Sometimes I wish there were more words for words, that is more sounds that form words, sounds that we recognise as words. And then we would have more words for sounds, more sounding words that allow us to describe the the sounds of sound.
Does sound writing always have be like this — to have this circular structure, this flipping back and forth upon itself like a fish.
How to make contexts for words to grow sounds and sounds grow words….
Schaeffer talks about the curious sound objects that spontaneously appeared when he and Jacques Poulin were exploring closed loops. He calls them “little sound creatures” that while they come from music “elude” the language of music like “words escaped from the dictionary”. He said while musicians struggled to understands these sound objects, poets understood as they were already working experimentally with words freed from realism. In the end he lets the sounds be and doesn’t attempt to the force them into his composition. He says:
“Perhaps their vocation as objects was to appear in some herbarium, one of those catalogues provided for the amateur, and that he consults, only too pleased that these objects are offered in a logical order and not according to some perfectly pointless and subjective author’s whim?” (p. 33)
Schaeffer, P. (2012). In Search of a Concrete Music (C. North & J. Dack, Trans.). University of California Press.
PS – When reviewing this post I thought of the photos I took in the Grande Galerie de l’Evolution of butterfly species. Not quite a herbarium but a sideways association. This then reminded me of a description of Kaffe Matthews that I wrote in one of my earliest reviews:
“I see the electric transmission beaming out into the ether and Matthews catching the loops in a digital butterfly net. I get a real sense of the structure of her improvisation—sending the sound out there, and then plucking it back, remolding it, sending it out again. She has a light touch, mixing only a few chosen elements, teasing them out, dropping them. All her butterflies beautifully controlled and musically combined create an intense and rewarding sonic vision.”
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 36, https://www.realtime.org.au/a-hint-of-permanence/
I like the idea of sound as species — as specimen, but it can never be pinned down, no matter how many systems Schaeffer tried make.
Doppler Diaries 
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