Abstract

“Listening to music” and “listening to sound recordings” have become perfectly synonymous in our society. The aim of this paper is to question the legitimacy of this supposed equivalence, which almost all listeners have taken for granted. Our sonic universe is saturated with recorded sounds: what space does it leave to music? What reasons could justify a radical distinction, or even opposition, between the exposure to recorded sounds and musical activity in the strict sense of the word? According to tried and tested phenomenological method, through conscious attention to what appears, we return “to the matters themselves”: namely, the conditions under which sonorities can become music. After a first, introductive part reflecting the exceptional marginality of recording in mankind’s musical history, the second part of the study sketches a phenomenological description of a genuine musical process; the final part examines the consequences of sound registration with regard to such a process and to various aspects of music making and listening to music. It is thereby shown that recordings are by no means a vector of democratizing musical culture.