretations become a causality of the imaginary mind of anxiety. Anxiety collaborates against Heraclitus's idea that "sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe."7 This leads to an agrypnia complex dream state distortion, where the dream-work is done by complexes. As Jung pointed out, these complexes are "the little people" who shape reality through the continual activity of psychic fantasy.8 Dreams are crafted by the persons within them—the personified complexes within us, most active at night.9

Ultimately, dismissing phantasy as mere pathology overlooks the breadth of human experience. The relationship between phantasy and illusion encapsulates our cognitive processes, shaping how we interact with and understand the world. As electromagnetic sponges, we absorb and respond to these interactions, with or without visual cues, underscoring the knotty wool between our sensory perceptions and the ever-evolving narrative of Dasein.10

Bibliography

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Dover Publications, 2001.

Freud, Sigmund. "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII. 1911.

Gregory, Richard L. Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Duke University Press, 2004.

Heraclitus. Fragment 75. In The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, edited by G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven. Cambridge University Press, 1957.

Hillman, James. Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper & Row, 1975.

Jung, Carl Gustav. Studies in Word Association. Moffat, Yard and Company, 1906.

Laing, R.D. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Penguin, 1967.

Biography

Simina Oprescu (b.1993) is a Romanian composer of electro acoustic music and sound artist based in Berlin, Germany, submersing herself in the intricacies of sound's acoustic and spectral properties. Her compositions embrace a diverse array of instruments, spanning from analogue synthesizers to computer music or string instruments. Simina employs acoustic artefacts from physical or natural spaces as recordings, showcasing techniques cultivated through an investigative electroacoustic composition approach. Her artistic thinking centres on unified immersion, sound movement, and gesture, infusing philosophical meaning into her work.