The Semiotics of Enunciation in Recorded Music

This short essay offers a semiotic answer to a simple question: where, exactly, is the listener placed by recorded music? Starting from the Greimassian tradition, it recalls that every text projects images of a model author and a model reader (Eco), and that enunciation can be reconstructed through shifts between third-person distance and first-person co-presence (débrayage/embrayage). The paper argues that, even without lyrics, recorded music positions its listener through technical and aesthetic decisions, and therefore allows a grounded analysis of its enunciative cues. To develop tools suited to popular phonography, the essay performs a semiotic bricolage, translating concepts from film theory to sound. Adapting Christian Metz’s opposition between pro-filmic material and trucage, it proposes a distinction between the prosonic (recordable acoustic sources) and the phonographic (manipulation: montage, effects, editing). This move is framed by debates on recording as more than a witness (Schafer’s “schizophonia”) and by Metz’s notion of impersonal enunciation: the record enunciates itself as a flow, punctuated by moments that reveal its own construction. At the same time, practices such as stereophony, spatialization, and sound design (Tagg’s “aural staging”) reintroduce a simulacral, anthropomorphic dimension. Drawing on Francesco Casetti’s typology of cinematic point of view, the essay outlines four configurations of “point of listening”: (1) objective, where the record functions as an account of a past event (bootlegs, simulated liveness); (2) subjective, where sound presents itself as a here-and-now event enabled by recording (acousmatic and electroacoustic aesthetics); (3) interpellation, where direct address, quotation, or sampling foregrounds the author–listener link; and (4) “impossible” objective, where frictions between prosonic and phonographic levels expose mediation itself (vinyl scratches, radio-switching intros). Mapped onto Floch’s axiology (mediation/creation/disintermediation/distinction) and illustrated by Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, the proposal frames recorded music as an active site of meaning-making that negotiates the listener’s position.