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Canned Laughter

Response to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

LYDIA GOEHR

DANIEL Leech-Wilkinson concludes his paper by writing that there is ‘no meaningfuldistinction to be made’ between listening as cultural practice and listening asbiological process, where listening is defined as ‘making sense of what is heard’(p. 61). Before this, his paper is dominated by a single aim, to account both for whatis shared amongst humans when they listen to music and for what is sometimes quitedifferent between listeners regarding their responses to the same piece of music.Although it is tempting to align sameness to biological process and difference tocultural practice, thus generating a distinction between them, his argument resiststhis tendency by showing that the two matters are too intertwined to make any suchdistinction possible. Though admirable in intention, such a position raises difficultquestions: whether, for example, culture goes all the way down, thereby challengingthe traditional distinction that aligns biology simply with nature. But if biology ornature is, as it were, cultured all the way down, how do biological processes groundthat which emerges as cultural practice in all the latter’s potential variety? Or does thevariety exist at the level of biological process and, if so, is the variety of the same sort?And if biological process stands to ‘nature’ so as to serve as the ‘scientific’ foundationof what emerges as culture, as the author seems to assume that it does, is not adistinction preserved between biology and culture after all?Leech-Wilkinson is interested in how listeners react to performance styles that

strike them as unfamiliar even if the listeners are biologically hard-wired in wayssimilar to those responsible for producing the styles. He wants to account for thebiological underpinnings of persons, while yet acknowledging that listeners processmusic in ways that sometimes lead to radical differences of taste. In his paper, theauthor does not offer a full account of what constitutes such hard-wiring. He(reasonably) rather relies on material previously developed and published by himselfelsewhere. However, he does offer the outlines of a plausible associational model,according to which listeners, in hearing bits and pieces of music, tend individuallyand socially to associate or assimilate the music metaphorically to extra-musical ideas,thoughts, emotions or objects with which they are already presumably familiar, butwhere the encounter with the music produces new forms of experience. Such forms

ISSN 0269-0403 print/ISSN 1471-6933 online# The Royal Musical AssociationDOI: 10.1080/02690400903414830http://www.informaworld.com

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 135, Special Issue no. 1, 63!66

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of experience are not only rich and varied with respect to the meanings that musicattains; they are also sometimes socially beneficial given the social cohesion they helpto promote. This would be the sort of social cohesion, the author suggests, thatbrings persons together given their sense of shared experience, despite ! and this ispresumably the anti-totalitarian or democratic point ! each person potentiallycoming up with different musical associations. Whether the sense of sharedexperience is enough to promote the sort of social cohesion favoured by the authoris a question he does not pursue further, because his aim is otherwise directed. Thatlisteners generate meanings for music in associational ways, but in such ways as toproduce different associations, is the model by which the author explains whypersons or groups ! within a given culture or amongst cultures separated by time orspace ! sometimes have quite radical differences of taste, judgment or reaction even if‘processually’, once more, they are all engaging with music in the same way.Leech-Wilkinson begins with a report from Nikolaus Harnoncourt of a modern

audience (of 2,500 persons) that laughed on hearing a 1906 recording of MariaGalvany singing Mozart’s Queen of the Night’s aria. He tells us that though he isfamiliar with the many Freudian or sociological accounts of laughter that have beenproduced, he is more interested in explaining the underlying biological mechanismsthat might bring a laughter like this about. Before he turns to the biologicalexplanation, he considers several reasons why persons might laugh at Galvany’sperformance. Maybe they laugh at the wide variations of tempo, at the ‘duettingcadenza’, or at any other musical choices made that they would not make themselves.Together, these reasons help to explain or establish the sense of strangeness, evenalienation, that in turn promotes the sort of discomfort to which we sometimesrespond by laughing. Again, he does not pursue the alienation thesis further,preferring, he says, to seek the underlying mechanisms of such a response. He doesnot question, therefore,

(1) whether the persons sitting in a concert hall in Vienna laugh at this recordingbecause laughter is infectious, especially in mass groups, so that when oneperson laughs, for whatever reason, this causes others to laugh;

(2) whether persons would laugh were each sitting privately at home listening tothe same recording;

(3) whether the Viennese particularly like to laugh in a city once so dominated byoperetta;

(4) whether there is something that makes one laugh about the technology of theearly recordings ! perhaps the ghostly, gritty or ‘tinny’ sound ! over and abovewhat one hears;

(5) whether this audience would laugh similarly at a recording were it produced in1946, 1966 or 1986; or, finally,

(6) whether the laughter suggests an arrogance, mockery or lack of understandingon the part of the audience or merely a funny, ha-ha reaction such that we

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might even think about it as artificially produced: canned laughter at canned-sounding recordings.

I raise these more ‘sociological’ questions less to suggest that answering them wouldyield more by way of understanding the reaction of the audience to these earlyrecordings, and more because it helps to bring into sharp relief what Leech-Wilkinson seeks by turning to underlying biological mechanisms. Everything, as faras I can tell, turns in his argument on what is meant by the term ‘underlying’. Ifbiological mechanisms underlie cultural practice, does this mean methodologicallythat biological explanation is merely additional to a sociological description orexplanation of cultural practice, or is it meant to offer an alternative to it? Thoughthe author acknowledges and indeed sometimes relies on the insights provided bythose who adopt a sociological approach, he writes as though his approach stands tothe other approach as clarity stands to obfuscation, or as sunlight stands to fog. Andyet, doesn’t fog sometimes bring out what sunlight masks or relegates merely to theshadows? Leech-Wilkinson takes the laughter of adults to be a mature extension ofwhat babies naturally do as a way of responding to the world around them. Fairenough, although this is only to tell us about a first step in a process that willeventually show a laughter that has turned away from being a positive or pleasurableresponse to being a negative or damning response. Whether biology can ever take usbeyond the infant steps, literally and metaphorically, has yet to be shown.Leech-Wilkinson looks back at old recordings neither because they are old nor

because they are recordings. Despite some assertions suggesting the contrary, oldrecordings serve his theory merely as a means . The oldness or pastness and thecharacteristics that make them recordings are not treated as constitutive of music’smedium. The fact the recordings are old serves only to provide examples ofperforming styles different from contemporary ones: hence the feeling of their beingunfamiliar. Strictly speaking, this means that the author could have compareddifferent contemporary styles to reach the same conclusions. That the recordings aremerely recordings of different and unfamiliar means of performing indicates that hecould have argued the same way had he travelled the world ! with his potentiallylaughing audience alongside ! listening to different performances by different artistsmaking all sorts of different performance choices. If, in Leech-Wilkinson’s view, thelaughter of the audience marks a difference of taste, culture or response to music,the ‘oldness’ of ‘recordings’ marks the same. All this amounts to saying is that thematerial and materiality of laughter and of recordings do no more work inthe argument than showing merely that there are different ways of responding to themusic and that this difference needs more than a sociological or merely culturalexplanation.Turning toward what he variously describes as an evolutionary, cognitive and

biological approach, Leech-Wilkinson considers four different theses of musicalresponse that have recently been offered and which might or might not result in

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laughter. We respond to music as if it were a person or by imagining what it wouldbe like to perform in that way ourselves. Or, although we respond to music as uniqueand widely differentiated individuals, we are aware of sharing a powerful experiencewith others who listen, and this helps promote social cohesion. Or, finally, werespond to music as we do because our acoustic or musical experiences areinextricably bound up with ‘runaway sexual selection’ and courtship rituals. Again, itturns out that it is not necessary to go into the details of the four theses, since each isintroduced to lead to the starting point of Leech-Wilkinson’s own account, thatmusical response is simultaneously personal and shared ! different and yet the same.Central to Leech-Wilkinson’s preferred model is the idea of change: change any

element in a performance and the shape or gestalt of the music will change.However, because, as he writes, ‘change is always significant’ (p. 54), it would seemto follow that, even in cases where performance choices make no difference to theshape of the music, this would be significant as well. Looking anthropologicallyaround him, Leech-Wilkinson concludes that music is shaped within a world full ofchanges. That each brain processes musical material differently indicates that themeanings music assumes can genuinely be described as personalized, even if themechanisms of finding or generating associations, similes or affinities are shared.Given further mechanisms and principles of ‘selection’ and ‘foraging’, Leech-Wilkinson claims to be able ! over time ! to account scientifically not only for whychange takes place but also for why specific changes take place. At the end of hispaper, he returns to thoughts about the laughter or, better, the unease we might feelin hearing performances that do not correspond to how we want to be shaped by themusic, suggesting that change, although natural to human life, is also that whichhumans sometimes most resist. This is a decidedly Adornian conclusion.In some ways, Leech-Wilkinson’s aim in this paper is modest, to convince us that

adding a hard-wire explanation of musical response will sort out what is right andwrong in explanations that are given in more sociological terms. One response to thisis to say: good, show us what we have got right and what wrong ! the strength ofyour account will lie with your results. Another response, a touch more cynical, is towarn those who want to test responses to music scientifically against their begging thequestion of science and culture the moment they reduce ‘music’ to something it‘culturally’ is not and has never been.

ABSTRACT

This response to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s paper questions whether the (explanatory)movement between culture, nature, biology and music is as seamless as his argumentsuggests.

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