PLASTIC SOUND OBJECTS1

Plastic Sound Objects refer to instruments that, according to Smetak, have unusual shapes and tones, differentiated from the common sense. This comes from the need to establish a identifying term specific to these creations that encompass their differentiation as a tool and a symbolic object. They are instruments designed to be closer to the musical interaction and, therefore, creations and processes for improvisational artistic purposes.

Someone's view on an already known instrument (considering the cultural factor present in this relation between being and instrument) suffers the actions of the individual, and especially collective, conscious and unconscious, in addition to the information that the form itself presents. References are as luggages of knowledge and concepts about the object, musical instrument, we have built and elaborated throughout our history. A piano , for example, carries in its form and timbre sounding various symbols and archetypes, such as virtuosity, elegance, stiffness, technical skill and countless other images.

An acoustic guitar also carries information, mainly present in its form. But someone who faces a guitar will have two possible antagonistic attitudes. He will either head directly to the instrument, moved by intense passion, probably related to what he saw from the masters of the instrument, and will be moved by the pursuit to achieve that model, distancing himself from his own musicality; or he will retract for already knowing that universe and thinking that will never reach the proposed reference model, and perhaps won't even touch the instrument. And both consequences will generate the same result: the distancing of his musicality.

Reflecting on this, we note that the being who observes a new form faces the meeting with the newness. And it is the newness (knowing that it is relative, because for a being who has never seen a guitar it is also new) that provides to being an openness to experience without the presence of pre-existing labels. Plastic sound objects aim, thus, to create a new sound form, in which musicians and audience find fertile and meaningful symbolic sources for the expression of musicality. Something similar happens to the wind and microtonal guitars Smetak, objects at the edge of the instrument category, whose transformation offers a personal and collective experience completely different from what we have associated with that shape and, unlike the previous case, brings us increasingly closer to our musicality. This places us directly in a process where the being who creates has the possibility to enjoy an interpretation, linked to his need for internal expression. Therefore, the process that brings the being closer to an identification and disclosure of aspects of his unconscious, from archetypal or symbolic sources, also leads to the approximation and identification with

Extracted from Andr Pereira Lindenberg. Plsticas Sonoras - ferramentas musicoteraputicas na aproximao Msica Sutil: um encontro com o Si-Mesmo [Plastic Sound Objects music therapeutic tools on approach to subtile music: an encounter with the self](Course Conclusion Paper in Music Therapy), 2008

the self, going through the creation and construction of an instrument in a new way, a new timbre, a Plastic Sound Object.