On the Music Listening Program by Tropicália Group: Sound Recording, Agency and Alterity

Abstract

This paper analyses the relationship between listening and the attribution of meaning to songs recorded by the members of the Tropicália collaborative circle, formed in Brazil in the late 1960s. Here, listening is discussed as an agency relationship between sounds and human beings, which varies in different contexts of production and diffusion of music records, and which is, to a certain extent, planned by its creators and inscribed by them on these records. The agency effects programmed on Tropicália records are different from those which were usually expected by listeners of music records at the time when the group was formed. During this period, ruled by a general belief on the capability of a recording to mirror the acoustic reality in a neutral and faithful way, listening to music records should be experienced as an immersion into soundscapes reproduced on the turntable as representations of live music events that should sound familiar to the listeners. Against this expectation, some members of Tropicália circle subverted this realism standard on recordings that combine “musical” and “non-musical” sounds, which fuse orchestral arrangements and everyday life soundscapes, and which simulate multidimensional and strange acoustic environments. In doing so, these composers and performers tried to favor an immersion that differs from the former one, by generating experiences of estrangement and alterity, as well as singular processes of motor and synesthetic imagination. On this work, we argue that such effects have direct implications on the way the record contents were signified by the listeners.